The relation and function of discourses: a corpus-cognitive analysis of the Irish abortion debate

Collocation analysis has proved useful in identifying discourses in media texts about people, events and situations. While corpus methods can tell us about the existence and frequency of discourses, they are unable to give insight into the function they play in a text. I argue that we can illuminate how discourses are conceptualised and used argumentatively in relation to other discourses by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Such discourse relations form the basis of ideologies and argumentative viewpoints. In this paper, I use a corpus-cognitive approach, employing collocational analysis and the 'trajector/landmark' alignment from Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2008) to analyse the discourses of the concept words mother, woman and church in the Irish debate on abortion access after the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012. This reveals relational and functional differences between the discourses of these three words (e.g., the discourses voiced about a mother differ when texts also concern the Church). I argue that the use of a corpus-cognitive approach reflects language in use and allows us to see how related discourses function to create ideological viewpoints.