Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2005

This article explores the role of language used by the Australian prime minister and other politicians in swaying Australian public opinion against ‘boat people’, focusing especially on particular lexical items. The article contextualizes the representation and treatment of asylum seekers and the language used to do this, both generally in the contemporary period and in the history of Australia as a British outpost in the Pacific. It relates this to other issues expressed linguistically concerning national identity.

A corpus-based analysis of discourses of refugees and asylum seekers was carried out on data taken from a range of British newspapers and texts from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website, both published in 2003. Concordances of the terms refugee(s) and asylum seeker(s) were examined and grouped along patterns which revealed linguistic traces of discourses. Discourses which framed refugees as packages, invaders, pests or water were found in newspaper texts, although there were also cases of negative discourses found in the UNHCR texts, revealing how difficult it is to disregard dominant discourses. Lexical choice was found to be an essential aspect of maintaining discourses of asylum seekers — collocational analyses of terms like failed vs. rejected revealed the underlying attitudes of the writers towards the subject.

In this article, we analyze the newspaper coverage of the concluding session of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) which took place in Brussels on the 12th and 13th December 2003 and which was the first attempt to reach an agreement on the “Draft Constitutional Treaty” proposed by the European Convention. Placing it in the larger context of EU ‘constitutional’ reform, the media pictured the Brussels Summit and its eventual failure as an event of high symbolic relevance. In a qualitative in-depth discourse analysis, we comparatively investigate how the Summit was represented in 15 newspapers from eight EU countries. Using analytical categories from various key theoretical approaches of Discourse Analysis, the data are analyzed according to three interrelated sets of questions: (1) Which actors are selected in the press coverage, how are they labeled, and what are their main activities? (2) What metaphors, images and topoi are applied for representing and explaining the European Union as a unique political space? (3) How is the Brussels Summit placed in the political and historical context of European integration, who is blamed for its failure and why, and what scenarios for the future are discussed or proposed? Results are presented on two dimensions: firstly, in a case study approach, it is shown how press coverage in each country differs on the level of semantics, thematic structures, and structures of relevance and argumentation. Secondly, a systematic cross-section analysis is carried out and the repertoire of the fundamental representations of EU-rope used in the press is reconstructed.

In addition to the socialist discourse on popular education, theoretical contributions of Austro-Marxist intellectuals such as Karl Renner, Otto Bauer and Otto Neurath on multiculturalism represent an important intellectual source of leftist culturalism. Considering actual debates, the Austro-Marxist approach on nation and culture moved between the politics of recognition and the politics of difference. Their concept combined both the recognition of (a positively evaluated) difference between national cultures and the demand for political unification transcending the nation state. Beyond their contemporary context, the Austro-Marxist concept gains in importance even for today by formulating a possible combination of political and economic unity on the one hand and cultural difference (and diversity) on the other. In a way, the Austro-Marxist approach represents a political and cultural concept of ‘nations without nationalism’.

This paper explores the discursive relationships of power, ideology, and affect that are instituted — and reproduced, resisted, or modified — in the functional pragmatics of talkback radio. In particular, I develop a critical analysis of the psychodynamics of subjectivity based on a case study of talkback in Northern Ireland in which the main topic of discussion deals with community responses to the Drumcree Protestant church parade. The functional pragmatics approach builds on the contributions of critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis to the study of ideology and affect in discourse in institutions. I develop a wider context for the analysis of discourse in the talkback institution by addressing the meta-linguistic implications of talk about talk through cognitive-developmental paradigms and psychoanalytic social theory. It is anticipated that such a motivated analysis will reveal the emancipatory interests concealed within ideologically bound — while not necessarily moribund — institutional frameworks of communicative action.

The plantation system that gave rise to many existing creoles can be said to be the prototype upon which the current wave of corporate globalization has been modeled (Linebaugh 1992). The daily wages received by the majority of workers worldwide at the beginning of the 21st century are not even equal to half the value of the daily food rations received by plantation slaves at the beginning of the 19th in the Greater Caribbean or at the beginning of the 20th in the South Pacific (World Bank 2000; Farnsworth 1999 and Queensland 1892). Structural adjustment policies are restricting the spread of English to the few who reap some reward from corporate globalization. In contrast, the overwhelming majority are by necessity learning and reshaping existing regional koines, pidgins, and creoles, through processes of adaptation, creativity and resistance (Rickford 1983). Far from being a threat to creoles, corporate globalization is bringing about an increase in the number of speakers of these languages, which dwarfs the much proclaimed growth of English worldwide.