English Linguistics Thesis Talk

Dr. Alena Soloshenko (University of Würzburg): The Dynamics of Emotions in Legal Discourse

This talk presents a perspective on the interaction between language, cognition, and emotion in legal discourse. The debate on the status of emotions as opposed to logic and reason is addressed via an interdisciplinary approach employing the frameworks of cognitive linguistics and psychology. Using the example of British fiction literature with legal themes, a corpus-driven diachronic analysis examined lexicalisation and conceptualisation of the emotion keywords. This enabled to trace and categorise the patterns of emotional experiences as represented linguistically by different types of emotions (e.g. fear, surprise) and compare these in relation to legal themes over time.

© Alena Soloshenko

Dr. Fabio Carrella (University of Bristol): Populism and Social Media: A Study of European Populist Parties’ Language on Twitter and Facebook

Crucial political events, such as the Brexit or the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, led to a proliferation of studies on populism and its nature. This talk will focus on the fortunate relationship between populists and social media, describing how the use of tools borrowed from discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and statistical analysis allowed (1) to identify the discursive themes differentiating populist from non-populist politicians, (2) to illustrate the stylistic features used by populists, and (3) to measure the effect that these features had on the popularity of the populist discourse online.

© Fabio Carrella