‘POST-TRUTH’ AS A LEXICAL ITEM:FREQUENCY, DISTRIBUTION, AND CO-OCCURRENCE

John Williams, School of Languages and Area Studies

john.x.williams@port.ac.uk @lexicoj0hn

Post-Truth: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, University of Portsmouth, March 24th 2018

CONTENTS

• Origins

• Corpora and corpus linguistics

• Frequency of ‘post-truth’

• Geographic distribution

• Collocation (= what words are most frequently used with ‘post-truth’)

• Keyword analysis (vs ‘fake news’)

ORIGINS

Source: OED Online

CORPORA AND CORPUS LINGUISTICS

What is a corpus?

• A corpus is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research (Sinclair, 2004)

Why is a corpus useful?

• [L]anguage looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once. Such evidence [as that made available by corpora] has not been available before. Linguists have had to rely on their intuitions, their limited capacity for thorough textual analysis, and whatever has caught their eye or ear […] in their daily lives (Sinclair, 1991: 100)

FREQUENCY OF ‘POST-TRUTH’: 1

Source: NOW (News on the Web) Corpus: https://corpus.byu.edu/now/

FREQUENCY OF ‘POST-TRUTH’: 2

Source: NOW (News on the Web) Corpus: https://corpus.byu.edu/now/

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ‘POST-TRUTH’

• In terms of the English-speaking world, early uses tended to be more frequent in developed Western countries.

• However, things have evened up in the last couple of years:

• Also: Kenya, 0.76 per mil; Tanzania, 0.0; Philippines, 0.69

Source: NOW (News on the Web) Corpus: https://corpus.byu.edu/now/

FREQUENCY OF ‘POST-TRUTH’: ‘POST-’ WORDS

Source: NOW (News on the Web) Corpus: https://corpus.byu.edu/now/

‘POST-TRUTH’ IS NOT FULLY LEXICALIZED

• In approximately 40% of examples, ‘post-truth’ (or its containing phrase) is enclosed in quotation marks → use/mention distinction

• Many examples are concerned with defining ‘post-truth’ .

Examples• Now, we have heard a lot recently about " post-truth " -- that is, lies.• No speech is now complete without a reference to our " post-truth " times.• All of this marks the advent of the so-called " post-truth " society.• If we accept that we somehow are living in an age of " post-truth politics ", it

stands to reason that...• The increase in usage of " post-truth " saw the term eventually emerge ahead

of the pack.• " Post-truth " is defined convolutedly as " relating to or denoting circumstances

in which objective facts…”

‘POST-TRUTH’: COLLOCATIONS

Source: JSI Web Corpus: 2014-18: https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/

‘POST-TRUTH’ vs ‘FAKE NEWS’: KEYWORDS

Generated by AntConc: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/

‘POST-TRUTH’: we need to...

Generated by AntConc: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/

‘FAKE NEWS’ vs ‘POST-TRUTH’: KEYWORDS

Generated by AntConc: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/

CONCLUSIONS

• From being almost unknown outside academia, ‘post-truth’ rose to prominence in late 2016, coinciding with Trump’s victory and the accolade from Oxford English Dictionaries

• It may already be declining in frequency, but is unlikely to return to pre-2016 levels

• From its beginnings in Western countries, its frequency is now spread evenly across the global English-speaking media

• It is not yet fully lexicalized in English, with the word being discussed almost as often as the idea behind it

• In media discourse, it is used mainly attributively, with politics, world, and era being overwhelmingly the most frequently qualified nouns

• ‘Post-truth’ seems to engage a ‘we’, who are ‘living in a post-truth world/era’, towards which we are urged to choose from a variety of different attitudes

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

• Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press

• Sinclair, J. (2004). Corpus and text: basic principles. In Wynne, M. (Ed.) Developing linguistic corpora: a guide to good practice. AHDS: Literature, Languages, & Linguistics. Retrieved from: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~martinw/dlc/chapter1.htm