'Her dreadful plight': A corpus-assisted analysis of the indexical and stance properties of poor thing

Nonnenmacher, Sean ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5246-200X and Naismith, Ben ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8347-3142 2023. 'Her dreadful plight': A corpus-assisted analysis of the indexical and stance properties of poor thing. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 6 (1) , pp. 61-90. 10.18573/jcads.90

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Abstract

Curiously, the English multiword expression poor thing (henceforth PT) often refers to entities that are neither economically impoverished nor inanimate objects. By using a mixed-methods corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approach, we demonstrate that PT functions as an expression of affective stance based on evidence from two American English corpora. In cases where the social identities of speakers and referents can be determined, PT is frequently used by women and in reference to women, children, or animals. Additionally, the expression may refer to entities of low vitality due to illness or death. Our results indicate that PT conveys a complex social meaning by indexing a speaker’s compassionate stance alongside a referent’s misfortune, bundling together a set of (stereo)typically ‘disempowered’ personae. This analysis demonstrates the potential of corpus-based CDA investigations which analyze relatively infrequent lexical expressions that, nonetheless, have recognizable social meaning for speakers.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Funders:	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 November 2023
Date of Acceptance:	19 December 2022
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2023 10:23
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/163791

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