Ruth Breeze
Biographic Data
| ID | 453845 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Breeze |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Breeze |
| SIGNATURE | BREEZE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidad de Navarra |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8132-225X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A Syncretic Overview of Languages for Specific Purposes
The human face of sustainability. Representing social sustainability in banks’ corporate websites in Spain and the United Kingdom
Visual design plays a key role on banks’ websites. However, little is known about how images are deployed to convey key messages in specific sections. This paper conducts an analysis of the human images in the “Sustainability” and “About us” sections of two Spanish and two UK bank websites, considering aspects of representation, interaction and composition. Although varied patterns emerge, our results show trends to use human images differently i…
A systematic review of reliability in corpus-based metadiscourse studies
Metadiscourse has been a major focus of research over the last twenty-five years, attracting methodological approaches from the areas of textual pragmatics and discourse studies, many of which are supported by corpus linguistics. A major challenge in corpus-based discourse studies, however, is subjectivity, which may affect their quality and undermine their methodological rigor. To reduce subjectivity and guarantee consistency, assessing reliabil…
Media coverage of the 2024 elections for the European Parliament in the UK and Turkey: Outsiders’ perspectives on the rise of the far right
This article extends research on European Parliament media coverage beyond member states to examine how media in two non-European Union (EU) countries with contrasting relationships to the bloc, a former member and a stalled candidate, interpret a watershed electoral moment marked by the unprecedented 2024 far-right surge, which may reshape their relationship with the EU. It investigates a comprehensive corpus of online news articles from ideolog…
Corpus Analysis of Business and Corporate Discourse
Business and corporate discourse have been approached from corpus linguistics in a number of ways. This chapter outlines the areas of business and corporate discourse, explaining the different perspectives used to research them. Using practical examples of classic and recent studies, it illustrates the main ways that written and spoken corpora have proved useful in these areas and discusses some future directions.
Is this War: Naming the Russia-Ukraine dispute in three international news providers
Media discourse around particular subjects comes to shape people’s understanding of that topic. In particular, the words used to describe situations of violence and conflict may colour public perceptions. This paper identifies the main words used to describe the Russia-Ukraine conflict by three international media outlets, Al Jazeera, Euronews and CGTN , from February to May 2022. Following the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies, it…
Writer and participant visibility in quantitative and qualitative research: A corpus-assisted study of human agent verbs in health science publications
Quantitative and qualitative research writing is thought to differ in a number of ways, which include the visibility given to the human agents involved, that is, writers and participants in the study. However, most studies have so far centred on writer visibility alone, which has been measured principally through personal pronoun use. This paper approaches the issue of writer and participant visibility in one area of research where both quantitat…
Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: A hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger
This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative electoral support, and his position as a…
Chinese reporting on the Ukraine war: A comparative Cads study of CGTN’S coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict
During the first months of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the attitude of the Chinese authorities was the object of much speculation. This paper sheds light on the Chinese official position by examining how the Chinese global channel CGTN presented the main actors and actions in the conflict over the first three months. By conducting a corpus assisted discourse study of all the reports published about the conflict on CGTN from February to May 2022,…
Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis
How can you carry out discourse analysis using corpus linguistics? What research questions should I ask? Which methods should you use and when? What is a collocational network or a key cluster? Introducing the major techniques, methods and tools for corpus-assisted analysis of discourse, this book answers these questions and more, showing readers how to best use corpora in their analyses of discourse. Using carefully tailored case studies, each c…
Time for Brexit? Temporalities in the 2019 UK European election campaign
Although the importance of time in political discourse cannot be denied, few recent studies address the representation of time as a factor in election campaigns. This discourse analytical study focuses on the role of time in the campaign literature produced by the nine main parties in the 2019 EU election in the UK, which resulted in a landslide victory for the newly-formed Brexit Party. The corpus consisted of the manifestos or leaflets produced…
People Engaging with Justice: Petitions to the Scottish Parliament
Performing right-wing political identities on reader comments pages
Recent discourse research has examined the rise of right-wing populism. Yet the predominant focus on political parties and politicians means that we know less about how right-wing identities are performed among ordinary people with different degrees of political engagement. This paper examines reader comments pages in three British newspapers, analysing how participants perform, defend and reinforce their political identities in online fora. It t…
Negotiating alignment in newspaper editorials: The role of concur-counter patterns
Newspaper editorials are shaped by the need to negotiate alignment and rapport with a diverse readership. This is achieved partly through the resources of engagement (Martin and White 2005), that is, through the argumentative moves of disclaim, proclaim, entertain and attribute, by which dialogic relations with the reader are carefully modulated. One aspect of argumentation in editorials that has sometimes been overlooked is that of the concede-c…
Critical discourse analysis and its critics
This article briefly reviews the rise of Critical Discourse Analysis and teases out a detailed analysis of the various critiques that have been levelled at CDA and its practitioners over the last twenty years, both by scholars working within the “critical” paradigm and by other critics. A range of criticisms are discussed which target the underlying premises, the analytical methodology and the disputed areas of reader response and the integration…
Gender and politics in a digitalised world: Investigating online hostility against UK female MPs
This paper investigates digital discursive practices of hostility against women in UK politics through quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of Twitter data retrieved across the 3 weeks preceding the UK General Elections in December 2019. A mixed-methods approach was designed. First, we used quantitative semantic analysis to compare the large datasets of tweets about female and male MPs, with a view to detecting possible gendered patt…
Teaching English-Medium Instruction Courses in Higher Education: A Guide for Non-Native Speakers
This book provides practical help and guidance for non-native English-speaking higher education lecturers faced with the need to deliver lectures and seminars in English. It builds on the authors' years of experience as researchers and teacher trainers in the area of English Medium Instruction (EMI), combining practical advice and research findings with useful case studies from different global settings, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Slo…
Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics
This paper analyses letters to shareholders by bank presidents in the ten years after the financial crisis to establish whether apologies for corporate wrongdoing and mismanagement are present, and if not, how these negative aspects are communicated. Apologies and quasi apologies are shown to be part of a wider repertoire of strategies including alignment with those affected, disassociation from negative events, scapegoating of perpetrators, and …
Using the L1 in university-level EMI: Attitudes among lecturers in Spain
English medium instruction (EMI) is widespread in European universities. In most such contexts, students and teachers are able to communicate in at least one other language, generally the shared L1. Recent studies in English-speaking countries and postcolonial settings have suggested that attitudes towards L1 use in EMI are changing, and that multilingualism in the classroom is accepted or even positively embraced. However, some studies in expand…
Understandable public anger: Legitimation in banking after the 2008 crisis
In the ten years from 2008 onwards the banking sector was constantly in the spotlight. Blame for the financial crisis and concern regarding controversial government bailouts were followed by public outrage about inflated bonuses, money laundering and false reporting. Over this period, banks deployed a range of legitimation strategies to salvage their reputation. This paper proposes a modified typology of legitimation strategies based on previous …
Power and Persuasion in Online Dispute Resolution
The area of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is growing worldwide, as it provides parties with an opportunity to avoid the costs, delays and complications often associated with traditional court proceedings. Some forms of ADR involving smaller disputes are now increasingly being carried out on online platforms. In this emergent field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), it has been noted that although the theory is essentially the same, in pra…
Angry tweets: A corpus-assisted study of anger in populist political discourse
The rise of populism has turned researchers’ attention to the importance of affect in politics. This is a corpus-assisted study investigating lexis in the semantic domain of anger and violence in tweets by radical-right campaigner Nigel Farage in comparison with four other prominent British politicians. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discourse show that Farage cultivates a particular set of affective-discursive practices, which bri…
Politics and Populism Across Modes and Media
Exploring populist styles of political discourse in Twitter
In public controversy after the Brexit referendum, social media played a prominent role. In particular, veteran populist anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage used Twitter as a powerful weapon to further his cause. This paper compares a corpus of Farage's tweets in 2017-2018 with those by four other prominent British politicians (May, Johnson, Corbyn and Starmer). Quantitative corpus linguistics techniques are combined with qualitative analysis to exam…
Imagining the people in Ukip and Labour
Europe has seen a rise in populist movements, as trust in mainstream political parties has been undermined by the financial crisis and by perceptions of widespread corruption. Some discourse-oriented studies have shown how new political movements use charismatic personalities and striking discursive strategies to attract media attention and appeal to particular sectors of the electorate. United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is broadly classif…
Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in Ukip and Labour
Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise …
Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon
Despite growing interest in corporate discourse practices, linguists have rarely focused specifically on the discursive legitimation of institutional or corporate actors after perceived episodes of wrongdoing. This may be due to the fact that under normal conditions, legitimation may scarcely be perceptible, only reaching a significant pitch when a major crisis threatens the existence of the agents involved. Should such an event occur, then insti…
Gender and politics in a digitalised world: Investigating online hostility against UK female MPs
This paper investigates digital discursive practices of hostility against women in UK politics through quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of Twitter data retrieved across the 3 weeks preceding the UK General Elections in December 2019. A mixed-methods approach was designed. First, we used quantitative semantic analysis to compare the large datasets of tweets about female and male MPs, with a view to detecting possible gendered patt…
Constructing complex Cognitive Discourse Functions in higher education: An exploratory study of exam answers in Spanish- and English-medium instruction settings
Exploring populist styles of political discourse in Twitter
In public controversy after the Brexit referendum, social media played a prominent role. In particular, veteran populist anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage used Twitter as a powerful weapon to further his cause. This paper compares a corpus of Farage's tweets in 2017-2018 with those by four other prominent British politicians (May, Johnson, Corbyn and Starmer). Quantitative corpus linguistics techniques are combined with qualitative analysis to exam…
Lexical bundles across four legal genres
Legal language is often said to be formulaic, but little research is available on the nature of frequently occurring sequences of words in different legal genres. This article investigates the lexical bundles found in four legal corpora: academic law, case law, legislation, and documents. Major differences are brought to light between the type of bundles that are found, and the roles they have in the text. Academic legal writing uses relatively l…
Enemies of the people”: Populist performances in the Daily Mail reporting of the Article 50 case
Representation of social actors underpins ideology in media discourse. • Pro-Brexit discourses in the Daily Mail drive powerful identification with “the people”. • Discursive strategies project Establishment figures as “enemies of the people”. • A productive symbiosis emerges between political and tabloid populism
Fixing points on a shifting landscape: Truth, lies and politics in two reader comments pages
This paper focuses on reader comments published in two online UK newspapers (Mail Online and Independent) in response to articles about one discreditable incident involving a far-right political leader. The concepts of articulation and fixation are used to examine how these readers engage with the politician’s actions using ethical categories. While Independent readers build theoretical articulations between the politician’s actions and a general…
Issues of persuasion in academic law abstracts
Across the academic world, abstracts may often serve a primary promotional function. However, it has also long been accepted that each academic field has its own perception of exactly what it means to be interesting and authoritative. Although abstracts in many disciplines have been extensively researched, so far those from the academic area of law have received little attention. This paper applies techniques of qualitative and quantitative analy…
Variations on a Theme: Party Manifesto Discourses in the Uk 2010 Election
The British General Election of 2010 raised high expectations due to the social and political situation of the country, both externally and internally alike: the global economic crisis, the troops in Afghanistan, the anticipation of a political landslide with the accession of the Liberal Democrats to power. However, it seems apparent that the parties involved did not live up to them in terms of political debate and engagement with the issues. Thi…
Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon
Despite growing interest in corporate discourse practices, linguists have rarely focused specifically on the discursive legitimation of institutional or corporate actors after perceived episodes of wrongdoing. This may be due to the fact that under normal conditions, legitimation may scarcely be perceptible, only reaching a significant pitch when a major crisis threatens the existence of the agents involved. Should such an event occur, then insti…
Lexical bundles across four legal genres
Legal language is often said to be formulaic, but little research is available on the nature of frequently occurring sequences of words in different legal genres. This article investigates the lexical bundles found in four legal corpora: academic law, case law, legislation, and documents. Major differences are brought to light between the type of bundles that are found, and the roles they have in the text. Academic legal writing uses relatively l…
Or so the government would have you believe”: Uses of “you” in Guardian editorials
A comparison of EFL teachers’ and students’ attitudes to oral corrective feedback
A relatively small number of studies on beliefs about oral corrective feedback (CF) have uncovered a mismatch between teachers’ and students’ attitudes which is potentially harmful to the language learning process, not only because students may become demotivated when their expectations are not met, but also because teachers appear to be reluctant to provide oral CF. One of the reasons why teachers may feel this way seems to be that they are worr…
Balancing neutrality and partiality in arbitration: Discursive tensions in separate opinions
Although arbitration is increasingly being used to settle important disputes, particularly on an international level, little attention has focused on the language used by arbitrators. This article contains a qualitative analysis of the discursive moves and resources used in separate (dissenting and concurring) opinions published on the website of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes from 1987 to 2013. Arbitrators’ di…
Tired of Nice People? An Appraisal-based Approach to Trump’s Dichotomies
Political discourse is rich in dichotomies, but there is considerable variation in the way this rhetorical strategy is used. This article explores the dichotomies in two of Donald Trump’s high-profile pre-election speeches, showing how the speaker uses a full range of attitudinal resources to exploit their persuasive effects. To ensure a systematic analysis, Appraisal theory is used, which proves productive to analyse political speeches on the di…
Tired of Nice People? An Appraisal-based Approach to Trump’s Dichotomies
Constructing complex Cognitive Discourse Functions in higher education: An exploratory study of exam answers in Spanish- and English-medium instruction settings
Listening with your eyes: Multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Author/s Ruth BreezeInstituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Spain ABSTRACT Fine arts offer opportunities for multimodal approaches in education. Museums and galleries are now aware of their social role, and provide outreach activities designed to bring an understanding of art to a wider public. Their websites offer educational material for school children, showing how artistic knowledge and sensitivity can be cultivated with young a…
Enemies of the people”: Populist performances in the Daily Mail reporting of the Article 50 case
Representation of social actors underpins ideology in media discourse. • Pro-Brexit discourses in the Daily Mail drive powerful identification with “the people”. • Discursive strategies project Establishment figures as “enemies of the people”. • A productive symbiosis emerges between political and tabloid populism
Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in Ukip and Labour
Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise …
Imagining the people in Ukip and Labour
Europe has seen a rise in populist movements, as trust in mainstream political parties has been undermined by the financial crisis and by perceptions of widespread corruption. Some discourse-oriented studies have shown how new political movements use charismatic personalities and striking discursive strategies to attract media attention and appeal to particular sectors of the electorate. United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is broadly classif…
Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary represen…
Verb-particle constructions in the language of business and finance
Author/s Ruth BreezeUniversidad de Navarra, Spain ABSTRACT Although verb-particle combinations are generally relatively uncommon in formal English, they occur with a certain frequency in texts related to the economy, and specifically in journalism and academic analysis focusing on the financial markets. The first part of this paper consists of a corpus study of the verb-particle combinations found in two 200,000 word corpora of business English, …
Fixing points on a shifting landscape: Truth, lies and politics in two reader comments pages
This paper focuses on reader comments published in two online UK newspapers (Mail Online and Independent) in response to articles about one discreditable incident involving a far-right political leader. The concepts of articulation and fixation are used to examine how these readers engage with the politician’s actions using ethical categories. While Independent readers build theoretical articulations between the politician’s actions and a general…
Sam Bennett “Constructions of migrant integration in British public discourse. Becoming British
This article reviews Constructions of migrant integration in British public discourse. Becoming British 978-1-3500-2920-0
Power and Persuasion in Online Dispute Resolution
The area of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is growing worldwide, as it provides parties with an opportunity to avoid the costs, delays and complications often associated with traditional court proceedings. Some forms of ADR involving smaller disputes are now increasingly being carried out on online platforms. In this emergent field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), it has been noted that although the theory is essentially the same, in pra…
Angry tweets: A corpus-assisted study of anger in populist political discourse
The rise of populism has turned researchers’ attention to the importance of affect in politics. This is a corpus-assisted study investigating lexis in the semantic domain of anger and violence in tweets by radical-right campaigner Nigel Farage in comparison with four other prominent British politicians. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discourse show that Farage cultivates a particular set of affective-discursive practices, which bri…
Politics and Populism Across Modes and Media
Exploring populist styles of political discourse in Twitter
In public controversy after the Brexit referendum, social media played a prominent role. In particular, veteran populist anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage used Twitter as a powerful weapon to further his cause. This paper compares a corpus of Farage's tweets in 2017-2018 with those by four other prominent British politicians (May, Johnson, Corbyn and Starmer). Quantitative corpus linguistics techniques are combined with qualitative analysis to exam…
Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics
This paper analyses letters to shareholders by bank presidents in the ten years after the financial crisis to establish whether apologies for corporate wrongdoing and mismanagement are present, and if not, how these negative aspects are communicated. Apologies and quasi apologies are shown to be part of a wider repertoire of strategies including alignment with those affected, disassociation from negative events, scapegoating of perpetrators, and …
Using the L1 in university-level EMI: Attitudes among lecturers in Spain
English medium instruction (EMI) is widespread in European universities. In most such contexts, students and teachers are able to communicate in at least one other language, generally the shared L1. Recent studies in English-speaking countries and postcolonial settings have suggested that attitudes towards L1 use in EMI are changing, and that multilingualism in the classroom is accepted or even positively embraced. However, some studies in expand…
Understandable public anger: Legitimation in banking after the 2008 crisis
In the ten years from 2008 onwards the banking sector was constantly in the spotlight. Blame for the financial crisis and concern regarding controversial government bailouts were followed by public outrage about inflated bonuses, money laundering and false reporting. Over this period, banks deployed a range of legitimation strategies to salvage their reputation. This paper proposes a modified typology of legitimation strategies based on previous …
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Media studies (9 works)