LLIRN members Dr Alexandra Grey, Dr Adrian Hemler and PhD Candidate Emma Genovese at UTS for Adrian’s seminar (Image credit: Alexandra Grey)

This April we celebrated the 6th birthday of the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) with a fascinating research seminar about the potential for corpus linguistics in legal research.

Six years ago, LLIRN was born out of a new event, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium, which Laura Smith-Khan and I hosted in Sydney. With researchers from multiple universities in Australia – including a number of people from the Language on the Move community – as well as visiting scholars from Asia and Europe, we workshopped the shared themes underpinning our varied case studies and how to collaborate across disciplines. We swiftly then set up the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network to continue the momentum.

We could only dream (and did dream) of this network becoming as active, friendly and international as it now is. We have over 260 members based in/from at least 40 countries. We’ve cast a spotlight on many of them recently in our LLIRN About US blog series, which we started to mark the 5th LLIRN anniversary.

It felt great to mark our anniversary this April with a visiting scholar, Dr Adrian Hemler from the University of Konstanz in Germany, presenting his innovative research to an interested audience online and in-person at the UTS Faculty of Law. Adrian’s topic was ‘Law and Corpus Linguistics – Current Trends and Future Applications’. He made corpus linguistic methods of analysis seem easily accessible even for those without a background in the field, and he shared a real passion for his research.

Enjoy this video recording of Adrian’s seminar to learn about the basics of Corpus Linguistics, the resources available online, and the potential he sees for corpus linguistic analysis in comparative legal research. You can also read Laura’s live posting about the seminar @lauraskh.bsky.social.

Monika Bednarek (l), Annmaree Watharow (m), and accessibility assistant Susannah McNally (r) (Photo: Helen Caple)

Editor’s note: Language on the Move has recently entered into an informal collaboration with the Sydney Corpus Lab, with mutual support and sharing of information and resources. The Sydney Corpus Lab aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia and has a special interest in bringing together corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis across different contexts. In this post, we feature a recent collaborative project of researchers in the lab.

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Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts

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‘What’s in a name?’, we ask, knowing that names matter. Respect matters. So, the question ‘how should people who live with disability be identified?’ becomes a question that speaks to selfhood.

I (Annmaree) have lived with disability for decades, also with the changing tides of identifiers – both how I personally thought of myself and how I was regarded by others. So much Othering in the language, from ‘retard’ and ‘deafie, dumbie’ at school to ‘the deaf one’ at uni. I’ve been ‘disabled’, ‘with disability’ and more recently, ‘living with disability’. When I write, I use ‘person with disability’ or ‘person living with deafblindness’, but honestly, I would rather be ‘a deafblind woman’. For me, the disability which affects communication, access to information and mobility is so intertwined historically and functionally with myself, that we cannot be separated. My experience isn’t the same for many others with disability, and not everyone identifies as having a disability or being disabled or living with disability. When linguists Monika Bednarek and Amanda Potts asked me onboard their project analysing Australian newspapers, I jumped out of my comfort zone to join in looking at how the media is navigating the identifiers of disability, and by extension respect and inclusion.

The difference between identity-first and person-first language – sometimes also called condition-first or people-first language – is key. In the context of disability, identity-first language involves putting the disability first, i.e. using the adjective disabled in front of a ‘human’ noun. Examples include a disabled woman, disabled Australians, a disabled child, disabled people. In contrast, person-first language places the ‘human’ noun – the person – first, and this person-reference is then followed by references to the disability. Different formulations are possible here, for example a woman who has a disability, a man living with disability, children with disabilities, a person with a disability.

This distinction is relevant to a range of identity categories, including disability, obesity, autism, mental illness, substance-abuse, and others. The relative merits of the two different practices are at times hotly debated and there are individual and impairment-specific preferences. It is therefore always best to ask, as Evan Young writes, how people want to be referred to. If it’s not possible to ask someone their preference, Media Diversity Australia’s Disability Reporting Handbook recommends person-first language.

Given these recommendations, how have Australian newspapers actually used these two practices? To find out, we analysed over 22,000 articles from The Australian, The Age and the Herald-Sun over a period of 20 years (from January 2000-December 2019). We chose these three newspapers to include Australia’s generalist national newspaper as well as the metropolitan broadsheet and the tabloid newspaper with the highest average readership level. News stories had to include at least one mention of one of the following terms: “disabled”, “with disability”, “with disabilities”, “with a disability”, “with a mental disability”, “with mental disabilities”, “with a physical disability”, “with physical disabilities”.

Our first interest here is in identifying the ‘human’ nouns that occurred with identity-first and person-first language. We found a large overlap, with most of the following categories identified as frequent and significant in both structures:

• General: people, person, someone
• Adults and children (including family terms): child, man, woman, girl, boy, kid, adult, son, daughter
• National/regional identity: Australian, Victorian
• Role labels: veteran, student, athlete, worker, pensioner, passenger, resident, client

These nouns may occur as singular (child) or plural (children) forms, including possessives (child’s, children’s).

Figure 1: Appearance of identity-first and person-first forms in 3 Australian newspapers over 20 years, normalised to frequency per million words per year.

Figure 1 plots how these occur within the texts in our dataset over time to see if anything has changed in the last 20 years (here retrieved using regular expressions written to capture these particular human noun labels).

Figure 1 demonstrates that, with the exception of 2001, person-first forms have been the preferred strategy in our corpus for the past 20 years, appearing roughly 1.5 times as often as identity-first forms between 2000 and 2009. However, the second half of our corpus shows a notably sharp uptick in the appearance of person-first forms. Since 2014, person-first language is four times as frequent on average compared identity-first language, which conversely seems to be undergoing a slow but steady decline.

We also analysed relevant uses of identity-first and person-first language in the sentences in which they were contained. The details of this analysis are available here. Overall, we found many similarities between the two practices, and identified multiple negative or otherwise problematic usages across both, including those that construct a social pathology discourse around disability. It is important for news professionals to be aware of how people want to be referred to, but also pay attention to how such references are used. This will allow moving beyond problematic, stereotyped or stigmatising media representations.

To help in this endeavour, Media Diversity Australia’s reporting handbook identifies several golden rules to improve media coverage. The most important of which is to ask individuals and communities what their preferred identifier is, as there’s no one size fits all identifier. For example, someone living with co-occurring sight and hearing loss (like myself) may identify as a deafblind person, a person with deafblindness, a person with dual sensory impairment, a blind person with hearing loss, a Deaf person with low vision, or simply as someone getting old. Disability is complex and diverse, and part of inclusion means paying attention to identity and identifiers.

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Dr Annmaree Watharow (MD, PhD) is a Lived Experience Fellow with the Centre for Disability Research and Policy at the University of Sydney. Her first book Improving the Experience of Health Care for People Living with Sensory Disability: Knowing What is Going on was published in February 2023.

Monika Bednarek is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, and the author of several books and multiple other publications on news discourse, including the co-authored Multimodal News Analysis Across Cultures (CUP, 2020) and The Discourse of News Values (OUP, 2017). She also leads the Sydney Corpus Lab.

Dr Amanda Potts is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Her specialism is in corpus-based critical discourse analysis of public and professional communication. Her main interest is representations of ideology and identity, most recently in media discourse, medical communication, and language of law.

Reference

Potts, A., Bednarek, M. A., & Watharow, A. (2023). Super, social, medical: Person-first and identity-first representations of disabled people in Australian newspapers, 2000–2019. Discourse & Society, doi:10.1177/09579265231156504 [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/labelling-people-with-disability-in-australian-newspapers/feed/ 2 24752 https://languageonthemove.com/designing-and-using-a-bilingual-writer-corpus/ https://languageonthemove.com/designing-and-using-a-bilingual-writer-corpus/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:41:44 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=23356 Update March 15, 2021: A recording of this lecture is now available on the Language-on-the-Move YouTube channel:

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After a pandemic-induced interruption, our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity are back as an occasional series within the Departmental Seminars of the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University. First one up in 2021 is Professor David Palfreyman with a lecture about “Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus”.

Date: Friday, March 05, 2021
Time: 3pm Sydney time, AEDT (=8am Dubai time)
Venue: Anywhere on Zoom. Click here to join.

Abstract: The language corpus (a large, structured collection of authentic language texts) has become a valuable resource for research on language. Corpora offer large, representative samples of ‘real world’ language use, which can be searched for examples of words or constructions; they are often enriched with annotations so that they can be searched for more underlying meanings or structures, errors or other features. However, language corpora have until very recently not been prepared with a focus on biliteracy. Instead, they have tended to focus on a single language; even research on learner corpora of writing in English (or in another language) tends to compare this writing with a reference corpus of writing by other, ‘native’ users of the same language.

A bilingual writer corpus for research on biliteracy

This talk will discuss the potential of a new type of corpus: the bilingual writer corpus, which focuses instead on a large set of bilingual writers writing in both their languages. Unlike a ‘parallel corpus’ (which pairs texts in one language with translations of those same texts into another language), the bilingual writer corpus matches comparable texts in different languages written by the same writer on different occasions.

One of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus is the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), developed by David Palfreyman, Zayed University, and Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi. This presentation explains some of the principles of design and methodology for the corpus, and some of the possibilities for research using ZAEBUC and bi/multilingual corpora more generally.

David Palfreyman is the editor of Academic Biliteracies

Presenter bio: Dr. David M. Palfreyman is a Professor in the Language Studies Department at Zayed University, United Arab Emirates.  His background is in language teaching, teacher education and socio-cultural contexts of language use and learning. He is the author of several well-cited publications relating to learner autonomy, and lead editor of the books Learner Autonomy Across Cultures (Palgrave); Learning and Teaching Across Cultures in Higher Education (Palgrave); and Academic Biliteracies (Multilingual Matters). He is also founding editor of the journal Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives.

Reports about previous Lectures in Linguistic Diversity

• How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world
• What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy?
• Bilingual children in preschool
• Secrets of bilingual parenting success
• Asylum interviews as linguistic conflict zones
• Are bilinguals better language learners?
• What do migrant parents expect from schools?
• Bilingual children refusing to speak the home language
• How can we change language habits?

Previous Lecture Series Programs

• Chats in Linguistic Diversity (an occasional podcast we started in 2020)
• Lecture in Linguistic Diversity 2020 (before the virus put a stop to them)
• Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2019, Term 2
• Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2019, Term 1
• Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2018

Barbarous multilingual devil worshippers

I’ve just run a search for the terms “multilingual” and “multilingualism” in the National Library of Australia’s archive of Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803-1954. In the process, I have learnt that the adjective “multilingual” was used for the first time in an Australian newspaper on October, 25, 1882 in the Tasmania-based The Mercury in a review of the then-most-recent issue of The Calcutta Review. This is the sentence in which “multilingual” appears for the first time in an Australian newspaper:

[T]hough individually weak in mind and body, [they] were numerous. They were barbarous multilingual worshippers not so much of many gods as of many devils.

Doesn’t sound good! Not what I’d hoped that “multilingual” would collocate with. It’s clear that “multilingual” is anathema to the author and devoid of any positive connotations.

Curious what this is all about? Well, the author asks why the “Aryans” (i.e. Indo-Europeans) of India are so much less civilized than their European counterparts despite the fact that they were “the cousins of our European forefathers” some millennia ago. Well, it turns out to be the fault of the “barbarous multilingual Aborigines” of India who lived there before the “Aryans” arrived on the subcontinent and in the “fusion” that followed they dragged those fine Aryans down to their level.

The text is a typical specimen of the prevalent colonial European worldview of the time, which was based on the assumption that cultures formed a cline, and that each culture was located somewhere on a specific point on a general path of human development from savagery to civilization, with Europeans sitting pretty on top of that hierarchy.

While the 19^th century pyramid of cultures is well-known, this example was the first time I’d come across a text where multilingualism served as a criterion for savagery as opposed to civilization. Civilization, by implication, can be assumed to be monolingual.

To me, this little exercise in corpus linguistics is a stark reminder of the wider colonial system in which the monolingual mindset developed. While monolingualism may not exist theoretically, practically the belief in monolingualism is part of the chronicles of colonial and post-colonial hierarchies and exploitative systems.