Research Design and Methods

The study synthesises corpus assisted discourse studies as a methodology, systemic functional linguistics as a theory of language, and sociological theories about social change as a theoretical framework. The data under investigation—all sentences published in the NYT between 1987 and 2014—was chosen for sociological and methodological reasons: sociologically, the publication is a respected and influential part of mainstream media; more practically, it has been digitised, is metadata-rich and provides a sample large enough to observe quantitatively reliable trends. Using a combination of existing and purpose-built tools, we transform NYT articles into a large, grammatically annotated corpus that can be queried and visualised using the Python programming languages. Using topic and title metadata, we also create a subset of articles in the health domain.