Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2004

Art is a public affair because its meaning is always collectively negotiated. Thus, public conflicts that are triggered by works of art are essentially political and inevitable. The analysis of these conflicts points to the effective limits of acceptability of art in a given social constellation. The following paper investigates two types of art conflicts: (1) conflicts that, at first glance, revolve around the interpretation and the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork; and (2) conflicts that explicitly call into question the legal legitimacy of publication of an artwork. This investigation aims to reveal the variety of contents and conditions which pre-structure public conflicts. Further, it opens a normative discussion of the current forms of dealing with such conflicts in the mass media and in the jurisdiction. Such a critical discussion is necessary, since the political quality of a society can be assessed on how it relates to its own conflicting nature.

Lakoff (1996) analyzes American political positions in terms of two different sets of conceptual metaphors: the right wing ‘Strict Father’ (SF) model and the left wing ‘Nurturant Parent’ (NP) model. The current study is an empirical test of the degree to which these models were manifested in the televised debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore before the 2000 US presidential elections. While the results show little metaphorical language which would directly support the proposed models, many expressions were found which follow from the models as logical entailments. An analysis of both speakers’ metaphoric gestures shows Bush expressing the SF model largely regardless of his use of SF or NP language, and Gore using gesture more for discourse structuring purposes. This study suggests that differences in the nature of the metaphors themselves in the two models help make the SF model easier to present as a coherent framework than the NP model.

This research project examined the metaphors of Globalization and trade in the context of current asymmetries prevailing between high- and low-income countries. As a theoretical underpinning we used historical discourse analysis which views language as a social activity through which humans conceive and understand the reality they live in. Metaphors in particular provide speakers with an inventory of comparisons and pictures. Metaphors offer the discourse its down-to-earth shading and help in this way to secure one specific perspective on reality. How this is being done in the WTO system is demonstrated in the empirical part of the article. Metaphors on Globalization and trade were extracted from face-to-face interviews with WTO staff and trade diplomats of low-income African countries. These metaphors were analyzed with respect to their force in making trade ‘speakable’, and by doing so providing the one particular view on Globalization that hardly leaves any space for alternative considerations.

This article explores the political use of discourses of nation by analysing the use of location formulation across a selection of Scottish newspapers. The article looks at a sample of the election coverage of six Scottish titles and conducts a corpus analysis to set out the patterns in their use of named locales. It argues that references to nation both come in a variety of forms and are driven by the constitutional disputes around the position of Scotland relative to the United Kingdom. In particular, the article finds that the newspapers engage in different rhetorical strategies that emphasise the Scottish dimension of the election, its British dimension, or a negotiated position between the two. The article therefore seeks to highlight the discursive role that the lexical expression of nation and nationhood might have in the articulation between nation and politics, and suggests that in the Scottish case the formulation of nation is employed in the reproduction of competing, constitutionally based political discourses.

This paper focuses on the discursive strategies used by the Singapore government to construct national identity and solidarity on the basis of a ‘clean and green’ environment. By analysing the slogans used in the Clean and Green Week campaign in terms of the use of pronouns and the pragmatic notion of ‘politeness’, the paper shows that the people of Singapore are not only persuaded to ‘buy’ the idea of environmentalism, but also to buy into the ideology of national identity and unity being derived (in part) from the proper management and conservation of Singapore’s scarce resources and limited physical space. The paper concludes with a discussion on how national campaigns such as the Clean and Green Week constitutes a form of political discourse, where public educational discourse becomes a veiled medium through which socio-political ideologies are produced and propagated. With the government treading the fine line between information and manipulation where ‘greening’ a country becomes a scaffolding for building a nation, a study like this offers interesting insights into the interplay between the language of politics and the politics of language.

This article builds on research on institutional language policies and practices, and on studies of the legitimization of racial categories in census data collection, in an exploration of language ideologies in the US Census. It traces the changes in language-related questions in the two centuries of decennial surveys, contextualizing them within a discussion of changing policies and patterns of immigration and nativism, as well as evolving hegemonic notions of race. It is argued that the US Census has historically used language as an index of race and as a means to racialize speakers of languages other than English, constructing them as essentially different and threatening to US cultural and national identity.