Stockholms universitet

Irene ElmerotDoktorand

Om mig

Forskningsprofil och övrigt arbete

I min forskning fokuserar jag på korpuslingvistik och diskursanalys för att undersöka språkliga maktstrukturer i tjeckiska, framför allt det som kallas språklig andrafiering. Materialet finns i den tjeckiska nationalkorpusens stora textmängder. Med hjälp av korpuslingvistiska metoder och statistik vill jag få fram forskningsmaterial på vilket det går att tillämpa diskursanalytiska/diskurslingvistiska teorier.

Sedan januari 2018 är jag doktorand inom forskarskolan Språk och makt (som nu blivit ett nätverk). Tidigare har jag dels tagit en magisterexamen i latin och en i slaviska språk, dels arbetat som facköversättare, korrekturläsare och språkgranskare, samt varit aktiv inom Sveriges Facköversättarförening. Nu har jag bara enstaka sådana uppdrag per år.

Jag samverkar i bland med det omgivande samhället, främst genom gästrecensioner på Dagensbok.com, men föreläser gärna för allmänheten inom relevanta ämnen. Jag är doktorandrepresentant sedan 2019 och webbplatsansvarig sedan 2022 i Svenska slavistförbundet; studentrepresentant i Centrum för indoeuropeiska språk- och kulturstudier sedan 2021; institutionens miljörepresentant från 1/7 2022 samt var ordförande i Humanistiska Fakultetsrådet från juni 2020 till juni 2021. 

Undervisning

Föreläsare

HT 2023: (Del av) "Vetenskapligt skrivande", dels i allmänhet, dels om kvantitativa metoder i språkvetenskapliga ämnen med fokus på tjeckiska. Kursen delas med Tora Hedin, Tjeckiska III – distanskurs.

HT 2019, VT 2020, HT 2020, HT 2021, VT 2022, VT 2023: ”Tjeckoslovakien mellan två krig” och ”Tjeckisk kultur och litteratur – en satirisk historia”, Tjeckien: Nytt land, gammal historia (TNLGH) – distanskurs.

VT 2018, VT 2022, VT 2023: "Textförståelse med grammatik", Tjeckiska I – distanskurs.

HT 2018: ”Tjeckisk kultur och litteratur – en introduktion”, Tjeckien: Nytt land, gammal historia (TNLGH).

HT 2018: ”Kvantitativa korpusmetoder”, Språk och makt (SV1320, Göteborgs universitet)

Kursansvar

HT 2018, HT 2019, VT 2020, HT 2020, HT 2021, VT 2022, VT 2023: Tjeckien: Nytt land, gammal historia (TNLGH/Realia)

Forskning

Här kan du läsa mer om forskarskolan Språk och makt: http://www.hum.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.345612.1504690149!/menu/standard/file/Informationsblad%20Språk%20och%20makt_2017-08-30.pdf

Min forskning hittar du under "Publikationer" på denna sida.

Under avhandlingstiden har jag även varit tjänstledig för att vara korpuslingvistisk expert i projektet Text analysis of transcripts of the tv programmes Události Czech Television and Události and comments (”Textová analyza přepišů pořadů Události ČT a Události a komentáře”) under 2022 och 2023. (Webbsida här.) Projektledare: Irena Reifová och Andrea Culková, Institutionen för mediestudier (Samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten), Karlsuniversitetet i Prag.

Konferensmedverkan – slavistik, korpuslingvistik eller diskursanalys

”Professional nouns in a positive light: How are internationally standardized groups reflected in news media?” på The Twelfth International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2023), Lancaster, Storbritannien, 3–6 juli 2023.

”What does time tell about women? A longitudinal study of adjectives modifying female nouns and their male counterparts”, Corpora and Discourse International Conference, Universitá di Bologna, 26–28 augusti 2022.

”Subjectivity on gender in the Czech Republic – results of a longitudinal news media study”, Det 22. nordiske slavistmøte, Oslo 10–13 augusti 2022.

”Income, Nationality and Subjectivity in Media Text – Czech newspapers from 1990 to 2018”, Slovko 2021, Bratislava, Slovakien, 13–15 oktober 2021.

”Why nationality matters – Ingroups and outgroups in Czech news after 1989” (uppdaterad version), The 11th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2021, Limerick (digital konferens) 13–17 juli 2021.

”Why nationality matters – Ingroups and outgroups in Czech news after 1989”, SlaviCorp 2020, en del av The 8th International Conference Grammar & Corpora, Kraków (digital konferens) 25–27 november 2020.

”A Muslim odyssey – subjectivity in news articles on Arabs and Muslims” (poster), Stance, (Inter)Subjectivity, Identity in Discourse 2020, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (digital konferens), 9–11 september 2020.

”Linguistic othering of Arabs and Muslims through adjectival modifiers in the press”, Corpora and Discourse International Conference, University of Sussex (digital konferens), 17–19 juni 2020.

”Reporting verbs about women and men in Czech printed media 1989 – 2015”, Slovko 2019, Bratislava, Slovakien, 23–25 oktober 2019.

”Language and power in Czech printed media”, 21:a Nordiska Slavistmötet, Joensuu, Finland, 14–18 augusti 2019.

”Linguistic othering in Czech media: adjectives – a work in progress” (poster) och
”Omnia divisa est in partes tres – how news production in the Czech Republic amplified othering”, The 10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2019), Cardiff University, Wales, 22–26 juli 2019.

”Hidden power structures in Czech printed media", Linguistics Prague, Tjeckien, 2019.

"Language and power in Czech media – a corpus analysis 
of linguistic othering". CADAAD 2018, Ålborg, Danmark, 2018.

”Language and power in Czech corpora”. Europhras – Student Research Workshop in conjunction with Computational and Corpus-based Phraseology, London, Storbritannien, 2017.

“Quantitative discourse analysis using the Czech National Corpus”. Quantitative Tools for Qualitative Analysis: Computational Social Science meets Discourse Analysis, A workshop at the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science London, Storbritannien, 2017.

Övriga konferenser etc.

”The translation of Czech particles in three registers: a corpus-based analysis”, Translation in Transition 6, Karlsuniversitetet i Prag, 22–23 september 2022.

”Språk och makt i tjeckiska media – ett pågående avhandlingsarbete” (poster), Ämneskonferens i slaviska språk, Göteborgs universitet, 25–26 november 2021.

“Språklig andrafiering i tjeckiska medier: Adjektiv och deras substantiv – en studie i vardande”, Forum för Textforskning 14, Uppsala universitet, 10–11 juni 2019.

“Linguistic othering in different forms – a case from Czech News Media", Framtiden för språken, Stockholm 2019

Handledare under doktorandutbildningen

Docent Tora Hedin, Stockholms universitet (Sverige)

Professor Masako Fidler, Brown University (RI, USA)

Professor Václav Cvrček, Karlsuniversitetet (Tjeckien)

Forskningsprojekt

Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • Constructing "us" and "them" through conflicts

    2022. Irene Elmerot. Discursive Approaches to Sociopolitical Polarization and Conflict, 122-136

    Kapitel

    This chapter concerns the evaluation of 105 nouns denoting Arab and Muslim nationalities and countries in the Czech news media over almost 30 years, using modifying adjectives from the Czech Subjectivity Lexicon (Veselovská, Hajič and Šindlerová, 2014). It is proposed that since the persons behind these nouns form an out-group (van Dijk, 1987, p. 12) in the focus country, the way they are reflected in the media is likely to be negative, especially in times of conflict. The polarization of this chapter concerns a) countries and b) nationalities of Arabs and Muslims, on the one hand, and two reference groups on the other. Four conflicts are the focus: the war in Bosnia, the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Arab Spring of the 2010s and the Syrian civil war thereafter. This chapter studies the case of the printed press from the Czech Republic, using approximately 33 million data points extracted from the Czech National Corpus, which makes it a larger study than any previously conducted on the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in this country. The results show that Arabs and Muslims indeed receive a clearly negative portrayal that has been unbroken since 1990, with the single exception of 1995, due to the peace talks in Bosnia.

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  • Income, nationality and subjectivity in media text

    2021. Irene Elmerot. Jazykovedný Časopis 72 (2), 667-678

    Artikel

    This article takes a bird’s eye view on how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country’s general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e. the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result remains. A discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also revealed as a result.

    Läs mer om Income, nationality and subjectivity in media text
  • Dirtbags, drunkards and miniature mutes

    2019. Irene Elmerot. Scando-Slavica 65 (2), 127-145

    Artikel

    Language may be seen as a tool for constructing and confirming power structures, and a corpus analysis of adjacent words may reveal how individuals or groups of people other than the sender (writer or speaker) are depicted. These depictions frequently reveal a phenomenon known as linguistic othering. The aim of this paper is to present a corpus-based survey of the linguistic othering of Roma, Vietnamese and Ukrainian people in Czech media discourse from 1989 to 2014. The representative result is acquired by comparing neutral, positive and negative adjectives related to the three key lemmata, and a quantitative method is used to answer analytical questions about the query words in this context. Although some previous researchers have used similar methods, it appears that no such study has been performed on such a large body of material for Slavic languages. The outcome reveals how these three groups are differentiated in text, and the source material helps to demonstrate how language usage reflects the discourse of Czech society.

    Läs mer om Dirtbags, drunkards and miniature mutes
  • Äta tårta bör man …

    2019. Irene Elmerot. Slavica antiqua et hodierna, 223-233

    Kapitel

    The Swedish modal verbs böra and töra are very often lost in translation. This is an overview of 100 years of translations of these verbs in fictional texts from Swedish to Czech, using InterCorp version 11 from the Czech National Corpus in comparison with dictionaries from the 20th and 21st centuries as well as some findings from selected Swedish Korp corpora. When comparing the corpus results with some of the larger, and a few smaller, dictionaries, it becomes clear why any new Swedish–Czech dictionary would need to take corpus findings into account. A brief comparison between fiction and non-fiction also shows that especially the verb töra is used more often in e.g. instructional and administrative text types, which leaves room for improvement both in research and in lexicography.

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  • Language and Power in Czech Corpora

    2017. Irene Elmerot. Computational and Corpus-based Phraseology, 174-177

    Konferens

    The author focuses on quantitatively examining the linguistic other- ing in printed media discourse in the Czech Republic, using the Czech National Corpus. The method used so far has been a corpus-based discourse analysis based on the adjectives preceding the keywords for each part of the project, now moving on to include reporting verbs. The theoretical starting point is that power relations in a society are reflected in that society’s mainstream media, and that the language usage in these media contributes to the worldview of its recipients, in some cases even helps to construct it. Frequent but widely dis- persed stereotypical and negative phrases and collocations are examples of a power language that may not be visible at once, but slowly enters the general discourse in a society. This project aims to survey these linguistic othering phrases in the Czech media discourse, as comprehensively as possible, and shed some light on their appearance over time. 

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  • Är en zigenare mer oanpassningsbar än en rom?

    2016. Irene Elmerot. Slovo 57, 9-23

    Artikel

    The purpose of this study is to explore the linguistic Othering of Roma people in a large corpus of modern newspaper and magazine texts in Czech. The texts that form the basis of the chosen corpus are taken from the Czech Republic’s largest daily newspapers and some of the largest magazines, which have sizable readerships. Answers to my hypotheses and questions about adjectives are given from a purely statistical perspective. Although more negative than positive adjectives are found before both studied terms – Rom and Cikán, many are neutral or stereotypically neutral. This study demonstrates how corpus linguistics can contribute to research into Othering, since the method used provides results from a substantial amount of basic data. The results are in line with previous research, and confirm it by means of an analysis of a large amount of data.

    Läs mer om Är en zigenare mer oanpassningsbar än en rom?

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