Corpora and Media Studies (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Traditionally, studies in media discourse have been divided into those that focus on spoken media (mostly radio genres) and those that focus on written media (mostly newspapers). Studies into spoken media discourse were largely covered by conversation analysts (Conversation Analysis, see Hutchby 1991, 1996) and written media discourse was more likely to be explored within a critical framework (Critical Discourse Analysis, see Fairclough 1995a, 1995b, 2000). Considering the prevalence of media discourse in everyday life, the number of studies based on it as a whole over the years is less than one would expect. Reasons for this probably lie in the difficulty of gathering data. In the case of spoken data, it has to be recorded and transcribed, a time-consuming and laborious task. In the case of written discourse, previous to the advent of the internet, the data needed to be scanned (and checked) or keyed into a computer. It is not a coincidence therefore that most studies of media discourse up until the year 2000 or so, whether spoken or written, focused on small amounts of data that did not need much recording, transcription or scanning time.