Walls, borders and bridges: a CADS study into discourses of separation and connection

The topic of the volume represents a key feature of the cultural climate today and in particular the multivalency of ideas about what is global and what is local, about distinct identities and common humanity. This paper addresses the subject by tracing the discourse around walls and borders, connection and separation in the British broadsheets over a 25 year period using CADS or Modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies, ways of tracking both recent language change and changes in the reporting of social, political and cultural issues over recent time and in this particular case the discourses of separation and connection. We can study meaning change, especially of sets of related lexical items, in relationship to both internal linguistic factors and also in response to external social influences. The period under consideration starts from the period just after the fall of the Berlin wall and runs through the period of globalisation. While a global interconnectedness through social media and the use of technology, demographic changes due to migration and populations on the move, suggest that the world is interconnected to an unprecedented extent. The term ‘Modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies’ (MD-CADS) was coined to describe research on corpora from different recent time periods.The study uses sister corpora of UK newspaper texts from different but contemporary periods in time, designed and compiled to be as alike as possible to eliminate potentially undesirable variables. They contain all the articles published by two main UK broadsheet newspapers, the Telegraph and the Guardian in the years 1993, 2005 and 2017, containing on average 100 million words each. The main software employed is WordSmith Tools (version 5.0) suite of programs (Scott 2008). For these types of studies, alongside the frequency word-lists and the keywords lists, considerable use is made of the concordancer tool, which sheds light on co-text and context. Both quantitative data and close reading are used. The sister corpora can be envisaged as snapshots of a particular language system taken in different periods of time and the comparison of the snapshots can reveal even small changes.