ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a small, specialized corpus of American news articles about suicide. It begins with an exploration of the relationship between coverage of suicide and potential contagious or protective effects on the community, then provides a review of corpus-assisted critical discourse analyses (CDAs) of media language. Suicide is a global public health issue, which since 2008 has ranked as the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. Media guidelines provide an opportunity to examine the intertextuality between these recommendations and news coverage of suicide. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysts are well positioned to expand the contribution of applied linguistics. After analysis of frequent collocations, a subset of full texts for CDA was selected through downsampling, a process of choosing a "smaller, representative set of data", the selection of which is informed by linguistic patterns discovered with corpus tools. The chapter concludes with suggested further reading in corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, news values, and media coverage of suicide.
