A genre, collocational, and constructional analysis of RISK

Abstract

Scholars of language have begun to explore the popular academic topic that is "risk" and to establish the viability of corpus linguistics for such analysis. We extend existing scholarship by analyzing the noun lemma RISK over the last two decades of contemporary American discourse with recourse to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Using the corpus procedures of frequency analysis, concordance contextual analysis, collocational analysis, and a variation on distinctive-collexeme analysis, we revisit the often under-supported assertion that RISK is semantically negative, and then investigate the semantic potential for good risk, a phenomenon associated with economic and adventuring sectors. Data suggest that RISK is genre sensitive, predominantly negative, and heavily medical in shared meaning across genres, and further, that evidence for good risk is minimal. A phrase of interest in recent corpus work -RISK worth taking -is shown to be sensitive perhaps more to constructional constraints than to semantic prosody.

The Concepts of Risk, Safety, and Security: Applications in Everyday Language

“…Of these the specification of an unwanted event is most common. Often, such events are health related, for example, cancer , heart disease , Alzheimer's [disease], diabetes , developing allergies , illnesses , and injury . In the case of safety and security , what is represented by prepositional phrase complements is typically an asset at stake, for example, safety of their children and security of the troops .…”

“…In corpus linguistics, collocation patterns have received special attention. For example, collocation analyses of risk have identified a strong orientation towards medicine and health among its lexical associates …”

Actually, Genuinely, Really, and Truly

“…Furthermore, we manually perused some of the tokens in context, a practice also known as 'concordance contextual analysis' (Hardy & Colombini 2011). This practice is necessary in BP studies because sometimes synonyms in the same context with the same distributions may have different meanings, as has been shown in studies by Liu (2010), and because sometimes the information needed is not accessible via a machine query.…”

A Discourse Analysis Through Corpus Linguistics on the Case of Popular Science Book the Grand Design

“…By using COCA, it was found that risk was frequently mentioned in the academic text comparing to fiction, newspaper, spoken and magazine (Hardy & Colombini, 2011). According to Hardy and Colombini (2011), to find the positive prosody of risk was exceedingly difficult, but they still found it such as "…those risks are worth taking." Tang and Rundblad (2015) investigated how media report materials in drinking water that could potentially harm human health through Wordsmith software.…”

“…A study conducted by Hardy and Colombini (2011) also investigated the positive prosody of risk through frequency analysis, concordance contextual analysis, collocational analysis and a variation of on distinctive-collexem analysis, since some previous studies mostly have shown the negative prosody and medical result of the word risk. By using COCA, it was found that risk was frequently mentioned in the academic text comparing to fiction, newspaper, spoken and magazine (Hardy & Colombini, 2011).…”