Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2012

This study examines how the pre-war debate of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq was discursively constructed in pro- and anti-war newspaper op/ed argumentation. Drawing on insights from argumentation theory, and using these within a framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, we explore fallacious arguments within the ‘justification discourse’ used in the pro-war opinion/editorials (op/eds). We argue that the type of arguments marshalled by the pro-war op/ed commentators uncritically bolstered the set of U.S. official ‘truth claims’ and ‘presuppositions’. Conversely, anti-war op/ed debaters dismissed the Bush administration’s ‘neo-imperialistic’ reasoning and called into question the logic of militarist ‘humanitarianism’ by arguing that brute force and daylight ‘plunder,’ found in the language of a ‘noble ideal,’ were part of a long Western colonialist tradition that glorified the West as the ‘civiliser’ of distant cultural others.

At the core of critical discourse analysis lies its emancipatory agenda: arguing for social equality and against discrimination. In the case of the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this stance has been theoretically justified mainly through references to Habermas’ language-philosophy. At the same time, the analysis of actually occurring argumentative speech requires more than a theoretical underpinning of one’s critique and, here, DHA has benefitted from drawing on van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectical argumentation theory. However, Pragma-Dialectics is not just a tool kit but rests on Popper and Albert’s critical rationalism. This results in both epistemological as well as normative conflicts at the paradigm-core of DHA between critical rationalism and Habermas’ critical theory regarding the concept of critique. In this article, we review the different epistemological and normative underpinnings of DHA and Pragma-Dialectics and discuss the consequences of implementing the latter in the former. We conclude by arguing for a coherent orientation towards Habermas’ language-philosophy in order to maintain a high degree of consistency in DHA.

This paper examines the discourses relating to antisemitism in the three leading UK national “quality” newspapers from 1993 to 2009. To this end, three corpora were compiled, each consisting of the complete set of instances in context in these papers where antisemitism is mentioned, the first from 1993 the others from 2005 and 2009. Considerable changes were noted between the discourses in the earlier corpus compared to the later ones. In the first, the majority of discourses were either historical and/or literary-artistic (typically discussing whether a particular writer or artist had been antisemitic) or, if they were related to contemporary society, they were discussions of potential or reported antisemitism outside the UK, especially in Eastern Europe. In the later corpora, however, there is much more discussion about a perceived resurgence of antisemitism in the UK and Western Europe. After an overview of these changing patterns, particularly controversial recent cases of alleged antisemitism in British politics are discussed. The methodology of this research combines corpus-analysis techniques with more traditional close textual analysis, characteristic of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS: Stubbs 1996, Partington 2008).

This essay attempts to account for the success of a German novel, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, in English translation by analysing both the effects of translation decisions and the influence of prevailing discourses in the receiving culture. It is shown how particular decisions in relation to content and style result in the downplaying of the political and philosophical aspects of the novel and the foregrounding of relationships between individuals. This, in turn, is seen as further evidence of a tendency in German-English literary translation to understate difference in translation by moulding the text to the norms of the receiving culture.

In the international scholarship, Chinese political communication is usually viewed from a political-economic and West-centric perspective. Consequently, it is portrayed as a product of the Chinese Communist Party(‘s ideology), deviant, totalitarian and unchanging. In this article I first argue for a historical and intercultural approach and so a view of contemporary Chinese political discourse as dynamic, critical-creative and cultural-hegemony-resistant. Then I analyze and assess accordingly the case of the Chinese discourse of human rights. It will be seen that this discourse has been evolving topically, reinforcing socially, and responding interculturally, thereby constituting a historic transformation in China’s human rights situation on the one hand and a counter-veiling force in the unbalanced international communication on human rights on the other. In conclusion I suggest that the mainstream scholarship go beyond the a-historical-and-a-intercultural approach to political communication in general and to that of non-Western societies in particular.

This contribution looks into a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin after the terrorist attack against a high school in the Northern Caucasian town Beslan in September 2004, widely seen as marking the end of the liberal hegemony in the Russia of the post-soviet period. However, a closer look reveals the many possible readings that are made of the speech. According to the reactions found in a corpus of press articles, the speech activates both “internationalist” and “sovereignist” readings in media discourse. By pointing out the polyphonic organization of discourse, I make the case for a productive exchange between the French tradition of discourse analysis, interactionism and critical discourse analysis. In this view, the readers have to deal with the many different voices crisscrossing political discourse. In the light of its polyphonic organization, the meaning of discourse needs to be “fixed” by the participants of political discourse.

Political actors typically use language with the goal of persuading an audience. But what shapes the use of language in political settings? Is it differences between ideologues — liberals and conservatives — that change language use? Or is it support or opposition to the issue? Using techniques adapted from cognitive psychology we examine arguments used in ballot proposition elections and show them to exhibit systematic patterns in line with the theoretical arguments of Riker (1996). The actor’s choice of issue position — for or against — can be seen to imply that the arguments they advance in support of their position are constrained. More specifically, we show that arguments in support of propositions are consistently similar to each other and consistently dissimilar from arguments against a proposal in language use. These patterns of similarity and dissimilarity persist across a wide range of issues and actors. Identification of these patterns helps explain a persistent empirical regularity within ballot proposition politics: the advantage held by “NO” campaigns.