A bilingual corpus-assisted discourse study of the construction of nationhood and belonging in Quebec

Abstract

The French language has traditionally been understood as a key symbol of Quebec identity; however, with rapidly changing demographics, new ways of identifying with Quebec have begun to emerge. Drawing on a bilingual corpus of English and French briefs submitted to the Bouchard Taylor Commission on religious and cultural accommodation, this corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) investigates the extent to which language plays a continuing role as both a symbol and medium in the construction of nationhood and belonging in Quebec popular discourse. Language was found to remain both a central concern and a demarcating line within and between English, French, and minority language speakers’ discourses. This study breaks new ground by adapting the CADS methodology to a bilingual corpus. We discuss the advantages of using CADS in two languages and point to remaining challenges such as keyness and corpus comparability.

Citizenship, community, and counter-terrorism

“…In order to investigate the discursive realization of UK security between 2001 and 2011, this paper will adopt an 'eclectic approach' (after Baker et al 2008;Freake et al, 2011) broadly situated within the tradition of corpus-based discourse studies (CADS). Recently, corpusbased techniques have been used to investigate the discourse of politically and ethically contested issues in the public sphere in the UK and internationally, e.g.…”

“…Recently, corpusbased techniques have been used to investigate the discourse of politically and ethically contested issues in the public sphere in the UK and internationally, e.g. : the New Labour administration (Fairclough 2000), educational governance (Mulderigg, 2003(Mulderigg, , 2011a(Mulderigg, , 2011b, refugees and asylum seekers (Baker 2010, Baker and McEnery 2005, diversity in US immigration legislation (Gales, 2009), bilingualism and national identity in Quebec (Freake et al 2011) and signifiers of radical Islam (Salama, 2011). As well as using a corpus-based methodology, these studies engage in the critical analysis of documentary evidence without adhering strictly to any singular CDA framework (e.g.…”

“…The Previously, corpora have been assembled which comprise either the total population of a relatively restricted field of texts (e.g. Mulderigg 2003Mulderigg , 2011aMulderigg , 2011bFreake et al 2011; MacDonald and Hunter 2013), or which narrow down the total population of texts to those produced within a certain timeframe (e.g. Baker and McEnery 2005;Gales 2009).…”

“…Baker, 2010, Freake et al, 2011, Mulderigg, 2003, 2011a, 2011b, a statistical analysis of lexical trends in each sub-corpus was carried out using the keywords programme in Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 2008). In order to make the keyword analysis historically revealing, the frequency of words in the CCC ('test' ) subcorpus was compared with that of the PVE ('reference') sub-corpus, and vice-versa.…”

“…Baker (2010), we proceeded on the basis that the top 100 words identified as statistically key in each sub-corpus should be investigated as 'candidates' for significance (Appendix 1), but that further quantitative checks and manual, context-sensitive qualitative assessment should also be carried out (after Baker and McEnery 2005;Baker 2010;Freake et al 2011) to support claims of 'salience' (Baker 2006, 125). Firstly, we checked the senses and roles displayed by the keywords when checked in context via concordance.…”