Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2016

This paper focuses on the day-to-day practices of service providers working with multilingual immigrants. It reports on 74 video recorded conversations between service providers and immigrant mothers, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at Kind en Gezin, the organization that monitors childcare for the Flemish authorities in Belgium. In discussing the findings, we focus on two principal themes: First, we demonstrate what the language requirements enshrined in Belgium’s language policies entail for the day-to-day practices of service providers working with multilingual clients. Secondly, we argue that, in superdiverse contexts, the growing need is towards delegitimizing language policy makers’ protectionist claim that the national language should be the only language used in public service encounters.

This paper investigates politico-media discourses of the international community revolving for the last few decades around the process of Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina from its Dayton inception until 2015. We first explain the contours of the BiH context and then use a critical discourse analysis to assess the data collected between 1997 and 2015 drawn from a variety of textual resources such as mainstream newspapers, online media, and international community websites to explain the main trends of the Europeanization discourse in the country. Grounding our analysis within the postcolonial theory and post-communist studies, we critically examine the post-1996 peace and state building as well as Europeanization processes in BiH with respect to signs of postcolonial condition including perpetual transition and a state of exception.

The article presents an analysis of the majority and minority opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States issued on District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. The court case addressed the meaning of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution that establishes gun rights in a famously confusing wording. The analysis applies parts of Fairclough and Fairclough’s ( 2011 , 2012 ) model of analysing argumentation and also discusses intertextuality to account for how the justices construct their arguments. The analysis shows how the justices shape their arguments on the basis of their values and beliefs, presenting contradictory readings of the amendment, sources of evidence and the preferred application of the amendment. 1

This study identifies gaps in official discourse between recognition of the other as a nation and recognition of the other’s right to statehood within identity conflicts. Using as a case study the discourse of Israeli political leaders during three distinct periods from 1967 until the present, the study proposes analytical tools based on recognition theory to examine how the relationship between recognition of the other and constitution of the self impact recognition gaps. The study illustrates that partial recognition of the other — either affirmation of peoplehood coupled with denial of statehood or conversely affirmation of statehood coupled with denial of peoplehood — can result from an untenable view of self based on ontological dissonance. Recognition of the other is shown to be an essential aspect of self-constitution within the context of a transformation of self-identity towards an identity that frees itself of mastery over the other.

The paper handles public crisis communication (cc) done by top public figures involved in what has been dubbed the News International Phone Hacking Scandal of 2011 in the UK. It contributes to the field by proposing an approach which reflects a “linguistic leaning” in cc (response) research. Hence, by applying sociolinguistic (face) and linguistic (stance) concepts we examine the texts released, with a view to discovering how crisis communicators ‘negotiate’ language to persuade/ manipulate the stakeholders to alter their perceptions about the crisis and the people implicated. The examination focuses primarily on grammatical stance marking devices ( Biber el al. 1999 ) yielding results in three dimensions: 1) structural, 2) semantic and 3) stance attribution, and shows that besides rhetorical goals, the underlying objectives the speakers pursue are face maintenance and, consequently, facework that must be done in the circumstances that have occurred.