ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7819-5424
Current Organisation
University of Sydney
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Journalism Studies | Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies | Communication and Media Studies |
The Media | Public Services Policy Advice and Analysis | Internet Broadcasting
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 2011
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2015
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 07-04-2008
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2010
Abstract: This paper explores the complex cultural and institutional practice of ‘playing’ and ‘bonding’ with the reader in the Australian print-media, as exemplified through a new news story genre in The Sydney Morning Herald, where events are presented as short, witty news stories with a heading, a dominant photograph and a caption. This is termed the image-nuclear news story. In these stories the heading and image enter into a verbal-visual play that relies on the manipulation of common (often idiomatic) expressions, while the caption elaborates on the story’s news value. Through this play newspapers construe a particular kind of reader, who fulfils certain expectations as far as different types of knowledge (linguistic, cultural, semiotic) are concerned. To analyze the intertextual and multisemiotic play and its interpretation by readers, this article makes use of corpus linguistic methodology and theory, in particular compositional (‘open-choice’) and non-compositional (‘idiom’) principles of interpretation. The analyses show how readers’ linguistic experience enables them to unpack the play in the image-nuclear news story, allowing them to ‘bond’ with the newspaper, and be part of the linguistic and cultural (reading) community construed by this news story genre. As newspaper circulation is falling, creating solidarity with the reader in the hope of maintaining their loyalty is essential to the survival of newspapers, and, arguably, getting them to participate in multisemiotic play is one way of doing so.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 16-03-2012
Abstract: Based on the analysis of key words and trigrams, this paper explores characteristics of contemporary American English television dialogue. Using a corpus comprising dialogue from seven fictional series (five different genres) and the spoken part of the American National Corpus, key words and trigrams are compared to previous corpus linguistic studies of such dialogue (Mittmann 2006, Quaglio 2009) and further explored on the basis of concordances, with special emphasis on over-represented key words/trigrams and their potential to indicate informality and emotionality. The results suggest that the expression of emotion is a key defining feature of the language of television, cutting across in idual series and different televisual genres.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2012
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 2015
Abstract: In this article I discuss “wicked” women in contemporary pop culture, analyzing the language of the “heroines,” or protagonists, of three popular American television series:
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 03-02-2010
DOI: 10.1558/LHS.V3I2.107
Abstract: This paper examines the concept of polyphony in Appraisal (evaluation) - the combining (e.g. fusing or blending) of different kinds of Appraisal systems or sub-systems.It identifies and describes four different types of polyphonic phenomena: 1) Fused Appraisals 2) Invoked Apraisals 3) Border phenomena 4) Appraisal blends In so doing, this paper provides a preliminary systematisation of such phenomena, in some cases offering an alternative description to those currently available. It also discusses the adequacy of typology and topology in classifying Appraisal and provides a theoretical background to the multiple coding practices in the analysis of Appraisal.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 03-07-2020
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 07-04-2008
Abstract: Evaluation — the function and usage of language to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion — has only relatively recently become the object of systematic linguistic research, for ex le in stance or appraisal analysis. This paper proposes an alternative, corpus-based approach to evaluation which assumes that there are at least ten different meaning dimensions (parameters) along which speakers can evaluate aspects of the world. This framework helps to explain the complexity of evaluation, and in particular what is here called evaluative interplay or combination : the expression of more than two evaluative parameters at the same time, which can be realized by evaluative conflation (evaluations signalled by one and the same linguistic item) and evaluative collocation (evaluations signalled by different linguistic items). Both the parameter-based framework and evaluative interplay are illustrated with a number of ex les from authentic discourse (mostly from British newspapers).
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Date: 2020
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-09-2022
DOI: 10.1177/09639470221096601
Abstract: While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film dialogue – i.e. to taxonomise its range of potential stylistic functions such as characterisation or the creation of consistency. Most stylistic research has also focussed on traditional US (Hollywood) or European narrative mass media, rather than culturally- erse or Indigenous-authored film and television. This article aims to make a contribution to both of these under-examined fields by offering a case study of the stylistic functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in three successful Indigenous-authored television series. The three series ( Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road) are all important for the television canon and were broadcast in Australia as well as exported internationally. Using an existing corpus with dialogue from these series as repository, this article illustrates the different functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in its surrounding text by critically examining multiple dialogue extracts from the three narratives. Quotations from Indigenous screen creatives are interwoven with the analysis where relevant. We argue that such lexis fulfils many functions beyond characterisation and demonstrate the significance of communicating culture and identity in Indigenous-authored drama. The study has implications both for the stylistic analysis of the multiple functions of television/film dialogue and for the study of narratives that feature significant creative involvement by marginalised, subjugated, colonised, or otherwise historically excluded communities – including but not limited to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait islander people(s) in Australia.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 19-07-2018
Abstract: Kaleidographic is a dynamic and interactive data visualization tool that allows users to observe and explore relations between any number of variables. It was developed in reaction to the problem of capturing the complex ways in which words and images combine to make meaning. This article introduces the Kaleidographic tool through a case study examining the multimodal construction of news values in news items widely shared on the Facebook social media platform. The design and functionality of the tool are explained in relation to the challenges faced when exploring both the visual and verbal elements of these news items as part of a multimodal discourse analysis. Through this case study, the authors show that Kaleidographic offers multimodal researchers a means of exploring relations at the intersection of different semiotic modes that might be missed in static graphs and tables. Despite Kaleidographic being initially conceived out of the analysis of text–image relations, the case study demonstrates that it has potential applications beyond multimodal discourse analysis. To facilitate broader applications of the tool, it is now publicly available online for use without charge.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2016
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 30-10-2020
Publisher: Elsevier
Date: 2006
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-2019
DOI: 10.1002/HPJA.295
Abstract: This study analysed diabetes coverage in 12 Australian metropolitan/national newspapers over a period of 5 years (2013-2017). It aimed to describe quantitative tendencies in diabetes coverage (amount of articles per newspaper and over time) and to identify potential discrepancies between diabetes coverage and societal prevalence of diabetes. The study addressed the following research questions, with a focus on language use: How frequent are mentions of different types of diabetes? How are people with diabetes referred to? How frequent and how distributed are mentions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and matters? Data were collected in electronic format, manually classified and processed using a specialised software program, with a focus on quantitative analysis. 577 articles were classified as news and 117 were classified as "non-news." The Australian Financial Review published the fewest items, followed by the NT News, while the West Australian and the Advertiser published the most. References to "type 2" appear slightly more frequent and more distributed than to "type 1" diabetes. The labelling of people with the noun diabetic/s occurs in about a quarter of the dataset. References to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or matters appear to be extremely rare in the analysed dataset. Diabetes coverage does not fully align with incidence of diabetes among Australians, and problematic language practices such as the labelling of people as "diabetics" continue to occur. SO WHAT?: Given the agenda-setting function of the news media, new strategies may be needed to change how Australian metropolitan and national newspapers cover diabetes, especially in relation to incorporating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and perspectives.
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 06-2015
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 23-09-2013
Publisher: Elsevier
Date: 2006
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2022
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 11-06-2020
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 2008
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-04-2021
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2022
DOI: 10.1177/09639470221090371
Abstract: Catchphrases have long been a hallmark of US-American sit-coms and dramas, as well as reality, game and variety show programming. Because the phenomenon of the television catchphrase developed throughout the era of network, commercial broadcasting under Federal Communications Commission guidelines regulating profanity in network television, catchphrases traditionally have not included swear words. Nevertheless, certain past television catchphrases can be regarded as euphemistic alternatives of swearing expressions (e.g. ‘Kiss my grits!’), while contemporary catchphrases from cable or streaming series do include explicit swearing (e.g. ‘Don’t fuck it up!’). We examine a database of 168 popular catchphrases from a 70-year period of US-American television programming according to categories for bad language and impoliteness formulae. We identify three categories of catchphrases based on structural-functional similarities to swearing expressions, and we trace the distribution of these categories over time and across networks. The data reveal a trend towards explicit swearing in catchphrases over time, not only in series on cable and streaming services, but across networks. We conclude that the expressive nature of catchphrases and their structural-functional properties render the inclusion of swear words both more palatable to a television audience and more compatible with television norms, thus propagating catchphrase swearing on cable and streaming television services, and mitigating the use of swear words on network television. Due to appropriation phenomena, swearing catchphrases may serve to blur the lines between actually swearing and simply invoking a swearing catchphrase, thereby potentially increasing tolerance for swearing both on television and off.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 27-08-2020
Abstract: Digital methods are becoming more and more important for text analysis in communications research. However, many computational methods require either relevant technical expertise or multi-disciplinary collaboration, which has impeded their uptake. This article introduces an alternative: computer-assisted linguistic analysis (corpus linguistics), an approach that is increasingly being used outside linguistics and requires less expertise. The article uses a dataset of almost 700 items of health news to demonstrate how such techniques can aid the analysis of (dis)preferred language, sources, stigma and responsibility, framing, and project-specific text analysis. We conclude with an evaluation of the key advantages and limitations of corpus linguistic analysis.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-01-2014
Abstract: This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a ‘discursive’ approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA – towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 2014
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 2011
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 05-08-2019
Abstract: Kaleidographic is a dynamic and interactive data visualization tool that allows users to observe and explore relations between any number of variables. The tool is useful for displaying the complex ways in which textual elements interact across a range of texts. Thus far, the tool has been used to display the results of corpus studies as well as corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analyses that investigate text-image relations. To facilitate broader applications of the tool, it is now publicly available online for use without charge. This paper explains the background and motivation for Kaleidographic and presents two case studies demonstrating its utility. Limitations of the tool are discussed and its potential uses in corpus linguistics research and beyond are introduced.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2005
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-03-2023
DOI: 10.1177/09579265231156504
Abstract: This paper provides an interdisciplinary, corpus-based study of naming practices for disabled people in a collection of Australian newspaper articles spanning 20 years. We analyse head nouns, modifiers, and coordinating structures for both person-first and identity-first language, drawing on social actor analysis as well as previously-identified models of media representation. Overall, we find similar usage of both naming practices with respect to the types of social actors that occur, the categorisations of disabilities that are referenced, and the associations that are established, with only minor differences. Additionally, both naming practices are strongly associated with the medical and social pathology models of media representation, which emphasise disadvantage, with almost a total absence of ‘progressive’ models, which represent people as multifaceted agents. We conclude by emphasising the need for the news media to incorporate the voices and preferences of disabled people themselves.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: 08-2016
Abstract: The sharing of news through social media platforms is now a significant part of mainstream online media use and is an increasingly important consideration in journalism practice and production. This paper analyses the linguistic characteristics of online news sharing on Facebook, with a focus on evaluation and news values in a corpus of the 100 ‘most shared’ news items from ‘heritage’ English-language news media organisations. Analyses combine corpus linguistic techniques (semantic tagging, frequency analysis, concordancing) with manual, computer-aided annotation. The main focus is on discursive news values analysis (DNVA), which examines how news values are established through semiotic resources, enabling new empirical insights into shared news and adding a specific linguistic focus to the emerging literature on news sharing. Results suggest that all ‘traditional’ news values appear to be construed in the shared news corpus and that there is variety in terms of the items that are widely shared. At the same time, the news values of Eliteness, Superlativeness, Unexpectedness, Negativity and Timeliness seem especially important in the corpus. The findings also indicate that ‘unexpected’ and ‘affective’ news items may be shared more, and that Negativity is a more important news value than Positivity.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 04-05-2011
Abstract: This article describes differences in the frequency of words/n-grams in television dialogue as compared with a variety of other corpora. It explores frequent lexico-grammatical patterns in the television series Gilmore Girls , in other fictional programmes, and in unscripted spoken and written English. Using ranked frequency lists, the ‘dramedy’ Gilmore Girls is compared both to unscripted language and to a corpus containing dialogue from ten other television series. The results allow us to describe both the specifics of the dialogue of this particular dramedy and the general characteristics of scripted television dialogue as compared to unscripted spoken and written language. The findings also confirm previous assumptions made on the basis of different data that television dialogue is more emotional, but less narrative and vague than naturally occurring conversation.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 14-09-2018
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 15-03-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2014
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2019
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: 04-2020
Abstract: This paper reports on the construction of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV). SydTV comprises approximately 275,000-words of dialogue from sixty-six episodes of recent US American fictional television series. The paper first provides a brief overview of existing TV dialogue corpora and then outlines the basic corpus composition, the corpus design principles, and the processes of data collection and storage. SydTV is a small, specialised corpus designed with the objective of being representative of fictional US TV dialogue. TV dialogue is defined as the dialogue uttered by actors on screen as they are performing characters in fictional TV series. The corpus is fairly balanced, since it contains 116,295 words from drama genres and 158,779 words from comedy genres as well as 135,887 words from ‘quality’ and 139,187 words from ‘mainstream’ TV series, in addition to a healthy mix of different types of episodes in terms of textual time (pilot episodes, final episodes, episodes occurring at the beginning, middle or end of a season). The corpus is available for educational (teaching and research) purposes through an online interface 2 and has a companion website 3 where frequency lists are provided.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 2012
Publisher: Elsevier
Date: 2006
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2011
Abstract: This article discusses expressivity (emotion, attitude, ideology) in televisual characterization. Drawing on views from professional practice (scriptwriting handbooks), media/television studies and stylistics, it first provides an overview of televisual characterization before arguing for the usefulness of considering expressive meanings in its analysis. The article then introduces linguistic and paralinguistic expressive resources, and a model for analysing expressive character identity is briefly described which aims to combine semiotic and cognitive (Culpeper, 2001) aspects as well as micro-, meso- and macro-levels of analysis. Expressive identity is also discussed with respect to dynamics, stability, in idual and social identity. Quantitative and qualitative linguistic studies of characterization are also considered. The aim of the article is to contribute to research on expressivity in stylistics and to provide a springboard for future research on televisual characterization.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-02-2014
Abstract: The study of news values/factors has a long and rich history in journalism and communications research. Conceptually, they encompass not only the newsworthy aspects of happenings or news actors but also external aspects that impact journalism practice, such as the influence of proprietors or advertisers, meeting deadlines or competition among news providers to get exclusive stories. Some view news values as existing in the actual events and people who are reported on in the news, that is, in events in their material reality (a material perspective). Others conceive news values as existing in the minds of journalists (a cognitive perspective). News values are also constructed in the discourses involved in the production of news (a discursive perspective). The focus in this article is on this third perspective, with the aim of demonstrating what a discursive approach to news values can add to the two other, theoretical and analytical perspectives. The article has an additional focus on the much neglected area of visual analysis and investigates the construction of news values in news photography.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-02-2015
Abstract: This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis (DNVA). We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags (POStags) and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 26-10-2015
DOI: 10.1075/SCL.73.12BED
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-03-2019
Abstract: This study investigates changes in sex education advice from the 1990s to the 2010s. Our research is based on the analysis of an 88,000 word corpus of advice columns from Dolly, a beauty, lifestyle and celebrity magazine aimed at Australian girls. The data are taken from 1994, 1995, 2014 and 2015, with both decades compared against each other to identify any potential shifts in sex education advice. The study combines corpus linguistic techniques with analysis of evaluative language (appraisal). Our analysis reveals a preoccupation with sexual health in the 1990s, shifting to a preoccupation with mental health in the 2010s. We identify a discourse of risk and safety and a discourse of pleasure in the 1990s, and medicalising and normalising discourses of mental health in the 2010s. We also consider interactions between question and answer in the advice pages, to better understand how discourses are introduced and negotiated in such written dialogic texts.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 22-10-2009
Abstract: Interpersonal or evaluative meaning has been described in systemic functional linguistics with the help of appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005), which distinguishes between different types of evaluation. One sub-system of APPRAISAL is ATTITUDE, which is further ided into APPRECIATION, JUDGEMENT and AFFECT. This paper uses corpus-linguistic evidence to investigate how far linguistic patterns support this classification, and whether they can be used as a ‘diagnostic’ for distinguishing types of ATTITUDE (as has been proposed in appraisal theory). It argues that two different aspects of APPRAISAL need to be considered: the kinds of attitudinal lexis (in terms of evaluative standards which are inscribed in this lexis) and the kinds of attitudinal targets or types of attitudinal assessment , and that this distinction has not been sufficiently considered in appraisal theory so far. A preliminary classification of attitudinal lexis is also suggested, and a new sub-category of ATTITUDE proposed (COVERT AFFECT).
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 07-04-2008
DOI: 10.1075/FOL.15.1
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 19-01-2006
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2010
Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyse environmental reporting in the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus is on a particular kind of new, multisemiotic news story genre that appears regularly in this newspaper, and that makes use of word-image play. Using a social semiotic framework and employing Appraisal theory, we analyse a corpus of 40 stories in terms of evaluative meanings in heading, image and caption, and interpret the significance of our findings in terms of both Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis. In particular, we question whether the playing with environmental stories in the news, and the resulting clash between the humorousness of the play and the seriousness of the reported environmental event, is good or bad practice. With its multisemiotic focus, this article aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of ecolinguistics, and the development of Appraisal theory.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-04-2014
Abstract: This article describes the variation in title sequences for American television series (a sequence of moving images and sound at the beginning of a television series). Using a quantitative survey of 50 contemporary fictional television series, it explores key features of the television title sequence – such as length, credits, characters, sound and style – and relates these to its functional characteristics. In so doing, the article provides a synchronic snapshot of a significant contemporary cultural product that viewers regularly engage with and enjoy. The survey not only shows the variation inherent in these cultural products, but also pinpoints areas that are worth investigating more closely and in depth.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 02-08-2023
Start Date: 08-2014
End Date: 06-2019
Amount: $142,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
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