Rationale underpinning the thesis

The discussion so far has brought to light a gap in applied linguistic research into the MMR debate and has suggested that more research is called for in the field of scientific

popularization into lay people’s discourse in web-based communication. It has also

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highlighted a number of pertinent features relating to the beliefs and concerns of parents and to the ways in which claims about MMR, or vaccination in general, are transformed as they travel in the public sphere. It was found that parents tend to hold different ideas from medical professionals about health, risk and the immune system. Parents reported that they seek information on MMR from a variety of sources: mass-media sources, medical sources, family and friends, and so on. It was also suggested that particular socio-historical factors (such as memories of other vaccine scares or the BSE-vCJD affair) might impact on parents’

vaccination decisions. But parents also base their decisions on their knowledge of their child’s, or other family members’, history with vaccination. This suggests that lay people’s talk about vaccination is likely to consist of a complex intertextual mix, characterized by different ‘discourses’ about health, risk and the immune system and, perhaps, personal anecdotes and narratives of health scares. But there are likely to be other intertextual influences in the mix. Mass-media publications and broadcasts were found to represent the main source of information. But the media typically framed the MMR stories not as a science issue but as a political or public policy issue or as controversy between competing groups of scientists. Strategic reframing of issues of risk and trust was found to be a feature of the discourse of vaccine-critical groups. These groups were also found to make strategic use of scientific discourse and to emphasize the expertise of parents.

The findings summarized above echo some of the findings in recent research into scientific popularization. It has long been recognized by scholars in this field that when scientific claims move from their source genre to a popularization genre, they undergo particular

lexico-grammatical and rhetorical transformations (Fahnestock, 1986; Myers, 1994). Recent research shows that the processes by which scientific claims are disseminated in the public sphere are

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more complex than first thought. Scientific claims circulate in a network of intertextually related genres (Solin, 2004) and meanings are negotiated during the course of interaction (Ciapuscio, 2003; Gűlich, 2003) or emerge as scientific claims move between discourse communities (Beacco et al., 2002; Moirand, 2003). Nor is a strict division between the expert and the lay-person uncritically accepted nowadays. Instead, it is accepted that ‘lay’ people have their own forms of expertise, either actively acquired or gained through personal experience, and thus have particular persuasive resources they can draw on (Myers, 2003:

268-269). Myers (ibid.), in fact, cites the use by the media of parents as experts in the MMR debate as an example of the persuasive potential of lay people’s arguments. The ways in which beliefs about health, risk and immunity are expressed and how expertise is performed form a major focus of this study.

As mentioned in Section 1.3 above, the JABS website was chosen as a data source for this project because it offers access to the voices of lay people. It also offers access to a wide range of views and ideological positions. JABS is a reformist vaccine-critical group, rather than a radical one (Hobson-West, 2005). Reformist vaccine critical groups are led by parents who believe their children have suffered vaccine damage and who campaign for reform to the compensation system and increased awareness of vaccine risks. Not all members of reformist vaccine-critical groups are opposed to vaccination per se. Radical vaccine-critical groups are those whose members do not necessarily have experience of vaccine damage but who oppose the use of vaccines and are often in favour of ‘alternative’ medicine and opposed to big pharmaceutical companies. Although not all JABS members are opposed to vaccination in general, most support Andrew Wakefield and find his hypothesis of a causal connection between MMR and autism, if not convincing, certainly plausible. Between 2005 and 2008,

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when the data was collected, the message board and discussion forum moderators allowed people to post who were openly critical of Wakefield’s hypothesis. The presence of these

‘pro-science’ posters grew from 2007 to the end of 2008, leading to much heated debate on some of the forum threads. The JABS corpus data is therefore ideal for finding out what discourses people deploy and what sorts of persuasive resources people draw on when arguing about MMR online.

We considered above the sort of intertextual mix we might expect to find in the JABS corpus.

We now need to consider another aspect of argumentation. In short, in order to make an argument persuasive, a writer needs to establish credibility and to align the reader with his or her point of view. This involves deploying various lexico-grammatical resources which signal attitudinal meaning. It also involves attribution. A powerful tool for uncovering attitudinal meaning is the study of evaluation.¹⁶ I discuss evaluation in full in Chapter Three. For now, I follow Hunston (2000; 2011) in highlighting expressions of status (expressions which signal the writer’s judgement of the epistemic status of a discursive object) and value (expressions which encode a judgement of the qualities of an object) as performing key functions in the expression of evaluation.

Obviously, the JABS corpus comprises web-based data. The technical features of new media offer the user types of discursive strategies not possible with traditional print based media, for example, the incorporation of texts or links to other websites to provide explanations or lend authority to their claims (Luzon, 2013). Using corpus assisted methods to analyse discussion

16 This phenomenon is variously termed stance (e.g. Biber and Finegan, 1988; 1989), APPRAISAL (Martin and White, 2005), or evaluation (e.g. Hunston, 2000) (among other things). For current purposes, I use the term evaluation.

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forum data raises its own challenges: the discussion forum allows users to copy large sections of texts or whole texts into their posts. Since the concordance line offers only a glimpse of a text, it can be hard for the discourse analyst to distinguish between the voice of the forum user and that of an external writer. This thesis attempts to address some of the challenges posed conducting a corpus assisted discourse analysis of discussion forum data.