Dogs, Owners & Responsibility: Law in the Doghouse

I'll be giving a talk at this workshop on the 24th June 2014. This is an interdisciplinary event involving academics from veterinary and legal domains, and Alison Sealey (co-investigator on the Leverhulme project 'People', 'Products', 'Pests' and 'Pets': The Discursive Representation of Animals) and myself.

The abstract and title for our talk is:

“Dogs, the law and language: a discourse of danger”

The control of dogs has been a controversial issue in the UK, with the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 receiving much criticism in the news. The dialogue surrounding such legislation has sparked fierce debate about dogs themselves, with many voices competing to represent dogs in such a way as to influence public perception toward them. This talk will use a corpus linguistic approach to analyse the discourse of UK news from 1995-2014, with a view to exploring how dogs have been talked about and how dog legislation has been received by the public.