EHU CRG events are held online (via MS Teams), and are free to attend. Times are GMT. Registration opens three weeks before each event. The link is sent to registered participants the day before the event. If you have problems registering, or have any questions, contact the organiser: Costas Gabrielatos ([email protected]).
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
MEETING #19: Friday 6 February 2026, 2:00-3:30 pm
Topic: Discourse Oriented Corpus Studies
Dan Malone (Edge Hill University, UK)
From Global Uncertainty to Domestic Danger: The lone wolf terrorist as a topos of threat in (poly)crisis discourses
Crises arise amidst uncertainty and are characterised, alongside urgency, by a sense of threat (Lipscy 2020). Few figures embody uncertainty more vividly than the lone-wolf terrorist. Acting in isolation and without formal ties to organised groups, the lone-wolf terrorist has become increasingly prominent in public discourse over the past 15 years (Malone, 2025).
In this talk, I explore how the lone-wolf terrorist emerges in the construction of polycrises in the UK press. Polycrises are understood here, following Krzyżanowski et al. (2023: 423), as the “combination of many, more or less simultaneous and overlapping, crises whose repercussions unfold in a cumulative manner”. Their discursive construction thus relies on how crises are presented as interacting, exacerbating, and reshaping one another (cf. Janzwood & Homer-Dixon, 2022: 4). Specifically, I focus on how the lone-wolf terrorist is rhetorically employed as a topos of threat, operating under the premise that if there is a risk or danger, action must be taken to prevent it (Wodak 2001; Boukala, 2016).
I draw on analyses from the Lone Wolf Corpus (Malone, 2026), a topic-specific corpus of UK newspaper articles featuring the lone-wolf terrorist, focusing on the years 2020 to 2024. The analytical approach employs three interrelated stages to identify collocations and semantic preferences of the lemma lone wolf, as well as discourse prosodies, that is, implicit and explicit attitudes (Stubbs, 2001) towards the lone-wolf terrorist. In the discussion, I pay particular attention to the role of metaphor clusters, viewing metaphor as a device for expressing evaluation implicitly (Martin & White, 2005).
Findings show that the lone-wolf terrorist is a recurring evaluative resource through which crisis events are connected and presented as threatening. From Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Hamas’s activities, and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, to mass migration, the climate crisis, and fears of radicalisation fuelled by AI and intensified by COVID-19 lockdowns, the lone-wolf terrorist emerges to recontextualise international events as matters of domestic security, transforming global uncertainty into a sense of danger for UK audiences. In this way, otherwise discrete events are discursively construed and rendered as potential polycrises through imagined terroristic violence.
References
Boukala, S. (2016). Rethinking topos in the discourse-historical approach: Endoxon seeking and argumentation in Greek media discourses on “Islamist terrorism”. Discourse Studies, 18(3), 249–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616634550
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.
Hjermann, A. R., & Wilhelmsen, J. (2025). Topos of threat and metapolitics in Russia’s securitisation of NATO post-Crimea. Review of International Studies, Advance online publication, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000937
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language. Routledge.
Krzyżanowski, M., Wodak, R., Bradby, H., Gardell, M., Kallis, A., Krzyżanowska, N., Mudde, C., & Rydgren, J. (2023). Discourses and practices of the “new normal”: Towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on crisis and the normalization of anti- and post-democratic action. Journal of Language and Politics, 22(4), 415–437. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.23024.krz
Janzwood, S., & Homer-Dixon, T. (2022). What is a global polycrisis? And how is it different from systemic risk? Discussion paper. Cascade Institute.
Janzwood, Scott, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. 2022. What Is a Global Polycrisis? And How Is It Different From Systemic Risk? Discussion Paper.
Lipscy, P. Y. (2020). COVID-19 and the politics of crisis. International Organization, 74(S1), E98–E127. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000375
Malone, D. (2025). The discourse presentation of the lone-wolf terrorist in the British press, 2000–2019: A corpus-based study (Doctoral dissertation, Edge Hill University).
Malone, D. (2026). Topic-specific corpus compilation: A componential approach to query formulation. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 6(1), 100180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2025.100180
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Blackwell.
Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 63–95). Sage.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
MEETING #20: Friday 6 March 2026, 10:00-11:30 am
Topic: LLMs, Corpus Linguistics, and Language Learning
Peter Crosthwaite (University of Queensland, Australia)
From induction to generation: Advances in combining corpus approaches to language learning with LLMs
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————