Language, Corpus and Empowerment: Applications to deaf education, healthcare and online discourses

Language, Corpus and Empowerment applies a novel corpus-driven approach to the exploration of the concept of empowerment in healthcare. The book proposes an innovative corpus-based methodology for finding evidence of empowerment in language use, using data from a video intervention delivered to families of deaf children, as well as assessing the effects of the intervention on the family. Language, Corpus and Empowerment provides a working definition of empowerment which incorporates concepts from linguistics and learning theory; uses corpus analysis to provide evidence of how video interventions can transform people’s perspectives; examines this new methodology as a potential tool for analysing conversational data longitudinally and at a case-by-case level; demonstrates how a corpus-based methodological approach can be applied in conjunction with other language-based approaches, such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis, to explore the ways in which complex social processes occur in interaction; makes a valuable development in the assessment of the impact of healthcare interventions and the language of empowerment. Insightful and ground-breaking, Language, Corpus and Empowerment is essential reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics.