ABSTRACT

This chapter uses techniques from corpus linguistics to examine recurring ways in which violent crimes committed by people with schizophrenia are re-contextualised in terms of responsibility in the British press. Schizophrenia refers to a spectrum of disorders, the most recognisable symptoms of which are hallucinations and delusions. Guglielmo found that subjects tended to ask for the same kinds of additional information and tended to ask questions pertaining to these criteria in a specific order. These findings led to the formulation of the Path Model of Blame, a model which maps out the types of textual evidence people look for when carrying out a blame judgement, and the order in which they look for them. Structurally, the analysis begins by examining collocates that refer to legal terms. One potential limitation of Dreyfus' approach is that she makes the assumption that causality is tantamount to responsibility.