Ángela Alameda-Hernández

Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

Title: 

Revisiting lexico-grammatical features for Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract:

As a broad discipline concerned with pressing social issues, there exist numerous approaches within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that present different methodological frameworks, but in general terms, without specifying which linguistic features are potentially relevant to the analysis. Drawing on the results of a systematic literature review that gathered publications in the field of CDA specifically applying the resources of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Alameda Hernández and Jiménez-Briones, 2025), this presentation outlines the process followed to provide a curated list of linguistic features that are effectively applied in this field. Since results from the review revealed a lack of consensus among practitioners and the actual analysis of a broader range of tools than those typically associated with canonical SFL, this process implied a series of steps that included conceptual and terminological revision of the raw inventory of features, as well as their structuring into a refined classification of lexico-grammatical elements.

As a result, we have provided a coherent and scalable dataset of linguistic features that can have multiple practical applications. On the one hand, as it is grounded in actual published research, it can guide the practice of other CDA scholars by providing the set of lexico-grammatical features that they have to focus on in their research to produce successful critical interpretations of discourse. Likewise, it can become the seed to develop a detailed methodology for systematically applying these features. Additionally, apart from being useful for traditional research, the findings of this study have already been successfully incorporated into AI systems, such as the YouTA corpus annotation tool, and in the future, they can also be incorporated into AI-assisted CDA, as in a module to be integrated into the TexMiLAB  application.

Bio:

Ángela Alameda-Hernández, PhD, is a Lecturer at the Department of English Studies, University of Granada (Spain). Her research interests range from discourse analysis, media discourse, and terminology to more recent work in natural language processing. She has extensively published book chapters and academic articles in peer-reviewed journals. Alameda-Hernández has also presented her work at national and international conferences. She has been a member of two nationally funded research projects that developed the multipurpose knowledge base FunGramKB (www.fungramkb.com) as well as the multimodal, crowdsensing-based system ALLEGRO (http://allegro.ucam.edu). She is currently a member of the ACUMEN project.