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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 19:6 (2020) ► pp.916–937

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A corpus-driven exploration of U.S. language planning and language ideology from 2013 to 2018

ORCiD logo with link | The Pennsylvania State University
 | The Pennsylvania State University
Published online: 16 June 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19108.dia
Abstract
Language planning is influenced by ideological stances, and exports those ideologies through the policy making process. Residing beneath policy documents lies a language policy of the texts themselves, policing their structure and linguistic forms by which ideologies are managed. Thus, a careful collection of such documents should offer rich grounds for analysis, to leverage claims of ideology against empirically founded patterns, and offer rigorous comparison across actors, genres, and policy areas.
We conducted a corpus-driven exploration of all bills from Congressional sessions 113 to 115 (33,968 documents, 85,612,752 words), and describe the collocational character of U.S. language policy, the semantic preferences of those collocations, and discuss the exposed ideological structure of these bills. By utilizing such a large corpus, this study responds to two issues in corpus-aided language policy analysis: (1) a paucity of very large corpora analyses; (2) further utilizes corpus-driven methods to naively investigate ideologies in status planning.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and literature review
    • 2.1Language policy and planning and legal text
    • 2.2Language and ideology
    • 2.3Language policy and planning in the United States
    • 2.4Locating ideology in discourse
    • 2.5Large-scale corpora and critical perspectives
    • 2.6Synthesis of corpus linguistics and language policy and planning
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Pilot
    • 4.2Main study results
      • 4.2.1Absolute frequency
      • 4.2.2Left-slot frequency
      • 4.2.3Right-slot frequency
      • 4.2.4Main results discussion
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • References
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