Miguel-Angel Benitez-CastroUniversity of Zaragoza | UNIZAR · Department of English and German
Miguel-Angel Benitez-Castro
PhD in English Language, University of Granada
About
20
Publications
8,125
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
91
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My main research interest lies in corpus-assisted discourse analysis, inspired particularly by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which I have managed to apply to my general focus on the interface between lexical choice, discourse structure and evaluation. This general interest is reflected, among others, in my previous and ongoing research on shell-noun phrases, as well as on the psychologically-inspired refinement of SFL's Appraisal Theory and its application to various contexts.
Education
October 2015 - September 2017
September 2009 - December 2013
January 2008 - April 2008
Publications
Publications (20)
Neojihadism taps successfully into the Internet’s influence to disseminate its oppression narrative of Muslims vs. non-believers (Al Raffie 2012). Whilst this type of radicalisation has received attention from psychoanalysis (Kobrin 2010), jihadist discourse is in need of more exhaustive examination. By detecting recruiters’ key persuasive strategi...
Extremist online networks reportedly tend to use Twitter and other Social Networking Sites (SNS) in order to issue propaganda and recruitment statements. Traditional machine learning models may encounter problems when used in such a context, due to the peculiarities of microblogging sites and the manner in which these networks interact (both betwee...
Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide an exciting insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Exiting research covers discussions within individual parliaments. In contrast, we ap...
Despite the growth of interest in the phenomenon of shell-nounhood in academic discourse, research has been primarily concerned with published research articles. This contrasts with the limited attention that it has received in the study of disciplinary student writing. This study explores discipline specificity in student writing through an in-dep...
Recursively in history, emotions such as social anger, moral satiety, distrust of the elite and the Establishment, among others, have all contributed to politicians’ encouragement and exploitation of a rather emotionally charged discourse (Block and Negrine 2017). In their self-imposed capacity as mouthpiece for the people, populist leaders have su...
Drawing on Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory, we study the language of evaluation in a corpus of interviews selected from the archives of The Magdalene Oral History Project. Apart from being deprived of proper food, clothing, and their identity, many of the women who spent their lives in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions had been, or were, sexuall...
Conference Languaging Diversity 2019
Utterance production/interpretation depends unmistakably on emotional contexts. This makes the analysis of emotion in language fascinating and difficult, as it permeates all levels of linguistic description. Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory is a powerful instrument intended to capture the subtleties of emotion in discourse. Its status as an...
Populist Discourse brings together experts from both linguistics and political science to analyze the language of populist leaders and the media representation on populism in different temporal, geographical and ideological contexts, including Nazi Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Greece, the UK, the US and South A...
Following the five successful events hosted by the Universities of Naples (2013), Catania (2014), Macerata (2016), Cagliari (2017) and Antwerp (2018), the I-Land Interuniversity Research Centre brings the sixth edition of its Languaging Diversity annual conference (LD6) to the University of Zaragoza, Spain, at the Campus of Teruel. The beautiful hi...
In the last decade, the Magdalene Laundries scandal has revealed endemic problems of Irish society. From 1765 to 1996, these asylums run by female religious congregations became prisons for prostitutes, single mothers, abused girls or young ladies allegedly prone to seduction. Forced into these institutions, those women had to work under pseudo-sla...
The analysis of newspaper discourse offers valuable insights into how society represents or misrepresents certain social participants and their actions. In view of the bias claimed to exist in journalistic prose (Bednarek, 2006; White, 2006), it is not uncommon to find evidence of the mistreatment directed towards particular minorities (Baker et al...
Numerous studies to date have investigated the cohesive, evaluative and formal features of semantically unspecific abstract nouns such as
objective
or
assumption.
These nouns share the property of ‘shell-nounhood’, associated with their ability to package and characterise complex discourse segments. One broad genre where this ability is widely expl...
This paper is concerned with the meaning, function and form of noun phrases headed by abstract nouns such as objective, problem or assumption. These nouns, labelled here as ‘shell nouns’, have been extensively investigated but, so far, the research focus has been on a limited range of patterns, meanings and functions. This is demonstrated here thro...
This paper analyses a group of shell nouns from a small but representative sample of the English language, i.e., the BNC Sampler Corpus. This class of nouns comprises abstract units (e.g., lie, idea, issue) that help to condense long stretches of discourse into smaller discourse entities. The motivation for their use lies in their text-organising a...
http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/31711/1/22805801.pdf
This paper draws on a longitudinal corpus-based study into the lexical competence of first-year Spanish university students of English, based on a set of written compositions collected over two semesters within the same academic year (2003-2004). The methodology employed for this paper takes account of the correct and incorrect tokens produced by s...
Este trabajo intenta cubrir un hueco en el estudio sobre el inglés para fines académicos. La formación de palabras ha tendido a ser un área de investigación deficitaria en el registro académico, en ocasiones subyugada a otras áreas con un mayor peso, tales como la sintaxis o el vocabulario. Este estudio nace con el propósito de establecer el grado...
The present paper offers a two-session lesson proposal aimed at a CLIL teaching-learning methodology, nowadays at the forefront of the FL teaching and learning experience. The theoretical background and the practical aspects underpinning this lesson plan stem from two models, namely Katherine Barnhouse’s proposal for lesson planning and the so-call...
Projects
Projects (2)
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad de Zaragoza, TERUEL
24-27 September 2019 [24 Sep: Pre-Conference Workshops; 25-27 Sep: Main Conference]
Conference website: http://langdiv2019.unizar.es/
Conference e-mail: ld2019@unizar.es
EasyChair submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ld2019
Follow us on:
Twitter: @LangDiv2019, #LangDiv2019
Facebook: https://goo.gl/2AniEo
My colleague Miguel Angel Benitez-Castro (University of Zaragoza, Spain) and myself are aiming to analyse the interviews of the Magdalenes from a SFL perspective.
