Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2014

The ideological (re)construction of the position of Swedish in Finland is examined as it took shape during a major year-long debate about the role of Swedish in Finnish education. Data were collected through archival research of the leading national newspapers in the two official languages of Finland: Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish) and Hufvudstadsbladet (Swedish). Circulating and intersecting discourses in newspaper texts are traced in order to examine how these discourses facilitate the negotiation of tensions about the status of Swedish in Finland. Analysis demonstrates how ideological space was opened for destabilizing dominant perspectives about the relative value of languages in Finland. Moreover, it is shown that (re)interpretations of the discourse of ‘Swedish as mandatory’ in education became a fulcrum for leveraging a wider debate about the ‘Finland as bilingual nation’ discourse, which has long been part of the national consciousness.

Similar to many modern languages Bosnian continues to borrow lexical material from English. Although this is by no means a new trend, the linguo-political situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina has dramatically changed in the past twenty years and with it the dynamics and patterns of lexical borrowing. Based on a special synchronic corpus compiled from opinion pieces and editorials from the contemporary Bosnian press, this study analyzes the collocational patterns of the most frequently occurring English loanwords and compares them to their original collocational patterns extracted from a comparable English-language corpus. The findings confirm a divergence in collocational patterning between the donor and borrowing languages (Kurtböke & Potter 2000), but also suggest the existence of a “washback” effect whereby some of the new collocational patterns from the borrowing language enter the donor language through media discourse. The new collocational patterns are shown to derive from the postwar constitutional arrangement in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This work uses data from two Spanish language newspapers: Granma from Cuba and El Nuevo Herald from Miami to analyze pragmatic and social factors that underlie the use of reported speech in news texts. This study examines pragmatic and social constraints on journalists’ choice of reporting speech structures. Journalists use direct speech to provide a literal quotation of another’s voice, whereas indirect speech is presents the journalists’ own rendition of the quoted words. The qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that Granma and El Nuevo Herald exhibit different patterns of use of direct and indirect speech, which are motivated by the two newspapers’ ideological perspectives and the level of political and social power of the news actors.

This study evaluates a computerized text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), by investigating the relationship between the discourse and personalities of presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2008 presidential election in the United States. Analyses of speech samples (N = 141) from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, and Sarah Palin were conducted using LIWC. The results show that in the context of political speech events, such as media interviews, political candidates make unique linguistic choices, which may be interpreted as displaying distinct personality traits. Yet, despite the statistical significance of the results, there are salient limitations of utilizing computerized methodologies to analyze political speech events, such as the limited interpretative capacity of the software to understand pragmatic and contextual language use.

This article explores how specific narratives of the past can be functionalized/ instrumentalized as discursive strategies in order to gain political power. To investigate this issue, four relevant governmental and non-governmental texts about the main opposition party in Turkey are analysed. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), which played a historic role by becoming a state party between 1923 and 1946, and which later adopted a social democratic position in the political system, has frequently been criticized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its historical identity. The article illuminates how discursive strategies of argumentation, nomination and predication are used to portray the CHP as an enduring bureaucratic-militarist state party and the ways in which these strategies are functionalized by AKP politicians as well as by public intellectuals in favour of the government.

This paper attempts to bridge translation studies on metaphor with perspectives from cognitive and critical discourse studies. It provides a new contribution to the study of the interplay between language and politics by investigating the ideological motivations behind choices made by Arab journalists/translators in translating metaphors in reports of world events, in the Middle East in particular. The analytic approach adopted for the purpose of this study draws inspiration from cognitive linguistics, critical discourse studies, and descriptive translation studies. Through a comparative study of a corpus of news representations in Western and Middle Eastern sources, the study scrutinizes the role of metaphor in our perception of reality and interpretation of a news event. Based on an examination of the processing of metaphor in professional translations, the study concludes that metaphors can be classified into two main types in terms of media translation: the cultural type and the ideological type and that each of these is approached differently by translators. The generalized findings concerning these two types of translational patterns are supported by input from Arabic-speaking university-level students of translation studies, in the form of parallel translations by the students and notes on their subsequent classroom discussion.

This paper describes selected outcomes of media monitoring for anti-minority hate speech in the Czech Republic. In keeping with the agenda of critical discourse analysis, we aim to integrate historical, linguistic and cultural specificities with their linguistic manifestations in news articles about minorities, and here we present findings from a long-term study devoted to tracking xenophobia against two of the main minority groups. The AntiMetrics project, of which the work described here is one part, is designed to detect signs of anti-minority rhetoric in a society, with a view to taking steps to prevent such indicators from developing into more embedded prejudice and ultimately inter-group violence. The paper aims to provide a snapshot of what is a broad, long-term interdisciplinary project. Using a critical discourse toolkit, we analyse a sample news story about the Roma community, and identify a number of discursive and linguistic features that indicate the entrenchment of “new racism” in media at some levels. The toolkit also seeks to go beyond lexical signs to identify more implicit rhetorical devices, such as framing and (de-)contextualization of news events, and to quantify lack of balance in the selection of witnesses and other primary definers. Our ongoing content survey indicates the embedding of linguistic patterns that raise concern about leakage of far right discourse via media into everyday communication.

The article explores the so far largely ignored question of the political relations between the European Union and the Roman Catholic Church. It analyzes the deeper mutual ideational influences of the two entities, asking whether there has been a convergence of views about several basic political notions between the Church and the EU. The analysis centres on the Church’s approach to four fundamental notions related to the EU – (1) secularism, (2) the individual(ism), (3) free market, and (4) the state, stressing in particular the discursive strategies the Church employs to defend its own position. The conclusion focuses on the relation between the RCC’s “theopolitical” imagination and the EU’s political form and argues that the surprisingly strong support of the Church for the integration process is not only a result of the aggiornamento, but a peculiar example of the Church’s ongoing Europeanization. Methodologically, the paper builds on a discourse analysis of almost 160 documents released by the three key Church bodies which often comment on the EU: the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, and the Curia.