One Hundred Years of Migration Discourse in The Times: A Discourse-Historical Word Vector Space Approach to the Construction of Meaning.

ABSTRACT: This study proposes an experimental method to trace the historical evolution of media discourse as a means to investigate the construction of collective meaning. Based on distributional semantics theory (Harris, 1954; Firth, 1957) and critical discourse theory (Wodak and Fairclough, 1997), it explores the value of merging two techniques widely employed to investigate language and meaning in two separate fields: neural word embeddings (computational linguistics) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) (applied linguistics). As a use case, we investigate the historical changes in the semantic space of public discourse of migration in the United Kingdom, and we use the Times Digital Archive (TDA) from 1900 to 2000 as dataset. For the computational part, we

SUBMITTER: Viola L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7861341 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature