Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2006

This article is in the first place about the syntactic variants allowing for the elimination of those complements which do appear in active as opposed to passive, in causative as opposed to recessive and in personal as opposed to impersonal constructions in Italian (and other Romance languages). In the second place we will have a close look at why and when these variants seem to be preferably used in political speeches. On many occasions the political orator obviously opts not to state explicitly who the agent responsible for an action is and therefore linguistically resorts to a passive, a recessive or an impersonal construction. Our theses will be supported by excerpts from speeches by Mussolini, delivered between 1938 and 1944. Mussolini’s personality must have been an extremely complex and contradictory one. It is, among other things, these diathetical variants allowing for the elimination of complements which made it possible for him to conceal from his audiences how far he was away from his original socialist ideals once he was in power.

In this essay, I analyze the changes that were brought to the handwritten draft of the first political address that Ben Ali, the current president of Tunisia (then the newly appointed Prime Minister), delivered on November 7, 1987 across the airwaves, to announce the deposition of President Bourguiba (1956–1987), and to proclaim himself the successor of the deposed ‘old’ and ‘sick’ president. Through the description and linguistic analysis of some excerpts, I demonstrate how the linguistic changes capture the processes whereby the new ‘presidential’ voice and discursive authority are being crafted in front of our eyes and how the speaker is being initiated, linguistically and pragmatically, into how and when to appropriate “the colloquy of other voices” (Farmer 1995: 318), their discourses and words, and how and when to subtly speak their own voice and words while respecting the pragmatics of appropriateness and appropriation, i.e. norms of what can be said, what cannot be stated or acknowledged, and what can be appropriated and how and when it can be appropriated in order to find a balance between competing voices (Bakhtin 1986), words, and linguistic habituses (Bourdieu 1991). By the same token, the analysis explores the intricate interweaving of text and discourse regulation, valuation of forms of speaking and styles of speaking, and political ideology. The analysis of the linguistic changes offers fertile ground to conceptualize ways to bridge the gap between the micro-analysis of linguistic patterns and the macro-processes of social and political factors, knowing that “much of the meaning and hence communicative value that linguistic forms have for their speakers lies in the ‘indexical’ connections between the linguistic signs and the contextual factors of their use” (Kroskrity 2000:7).

Following the discourse-historical approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak, de Cilia, Reisigl and Liebhart 1999; Wodak 2001), we analyze the inaugural speech of the actual president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, which he delivered on August 7th, 2002 in Bogotá. We take this speech as an illustration for the construction of national identity by the Colombian elites. In our analysis, we are particularly interested in Uribe’s strategy of referring to the European heritage and in his ways of appeasing the cultural and ethnic differences of the population.

The EU and the OIF have both developed to become international organisations that combine economic, geopolitical and cultural-linguistic policies. This article deals with the fascinating interface of such policies. The main focus resides on the discourse by which both organisations construct their linguistic and cultural diversity concept and on how they deal with language rights. The role of other divides in the debate on linguistic and cultural diversity in international cooperation is investigated. Furthermore, the analysis includes future scenarios and integrates the frequently used arguments in on-going Belgian public debates on French as an international language and in European debates on French as the legal language for the EU.

This paper is an attempt to testify with Chinese historical data that the cultural status of a language (or dialect) directly affects the translation flow, legal power of parallel texts, orientations of translators, selection of a TL temporal dialect, etc. It has been discovered that when the actual power of a language and its acknowledgement by translators contradict, the cultural positioning of translators seems more decisive. A distinction must be made between translators as a cultural collectivity and as individuals. Ideology may also interfere with language selection in translation. TL choice is often influenced by the power of a temporal dialect and its users. Varying with the context, translation for the elites may involve selection of the classical dialect or highly literal and modernizing forms. A language becomes dominant when it is considered the vehicle for advanced technology and thought. Its interaction to translation is hence dynamic.

The nineteenth and most of the twentieth century of Europe were dominated by the perspective of the nation-states. At the core of the European nation building was the social question. The (West) European unification project after 1950 was a rescue operation of the Western national welfare states under the conditions of the Cold War. The European rescue operation dealt with the maintenance of the welfare states. These attempts became problematic in the 1970s when the international order established after 1945 collapsed. EEC tried to respond to the experiences of crisis by a transfer of the social commitments to the Community level. The conceptualisation of such a transfer failed, however. The article analyses the failure of three subsequent key concepts in the European unification project: integration, identity and constitution. The analysis emphasises the connection between politics and language

One of the main functions of discourses is to impute significance to, or interpret the significance of, things. Claims about significance are not merely expressive or evaluative but informative or descriptive, often referring to matters bearing on well-being or flourishing. It is argued that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can hardly be critical unless it acknowledges and evaluates how discourses impute and interpret significance or import and how this relates to well-being. Critical thought in contemporary social science is undermined by dualisms such as fact/value, reason/emotion, and positive/normative, which tend to position critique as ‘merely subjective’ and beyond the scope of reason or science. Although, like any critical social science, CDA uses terms like ‘oppression’, ‘racism’, ‘abuse’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘suffering’, these cannot be reduced wholly to either positive or normative matters. The paper shows how significance can be understood by challenging these dualisms.