Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 14, Issue 4, 2015

“Illegal immigration” occurs at a quite small scale in the Irish context, especially when compared to other European countries. Nevertheless, there is a significant level of discussion about “illegal immigration” in the Irish Parliament. Through the conceptual frameworks of Foucauldian thought and Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper undertakes a Topoi Analysis to examine discursive representations from the Irish Parliament (2002–2009). It concentrates upon the most common argumentation forwarded by parliamentarians – the need to control “illegal immigration” in Ireland. This argumentation is expressed through various discourses. Notably, these discourses are juxtaposed with positive representations of the “undocumented Irish” in the U.S. Overall, it is argued that negative control discourses about “illegal immigrants” in Ireland provide a number of functions: (i) the legitimization and continuation of the nation-state rationale of governance, (ii) the provision of a forum for implicit expressions of racism, and (iii) the acceptance of “justified” practices of exclusion of unwanted non-EU migrants.

This article investigates the self-presentation and the construction of immigration discourses in articles and policy documents published by the British National Party (BNP) and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). By combining corpus analysis with the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, a picture emerges of two parties whose use of language is governed by the same principle of differentiation. Fundamental to the BNP’s and UKIP’s language is the dichotomy in-group/out-group. The in-group analysis investigates the parties’ choice of form of self-representation, claims to unique competence, denial of attributes and mutual perception. The out-group analysis shows how the parties construct immigration, and focuses on the aspects of legal status, quantification and origin. The analyses suggest considerable lexical and conceptual similarities in both in-group and out-group formation.

This paper examines the changes in political language that occurred after 1989 in Italy and focuses on textual documents drafted by intra-party subgroups between 1946 and 2010 that were related to the internal debates of Italian political parties. These documents, which are addressed to party members and activists rather than the wider public, have been analyzed through quantitative text analysis of word frequencies. The results confirm that a few relevant changes occurred that involve the lexicon, tone, and content of messages. However, concepts such as left and right are still relevant, and we observed neither a strong decline in the use of ideological terms nor a wider usage of populist words. Despite the growing personalization of politics, the main political leaders are not frequently mentioned, with two exceptions: Prodi and Berlusconi. Overall, there is a distance between intra-party politics and the logic of entertainment.

After the war in ex-Yugoslavia subsided in the mid-90s, another war – this time a virtual one – broke out: the war of Balkan apologies. It refers to a decade-long series of apologies for participation in the conflict and the crimes committed during the war, as well as demanding the other parties to counter-apologise. The paper analyses all 19 apologies delivered by the top-ranking statesmen for their country’s/nation’s role in the conflict, which were delivered between 2000 and 2010. Their content is critically examined and wider social and political context is taken into account. The analysis points to the strengths and weaknesses of the apologies issued and dwells on their functions and the factors that have shaped them. The conclusion is that although the apologies are lacking in a number of ways, both contents-wise and regarding the manner they were delivered in, they might have been beneficial and could have had a role in reconciliating the ghosts of the past, present and future.

This article analyzes the way in which migration control laws are metaphorically conceptualized in the voices of individuals who demonstrate emotional solidarity with irregular immigrants. The metaphors studied are shown to constitute a coherent conceptual corpus that reveals their users’ ideology. These metaphors present a cultural narrative that affects the moral consideration of the characters involved in the story. They also reflect the perception of those who feel oppressed by the dominant social group and therefore, they are narratives of oppression, in juxtaposition to the narratives of hegemony that can be identified in the metaphors used in hostile political speeches against this social group.

The article analyzes the role of economists in public discourse with regard to the financial crisis. Specifically, it focuses on the prevailing rhetorical strategies and the economic convictions of leading German-speaking economists as they appear in seven leading newspapers and magazines in the German-speaking area. Special attention is given to the prevailing rationales and explanations for the financial crisis as well as on the metaphors used for describing specific economic events in particular and the market economy in general. The results of this article show that while the financial crisis could have offered a possibility for a paradigm shift in economic thinking, there is not much evidence for such a shift among German-speaking economists. The observed stability of the dominant paradigm is attributed primarily to the very stable role of certain basic economic convictions, which are exposed through the use of specific metaphors as well as a characterization of the financial crisis as a series of extraordinary and exogenously given events. (e.g. “a tsunami” or “earthquake”)