Search

As a trendy present-day pastime in the West, yoga can be traced back to ancient India. This study focuses on how yoga is construed in two different varieties of contemporary English, namely, American English and Indian English. The data come from the 387-million-word United States section and the 96-million-word Indian section of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). Supplemented with corpus-linguistic techniques (i.e. concordancing and collocational patterns of the lexical item yoga), the framework of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian 2015: 473–492; Sharifian 2017b: 1–28) is employed for analysis. The findings demonstrate remarkable differences in the conceptualisations of yoga between the two World Englishes. For instance, yoga in Indian English tends to abound with words of Sanskrit origin such as guru, Patanjali and sutras as well as lexical items associated with religion like God and bible, thereby instantiating the conceptualisations yoga as tradition and yoga as religion. Yoga as an uncountable noun in Standard English is given the plural suffix (viz. yogas) in Indian English to reflect the various subcategories of yoga. On the other hand, collocates of yoga in American English like pants, mat, Pilates and studio underpin the conceptualisations yoga as sport and yoga as commodity/business. Furthermore, the conceptualisation yoga teaching as a profession (as evident in the co-occurrence of yoga, instructor/teacher and certified/registered) is much more prevalent in American English. It is concluded that although the word yoga exists in both varieties of English, yoga as a cultural schema varies noticeably across the two speech communities. By examining World Englishes with Cultural Linguistics, the current research offers concrete linguistic evidence on the socio-cultural transformation of yoga as it was popularised in America. Simultaneously, the study shows how English has enriched the way the Indian society encodes its cultural conceptualisations.

Capitalizing on the lack of gambling-related research among discourse analysts and the recent liberalization of C-A-S-I-N-O operations in Singapore, the present article reports on the discursive representation of gamblers in Singapore newspaper texts by merging corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. 889 articles from the popular daily paper The Straits Times (Singapore) were retrieved via LexisNexis in accordance with a series of criteria. The extracted texts, which were dated from 17 April 2005 to 28 April 2013, constitute the 615 827-word corpus of the current study. WordSmith Tools 6.0 was used to perform collocation analysis, which was enriched by critical examination of the concordance lines. The findings indicate that apart from gender stereotyping, social alienation is manifested in various ways while gamblers are being portrayed. For instance, the pronoun collocate ‘we’ of the node ‘gambler*’ tends to signify the non-gamblers’ voice which is geared towards the institutional stance. The verb collocate ‘say’ is frequently used in contexts where the gamblers are being commented upon or criticized. The analytic outcomes of the research have once again confirmed the ‘hegemonizing’ character of newspaper texts.

Contextualized within immigrants’ acquisition of specialized knowledge about the host country at the institutional level, this article examines a 64295-word corpus of textbooks written for participants of the orientation course in German politics, history and culture. Corpus-based techniques (“keyness,” collocation and qualitative examination of concordance lines) are deployed to explore the corpus. The findings reveal that the collocational patterns of the identified keywords construct particular world views vis-à-vis Germany. For instance, the keyword DDR [German Democratic Republic (GDR), aka East Germany] frequently co-occurs with negatively connoted lexis while collocates of the keywords denoting present-day Germany (e.g., Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Federal Republic of Germany] and Staat [nation, country, state]) facilitate the portrayal of Germany as a nurturing welfare state that is popular among foreigners. It is argued that such discursively-construed opposition between the “bad” GDR and the “good” Federal Republic of Germany helps to legitimize the German reunification. Furthermore, it is found that certain keywords (e.g., Sie [you], Kurs [course, class] and z.B. [e.g.]) are “metadiscourse resources” (Hyland, 2005). Their pedagogic effects are discussed in relation to the ideological implications of the research findings.

Among practitioners of critical discourse studies (CDS), German storybooks for children are relatively unexplored in comparison with storybooks targeted at the Anglophone communities. In this study, I investigated a German children’s book series called Siggi Blitz. Containing a total of 23 639 words, this series comprises twelve storybooks which were released between 2013 and 2014. Focus was given to the discursive representation of characters and the legitimation strategies used to convey ideologies. Specifically, I would like to explore how female and male characters are represented. To this end, two analytic frameworks from van Leeuwen (1996, 2007, 2008)—the Social Actor Theory and the discursive construction of legitimation—were employed. The findings indicate that gender stereotyping is pervasive in the storybooks. For instance, on the dimension of “categorization,” female characters tend to be represented by reference to their physical appearance (viz., “physical identification”) while male characters are regularly associated with their occupations (viz., “functionalization”). Analysis of the legitimation strategies used demonstrates that “rationalization” is the most frequent form of legitimation. “Rationalization” has two functions in the storybooks: (i) to justify acceptable and/or unacceptable behaviors; (ii) to mark the utility of common artifacts. Furthermore, it was found that “role model authority” is exclusively applied to male characters, echoing the findings regarding gender stereotyping in the earlier part of the study. Given the “socializing” nature of storybooks for children, the present study reveals that awareness in relation to the representation of gender has to be increased among story contributors.