The Religious Rhetoric of U.S. Presidential Candidates by Arnaud Vincent;

Author:Arnaud Vincent;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

A collocation network is an extended collocation graph that shows i) shared collocates and ii) cross-associations between several nodes.

A collocation network displays nodes with unique collocates (outer rim of the graph) and shared collocates (middle of the graph). The links between nodes and shared collocates are indicated by a dash-dot line.

Position: the collocates are dispersed evenly around the node with a ‘L’ or ‘R’ index displayed above the collocate circle indicating their original position to the left and to the right respectively.

Strength: The strength of collocation as measured by the association measure is indicated by the distance (length of line) between the node and the collocates. The closer the collocate is to the node, the stronger the association between the node and the collocate (‘magnet effect’).

Frequency: Collocation frequency is indicated by the intensity of the colour of the collocate. The darker the shade of colour, the more frequent the collocation is.

Source: Excerpts from LancsBox’s user guide (version 3.0), http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/help.php Last consulted: October 22, 2018.

As explained in Brezina et al.:

any discourse rests upon a large network of associations, where each one activates a number of others (cf. Hoey 2005), that produces social meaning through multiple cross-associations. These cross-associations, however, cannot be observed even with careful reading of source documents, but need to be analysed using a tool that allows simultaneous multiple comparisons of word frequencies and co-occurrences. GraphColl … is a tool designed specifically for this type of research.

(2015: 155)

As suggested above by Brezina et al. and explained in Hoey’s lexical priming theory to which they refer, “[a word] becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context” (Hoey 2005: 8). In the present collocation network analysis of liberal*, it is therefore not the collocates in isolation that interest us as such, but rather their cumulative effect on liberal* and the GOP-induced meaning that results from it. Following this rationale—and because the subcorpus analyzed is rather small in size and therefore more prone to contain collocations with lower raw frequencies than a larger corpus—the choice was made to allow for even the rarest collocates and collocations to be identified (see collocation frequency and collocate frequency values in Table 3.8) if showing a statistically strong association with liberal*.

As apparent in Figure 3.10, five direct collocates of the node liberal* were expanded—to wit, five-justice,21 medicaid-expanding, far-left, elite and pro-abortion—and their respective collocates generated accordingly. All these collocations (between liberal* and its five expanded collocates) are—in our small subcorpus—unique in terms of frequency (each occurring only once) but it is quite easy to see how these rare instances all contribute to the same uncompromising interpretation of the term liberal. Figure 3.10 also identifies—via labels added to the screenshot from GraphColl—the candidates who generated these associations with liberal*. The subcorpus is too small to allow any kind of definite conclusion, yet it is interesting to see that Trump is absent from Figure 3.

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