Investigating anti and some reflections on Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS)

PDF plus In this study, I use WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott, 2008) and Xaira to examine the prefix anti, its collocates, contexts and quantitative profile in the SiBol corpus.2 2The two corpora are named after the universities (Siena and Bologna) working on the project and are called SiBol 93 and SiBol 05. See Partington (2010) for further details. The first corpus contains around 100 million words (about twenty-seven million from the Guardian, thirty-four million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and thirty-nine million from the Times and Sunday Times). The second, contains about 145 million (forty-one million from the Guardian, thirty-seven million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and sixty-seven million from the Times and Sunday Times). First, I discuss the problem involved in investigating a prefix, and I follow this with an examination of the prefix itself. Although the overall proportion of anti prefixing has remained fairly similar over time, (unlike pro which has decreased), there are key changes in the stems or ‘targets’ of the prefix which reflect changes in social and political concerns. Among the findings are changes in the way that antibiotics are talked about, and an increase in the discourse about products designed to deal with age-related problems. The study also examines co-texts and contexts of anti terms expressing opposition to groups distinguished by their nationality, religion or ethnic origins, and differences in the ways such opposition is constructed. The analysis illustrates how modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) can contribute to research into socio-cultural and political language and highlights the value of investigating prefixes.