Cover not available

Article published In: Register Studies
Vol. 3:1 (2021) ► pp.144–171

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Multiple Correspondence Analysis, newspaper discourse and subregister

A case study of discourses of Islam in the British press

 | Lancaster University
ORCiD logo with link | Lancaster University | Xi’an Jiaotong University
ORCiD logo with link | Lancaster University
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 25 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20024.cla
Abstract
This article introduces a new method for grouping keywords and examines the extent to which it also allows analysts to explore the interaction of discourse and subregister. It uses the multivariate statistical technique, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, to reveal dimensions of keywords which co-occur across the texts of a corpus. These dimensions are then interpreted in terms of the discourses to which they contribute within the data, thus forming the basis of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The approach is demonstrated through analysis of the discourses that are used to represent Muslims and Islam in a corpus of UK national newspaper articles published on these topics spanning 2010–2019. The approach reveals an interaction between discourse and subregister, hence this article argues for the need for (corpus-assisted) discourse analysts to account for subregister as a level of meaningful variation when analysing press discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Islam in the press: Existing research and the recent context
  • 3.Approach: Data, keyword co-occurrence and MCA
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Dimension 2: War, conflict and terrorism vs. reporting of everyday life and events (link to subregister: Yes)
    • 4.2Dimension 3: Foreign Affairs vs. domestic affairs (link to subregister: No)
    • 4.3Dimension 4: Western political conflict vs. overseas conflict (link to subregister: Yes)
    • 4.4Dimension 5: UK Policy versus US Policy (link to subregister: No)
    • 4.5Dimension 6: Globalisation vs. Tribalism
    • 4.6Dimension 7: Corruption and human rights vs. The aftermath of terror attacks (link to subregister: Yes)
    • 4.7Dimension 8: The rise of the far right vs. the radicalisation of British Muslims (link to subregister: No)
    • 4.8Dimension 9: Political processes and elections vs. political processes and security threats (link to subregister: No)
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (20)
References
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2019). The value of revisiting and extending previous studies: the case of Islam in the UK press. In R. Scholtz (Ed.), Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists (pp. 215–249). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluations in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, Genre and Style (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2013). Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics, 41(2), 104–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benzécri, J. P. (1979). Sur le calcul des taux d’inertie dans l’analyse d’un questionnaire. Cahiers de l’Analyse des Données, 41, 377–378.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brookes, G., & McEnery, T. (2019). The utility of topic modelling for discourse studies: a critical evaluation, Discourse Studies, 21(1), 3–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carter, R. (1988). The language of written sports commentary: soccer – a description. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Registers of Written English. Situational Factors and Linguistic Features (pp. 16–51). London: Frances Pinter, London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, I. (2019). Functional linguistic variation in Twitter trolling. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 26(1), 57–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, I., Brookes, G. & McEnery, T. (Forthcoming). Keywords through time: Tracking changes in press discourses of Islam. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics, 19(1), 61–74.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lê, S., Josse, J., & Husson, F. (2008). FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 25(1), 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Le Roux, B., & Rouanet, H. (2010). Multiple Correspondence Analysis. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Partington, A. (2014). Mind the gaps: The role of corpus linguistics in researching absences. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(1), 118–146. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinna, A., & Brett, D. (2018). Constance and variability: Using PoS-grams to find phraseologies in the language of newspapers. In J. Kopaczyk & J. Tyrkkö (Eds.), Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics (pp. 107–130). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schroeter, M. & Taylor, C. (2018). Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse: Empirical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zou, H., Hastie, T. & Tibshirani, R. (2006). Sparse Principal Component Analysis. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 15(2), 265–286. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (12)

Cited by 12 other publications

Sardinha, Tony Berber & Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan
2026. Lexical Multidimensional Analysis, DOI logo
Claridge, Claudia
2025. Introduction. In News with an Attitude [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 105], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Cvrček, Václav & Martina Berrocal
2025. Sibling-texts keyword analysis: exploring topic and register keywords. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 40:3 ► pp. 762 ff. DOI logo
Gries, Stefan Th.
2025. Cultural Keywords in Varieties Research. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science DOI logo
McGlashan, Mark, Isobelle Clarke, Matt Gee, Tatiana Grieshofer, Andrew Kehoe & Robert Lawson
2025. COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories, discourses of liberty, and “the new normal” on social media. Linguistics Vanguard DOI logo
Sha, Yuze & Isobelle Clarke
2025. Using ATLAS.ti to interpret keyword co-occurrence analysis: a case study on the representation of vaccin* across pseudoscience and conspiracy websites. Linguistics Vanguard DOI logo
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2025. Orality in the History of English. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language, ► pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Brookes, Gavin, Tony McEnery & Isobelle Clarke
2023. The Representation of Islamism in the UK Press. In Media Language on Islam and Muslims, ► pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Delfino, Maria Claudia Nunes, Tony Berber Sardinha & Joseph Glynn Collentine
2023. Dimensões de variação lexical e acústica na música popular em inglês. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos 65 ► pp. e023025 ff. DOI logo
Gillings, Mathew, Gerlinde Mautner & Paul Baker
2023. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, DOI logo
Clarke, Isobelle, Gavin Brookes & Tony McEnery
2022. Keywords through time. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 399 ff. DOI logo
Foye, Chris
2022. Framing the housing crisis: How think-tanks frame politics and science to advance policy agendas. Geoforum 134 ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue