Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2018

This article analyses the rhetoric of speeches delivered by British politicians at televised national HMD commemorations. Following the recommendation of the Stockholm International Forum, since 2001, Britain has commemorated victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides every 27 January. The television broadcasts of the national commemoration both reflect and illuminate the complex processes of (national) histories, individual memory and collective remembrance, and the ways that they mediate and interact with each other in social and historic contexts. In addition to other genres (e.g. music, poetry readings, archival film), a speech is delivered by a prominent politician at each of these ceremonies. I argue that these speeches are examples of epideictic oratory, which provide politicians with the opportunity to communicate an understanding of the Holocaust as a catastrophe and a great affront to Our values. My rhetorical analysis focuses on the ways that politicians utilize two artistic means of persuasion: ethetic strategies, which place emphasis on their personal character; and logetic strategies, which aim to persuade through invoking arguments. I orientate to the ways that poorly selected ethetic and logetic strategies can disrupt the primary purpose of the epideictic speech: to communicate, and revivify, shared values.

This article examines reactions to the changing linguistic ecology in the U.S. state of Iowa, which is experiencing a demographic phenomenon often referred to as the New Latino Diaspora (NLD) ( Hamann et al., 2002 ). We first examine the historical processes and social structures that link current language policy initiatives within Iowa to local and national nativism. We then analyze public policies and texts to reveal how language ideologies circulate across diverse texts and contexts, forming discourses that shape the experiences of Latin@s in Iowa.

Political discourse becomes more and more ‘mediatized’ nowadays but, as I argue in this article, mediatization should be considered neither as a testament to ‘de-ideologization’ nor as a restyling of the ‘inherently ideological’ contemporary political communication. Ideology, I claim, is a potentiality of mediatized political discourse and as such, it rests with the generic capacity of the latter to recontextualize symbolisms from the institutional past serving the ordering of the institutional present. How is the recontextualization of symbolic meanings facilitated by the aesthetic and affective qualities of different media genres? In what ways does recontextualized discourse serve the neoliberal order of the present? Lying at the heart of the ideological analysis of political communication, these are questions which can be insightfully addressed through a discourse analytics of mediatization as the one I apply here on two political advertisements from the Greek general election of January 2015.

The new dialogic, conversational nature of television broadcast news ( Hamo, 2009 ) poses a challenge to traditional commentators, who are forced to move from an authoritative monologue to a confrontational dialogue that requires additional flexibility and conversational skills. The paper focuses on an Israeli case study which presents a confrontational dialogue in which one of the discussants is an experienced military correspondent and commentator. We demonstrate the various resources he uses in order to cope with a complex discursive challenge by using multimodal tools, both verbal and visual ( Kress 2010 ; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001 ; Jewitt and Oyama 2001 ).

Besides interrupting his interlocutor’s eloquent discourse in any possible way, demonstrating his well-known direct and involved television persona, the military correspondent employs institutional discursive resources such as using authoritative voice and taking the role of the mediator. Concession structures ( Anscombre 1985 ) reflect his inner moral conflict toward the issue ( Livnat 2012 ).

This article analyses antisemitic elements in the Austrian print media discourse about the 2008–2010 economic crisis. The relevant discursive statements are examined in the light of a theoretical understanding of antisemitic discursive threads as found in the prevalent modes of presentation of the economic and financial crisis in the media. The first main finding is the broad avoidance of openly antisemitic stereotypes, with the exception of the Neue Kronen Zeitung. The second main finding is that structurally antisemitic discursive elements appear above all where (a) specific groups (“high finance”, “financial sharks”, “speculators”) are singled out as the main culprits, (b) these are opposed to a homogeneously constructed “us” (the “Volk”), and (c) where the formers’ greed is stressed and where they are accused of harming the people. Here we find nationalistic and latent antisemitic discourses, the stereotypical contrasting of finance and production, conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism closely interwoven.