Isobelle Clarke

• PhD in Applied Linguistics
• Senior Researcher at Lancaster University

Public distrust in government, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professions, and medical science and technology has been consistently linked with vaccine rejection. Policymakers, therefore, want to better understand links between distrust of institutions and vaccine refusal. This paper reports on a case study of posts (tweets) to the social med...

In this study we use ATLAS.ti to interpret the results of a keyword co-occurrence analysis (KCA) of fake vaccination news. Specifically, KCA is used to uncover the most dominant patterns of co-occurring keywords across a corpus of 37,676 texts from 235 pseudoscience and conspiracy websites that mention vaccin* . KCA enables researchers to examine l...

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words...

The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of Spoken American English (LANA-CASE) is a collaborative project between Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University to create a publicly available, large-scale corpus of American English conversation. In this article, we describe the design of LANA-CASE in terms of the challenges that have arisen and...

This entry details the academic career and contributions of the Australian linguist, Diana Eades. Eades is a major figure in the field of forensic linguistics with her work on increasing understanding about the linguistic disadvantage and communicative challenges faced by speakers of Aboriginal English and nonstandard varieties of English in the Au...

This chapter explores the language that newspapers published in the UK use to represent Islamism. The chapter studies 22 years of UK national press reporting on the topic. Working with a very large volume of data, we use the approach of corpus linguistics to allow us to be able to account for the use of words referring to Islamism. This is an advan...

This paper applies a new approach to the identification of discourses, based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), to the study of discourse variation over time. The MCA approach to keywords deals with a major issue with the use of keywords to identify discourses: the allocation of individual keywords to multiple discourses. Yet, as this paper...

This paper applies Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) to a corpus of English tweets to uncover the most common patterns of linguistic variation. MDA is a commonly applied method in corpus linguistics for the analysis of functional and/or stylistic variation in a particular language variety. Notably, MDA is an approach aimed at identifying and interpr...

Supplementary Materials for Matteo Fuoli, Isobelle Clarke, Viola Wiegand, Hendrik Ziezold, Michaela Mahlberg, Responding Effectively to Customer Feedback on Twitter: A Mixed Methods Study of Webcare Styles, Applied Linguistics, Volume 42, Issue 3, June 2021, Pages 569–595, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa046

This article introduces a new method for grouping keywords and examines the extent to which it also allows analysts to explore the interaction of discourse and subregister. It uses the multivariate statistical technique, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, to reveal dimensions of keywords which co-occur across the texts of a corpus. These dimensions...

Social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for companies to interact more closely with customers and market their products and services. But social media also present reputational risks as negative word-of-mouth can spread more quickly and widely through these platforms than ever before. This study investigates how companies respond to custome...

Twitter was an integral part of Donald Trump’s communication platform during his 2016 campaign. Although its topical content has been examined by researchers and the media, we know relatively little about the style of the language used on the account or how this style changed over time. In this study, we present the first detailed description of st...

Trolling is a multifunctional phenomenon, which varies considerably, not only in terms of the behaviours it displays and the perceptions of those behaviours, but also with respect to the platform and the community in which it resides. From a forensic perspective, trolling also varies in terms of that which is prosecutable to that which is not. Desp...

There is a long-standing debate about the authorship of the Bixby Letter, one of the most famous pieces of correspondence in American history. Despite being signed by President Abraham Lincoln, some historians have claimed that its true author was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary. Analyses of the letter have been inconclusive in part because...

Although Phillips and Milner (The ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity and antagonism online 2017) have emphasised that the term ‘troll’ and ‘trolling’ are vague and ethically problematic, due to the fact that they are used as catch-all terms for various behaviours, including more serious and criminal behaviours, resulting in the desensitisation o...

This article reports on a research project investigating the professional identity of linguists as experts in legal and forensic settings. It reveals how they construct that identity discursively and intersubjectively. The analysis adopts a social constructionist perspective whereby the ways in which the experts talk and make sense of their profess...