Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 19, Issue 6, 2020

Abstract

This paper contextualizes Donald Trump’s political “Message” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) within the current anti-intellectualism phenomenon in the Post-Truth era. Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech marks the beginning of the Trump era, as it introduces critical traits of his persona, message and political agenda to the general audience. From a Discourse Analysis approach, this paper considers Aristotelian modes of persuasion and the multimodal concept of “Message” (ibid.), to contribute to the literature on Trump’s political communication by focusing on the cult of personality and self-representation (i.e. non-politician, overachieving businessman, great leader). Trump built his candidacy and presidency around his persona, distancing himself from the Republican Party and traditional politicians. These strategies allowed Trump to evoke an Ethos capable of saving America. His personal fight against every enemy and threat encapsulates a simple and ingenuous dichotomy “I vs. them” with the populist intention of completing a hyperbolic task: Make America great again.

Abstract

Overt constructions of discrimination in political discourse towards immigrants are easy to detect and have been traditionally associated with far-right parties. However, mainstream political discourse on immigration delivered by so-called center or center-left parties has transformed into more subtle forms of discursive discrimination, which might not be obvious and need a closer analysis in order to be spotted in discourse. Overt discriminatory discourse has been studied by disciplines, such as political sociology, social psychology and Critical Discourse Studies, but subtle discriminatory constructions have been rather neglected. By combining these three disciplines, we propose here a multidisciplinary and multitheorical framework to systematically analyze subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. It aims at contributing to the development of a methodology for a socio-political analysis that allows to detect subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. Such framework is composed by four strategies with different degrees of subtleness: highlighting, diminishing, homogenizing and normalizing.

Abstract

Language planning is influenced by ideological stances, and exports those ideologies through the policy making process. Residing beneath policy documents lies a language policy of the texts themselves, policing their structure and linguistic forms by which ideologies are managed. Thus, a careful collection of such documents should offer rich grounds for analysis, to leverage claims of ideology against empirically founded patterns, and offer rigorous comparison across actors, genres, and policy areas.

We conducted a corpus-driven exploration of all bills from Congressional sessions 113 to 115 (33,968 documents, 85,612,752 words), and describe the collocational character of U.S. language policy, the semantic preferences of those collocations, and discuss the exposed ideological structure of these bills. By utilizing such a large corpus, this study responds to two issues in corpus-aided language policy analysis: (1) a paucity of very large corpora analyses; (2) further utilizes corpus-driven methods to naively investigate ideologies in status planning.

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the symbolic meanings of metaphors and their potential social effects. Specifically, it examines the case of the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox “Ḥardakim” poster campaign distributed throughout Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel in 2013. Following social group theory, the paper interprets the symbolic meanings of the main metaphors in the campaign in order to reconstruct the lifeworld of this religious group. On that basis, it offers a discussion of how metaphors were strategically utilized in order to draw social boundaries, uphold social norms and sanction group members who deviate from those. The paper’s empirical contribution is a case study of how symbolic meanings of metaphors as a part of propagandistic discourse targets and exploits social identities in order to mobilize collective emotions thereby provoking certain actions. It contributes theoretically by arguing that deeming norm-deviant group members internal threats is an efficient propaganda tool for maintaining intragroup behavioral codes.

This article reviews Discourses of Disorder: Riots, Strikes and Protests in the Media97814744 35413£85

This article reviews Une formule dans la guerre des mots : « La délégitimation d’Israël »978-2-406-07815-9

This article reviews When Words Trump Politics. Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language9781503610798

This article reviews Discourse and Political Culture. The Language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

This article reviews Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics978-1-107-11698-6