This paper provides a critical social semiotic analysis of the UK Department of Work and Pensions ‘Employ ability’ initiative. Although this initiative can be read as an attempt to reduce the exclusion of people with disabilities from the workplace, it is argued that the ‘Employ ability’ initiative, should be read as part of a discursive strategy to legitimate neo-liberal welfare reforms, where policies relating to the employment and underemployment of people with disabilities remain fixed almost entirely on the supply side (...) rather than the demand side of labour. A number of semiotic resources are identified that attempt to make a neo-liberal ‘problematic’ appear to be a natural and common sense response to questions of welfare. Most notable is the use of an ‘empowerment’ discourse that seeks to legitimate a disciplinary welfare regime and attempts to fabricate an active citizenry so necessary to the demands of neo-liberalism. (shrink)

This research analyses media and online discourses produced by the Indigenous People of Biafra, a Nigerian separatist/secessionist group that seeks a referendum for the independence of the Igbo ethnic group of Nigeria. The research examines discourse structures, such as language use that clearly or implicitly produces propositions of conflict and war, tribalism and hate-speech. Discursive strategies such as labelling, exaggeration, metaphor and contradiction applied by the group to produce ideological discourses of outrage are also analysed. Moreover, conflicting discourses produced by (...) the Igbo politicians and factions of IPOB and other Biafra campaign groups are analysed in terms of their political implications to the overall self-determination efforts of the Biafra nation. The study concludes that the pragmatic implications of discourses that reflect opposing views, as well as varied ideological perspectives by group members, suggest that Biafra is a nation divided against itself and are a people incapable of the separate nation that they seek. (shrink)

This article reports a critical discourse analysis of the legitimation strategies used in two Chinese government white papers about trade frictions between China and the United States. Drawing on the legitimation framework advanced by van Leeuwen to political discourse, it shows how the white papers use four main legitimation strategies: authorization, moralization, rationalization, and integration. It argues that the Chinese government uses these strategies to legitimate its responses to US trade policy and delegitimate the US government’s motives for initiating/escalating tensions. (...) This article also discusses how the use of these legitimation strategies draws from certain traditional Chinese cultural values, such as Confucianism, the culture of face, and collectivism. This article is a part of a larger research project studying discursive strategies in trade friction discourse and hopes to shed light on the attributes and functions of this type of discourse. (shrink)

This study uses appraisal theory to investigate the media attitudinal variations in the context of the recent 2013 air pollution incident in China. Drawing upon the appraisal systems of attitude and engagement, this article examines how the reportage has changed over time in terms of the type and source of attitude. Through a comparative analysis of the news reports and editorials in the latest and back issues of the official English-language newspaper China Daily, this article identifies two major attitudinal shifts: (...) 1) from an absence of inscribed attitude representing air quality as something natural to negative judgement of social sanction judging foreign embassies’ monitoring; 2) from judgement to three interwoven strands of appreciation, with the air quality, Western experience and prospective opportunities evaluated by both Chinese and international communities. When reporting and commenting on environmental issues of global concern, the national media voice may seek to achieve attitudinal consensus with the international community while adhering to the official discourse. (shrink)

Using critical discourse analysis this study analyzes how ideologies and national identities are discursively constructed through editorial and opinion commentaries in two English-language newspapers from China and Japan on an international incident involving the two countries. The first four editorials/opinions on the East China Sea trawler collision incident from the China Daily and Daily Yomiuri are analyzed. Findings show that a variety of discursive strategies are adopted by the newspapers to construct national identity and intergroup relations, including: 1) the discursive (...) categorization of group identity, 2) the discursive re-categorization of intergroup relations, and 3) the discursive re-categorization of intragroup relations. Even though both newspapers are products of globalization, and purport to target international and cosmopolitan audiences, the reporting of the East China Sea incident closely adheres to official narratives and discourses of the respective governments. (shrink)

Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation analysis by providing a number of analytical frameworks. Multimodal legitimation research, however, seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative (...) election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy. In this article, I use the six-layer framework proposed by Mackay for multimodal legitimation analyses and I argue that multimodal legitimation research can benefit and get enhanced from the use of narratology and its analytical categories, such as perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present paper analyses the anti-immigration discourse in Poland in terms of Proximization Theory. PT [Cap, P.. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 17–41; Cap, P.. Axiological aspects of proximization. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 392–407; Cap, P.. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Cap, P.. The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; among others] is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the (...) ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. It reveals how top public actors construe closeness of an external threat, to claim leadership and solicit legitimization of preventive measures to offset the effects of the threat. The present paper applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today’s Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’. Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/majid_khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who (...) may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity. Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19, 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical (...) multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

In 2012, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published a series of articles criticising Swedish national level gymnastics for being abusive. This text analyses the subsequent debate by identifying the discursive and rhetorical resources used by the involved parties. The analysis shows how the parties negotiate accountability, manage dilemmas of stake and what the possible social consequences of these are. Five narratives are singled out in the debate: the counter narrative, the victim narrative, the defence-speech narrative, the expert narrative and the (...) ‘not-us-narrative’. In these narratives, the involved parties used rhetorical resources to account for reality. Hence, the gymnastics community, the research community, individuals and journalists are all portrayed as actors co-producing a social problem. (shrink)

In a society where the ideology of shareholder value maximization prevails, how do evaluators make appraisal and bonus decisions when corporate social responsibility measures and financial measures in the balanced scorecard point in different directions? To explore this question, we conducted two studies to develop and test a conceptual framework. Participants were asked to evaluate the performance of two managers, using a case we wrote about a commercial bank. We found that evaluators are more willing to drop CSR performance measures (...) than financial measures from the evaluations; perceived CSR relevance is influenced by where evaluators stand in regard to CSR and also by where evaluators believe shareholders stand ; and there is a financial bias in appraisal and bonus decisions when CSR measures are used in the BSC, consistent with SVM ideology. We conclude by discussing the implications of the influence of SVM ideology on the use of CSR measures in terms of business research, practice, and education. (shrink)

This article examines word-based puzzles as texts. In particular, it analyzes the potential of using a seemingly harmless pastime — the solving of puzzles — for propagandistic ends. Propaganda is an attempt to manipulate and dominate discourses some of whose manifestations are texts. Because a thorough examination of puzzles has not yet been undertaken, word-based puzzles will be considered first in general, followed by a detailed examination of the potential propagandistic impact of puzzles drawn from the official Nazi newspaper, Völkischer (...) Beobachter [Folkish Observer]. (shrink)

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project on epistemic strategies in text and talk, this article examines such strategies in a secondary school textbook on social science. After a summary of current insights into the theory of knowledge in philosophy, psychology and linguistics, it is shown how discourse presupposes and expresses knowledge, with special emphasis on discourse processing and learning from text and its applications in education. The specific aim of this article is to study in some detail how exactly (...) ‘new’ knowledge is formulated in pedagogical discourse, and how ‘old’ knowledge is presupposed in a lesson on migration. We thus are able to describe the categories of, and the functional relations between, old and new knowledge, as discursive manifestations of underlying cognitive strategies of teaching and learning. It was also observed that in textbooks what is purported to be presented as knowledge often has an ideological basis. (shrink)

Nationalism is a notoriously complex, slippery notion that has been the subject of much scholarly debate and scrutiny. The last two decades, however, had seen a proliferation of methodological orientations which emphasized the socially constructed nature of national phenomena. The conception of nation as an ‘imagined community’ highlights the active role of discourse through which notions of national homogeneity, historic continuity and shared present and destiny are constituted, re-constituted and inculcated in and through discourse, often by a nationalist and engaged (...) intelligentsia. Informed by the work of Wodak and colleagues [. The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press;. Commemorating the past: The discursive construction of official narratives about the rebirth of the second Austrian republic. Discourse & Communication, 1, 337–363], the present study examines the construction of the ‘homeland’ in Palestinian nationalist discourses. Drawing on a corpus of Palestinian constitutive documents, including political speeches and national tracts, this article probes into the constituent themes of Palestinian national identity as expressed and consistently presented in Palestinian official secularist and Islamist discourses. In particular, the study draws attention to the discursive processes through which a common Palestinian identity is forged and the similarities and ideological tensions between secularists and Islamists in the construction of the ‘nation’. (shrink)

The recent trend in institutional communication research seems to foster the image of the University as a private organization significantly oriented towards a policy of customer satisfaction. Following the concept of organizational culture, institutional settings too are conceived as organizational contexts, where discourse is a privileged vehicle to convey and spread values, traditions and artifacts, both through internal and external communication practices. Thus, within academic discourse organizational culture is shaped and perpetuated by specific devices of rhetorical argumentation. The corpus of (...) data consists of two different examples of academic discourse: the self promotional endorsement letters of the academic candidates to the chancellor’s position on occasion of the elections and the inaugural speeches proclaimed by the chancellors in charge during the opening celebration of the academic year. The first kind of academic discourse could be meant as an example of political discourse since the candidates use communication strategically and manipulate their academic membership as a rhetorical device to support their aims. On the other hand, the second example is a mere celebration of academic culture which through linguistic rituals recalls and perpetuates the basic values of this microcosm. The data have been analysed with the critical discourse analysis and diatextual analysis which pay particular attention to the context of speech. Moreover, attention has been focused on the metaphors and on the meta-discursive cues. The results show that although with different purposes academic discourse use similar discursive and rhetorical strategies as both belong to the same organization. (shrink)

This article presents the results of an analysis of the large-scale processed texts of Arabic newspapers in the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Arabic Corpus Project. I adopted methods modified from the Biber Connor Upton Approach to retrieve the expanded concordances of the lexical units almarᵓa and alnisāᵓ from the corpus. The extracted text reveals the discursive patterns regarding a number of topics which are discussed in Arabic newspapers, namely, socio-culture and eco-politics. The results of the study show (...) how and why topics related to Arab women are discursively constructed, revealing negative patterns with regard to the topics discrimination, the veil, sports, male guardianship, driving, pro-divorce settlements and municipal elections, and positive patterns concerning the topics marital status, violence, education, travel, sexual harassment, the removal of male guardianship, employment, ministerial election and political participation. The specific case of the topic veil is subsequently analysed in more detail and the results reveal that the topic is associated with negative patterns within a wider socio-cultural discourse. (shrink)

While the role of the media in the war against terror has received ample attention from scholars, there is little in the literature that deals specifically with the Iraqi point of view with respect to the nature of terror or with the comparative analysis of Western and Arabic media treatment of terror. That Western and Arabic ideologies arise from divergent political, national, cultural, and religious traditions is well understood in the West. Indeed, this understanding is generally implicit and unconscious, often (...) leading to perception of Arabic culture and ideology as a monolithic whole. Lost in this division between ‘Us’ and ‘Other’ are the multitude of inner-Arabic ideological divisions. Among these is an important inner-Arabic ideological division that reflects the larger Arab–Western ideological split, a split between those in support of Saddam’s reign and the post-invasion Iraqi insurgency and those in opposition. Cultural ideologies, all-encompassing yet often unstated, are difficult to summarize and analyze through the examination of indigenous news media. The media must balance truthful accuracy and objectivity with self-preservation. They must be exceedingly sensitive to the moods and outlooks of their target audiences in order to survive politically as well as economically. This work is a comparative, descriptive analysis of Saddam’s execution as covered by Arab and Western media, making use of Van Dijk’s Socio-ideological Discourse Theory as embodied in the Theories of Semantic Macroproposition and the concept of the Ideological Square as well as the Discourse-Historical Approach of Wodak. This combination of theoretical elements constitutes a basis for comparative Arabic–English discourse analysis with a focus on socio-linguistic analysis of text and rhetoric, rather than the more common functional Systemic Linguistic analysis or grammar theory considerations. These analytical elements also enable the de-construction of news media coverage in terms of macro-microstructures, micro-semantics, and the rhetoric news discourse. Technical analysis of news article word count, lexical selection, grammar, literary style, and rhetoric provides a portal through which hidden opinion, ideology, and dogma are made visible. (shrink)

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown the operational potential in political discourse analysis from the proximization perspective. This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze political communication across transcultural contexts, especially in the cyber discourse space. Based on the spatial–temporal–axiological model, we compare the journalistic discourses on two social media platforms by China Xinhua News Agency, an official speaker for China worldwide. The corpuses are constructed with microblogs on Weibo in Chinese and Twitter in English containing key words of Sino–US trade war. (...) It is found that the speaker has shaped different realities of discourse in accordance with the cultural contexts and proximized from corresponding dimensions to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, and on advocating (...) for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on air pollution published from 2008 through 2015 by China Daily, China’s largest official English-language newspaper, reveals a significant attitudinal shift around the end of 2011 as regards public awareness of increasing air pollution levels in China and related public criticism. It also constructs a clear image of the increasing determination and resolve of the Chinese central government over the course of this 8-year period to take action to effectively reduce air pollution. (...) This study highlights the submissive role played by the official Chinese press in their reporting on air pollution under the strict censorship system of the Communist Party of China, as well as the socio-political role that international sporting events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games played in raising both public and governmental awareness of environmental issues. (shrink)

The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was the result of a coup of the economically dominant conservative oligarchy against the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores, in power since 2003. The right wing Brazilian media played a crucial role in this coup by manipulating public opinion as well as the politicians who voted against Dilma. In particular, the media of the powerful Globo Corporation, such as O Globo newspaper, and especially Globo’s Jornal Nacional, the pervasive TV news program, systematically (...) demonized and delegitimized Dilma, as well as ex-President Lula and the PT, in their news reports and editorials by selectively associating them with pervasive corruption and attributing the serious economic recession to them. After a summary of this sociopolitical context, and a brief theoretical definition of manipulation, this article examines some of the manipulative strategies of O Globo’s editorials during March and April 2016. (shrink)

Drawn from an investigation of the construction of collective identity in DIVA magazine between 1994 and 2004, this article considers the discursive contestation of the boundaries necessarily, though never straightforwardly, erected in the process. Analysing first a selection of articles and second debates about who ‘we’ are in and between readers' letters, the article focuses on the ‘trouble’ posed by bisexuality in this era. Readers draw on and contest a cluster of interrelated characterisations of bisexuals: as undecided, as a kind (...) of pollutant, and as inadequate facsimiles of ‘real lesbians', as well as more or less open characterisations of ‘us’. These arguments are necessarily managed editorially, and always ‘end’ with calls for acceptance. This does not fully recover the ambiguity with which bisexuality is handled, however, and the article concludes by discussing the dilemma faced by the imagined community. (shrink)

This article explores discursive contrasts used to minimise a groping in Colombian newspaper forums. Analysis with critical discourse analysis and grounded theory shows that constant talk about ‘real’ violence in Colombia limits the groping to being seen primarily in contrast with more commonly discussed examples of crime and violence, including the armed conflict, robbery and murder, and sexual abuse. The contrasts, together with other discursive devices, characterise the perpetrator as a normal, hardworking man; suggest that violence was not present in (...) this act; and portray the woman who was groped as different from victims. The discourse in the forum comments places this groping outside of the category of violence rather than considering it as part of a greater picture of gendered violence in Colombia. The contrasts participate in the muting of women's voices about violence against women in Colombia by silencing the victim's perspective and undermining her pursuit of justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 2013, ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing the American NSA’s extensive surveillance programs. The ensuing media discussion became a focal point for the justification and contestation of surveillance in the digital age. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the discursive construction of surveillance, concentrating on how the practice is legitimized. Methodologically, the paper draws on Critical Discourse Studies, applying the concept of discourse and utilizing insights from Van Leeuwen’s categories of (...) legitimation and social actor representation. The data come from the media coverage of the Snowden affair in Finland, whose hitherto very limited state surveillance is now being transformed into extensive digital monitoring. The study concludes that surveillance is legitimized through two main discourses, one legitimizing it by constructing it as a tool for protection against terrorism, the other contesting it by depicting it as a threat to the basic building blocks of democracy. The study suggests that the latter understanding tends to be favored in the media, but the critique of surveillance is on a rather abstract level. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the concept of ideology to contemporary sociological analysis. To this end, the article draws upon central arguments put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski in ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The Production of the Dominant Ideology’]. Yet, the important theoretical contributions made in this enquiry have been largely ignored by contemporary sociologists, even by those who specialize in the critical study of ideology. This article intends to (...) fill this gap in the literature by illustrating that useful lessons can be learned from Bourdieu and Boltanski’s critical investigation, as it provides crucial insights into the principal characteristics and functions of ideologies, including the ways in which they develop and operate in advanced capitalist societies. The article is divided into two main parts: the first part examines various universal features of ideology; the second part aims to shed light on several particular features of dominant ideology. The paper concludes by arguing that the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, despite the fact that it raises valuable sociological questions, is ultimately untenable. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the ‘existence theory’ proposed by Patrick Baert, Marcus Morgan, and Rin Ushiyama. To this end, it focuses on some key issues that could, and arguably should, be explored in more detail, especially if the authors decide to develop their project further, permitting them to establish a new interdisciplinary branch of inquiry. The comments and suggestions made in this paper are meant to be constructive, supporting the idea that Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama’s (...) outline could, and should, be turned into a bold, systematic, and long-term research programme. More specifically, the in-depth analysis of Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama’s theoretical framework demonstrates that their undertaking, which draws on central insights from both existentialism and phenomenology, contributes to bridging the disciplinary gap between philosophy and sociology. The paper concludes by asserting that Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama’s model provides a solid foundation for an ambitious, but viable, project that may result in the creation of a new current of research, capable of generating valuable insights into the tension-laden confluence of existential milestones, existential ladders, and existential urgencies in the theatre of human life. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze, as an example of political discourse, the songs used by Spain's two main political parties in the 2008 general elections. Just like other texts used in political electoral discourse, these songs form a part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate. The whole of the candidate's discourse is aimed at convincing the electorate that she/he and his/her party are the best choice, while the opposing candidate is the worst. (...) In this paper, I will analyze how this strategy, quite typical in political ideological electoral discourse, is put into practice in the two songs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I critically analyze the work of Shepard Fairey, the street artist better known as OBEY, as a multimodal discourse. After introducing the notion of street art, I analyze Fairey’s aesthetics, inspired in Pop Art and Soviet Constructivism, as well as his accounts on his own art, in order to unveil his ideology. I then discuss a particular case, concerning the pastiche of the Che Guevara’s image. I will show that the seemingly subversive nature of OBEY’s work, is (...) nothing more than marketing. Consequently, by industrially producing and commodifiying dissent, OBEY banalizes and deactivates it. According to the dichotomy between oppositional and emergent discourses, I conclude that OBEY enacts only an oppositional behavior. Moreover, by ‘manufacturing propaganda dissent’, OBEY performs protest, but in doing so he contributes to perpetuating the system he says he fights against. (shrink)

This paper examines how German media discourses reflect debates around integration, based on a newspaper corpus spanning the period 2008–2018. Considering these discourses, our research interest is focussed on how integration is constructed as a responsibility of those who are expected to integrate into society. To analyze how media might play a role in reproducing essentialist constructions of difference, we present a case study that combines methodologies of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, and that examines discursive practices and strategies (...) linked to dominant discourses about integration in Germany. Our findings show that in the German context, certain ethnicities are framed as “other” and these groups are constantly being assessed in terms of integration in ways that others are not. (shrink)

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the (...) different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an discursive chain of legitimization. (shrink)

This article proposes a novel discourse-analytical approach that explores Obama's rhetoric of pluralization in his Cairo speech on 4 June 2004. The approach eclectically combines both quantitative corpus and qualitative discourse-analysis methods. Three aspects of analysis are at play. First is the collocational aspect capturing the lexico-grammatical meanings associated with the political and social actors nominated, referenced and predicated in the speech. Second is the intertextual aspect that reflects the political-religious meanings underlying the speech. Third is the institutional aspect related (...) to the spatial setting of the speech and the socio-historical meanings attaching to it; meanings that explain how the institutional framework of the speech go fittingly with its core message. This article has reached four important findings. First, Obama's Cairo speech is rhetorically predicated on the pluralization of politically and religiously heterogeneous social actors, such as Americans, Israelis, Christians and Jews on the one hand and Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims on the other. Second, Obama's speech has drawn upon a political-religious interdiscourse with four major functions, phatic communion, legitimation, exclusion/inclusion and peaceful co-existence – again all are directed toward arguing for political and religious pluralization. Third, Obama's conscious choice of the spatial setting of his Cairo speech is rhetorically oriented toward institutionally pluralistic meanings. Last, there is considerable potential for integrating the micro collocational-intertextual aspect with the macro socio-historical institutional aspect for critically examining the import of political speeches. (shrink)

Following the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Japan passed laws that resulted in the dispatch of its Self-Defense Force to support military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This marked a major break from Japan's previous pacifist stance, which, as stated in Article 9 of the national constitution, did not allow for participation in war. This article examines editorials from four leading Japanese newspapers, Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi, and Sankei, to explore a connection between language usage in the (...) media and Japan's move towards militarism. More specifically, the analysis shows that the editorials employed a series of linguistic devices, including metaphors, a grammar of urgency, and the term ‘challenge’ to construct a strong sense of pressure on Japan to participate in the US-led military response, thereby leaving the Japanese public with little course to consider alternatives to military involvement. (shrink)

This article presents recent developments in the Geneva modular and interactionist approach to discourse organization. The first section analyses the main epistemological, theoretical and methodological properties of the Geneva Model by examining its relationship to data, communicative action, complexity and discourse organization, and then outlines the Geneva Model's modular methodology. The second section of the article focuses on a text extract from a service encounter and applies some aspects of the modular methodology to the analysis of request sequences. The authors (...) argue that requests cannot be reduced to the utterance of single speech acts but are best described as complex discourse practices linking praxeological information, conceptual knowledge and textual competence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe discursive analysis of criminal organizations’ family dynamics and ideological devices may provide important insights into the inner functioning of these groups. In this article, we describe and analyze a specific set of discursive strategies and the thematic narratives emerging from a TV interview with Giuseppe Riina, a member of Cosa Nostra and the son of one of the most important mafia bosses. Our analyses demonstrate the existence of recurring ideological devices such as reductionism, amoralism, familism, verticalism, normalism, victimism and (...) religious relativism. The results are discussed in light of previous research that examines how discursive strategies and narratives may represent powerful tools for understanding criminal organizations. Family-related discourses, in particular, reveal meanings, values and ideas that contribute to constructing criminal organizations’ internal structure, as well as their relationship with the external world. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the concept of ‘presupposition’, specifically as it is applied in critical approaches to discourse analysis such as Critical Discourse Analysis or Societal Pragmatics, and proposes a systematisation of a socio-cognitive approach to the concept. Presupposition analysis is crucial for uncovering naturalised ideologies underlying discourse, and examining manipulative functions of discourse, especially strategies making it socially or cognitively harder to challenge ideological assumptions. However, the way presupposition is analysed in current critical discourse analysis is not methodologically (...) consistent and not necessarily theoretically consistent with an understanding of discourse as socio-cognitively grounded social practice. I demonstrate this through a brief overview of the two main current approaches to presupposition in discourse analysis – the truth conditional and the socio-cognitive one. I propose examining presupposition on different levels of analysis, ranging from lexical-item triggered presuppositions to discourse presuppositions and mutually presupposed pragmatic competence. (shrink)

The Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2013–2017 is characterized as ‘hybrid’ warfare, with a crucial role of informational component. Using ideological discourse analytic tools, this article demonstrates how two prominent Russian TV channels shaped the persuasive message, creating strong unity and mobilizing a high level of support among the national audience. Based on legitimation and de-legitimation patterns, Channel One and Russia-1 built ideologically polarized opposition between ‘Our’ and ‘Their’ sides of the conflict. The wide range of editorializing tools, socio-cultural and historical Soviet-time (...) constructs, and references to gay culture served to promote one group and to debase the opposition. Close institutional ties between government and media in Russia sustain multiplicity and intertextuality of ‘general line’, thus eliminating discordant interpretations. The article shows strong evidence that the analyzed TV news programs present a typical illustration of ideological discourse, exploited by the Russian government in order to achieve its political goals. (shrink)

Introducing the concept of Crisis Solution Marketing, this research explores how metaphor pre-packages information, proposing “solutions” to “problems” they discursively construct in the media. These conceptual frameworks are capable of influencing how readers perceive and interpret news events, ultimately influencing their behavior as consumers and the financial decisions they make. This article explores the relationship between editorial positioning and ideology in financial news and the types or ontologies of metaphors used to describe the nature of the stock market via reporting (...) on the stock market crash of 2008 in online news media. Results indicate a statistically significant preference for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, liberally positioned newspapers, for animate-biological metaphors which promote understanding of the stock market in terms of a living being that must be ‘nurtured’ through intervention as opposed to being ‘left alone’, which is more consistent with laissez-faire approaches to economic crisis scenarios. (shrink)

This article examines precontextualization: the rhetorical act of previewing and contextualizing a future discursive event. I examine how an NBC News broadcast selected verbal–visual representations of the past in order to enact a context for an upcoming discourse moment: Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations address. The article draws on appraisal analysis, multimodal video analysis and scholarship on the rhetoric of futurity. I show that the NBC journalists who precontextualized Powell’s address on the night before its delivery presented viewers with a (...) supportive context for understanding Powell’s argument. By representing Saddam Hussein as deceptive and even deserving of future violence, the journalists essentially pre-confirmed arguments that Powell employed the next day. More importantly, because the news representations were presented as factual, they allowed viewers little space to consider alternative viewpoints – and little reason to question or resist the seemingly inexorable push for war. (shrink)

This article examines a distinct form of moral argumentation found to be common in a corpus of 500 editorials and opinion pieces written in 23 US newspapers and news magazines between August and October 2002 debating whether or not the US should attack Iraq. The purpose of the article is to delineate this communicative phenomenon, which we call moral muting. Moral muting occurs when a message either blunts the moral considerations involved in a case or presents an equivocal moral meaning. (...) Moral muting overlaps with but is distinct from mitigation, and even when it involves mitigation, moral muting depends on devices that go beyond those generally associated with conversational mitigation. The examination of moral muting offered here contributes to a better understanding of moral communication in general and of the conduct of the American public sphere. (shrink)

Since 2013, several social actors of the Federal University of Santa Catarina community have formed a public sphere in order to deliberate and decide on the University Hospital’s affiliation to the Brazilian Hospital Services Company, a public company set up in accordance with a private law which has been created by the Brazilian federal government in order to set up a management body for public university hospitals. Underpinned by critical discourse analysis, our purpose is to analyze the embedded ideologies in (...) discursive practices within the UFSC/ebserh public sphere, especially those perpetrated by the federal government’s bureaucratic means as to mystify reality, and also promote and legitimize dominant interests and actions with regard to the UH/ufsc’s affiliation to the EBSERH. We organized this analysis in five main categories: staff shortage and the ideological use of the double standard policy, the ideology of neo-liberalism and managerialism, blame avoidance behavior and the ideological dispute between ideology and pragmatism, the policy of terror and the fallacy of choice and ideology of participationism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn recent years, studies on discourses of resistance in politics have become prevalent, focusing mainly on the language of radical movements and rebel groups, but not the discourses on colonialism, imperialism, and repression which can be considered as potential sites for discourses of resistance. To fill this gap, this paper critically explores how an independence leader utilized metaphor to construct a discourse of resistance against colonialism and imperialism. It analyzes a number of speeches delivered by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering Pan-African (...) and Ghana's independence leader, using a combination of models, including critical metaphor analysis and membership categorization analysis. The analysis illustrates that Nkrumah deployed war/conflict/military and religious metaphors in conjunction with other discursive strategies such as labeling or stereotyping, category work, sentimentalism, victim-playing, and negative other-presentation to formulate a resistance discourse against colonialism and imperialism. These metaphors were exploited through representations of vilification, enemification, demonization, freedom and justice, and attack and defense. This paper provides insight into the use of language in the service of resistance and activism, thereby demonstrating that the use of metaphor by political actors serves manipulative and/or ideological purposes and illustrating that metaphor is essential to a leader's persuasive force. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between everyday talk, the reproduction of political ideology and the interactional accomplishment of situated identities through analyzing how institutional members index neoliberal ideology in their everyday interactions. Analysis of audio- and video-recorded data from racially diverse business members of two Texas chambers of commerce illustrates how chamber members indirectly index neoliberal ideology through taking stances toward government policies. White, upper class participants display neoliberal stances through using complaints – constituted by questions, humor, idioms and inference-rich (...) terms – about the Affordable Care Act because it is a form of government interference that increases taxes and the federal deficit. Minority business members use discursive strategies such as double-voiced discourse and self-repairs to balance tensions between criticizing neoliberal ideology because it does not benefit minorities yet still orient to its taken-for-granted value in their business community. Overall, while participants’ interactions generally seem to operate within the structural constraints of neoliberal ideology, our analysis illustrates how participants take up neoliberal ideology in situated ways that, at times, provide avenues for negotiating the relevance of neoliberal ideology to everyday life. (shrink)

This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social psychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examine examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the expense of and in preference to the work of examining participants' own formulations of those same activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology which seeks (...) to the explore how participants' talk is responsively oriented to foreclosing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a way for speakers to account for their own and others' activities within the controversy which that same body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical context of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities whereby speakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some independent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episode of talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-cultural contact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the conflicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement as Western expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials, the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakers in the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they are engaged. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFramed within Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines women’s relationship to their cooking practices in cookbooks by three female celebrity chefs: Giada De Laurentiis, Ree Drummond, and Ina Garten. Prevalent in all of the cookbooks is a discourse that continues traditional gender roles of women being predisposed to care, cook, and serve others. At the same time, alternative discourses of achievability, self-fulfillment, and femininity are offered with ‘easy’ and ‘delicious’ recipes, enabling women to be competent in the kitchen, and by (...) extension, in life. Cooking is a way to care for the self and realize happiness. Examining the recipe narrative and supporting text, this article shows how these complex and competing discourses are part of the construction of hegemonic femininity. (shrink)

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

This article is concerned with ‘how’ newsworthiness is constructed linguistically/discursively in a sample of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. This is new as both linguistic analysis of ‘crime reports’ and the context of ‘Iranian journalism’ are among under-researched areas. One-month worth editions of two Iranian/farsi language newspapers were collected, and the data were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively with reference to the analytical framework of Bednarek and Caple. While the quantitative analysis showed the construction of Eliteness as the most frequent (...) news value in both newspapers, there were differences in the construction of news values between the newspapers. Qualitative analysis of the data also showed the construction of news values in line with the sociocultural values prevalent in the society as well as the possible role of state and political authorities. (shrink)

This article explores verbal and visual language use in Zimbabwean contraceptive promotional brochures distributed from the early to mid-1980s. Drawing on recent work in critical discourse analysis of text and visual design, the article uses multimodal discourse analysis and draws from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar’s transitivity analysis to analyze family planning pamphlets, focusing on the discursive construction of women as contraceptive users. The article argues that the salience of the language of risk and vulnerability, which is textually and visually deployed (...) throughout the pamphlets, discursively constructs risk as a feature of unequal power relations. The article further argues that underlying the overarching discourse on risk are multiple ‘silences’ that discursively construct an ideological difference consisting of oppositional binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in terms of power relations. The differentiation of social groups reflects ‘hidden’ social inequalities in the text and visual images. (shrink)