Teacher (in Swedish)

Autumn 2023: (Part of) “Academic writing”, about the subject in general and specifically about quantitative methods in (Czech) linguistics. Course shared with Tora Hedin, Czech III (Stockholm University) – online.

Autumn 2019, Spring 2020, Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023: “Czechoslovakia between two wars” and “Czech culture and literature – a history of satire”, Czechia: New nation, ancient history (Stockholm University) – online.

Spring 2019, Spring 2022, Spring 2023: “Understanding text and its grammar", Czech 1 (Stockholm University).

Autumn 2018: “Czech culture and literature – an introduction”, Czechia: New nation, ancient history (Stockholm University).

Autumn 2018: “Some quantitative corpus linguistic methods”, Language and Power (Sociolinguistics, University of Gothenburg).

Course administrator

Autumn 2018, Autumn 2019, Spring 2020, Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023: Czechia: New nation, ancient history – online.

The Doctoral school Language and power has now turned into a network. Please read more here: https://www.su.se/english/research/research-groups/network-language-and-power

You will find my research under "Publications" on this page.

During my Ph.D. education, I have also been on leave to assist as a corpus linguistics expert for the project Text analysis of transcripts of the tv programmes Události Czech Television and Události and comments (“Textová analyza přepišů pořadů Události ČT a Události a komentáře”) 2022 and 2023. (Website here.) Primary investigators: Andrea Culková and Irena Reifová, Department of Media Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences), Charles University, Prague.

Conference participation (Slavic studies, corpus linguistics or discourse analysis)

“Professional nouns in a positive light: How are internationally standardized groups reflected in news media?” at The Twelfth International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2023), Lancaster, UK, 3–6 July 2023.

”What does time tell about women? A longitudinal study of adjectives modifying female nouns and their male counterparts”, Corpora and Discourse International Conference, Universitá di Bologna, 26–28 August 2022.

“Subjectivity on gender in the Czech Republic – results of a longitudinal news media study”, 22nd Nordic Meeting of Slavists, Oslo, Norway, 10–13 August 2022.

“Income, Nationality and Subjectivity in Media Text – Czech newspapers from 1990 to 2018”, Slovko 2021, Bratislava, Slovakia, 13–15 October 2021.

“Why nationality matters – Ingroups and outgroups in Czech news after 1989” (updated version), The 11th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2021), Limerick, Ireland (online conference) 13–17 July 2021.

“Why nationality matters – Ingroups and outgroups in Czech news after 1989”, SlaviCorp 2020, a part of The 8th International Conference Grammar & Corpora, Kraków, Poland (online conference) 25–27 November 2020.

“A Muslim odyssey – subjectivity in news articles on Arabs and Muslims” (poster), Stance, (Inter)Subjectivity, Identity in Discourse 2020, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (online), 9–11 September 2020.

“Linguistic othering of Arabs and Muslims through adjectival modifiers in the press”, Corpora and Discourse International Conference, University of Sussex (online), 17–19 June 2020.

“Reporting verbs about women and men in Czech printed media 1989 – 2015”, Slovko 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia, 23–25 October 2019.

”Language and power in Czech printed media”, The 21st Conference of Scandinavian Slavists, Joensuu, Finland, 14–18 August 2019.

”Linguistic othering in Czech media: adjectives – a work in progress” (poster) and
”Omnia divisa est in partes tres – how news production in the Czech Republic amplified othering”, The 10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2019), Cardiff University, Wales, 22–26 July 2019.

”Hidden power structures in Czech printed media", Linguistics Prague, Czech Republic, 2019.

"Language and power in Czech media – a corpus analysis of linguistic othering". CADAAD 2018, Aalborg, Denmark, 2018.

"Language and power in Czech corpora”. Europhras – Student Research Workshop in conjunction with Computational and Corpus-based Phraseology, London, UK, 2017.

“Quantitative discourse analysis using the Czech National Corpus”. Quantitative Tools for Qualitative Analysis: Computational Social Science meets Discourse Analysis, A workshop at the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science London, UK, 2017.

Other conferences

“The translation of Czech particles in three registers: a corpus-based analysis”, Translation in Transition 6, Charles University, Prague, 22–23 September 2022.

“Språk och makt i tjeckiska media – ett pågående avhandlingsarbete” (poster), Ämneskonferens i slaviska språk, University of Gothenburg, 25–26 November 2021.

”Språklig andrafiering i tjeckiska medier: Adjektiv och deras substantiv – en studie i vardande”, Forum för Textforskning 14, Uppsala university, 10–11 June 2019.

”Romani – a language for education only? Using corpus linguistics tools to analyze attitudes toward a minority language”, Symposium on Ideologies, Attitudes, and Power in Language Contact Settings, Stockholms universitet, 16–17 May 2019.

“Linguistic othering in different forms – a case from Czech News Media", Future of the Languages, Stockholm 2019

Supervisors during my Ph.D. education

Docent Tora Hedin, Stockholm university (Sweden)

Professor Masako Fidler, Brown University (RI, USA)

Professor Václav Cvrček, Charles University (Czech Republic)

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Decoding Discourse: A corpus linguistic study of evaluative adjectives and group nouns in Czech print news media (1989–2018)

  2024. Irene Elmerot.

  Thesis (Doc)

  This compilation thesis takes a top-down perspective on the representation of different groups of people in Czech news press over three decades. The starting point is that human equality is a global prerequisite for a democratic world, according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The research questions for the thesis concern how positively or negatively different groups of people are represented, and how often the different groups appear compared to each other. The thesis contributes results based on a language other than English, which represents a valuable contribution to the field.

  Theoretically, focus is on the premise that language is a tool for gaining and maintaining power, and a way of expressing power relations (Reisigl & Wodak 2016; Fairclough 2015). An important theoretical focus is the phenomenon of linguistic othering (Fidler 2016), which here means letting a group of people stand out from a certain news description by emphasising some of their characteristics. They then form what is also called an outgroup, as opposed to the ingroup that the writer is assumed to be part of (van Dijk 1987). The findings of this thesis provide insights into how news media can influence our perceptions of, for example, different nationalities or professions, linked to their socio-economic status, and by extension how these perceptions can influence our attitudes and behaviours towards these groups.

  Methodologically, the thesis uses corpus-based discourse analysis. Empirically, the research is based on the Czech National Corpus (www.korpus.cz). From this corpus, 32 million observations are extracted of when positive and negative adjectives, classified according to a subjectivity lexicon, appear in the news press together with nouns for different kinds of groups of people, such as gendered words like “woman” or “man”, occupations like “maid” or “miner” and nationalities like “Somali” or “Dane”. When adjectives are closer to nouns, or even next to them, they are given more weight than when they are more distant (Cvrček 2014). With such large amounts of data, a top-down or bird’s eye view is the most reasonable, but some detailed analyses are also included.

  Study I focuses on the representation of nationalities and countries, classified by the World Bank into groups according to their gross national income, and their co-occurrence with the positive and negative adjectives. Results: the nationalities in the different income groups are represented in a descending order; the higher the national income, the more positive the representation. Furthermore, discourses related to the so-called war on terror, as well as the security of different nations, emerge as a result of the analysis.

  Study II focuses on two groups, a focus group of Arabs and Muslims and a reference group of the other nationalities and countries. The focus group is a very heterogeneous group of people and countries that is often portrayed in the context of conflict (Baker et al., 2013, pp. 2 and 32). Results: Arabs and Muslims are consistently represented as an out-group, which over time affects how the people who read these news media view them.

  Study III contains two sub-studies, based on an intersectional analysis of modern Czech news reporting; in one sub-study the analysis focuses on professional roles, and in the other on different nouns for women and men. Results: Those with lower socio-economic status and fewer supervisory roles in their work are less likely to appear in news coverage, but when they do appear, it is not always with more negative representations. Regarding gender, men are more often portrayed than women, and women are more often represented by evaluative adjectives than men. In addition, women’s positive representations are based to a greater extent on their appearance and feelings, while men’s representations are based on their importance and competence.

  Overall, the results confirm quantitatively, with an empirical material covering almost the entire print news reporting in the Czech Republic since democratisation, that hypotheses that have been theoretically proposed, as well as confirmed, for other countries, turn out to be true for Czech news reporting. There are systematic differences in the way that some groups of people are significantly more often represented in the media than others, and that some groups are systematically represented more favourably than others. It also shows that these imbalances are clearly linked to factors such as nationality, occupation and gender.

  Read more about Decoding Discourse

• When is a Crisis really a Crisis?: Using NLP and Corpus Linguistic Methods to Reveal Differences in Migration Discourse Across Czech Media

  2023. Ondřej Pekáček, Irene Elmerot. Jazykovedný Časopis 74 (1), 369-380

  Article

  This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of discourses on refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) in mainstream and alternative media in the Czech Republic. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) and drawing on insights from media sociology, we demonstrate the value of an interdisciplinary approach for conducting robust research that can inform policymakers and media practitioners. Our analysis of nearly one million documents from January 2015 to February 2023 reveals distinctive terms and phrases used by alternative media, highlighting the growing divergence between the mainstream and alternative media discourse and its intensity over different periods. These findings have implications for understanding the mobilization of anti-systemic groups, particularly those on the far right.

  Read more about When is a Crisis really a Crisis?

• Constructing "us" and "them" through conflicts

  2022. Irene Elmerot. Discursive Approaches to Sociopolitical Polarization and Conflict, 122-136

  Chapter

  This chapter concerns the evaluation of 105 nouns denoting Arab and Muslim nationalities and countries in the Czech news media over almost 30 years, using modifying adjectives from the Czech Subjectivity Lexicon (Veselovská, Hajič and Šindlerová, 2014). It is proposed that since the persons behind these nouns form an out-group (van Dijk, 1987, p. 12) in the focus country, the way they are reflected in the media is likely to be negative, especially in times of conflict. The polarization of this chapter concerns a) countries and b) nationalities of Arabs and Muslims, on the one hand, and two reference groups on the other. Four conflicts are the focus: the war in Bosnia, the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Arab Spring of the 2010s and the Syrian civil war thereafter. This chapter studies the case of the printed press from the Czech Republic, using approximately 33 million data points extracted from the Czech National Corpus, which makes it a larger study than any previously conducted on the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in this country. The results show that Arabs and Muslims indeed receive a clearly negative portrayal that has been unbroken since 1990, with the single exception of 1995, due to the peace talks in Bosnia.

  Read more about Constructing "us" and "them" through conflicts

• Income, nationality and subjectivity in media text

  2021. Irene Elmerot. Jazykovedný Časopis 72 (2), 667-678

  Article

  This article takes a bird’s eye view on how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country’s general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e. the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result remains. A discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also revealed as a result.

  Read more about Income, nationality and subjectivity in media text

• Dirtbags, drunkards and miniature mutes

  2019. Irene Elmerot. Scando-Slavica 65 (2), 127-145

  Article

  Language may be seen as a tool for constructing and confirming power structures, and a corpus analysis of adjacent words may reveal how individuals or groups of people other than the sender (writer or speaker) are depicted. These depictions frequently reveal a phenomenon known as linguistic othering. The aim of this paper is to present a corpus-based survey of the linguistic othering of Roma, Vietnamese and Ukrainian people in Czech media discourse from 1989 to 2014. The representative result is acquired by comparing neutral, positive and negative adjectives related to the three key lemmata, and a quantitative method is used to answer analytical questions about the query words in this context. Although some previous researchers have used similar methods, it appears that no such study has been performed on such a large body of material for Slavic languages. The outcome reveals how these three groups are differentiated in text, and the source material helps to demonstrate how language usage reflects the discourse of Czech society.

  Read more about Dirtbags, drunkards and miniature mutes

• Äta tårta bör man …

  2019. Irene Elmerot. Slavica antiqua et hodierna, 223-233

  Chapter

  The Swedish modal verbs böra and töra are very often lost in translation. This is an overview of 100 years of translations of these verbs in fictional texts from Swedish to Czech, using InterCorp version 11 from the Czech National Corpus in comparison with dictionaries from the 20th and 21st centuries as well as some findings from selected Swedish Korp corpora. When comparing the corpus results with some of the larger, and a few smaller, dictionaries, it becomes clear why any new Swedish–Czech dictionary would need to take corpus findings into account. A brief comparison between fiction and non-fiction also shows that especially the verb töra is used more often in e.g. instructional and administrative text types, which leaves room for improvement both in research and in lexicography.

  Read more about Äta tårta bör man …

• Language and Power in Czech Corpora

  2017. Irene Elmerot. Computational and Corpus-based Phraseology, 174-177

  Conference

  The author focuses on quantitatively examining the linguistic other- ing in printed media discourse in the Czech Republic, using the Czech National Corpus. The method used so far has been a corpus-based discourse analysis based on the adjectives preceding the keywords for each part of the project, now moving on to include reporting verbs. The theoretical starting point is that power relations in a society are reflected in that society’s mainstream media, and that the language usage in these media contributes to the worldview of its recipients, in some cases even helps to construct it. Frequent but widely dis- persed stereotypical and negative phrases and collocations are examples of a power language that may not be visible at once, but slowly enters the general discourse in a society. This project aims to survey these linguistic othering phrases in the Czech media discourse, as comprehensively as possible, and shed some light on their appearance over time. 

  Read more about Language and Power in Czech Corpora

• Är en zigenare mer oanpassningsbar än en rom?

  2016. Irene Elmerot. Slovo 57, 9-23

  Article

  The purpose of this study is to explore the linguistic Othering of Roma people in a large corpus of modern newspaper and magazine texts in Czech. The texts that form the basis of the chosen corpus are taken from the Czech Republic’s largest daily newspapers and some of the largest magazines, which have sizable readerships. Answers to my hypotheses and questions about adjectives are given from a purely statistical perspective. Although more negative than positive adjectives are found before both studied terms – Rom and Cikán, many are neutral or stereotypically neutral. This study demonstrates how corpus linguistics can contribute to research into Othering, since the method used provides results from a substantial amount of basic data. The results are in line with previous research, and confirm it by means of an analysis of a large amount of data.

  Read more about Är en zigenare mer oanpassningsbar än en rom?

Show all publications by Irene Elmerot at Stockholm University