The article focuses on Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its recontextualisation 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Having discussed the dynamics of the threat construction process and its role in shaping public attitudes to migration and policies related to it across time and space, we proceed to analyse Powell’s speech in terms of lexical, grammatical, and discursive fear-inciting devices and strategies. While doing so we draw on the insights from neuroscientific research (...) on the role of lexis in fear stimulation and functional-cognitive models of grammatical structure. The second part of our analysis is meant to demonstrate how the semiotic potential of cyberspace and social media, along with multimodal integration of various forms, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity they enable, endow fear-inciting discourse with new spatiotemporal and affective qualities. To this end we examine one of the most popular YouTube videos making “Rivers of Blood” speech part of its anti-immigration stance. (shrink)

This study aims to establish ideological effects of the pre-pandemic metaphor use in the mainstream media on users’ perceptions of their relationship with technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve that, 120 media articles from global mainstream media sources during the pre-pandemic period were collected and analysed at three levels: (1) metaphor identification; (2) deconstruction of conceptual source domains; (3) the coding of metaphorical expressions into psychological types of interpersonal relationships that are projected on technologies. The established metaphorical patterns were (...) tested in an online survey with 100 young adults and adults from Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic period of 2019-2020. The research findings resulted in the ideological perceptions of Reversed Agentivity and Mechanised Action characterising our relationship with technology and pointing out to the loss of individual autonomy, a lack of personal growth and more fragmented personal identity during the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)