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This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple's discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis (DNVA). We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags (POStags) and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening-Hurricane Katrina-was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics.

Since the publication of Susan Sontag's highly influential Illness as Metaphor in 1978, many studies have provided follow-up analyses on her critique of metaphors for cancer, but none have investigated her claims about the uses and implications of cancer as a metaphor (e.g., the cancer of corruption), and her prediction that medical advances would make this metaphor obsolete. In this article, we present the first systematic study of cancer as a metaphor in contemporary English. We show the forms, frequencies, and functions of 925 metaphorical uses of cancer-related vocabulary in two large English language corpora, and discuss their implications for: (a) the framing of the phenomena that are most frequently described as cancers and of potential courses of action to be taken in relation to these phenomena; (b) perceptions of cancer itself; and (c) theoretical accounts of what makes a metaphor successful, in terms of its effectiveness and its applicability to a wide range of topics. In this way, we provide detailed evidence, and additional nuance, for Sontag's critique of cancer as a metaphor and put forward an explanation for the current persistence of this metaphor, despite its controversial status.

The use of Violence metaphors in healthcare has long been criticised as detrimental to patients. Recent work Semino et al., 2015) has combined qualitative analysis with corpus-based quantitative methods to analyse the frequency and variety of Violence metaphors in the language of UK-based patients, family carers, and healthcare professionals talking about cancer and/or end-of-life care. A new, 250,324-word corpus of US health professionals' online discourse has been collected to add a contrastive, crosscultural element to the study of metaphors in end-of-life care. In this work, we move towards a replicable method for comparing frequency and type of Violence metaphors in UK and US contexts by making use of both search-and-recall and key semantic tag analysis in the corpus query tool Wmatrix. First, we discuss the most overused and underused semantic domains in the US corpus as compared with the pre-existing UK corpus of online healthcare professional discourse. Second, we show that there are no notable frequency differences in the occurrence of Violence metaphors in the two corpora, but we point out some differences in the topics that these metaphors are used to discuss. Third, we introduce a novel framework for analysing agency in Violence metaphors and apply it to the US corpus. This reveals the variety of relationships, concerns and challenges that these metaphors can express. Throughout, we relate our findings to the different US and UK cultural and institutional contexts, and reflect on the methodological implications of our approach for corpus-based metaphor analysis.

This paper explores the viability of automated semantic tagging as a tool of cultural analysis comparing American and British English using the Brown family of corpora. Pairs of corpora representing written language production from circa 1961, 1991 and 2006 were contrasted by comparing key semantic tags. This method was then evaluated in relation to three earlier studies which attempted to uncover cultural differences via assigning keywords to ad hoc categories. After outlining the differences found, we conclude that computerised semantic tagging can offer a wider reaching and more scientific comparison of language patterns. However, we suggest that this method is most appropriate as a starting point for a more in-depth cultural analysis, rather than as a final or certain indication of cultural change.