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- Volume 14, Issue, 2015
Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2015
Volume 14, Issue 2, 2015
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Revisiting the apology as a speech act: The case of parliamentary apologies
Author(s): James Murphypp.: 175–204 (30)More LessBy looking at both apologies made in everyday conversation and those made by politicians in public, I aim in this paper to provide a full set of felicity conditions for the speech act of apology. I also discuss how refinements to previously proposed categories of apology strategies are needed to accurately describe how (British) politicians apologise. I endeavour to show that with these refinements, the speech act approach to apologies is applicable to those of a political nature, as well as those in everyday conversation. Using these developments I analyse how Members of the U.K. Parliament apologise for a variety of offences. This analysis shows that MPs make more fulsome apologies than the apologies found in everyday conversation. The type of offence has an effect on how an MP apologises, with apologies for financial irregularities being the more detailed and making use of more conventional strategies than other apologies.
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Aligning language to ideology: A socio-semantic analysis of communist and democratic mass media language in Bulgaria
Author(s): Anastasia Smirnovapp.: 205–232 (28)More LessThis paper compares and analyzes mass media language in Bulgaria before and after the breakdown of the communist regime with the goal to reveal the effect of political setting, communist vs. democratic, on the form of public discourse in the media. The comparison reveals statistically significant differences in the types of grammatical constructions used in the communist and democratic media (active vs. passive), as well as differences in grammatical properties of nouns (animacy, concreteness, and properness) and verbs (tense and evidentiality). I propose that the observed differences are best explained within a sociocognitive model of context proposed by van Dijk (2008). From this perspective, linguistic characteristics of the democratic and communist discourse examined in the paper reflect speakers’ shared beliefs about the system of social meanings and fundamental principles of their respective societies, such as humanism vs. institutionalism, individualism vs. collectivism, and the differences in the perception of time.
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‘Saying sorry’ in Turkey: The Dersim massacre of the 1930s in 2011
Author(s): Ibrahim Efe and Bernhard Forchtnerpp.: 233–257 (25)More LessDominant self-complacent national narratives (not only) in Turkey have long silenced past wrongdoings. Among these, the massacre of thousands of Kurds in Dersim during the 1930s, being part of the wider suppression of the Kurdish minority until the present day, is a particularly significant example. However, against the background of an almost global emphasis on recognising past crimes, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, offered an apology on 23 November 2011. Erdoğan’s unexpected move has been both viewed as an opportunity for a more inclusive understanding of Turkish citizenship, as well as criticised for being a calculated manoeuvre in order to sideline political opponents. In this article, we investigate both this performance and its public reception. Drawing on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, we ultimately illustrate how Erdoğan instrumentalised an ‘apology’ for political gain.
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Deliberations in the Turkish parliament: The external perceptions of European foreign policy
Author(s): Meltem Müftüler-Baç and Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürümpp.: 258–284 (27)More LessParliamentarians find themselves engaged in political struggle through the medium of language and constrained by their own rhetoric. These parliamentary debates reveal political perceptions. The external perceptions about the European Union emerge as a relatively understudied topic in political science. This brings forth the following question; how is the European Union and its foreign policy perceived externally? This paper focuses on one particular country, Turkey and the political deliberations within the Turkish Parliament, in order to assess the external perceptions of the EU. The paper analyzes the political debate in Turkey through an investigation of the proceedings of the Turkish Parliament, the legislature in Turkish politics, from 1998 to 2012. The proceedings in the Turkish Parliament enable us to analyze the different political camps’ positions by looking into their deliberations on the European foreign policy thoroughly. This analysis enables us to uncover the Turkish view on the European foreign policy.
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The shifting representation of common people in China’s news media
Author(s): Wei Zhangpp.: 285–308 (24)More LessThis paper examines the meanings associated with the high-frequency social address term baixing (‘common people’) in China’s contemporary news media, through the analysis of a sizable corpus of data from China’s online news portals, together with the results of qualitative research derived from participation in an online discussion forum. The findings of this project indicate that the term baixing is closely associated with discourses of insignificance, obedience, and powerlessness. This study sets out to make a contribution to current research on Chinese address terms through the use of a corpus-based methodology, by expanding the site of investigation beyond face-to-face encounters to a wider media public, and thereby to provide insights into the discourses of citizen identity in contemporary China.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 24 (2025)
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Volume 23 (2024)
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Volume 22 (2023)
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Volume 21 (2022)
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Volume 20 (2021)
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Volume 19 (2020)
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Volume 18 (2019)
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Volume 17 (2018)
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Volume (2018)
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Volume 16 (2017)
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Volume 15 (2016)
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Volume 14 (2015)
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Volume 13 (2014)
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Volume 12 (2013)
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Volume 11 (2012)
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Volume 10 (2011)
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Volume 9 (2010)
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Volume 8 (2009)
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Volume 7 (2008)
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Volume 6 (2007)
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Volume 5 (2006)
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Volume 4 (2005)
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Volume 3 (2004)
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Volume 2 (2003)
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Volume 1 (2002)
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