{"title":"A corpus-based discourse analysis of reparations inertia","authors":"Joshua F Hoops","doi":"10.1177/17504813241244609","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The movement for reparations for those enslaved on the North American continent from 1450 to 1866 has a long history fraught with debate, criticized by individuals on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Specific points of contention include how much money should be allocated, who the recipients and potential liable parties should be, and what specific form reparations should take. Accounting for this historical opposition, this paper employs a corpus-based discourse analysis to examine the communicative barriers to implementing reparations. The corpora consisted of YouTube comments posted to news reports of six cities’ reparations proposals. I utilized Sketch Engine to examine frequency of keywords, collocations, and concordance, followed by a close-reading discourse analysis of lexical, grammatical, and tonal elements. The analysis revealed myriad constructions of reparations resulting in inertia, the institutional tendency to preserve the status quo. This discursive formation is consequential not only for its implications for reparations, but for broader structural reform efforts.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241244609","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The movement for reparations for those enslaved on the North American continent from 1450 to 1866 has a long history fraught with debate, criticized by individuals on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Specific points of contention include how much money should be allocated, who the recipients and potential liable parties should be, and what specific form reparations should take. Accounting for this historical opposition, this paper employs a corpus-based discourse analysis to examine the communicative barriers to implementing reparations. The corpora consisted of YouTube comments posted to news reports of six cities’ reparations proposals. I utilized Sketch Engine to examine frequency of keywords, collocations, and concordance, followed by a close-reading discourse analysis of lexical, grammatical, and tonal elements. The analysis revealed myriad constructions of reparations resulting in inertia, the institutional tendency to preserve the status quo. This discursive formation is consequential not only for its implications for reparations, but for broader structural reform efforts.
期刊介绍:
Discourse & Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research. Besides the classical social scientific methods in communication research, such as content analysis and frame analysis, a more explicit study of the structures of discourse (text, talk, images or multimedia messages) allows unprecedented empirical insights into the many phenomena of communication. Since contemporary discourse study is not limited to the account of "texts" or "conversation" alone, but has extended its field to the study of the cognitive, interactional, social, cultural.