Towards a ‘synergy’ of text mining and critical discourse analysis: a corpus-assisted discourse study of imagining China in Hong Kong political discourse

Abstract This study proposes to incorporate text mining into critical discourse analysis (CDA) to give a corpus-assisted discourse study of the particular ways of imagining Hong Kong’s relations to China in the public speeches of three former Chief Executives in the two decades after its handover. With the computer-assisted text-mining tool KH Coder, this study combines the methods of quantitative text mining and qualitative discourse analysis to examine their preferential ways of imagining China at different levels of discourse: (1) topics/themes, (2) discursive strategies, and (3) linguistic means and realizations. It generates illuminating findings concerning their preferential ways of imagining Hong Kong’s relations to China as well as the analytic potential of incorporating text mining into CDA. It is expected that it can lead to more studies towards this endeavour.