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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 9:2 (2018) ► pp.252–273

Does a corpus informed analysis provide any insights as to why Robert Phillipson’s theory of Linguistic Imperialism is labelled by some as a conspiracy theory?

| Toyo University

This paper uses the corpus tools DOTA and WordSmith to see if they can provide any indication as to why some label Phillipson’s theory of Linguistic Imperialism as a conspiracy theory. The tools were applied to multiple corpora composed of texts drawn from: Phillipson’s works, conspiracy theory books, and a control corpus of general academic papers. The quantitative data generated was subjected to a corpus informed qualitative analysis with the tools being applied to facilitate a corpus-assisted discourse study of Linguistic Imperialism.

Keywords: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), conspiracy theory, Dogmatism Text Analysis (DOTA), Linguistic Imperialism, Robert Phillipson, WordSmith
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Linguistic imperialism
    • Conspiracy theories
  • Methodology
  • Results
    • only
    • can
    • cannot
    • several
    • possible
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.15065.tho
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