Title: Is there a language of fake news? Some answers from the Fakespeak project
Speaker: Dr Nele Põldvere (University of Oslo)
Date and time: Thu, February 2, 2023, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT (This is an online talk taking place on Microsoft Teams. The link to join will be sent out on the day of the talk.)
Organized by: Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Abstract:
In this talk, I will present some findings from a large project on the language of fake news, called Fakespeak. The goal of the project is to find out whether or not fake news is characterised by a distinct set of linguistic features that would allow us to speak of a language of fake news. Research on this topic has gained much ground in other disciplines, such as computer science, but in linguistics, it is still quite new. Grieve and Woodfield (forthcoming) have taken important steps towards establishing a linguistically driven approach to fake news, one that is grounded in existing linguistic theory and where the data are of high quality, i.e., controlled for a number of variables. In the Fakespeak project, we add to their research by drawing on the linguistic theories of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) to determine the defining metaphorical and evaluative features of fake news, respectively. The data are of different kinds. We make use of the Jayson Blair corpus used in Grieve and Woodfield, but we have also built new corpora, both large and small, to be able to generalise our results to different types of fake news.
References
Grieve, J., & Woodfield, H. (forthcoming). The language of fake news. Cambridge Elements in Forensic Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago University Press.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
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