Papers by Sara Vilar Lluch
Criminal Law and Philosophy
Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violen... more Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive and moral disputes surrounding hate speech laws—in particular, surrounding their compatibility with the rule of law, democracy, and free speech—depend crucially on the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Next, we argue, drawing on recent developments in legal philosophy, that corpus linguistics constitutes a distinctively promising tool for ascertaining the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Finally, we offer a proof of concept, by outlining, and analyzing the interpretive and moral implications...
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Hate speech has become a matter of international concern, permeating institutional and lay discus... more Hate speech has become a matter of international concern, permeating institutional and lay discussions alike. Yet, exactly what it means to refer to a linguistic act as ‘hate speech’ remains unclear. This paper examines the lay understanding of hate speech, focusing on (1) the relationship between hate speech and hate, and (2) the relationship between hate speech and offensive speech. As part of the second question, the paper considers how hate speech is defined as a legal matter in the UK Public Order Act 1986. The study adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis approach and examines 255 hate speech-related news articles and the general English Web 2020 corpus. Hate speech is a complex multifaceted phenomenon; while ‘hate’ is one of its core characteristics, it is not sufficient to assess a certain behaviour as hate speech. Threats, denigration of the targets based on a protected characteristic (age, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability), the potential to cause harm a...
Medical Humanities
Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key ... more Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvemen...
Medical Humanities
Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key ... more Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvemen...
Applied Corpus Linguistics
Health Communication
This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., "may", "ofte... more This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., "may", "often") in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g., carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a Systemic Functional perspective towards language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when nonpractitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice.
Health Communication
This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., "may", "often") in the Diagnostic and S... more This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., "may", "often") in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g., carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a Systemic Functional perspective towards language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when nonpractitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice.
This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world ... more This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception at the start of 2020. The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorisation and metaphorisation of the illness and the administrative responses to it, perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services and further social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis. The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic: ● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level? ● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work? ● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate? ● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated? ● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?
Functions of Language
This article considers the application of the Attitude framework (Martin & White 2005) to study t... more This article considers the application of the Attitude framework (Martin & White 2005) to study the evaluation of human behaviour. The distinction between inscribed (explicit) and invoked (indirect) attitude is re-examined and systematised to better operationalise the analysis of the evaluation of behaviour. General linguistic evaluation triggers are identified for inscribed and invoked evaluations, and the annotation scheme is applied in a corpus of texts from different registers (a psychiatric manual, educational guidelines and informal online exchanges) concerned with ADHD. Indirect evaluations of behaviour are described as attitudinal inferences derived from (i) the behaviours of the individuals, (ii) the behavioural outcomes, (iii) the impact that the behaviour or its outcomes have on third parties and the actions that the latter may perform as a result. It is proposed that indirect evaluations of people’s behaviour are metonymically inferred through an effect→cause relation dr...
Functions of Language, 2022
This article considers the application of the Attitude framework ( Martin & White 2005 ) to study... more This article considers the application of the Attitude framework ( Martin & White 2005 ) to study the evaluation of human behaviour. The distinction between inscribed (explicit) and invoked (indirect) attitude is re-examined and systematised to better operationalise the analysis of the evaluation of behaviour. General linguistic evaluation triggers are identified for inscribed and invoked evaluations, and the annotation scheme is applied in a corpus of texts from different registers (a psychiatric manual, educational guidelines and informal online exchanges) concerned with ADHD. Indirect evaluations of behaviour are described as attitudinal inferences derived from (i) the behaviours of the individuals, (ii) the behavioural outcomes, (iii) the impact that the behaviour or its outcomes have on third parties and the actions that the latter may perform as a result. It is proposed that indirect evaluations of people’s behaviour are metonymically inferred through an EFFECT→CAUSE relation drawn across the different parts of an action scenario. The conceptual metonymy explains the directionality observed in attitude analyses (Appreciation attitude type may stand as tokens of Judgment), and it shows the impossibility of evaluating performances without indirectly appraising the human behaver.
Pandemic and Crisis Discourse
This research analyses how psychiatric institutional discourse shapes Attention Deficit/Hyperacti... more This research analyses how psychiatric institutional discourse shapes Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) in order to understand how this discourse (i) has an active role in modelling a canonical representation of the illness, and (ii) contributes to the social formation of an identity for the diagnosed individuals. Attention is paid to any evidence of stigmatisation. The investigation is performed through a data-driven critical discourse analysis of the ADHD chapter of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V) (American Psychiatric Association) adopting Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) systemic functional grammar and Jeffries’ (2010) analytical toolkit. The prototypical ADHD target is identified with a querulous elementary school-aged white boy. ADHD is defined by its symptoms and established as perilous in virtue of its associated consequences. Insufficient attention and excessive movement or talk are graded according to standards ul...
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
This research analyses how psychiatric institutional discourse shapes Attention Deficit/Hyperacti... more This research analyses how psychiatric institutional discourse shapes Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) in order to understand how this discourse (i) has an active role in modelling a canonical representation of the illness, and (ii) contributes to the social formation of an identity for the diagnosed individuals. Attention is paid to any evidence of stigmatisation. The investigation is performed through a data-driven critical discourse analysis of the ADHD chapter of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V) (American Psychiatric Association) adopting Halliday and Matthiessen's (2004) systemic functional grammar and Jeffries' (2010) analytical toolkit. The prototypical ADHD target is identified with a querulous elementary school-aged white boy. ADHD is defined by its symptoms and established as perilous in virtue of its associated consequences. Insufficient attention and excessive movement or talk are graded according to standards ultimately founded on social desirability. DSM-V not only provides the orthodox description of all categorised mental disorders, it also establishes the standards all individuals have to meet to be sane.
Book Reviews by Sara Vilar Lluch
Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2017 282 pages, Irony constitutes a complex conceptual and communicati... more Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2017 282 pages, Irony constitutes a complex conceptual and communicative process with multiple manifestations, mainly divided between situational and verbal types. To analyze the importance of irony for cognitive, embodied and communicative or social skills requires the dialogue and collaboration between different disciplines. "Irony in Language Use and Communication", edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, examines the different aspects of irony by bringing together contributions from a wide variety of disciplines and approaches. Part I presents research from cognitive science, psychology and philosophy, and it is complemented by Part II, a collection of studies in authentic data. Part III traces a relationship between irony and other types of figurative language, and Part IV closes the volume with an examination of different methods and approaches followed to date in irony research.
Conference Presentations by Sara Vilar Lluch
FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
Uniting Two Perspectives on Mental Illness: Philosophy and Linguistics
Uni... more FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
Uniting Two Perspectives on Mental Illness: Philosophy and Linguistics
University of Essex, 13-14 September 2018
Keynote speakers: Dr. Nelya Koteyko and Prof. Tim Thornton
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- Diagnosis and treatment ideologies
- Mental illness in institutional discourse (e.g. clinical texts, law, government policy)
- Models of mental illness (e.g. medical, social)
- Feminist and minorities perspectives on psychiatry
- Conceptualisation and portrayal of specific conditions
- Diagnosis and self-understanding
- Verbal and non-verbal communication in neurodiverse communities (e.g. autism communities)
- Mental illness in clinical, education, workplace, or family settings
- Mental illness in the media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, films, cartoons, advertisements)
- Identity and political representation (e.g. the neurodiversity movement, mad pride)
- Stigma and anti-stigma campaigns
Abstracts of up to 300 words (references excluded) should be submitted via the form provided in our webpage:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/arts-humanities/graduate-school/news-and-events/uniting-two-perspectives
Deadline for Submissions: 20th April, noon
Conference supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.
CALL FOR PAPERS by Sara Vilar Lluch
Books by Sara Vilar Lluch
Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy, 2022
This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world ... more This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception at the start of 2020. The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorisation and metaphorisation of the illness and the administrative responses to it, perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services and further social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis.
The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic:
● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level?
● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work?
● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate?
● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated?
● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?
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Papers by Sara Vilar Lluch
Book Reviews by Sara Vilar Lluch
Conference Presentations by Sara Vilar Lluch
Uniting Two Perspectives on Mental Illness: Philosophy and Linguistics
University of Essex, 13-14 September 2018
Keynote speakers: Dr. Nelya Koteyko and Prof. Tim Thornton
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- Diagnosis and treatment ideologies
- Mental illness in institutional discourse (e.g. clinical texts, law, government policy)
- Models of mental illness (e.g. medical, social)
- Feminist and minorities perspectives on psychiatry
- Conceptualisation and portrayal of specific conditions
- Diagnosis and self-understanding
- Verbal and non-verbal communication in neurodiverse communities (e.g. autism communities)
- Mental illness in clinical, education, workplace, or family settings
- Mental illness in the media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, films, cartoons, advertisements)
- Identity and political representation (e.g. the neurodiversity movement, mad pride)
- Stigma and anti-stigma campaigns
Abstracts of up to 300 words (references excluded) should be submitted via the form provided in our webpage:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/arts-humanities/graduate-school/news-and-events/uniting-two-perspectives
Deadline for Submissions: 20th April, noon
Conference supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.
CALL FOR PAPERS by Sara Vilar Lluch
Books by Sara Vilar Lluch
The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic:
● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level?
● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work?
● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate?
● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated?
● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?
Uniting Two Perspectives on Mental Illness: Philosophy and Linguistics
University of Essex, 13-14 September 2018
Keynote speakers: Dr. Nelya Koteyko and Prof. Tim Thornton
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- Diagnosis and treatment ideologies
- Mental illness in institutional discourse (e.g. clinical texts, law, government policy)
- Models of mental illness (e.g. medical, social)
- Feminist and minorities perspectives on psychiatry
- Conceptualisation and portrayal of specific conditions
- Diagnosis and self-understanding
- Verbal and non-verbal communication in neurodiverse communities (e.g. autism communities)
- Mental illness in clinical, education, workplace, or family settings
- Mental illness in the media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, films, cartoons, advertisements)
- Identity and political representation (e.g. the neurodiversity movement, mad pride)
- Stigma and anti-stigma campaigns
Abstracts of up to 300 words (references excluded) should be submitted via the form provided in our webpage:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/arts-humanities/graduate-school/news-and-events/uniting-two-perspectives
Deadline for Submissions: 20th April, noon
Conference supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.
The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic:
● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level?
● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work?
● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate?
● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated?
● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?