#cadaad2026 was intense and inspiring - huge thanks to @laurafilardollamas.bsky.social and team, I hope you can rest now. Can we have the next one in the North though - Umeå, Tromsø, Reykjavik, Jyväskylä? Come on, Nordics!

We had to wait until the last day for our panel on ways to analyse emotions among supporters and opponents on populist social media - but it was well worth the wait! Great audience (thanks for valuable input!) and great conference in beautiful (but hot) Valladolid. #cadaad2026

There are so many good talks on #affect at #cadaad2026 that I feel (sic) I need to completely revise tomorrow's (9.30am) panel on analysing emotion in political discourse online. The latest was @miglmarl.bsky.social & @laurafilardollamas.bsky.social's study on affective polarisation on X & Reddit

@susannekopf.bsky.social in full flow, talking about four approaches to social media at #cadaad2026

After some comments by journalists that (imho) didn't reveal much that was new or interesting, here we go with a very promising panel on Day 2 of #cadaad2026

A high-profile queer moment at #cadaad2026: @nounfraze.bsky.social (introduced by Alba Roldan Garcia) presenting his/their work for @amnestyuk.bsky.social on how trans people were represented in the British press 2020-25

The third of the Glorious 3 (my students at #cadaad2026): @tianxin.bsky.social on discourses of voluntary childlessness on Chinese social media. My work here is done 😊

Good to see mtaphtonymy in political cartoons being analysed by Giribaldi & Narisano - it is often overlooked or subsumed under either metaphor or metonymy #cadaad2026

Here are @huichen0826.bsky.social and Budi Pranoto talking about their corpus-asdisted discourse studies of #sustainability reporting in different countries and industries - they did @lancslinguistics.bsky.social proud! #cadaad2026

Two interesting papers on emotions, and lack of empathy, in Israeli soldiers' videos and Israeli voices on X, by S.N.M.Jamil and @elifriedman.bsky.social et al., resp. #cadaad2026

Like all the best research, Pilar G. Blitvich's plenary at #cadaad2026, on cancelling and forgiveness online, is relevant beyond her case study. It is relevant to #crisis communication, f.ex.

Hashtag of the week is #cadaad2026, for the critical discourse studies conference in Valladolid, Spain. I am so looking forward to being there 😊 @cadaad2026.bsky.social

Off to Valladolid to co-present the latest @mantrap.bsky.social research (on anti-feminist YouTube videos). I also convene a panel on analysing #emotions in political discourse on social media, with @susannekopf.bsky.social, @laurafilardollamas.bsky.social & A.W. Gustafsson. #cadaad2026

Over the past few days, I had two really good interactions with students. The first was an email from a Year 12 student in Australia, who had read my paper on pink for a school project and asked if I would answer a few questions on the topic - a great opportunity to reflect on that earlier work! 1/2

My work really takes me to the most interesting places: today, I gave a lecture and workshop on critical metaphor analysis and corporate discourse in Karamay, in the far northwest of China. Plans for tonight: a trip to the Gobi desert

And what a journey it has been! Tianxin does amazing work on discourses of voluntary childlessness on Chinese social media.

A little CADS 2026 moment I presented my poster, got some really thoughtful questions, and came away feeling inspired by so many brilliant presentations and conversations. #CADS2026

Chapters by @stenhansson.bsky.social @susannekopf.bsky.social @miglmarl.bsky.social @ursulalutzky.bsky.social S. Bennett, @francozappettini.bsky.social @michelezappavigna.bsky.social N. Wenzl, M. Demata @catherinebouko.bsky.social D. Garcia, A. Musolff, G. Lalic-Krstin, N. Silaski, G. Mautner & me

And here are some tiny old reflections on this project in the context of metaphor research makingsciencepublic.com/2019/11/08/m...

10 years since the #Brexit referendum - no one who lived through it will ever forget it, for better or worse. To mark the occasion, I have made a short summary article on the language of Brexit available on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/veroni...

Hashtag to follow this week is #CADS2026, for the Corpora and Discourse conference in Lancaster. @mantrap.bsky.social have a paper, on mainstreaming 'misandry', but sadly I still cannot be in two places at once 🤷🏼‍♀️ Have a great time, everyone!

New publication after an easy & efficient process (really): Zhang, W., Koller, V., & Wang, H. (2026). Trust repair in China’s milk tea industry: Crisis types, response strategies, and linguistic realizations. International Journal of Business Communication. htps://doi.org/10.1177/23294884261453064

Here is corpus-based discourse analysis by @veronikakoller.bsky.social If you‘re interested in corporate communication，do check it out！ #LancsSS26

We recorded another @wordsandactions.bsky.social episode today, featuring three interviews with language activists. Who are they and what is language #activism, you ask? New episode will be out soon! @linguadigitalis.bsky.social

This bumper issue of Discourse & Society includes two articles by @lancslinguistics.bsky.social PhD students: among many other interesting contributions, Nurnadilla Jamil and Hikaru Suzuki both have papers in it. journals.sagepub.com/toc/dasa/37/...

The power of punctuation: Me to 15yo son: gif saying "go to sleep" Son (avoiding all punctuation on WhatsApp): Id rather die Me: gif of skeleton Son: Fine. [goes to bed] And yes, we were in the same place, only separated by a hallway.

Here's one for the nerds: A while back, I did a piece of work on the language of #auditor reports for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). This article reports on the findings and recommendations: www.icaew.com/policy-and-r...

This paper by two PhD students at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social started life as a piece of MA coursework: Liu, T., & Wu, D. (2026). “CCP” versus “racist”: The construction of co-tellership in digital narratives of the London pianist incident. Discourse & Communication. doi.org/10.1177/1750...

Voters and parties as couples - interesting metaphor, even if the source and target domains are conceptually not quite distinct. And what about the gender of the party wooing the (metaphorically and partly literally) female voters?

After a month without giving any talks, I'm back at it on Tuesday 2 June, 1-2 UK time, presenting on #corpus approaches to business communication. Includes a comparison of AI-generated and corpus-assisted discourse analysis of #BCorps www.linkedin.com/posts/corpus...

This article has now been published: utppublishing.com/stoken/autho...

It is so hot in England that I just wrote "a phenomena". This temperature is weakening my moral fibre (and also making me very cranky and prescriptivist).

What is worse for you when reviewing/marking academic work: a) having to spot and take action on AI-generated writing or b) reading human writing that is almost incomprehensible due to grammar issues?

If I had a £ for every time I have said or written the sentence "CDA is not a method", I could retire tomorrow <sigh>

How people can send me an email cobbled together by AI, with irrelevant, incoherent and incorrect references to my work and then expect me to accept them as PhD students, I just can't make out. Please stop wasting my time.

Reading grant applications can make your head hurt. I mean, can you really have "cascading impact pathways"? 😵‍💫

It's official: after 22 (!) years at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social, I will start as Professor of Organisational Communication at @sdu.dk's Department of Language and Culture on 1 September this year. 1/2 www.sdu.dk/en/om-sdu/in...

When visual and linguistic meaning collide - and yes, the whole 29-page document is in Comic Sans 🤦‍♀️

I have just learned about CoARA and its qualitative principles for assessing research, instead of relying on rankings and metrics. 20+ years in a British university and I had no idea this approach even existed 🥲 www.coara.org

Whether you cannot wait to read this ⬇️ new book on the discursive construction of veganism or your guilty pleasure is watching meat carving videos, our episode on the language of #food is for you. Free extra materials at wordsandactionspodcast.wordpress.com www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discursiv...

Today, we have a #metaphor half-day at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social, where PhD students present their work. Nice to have a visitor from Birmingham, too @jeannettel.bsky.social

Right now, I am on a train driving across a small Danish island called Sprogø. I don't know if that really translates as "language island", but I like it.

Who - who?! - designs editorial management software? Why is it so uniformly user-unfriendly, time-wasting and unattractive? Why?? The programmers need to talk to UX people and they in turn need to talk to the users.

Your podcast hosts have four teenage sons between them, and one of them has promised (threatened?) to cook tonight. He could do worse than listen to our latest episode on language and #food while preparing dinner. wordsandactionspodcast.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/e...

And finally, preliminary findings on the use of up/down metaphors in the annual reports of UK companies. Industry also plays a role ('low carbon' in reports by energy companies)

I have just presented the latest @mantrap.bsky.social research at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social meeting, on #emotion and humour in an anti-feminist YouTube video (and comments)

The unparalleled Alon Lischinsky is talking about media representations of polyamory at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social meeting: who would have guessed that British tabloids are obsessed with it? I'm also learning about a (functional) grammar of jealousy

Another thing I just learned at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social event (talk by Ningxin Yin) that in Chinese, 'pink gay' refers negatively to nationalist gay men (originally blending femininity and Communist red) or positively to fun (a curious parallel to the old sense of 'gay') 💗

Interesting to hear Soyoon Park talk about "affective code-switching" at today's @lgas-baal.bsky.social event. And thanks to the organisers for making it easy to find 🏳️‍🌈

One of our hosts, @veronikakoller.bsky.social, switched sides and was interviewed on all things #metaphor for the @discourseacademy.org podcast "Doing Critical Discourse Analysis". Listen and find out more about the Discourse Academy here: www.discourseacademy.org