Acts of killing, acts of meaning: an application of corpus pattern analysis to language of animal-killing

Abstract

We are currently witnessing unprecedented levels of ecological destruction and violence visited upon nonhumans. Study of the more-than-human world is now being enthusiastically taken up across a range of disciplines, in what has been called the ‘scholarly animal turn’. This thesis brings together concerns of Critical Animal Studies–along with related threads of posthumanism and new materialist thinking–and Corpus Linguistics, specifically Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), to produce a data-driven, lexicocentric study of the discourse of animal-killing. CPA, which has been employed predominantly in corpus lexicography, provides a robust and empirically well-founded basis for the analysis of verbs. Verbs are chosen as they act as the pivot of a clause; analysing them also uncovers their arguments–in this case, participants in material-discursive ‘killing’events. This project analyses 15 ‘killing’verbs using CPA as a …

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Alison Sealey (Director of Studies)