Discourse and Text Research Group (DisTex)

Description

Based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, Discourse and Text Research Group brings together researchers interested in the way meaning is made in different contexts, modes and genres of communication.

Adopting and developing a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives to investigate the social, historical, cognitive and situated-interactional dimensions of meaning in different communicative settings, the Group’s research falls within various fields of text/discourse analysis, including critical discourse analysis, health communication and pragmatics.

The Group is a large research cluster representing a diverse and long-standing tradition of research at Lancaster University investigating language use in various social domains and communicative activity-types.
The Group’s research investigates language in use across a broad range of social domains and communicative activity-types. It falls within various sub-fields of text and discourse analysis, including:

• Business and Corporate Communication – corporate identity and branding, legitimation in stakeholder documents
• Critical Discourse Studies – power and identity in discourse, language policy and language ideologies, representations of minority social groups and social movements, the discursive legitimation of discrimination
• Ecolinguistics – representations of climate change, representations of animals
• Forensic Linguistics – conflict and aggression in online discourse, language as evidence, legal document analysis
• Health Communication – mental illness in fictional and non-fictional narratives, figurative language and chronic pain, metaphor and illness/end of life, stigmatisation in media discourses
• Language, Gender and Sexuality – intersection of gender and sexuality with other identities, representation of those identity groups and language use by such identity groups
• Pragmatics – politeness and impoliteness, historical pragmatics
• Stylistics – metaphor and mind style in fiction

The Group’s research is interdisciplinary, adopting and developing methods and perspectives in other areas, including Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Multimodality.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

Lancaster University
Lancaster