Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (vols. 1–65, 2002–2015)

With the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this book approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse. This study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and thirteen governmental speeches are analyzed accordingly. It also provides readers with a theoretical discussion on the nature of political discourse through references to deliberative, agonistic and critical realistic approaches.

This book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.

What role do language and discourse play in the advancement of peace? What is the connection between a given society’s “peace language” and the repeated failure of peace initiatives involving it? At the heart of this book lie these basic questions and the attempt to shed light on them from new angles. The book focuses on an analysis of Israeli peace discourse and indicates the need for change in this discourse in order to promote a “culture of peace”. It presents the process of peace-estrangement, a set of linguistic, discursive and cultural devices intended for creating doubt regarding the positive meaning associated with the concept of peace. The approach adopted in this book is the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). This approach aims at exposing the cultural codes embedded in the discourse, which contribute to reproducing abuses of social power. The analytic chapters focus on different historical periods, since the beginning of the 20th century to this day, and deal with various genres found in diverse corpora, such as Knesset records and school textbooks.

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.

From Text to Political Positions addresses cross-disciplinary innovation in political text analysis for party positioning. Drawing on political science, computational methods and discourse analysis, it presents a diverse collection of analytical models including pure quantitative and qualitative approaches. By bringing together the prevailing text-analysis methods from each discipline the volume aims to alert researchers to new and exciting possibilities of text analyses across their own disciplinary boundary.

The volume builds on the fact that each of the disciplines has a common interest in extracting information from political texts. The focus on political texts thus facilitates interdisciplinary cross-overs. The volume also includes chapters combining methods as examples of cross-disciplinary endeavours. These chapters present an open discussion of the constraints and (dis)advantages of either quantitative or qualitative methods when evaluating the possibilities of combining analytic tools.

Based on extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of American presidential speeches that includes all inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages from 1789 to 2008, as well as major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945, this research monograph analyzes the various forms and functions of intertextual references found in the discourse of American presidents. Working within an original, interdisciplinary theoretical framework established by theories of intertextuality, discourse analysis, and presidential studies, the book discusses five different types of presidential intertextuality, all of which contribute jointly to creating a set of carefully manipulated and politically powerful images of both the American nation and the American presidency. The book is intended for scholars and students in political and presidential studies, communications, American cultural studies, and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in the American presidency in general.

This monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies, debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts, and also to investigate salient features of context. This allows a broader discussion of the role of this language in Scotland, and how different ways of constructing a language can percolate through society, appearing in both important, elite texts and discussions among ordinary people. It thus contributes to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots, but also expands the range of possible applications for critical discourse analysis approaches.

This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.

How do people construct collective identity during profound societal transformations? This volume examines the discursive construction of identity related to important national holidays in nine countries of Central Europe and the Balkans: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia. The chapters focus on the decades during which these countries moved from communism towards democracy and a market economy. This transition saw revivals of national values and a new significance of regional and transnational ties, entangled with negotiations of national identity that have been particularly lively in discourse concerning national holidays.

The chapters apply discourse analysis in addition to approaches from history, sociology, political science, and anthropology. All of the analyses make use of empirical material in the Slavic languages, including newspaper articles, interviews and other media contributions, sermons, addresses, and speeches by members of the political elite.

News coverage of EU negotiations, children’s war memories or TV series glamourising political processes – images pervade both private and public discourse, and visual communication plays a key role in our social negotiation of values. Conceptualising images as “images in use”, this volume considers the agencies behind visual communication and its impact on society.

Images in Use engages critically with traditional approaches to visual analysis, offers suggestions for alternative, socially situated analyses of images and demonstrates the explanatory force of thinking through “images in use” in a series of case studies. The conceptual contributions consider broader issues of critical theory, representation, as well as the mediatisation of politics. The case studies offer a survey of current visual communication including news coverage, political cartoons, political rhetoric, memory culture, celebrity humanitarianism, reality TV, as well as the narratives of blockbuster cinema and comics.

This volume proposes a new approach to visual communication, situating images in their social contexts and identifying the real, rhetorical and political impact of their use.

This book is a collection of studies on political interaction in a variety of broadcast, namely news and current affairs programs, political interviews, audience participation programs and radio phone-ins. Following a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, dialogic forms of news production and media talk in general, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars investigate the discursive and interactional practices that give rise to the arena of public politics in contemporary society. Chapters span an array of cultural contexts, as diverse as Sweden, Greece, Belgium (Flanders), the U.K., Spain, Israel, the U.S.A., Australia and China. Authors combine an interest in discourse analysis and conversation analysis with different disciplinary orientations, such as linguistics, media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, and social psychology. The book uncovers current trends in media and political discourse, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of media discourse and politics.

This monograph examines the rhetorical nature and function of representations of the future in political discourse, focusing on political actors’ use of hegemonic images of future “reality” to achieve their political goals. It argues that a key ideological dimension of political rhetoric lies in politicians’ use of projections of the future to legitimate policies and actions. This argument is grounded in systemic-functional and critical discourse analyses of the “Bush Doctrine,” the U.S. policy response to the September 11 terrorist attacks which sanctioned a “preemptive” military posture. By focusing on the discursive construction of the future, this project addresses a lacunae in critical discourse studies and calls attention to the crucial role that the discourse and practice of “futurology” has played in post-Cold War politics and society. It will be of value to scholars interested in the discourses of politics, the “war on terror,” U.S. national security, and futurology.

This volume examines the construction of Turkey's possible European Union accession in French political discourse. In today's France, heated debates regarding Turkey's EU membership are turning into an essential part of European identity formation. Once again, the 'Turkish Other' functions as a mirror for defining not only the 'European Self', but also European values. By providing a genuine and multi-disciplinary approach for studying the Otherness attributed to Turkey, this book contributes to our understanding of the Self/Other nexus in International Relations. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this study explores the socio-historical basis of the construction of Turkey's Otherness in an attempt to identify the processes through which past memories, representations, images and fantasies regarding Turkey are inserted into the French social imaginary. Focusing on these significations, which are (re)produced and become manifest through language, this book strives to uncover the link between discourse and political action.

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on discourses in one national context of post-communist transformation. Proposing a macro-micro approach to discourse analysis and transformation, it examines a spectrum of topics including Polish history, with its ‘interpreters’; changes in political bodies and the media, policies of the Catholic Church and the Institute of National Remembrance; xenophobia and anti-Semitism, with the emergence of unemployment and homelessness; experiences of new gender relations and migrations. In effect, drawing upon unique sets of data, the book shows how post-communist transformation can be understood through analyses of the changing public and private discourses. It shows Polish post-communism as a fragile and uneasy transformation, with people and institutions struggling to make sense of it and of life within it. The volume will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists: discourse analysts, sociologists, modern historians and political scientists, as well as to the informed lay public.

Editorials define at a given time how media construct their socio-cultural environment and where they position themselves in it. In this sense, they are snapshots of media socio-cultural identities whose study is crucial for the understanding of media actions and interactions on the political stage. This book contributes to the study of media roles in politics with a methodological “discursive communication identity framework” and its application to a corpus of editorials. This allows for the definition of editorials as a genre, and it reveals that, thanks to a very adroit interweaving of their socio-cultural identities, news media can play a much more active role on the political stage than studies on framing and agenda setting have hitherto shown. The place of media in political communication models might therefore need to be reviewed. This book is intended for all those interested in media and politics whatever their academic specializations.

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary European societies is the need to promote integration and social inclusion in the context of rapidly increasing migration. A particular challenge confronting national governments is how to accommodate speakers of an ever-increasing number of languages within what in most cases are still perceived as monolingual indigenous populations. This has given rise to public debates in many countries on controversial policies imposing a requirement of competence in a ‘national’ language and culture as a condition for acquiring citizenship. However, these debates are frequently conducted almost entirely at a national level within each state, with little if any attention paid to the broader European context. At the same time, further EU enlargement and the ongoing rise in the rate of migration into and across Europe suggest that the salience of these issues is likely to continue to grow. This volume offers a critical analysis of these debates and emerging discourses on integration and challenges the assumptions underlying the new ‘language testing regimes’.

When the SARS virus began its spread from southern China around the world in spring 2003, it caught regional and international health officials by surprise. The SARS epidemic itself lasted for only a few months, whereas its treatment, in communicative terms, keeps providing us with important lessons that can prepare us all for the much larger pandemic that many are predicting will eventually occur. While the medical aspects of SARS are now relatively well understood, the discursive rhetorical dimensions are much less so.

As an international epidemic, SARS arrived in a number of distinctive societies with the result that different communities handled the crisis in different ways, some far more effectively than others. Accordingly, the 12 chapters in The Social Construction of SARS are studies of how a major health-related crisis was understood and dealt with from a communicative perspective in such diverse places as Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and the United States during the SARS outbreak.

This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants, we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice, the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered, how it is remembered, and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts, historians, sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent is a detailed investigation of proofs of criminal intent in Israeli courtrooms. The book analyses linguistic, pragmatic, interpretative and argumentative strategies used by Israeli lawyers and judges in order to examine the defendant’s intention. There can be no doubt that this subject is worthy of a thorough investigation. A person’s intention is a psychological phenomenon and therefore, unless the defendant chooses to confess his intent, it cannot be proven directly – either by evidence or by witnesses’ testimonies. The defendant’s intention must be inferred usually from the overall circumstances of the case; verbal and situational contexts, cultural and ideological assumptions and implicatures should be taken into account. The linguistic analysis of these inferences presented here is necessarily comprehensive: it requires consideration of a variety of theoretical frameworks including speech act theory, discourse analysis, argumentation theory, polyphony theory and text linguistics.

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude, investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is, in fact, culturally relative, compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover, event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and, as the basis for technological mega-projects, has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore, the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21^st century, ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises. The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor’s reductionist tendencies.

The Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) is still in its infancy as a sub-discipline in the macrosociolinguistic tradition. It is therefore no coincidence that the editorial collaboration to produce its first definitive text Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion has involved Joshua A. Fishman, often cited in the literature as one of the founders of the Sociology of Language. Tope Omoniyi brings to the collaboration an insightful and incisive critical eye for engaging with diversity in the treatment of language and religion. Together as editors they have successfully midwived the birth of SLR. The studies and debates contained in this volume revisit those themes that both of the contributory disciplines of Sociology of Language and Religion have common interest in. The contributing authors explore new methodologies and paradigms of analysis that they deem appropriate for this interesting and complex interface in an attempt to demonstrate how the shared interests of these disciplines impact social practices in various communities around the world. The ultimate objective of the discussions is to fashion tools for creating a body of new knowledge that supports the emergence of a better society. Towards this end, the authors have harnessed resources from varied geographical, cultural, linguistic and religious constituencies without compromising analytical depth. In the process, they have opened up new areas of sociolinguistic inquiry. The volume is thus presented as a highly useful reference resource both for undergraduate and postgraduate scholarship.

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

This book is a collection of 12 papers dealing with manipulation and ideology in the 20th century, mostly with reference to political speeches by the leaders of major totalitarian regimes, but also addressing propaganda within contemporary right-wing populism and western ideological rhetoric. This book aims at bringing together researchers in the field of ideology reproduction in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms of speaker-favourable belief inculcation through language use. The book covers a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from psychosocial approaches and discourse analysis to semantics and cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The book’s central concern is to provide not only a reference work with up-to-date information on the analysis of manipulation in discourse but also a number of tools for the scholar, some of them being developed within theories originally not designed to address belief-change through language interpretation. Foreword by Frans van Eemeren.