Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2007

This essay explores the composition of United States post-Cold War foreign policy rhetoric under President Bill Clinton. We contend that Bill Clinton offered a coherent and comprehensive foreign policy narrative for the direction of U.S. foreign policy discourse in the post-Cold War world. Specifically, we analyze the “new partnership” narrative that Clinton articulated in his 1998 trip to Africa as a representative anecdote for the larger body of his foreign policy discourse. This “new partnership” narrative was structured by three narrative themes: (1) America’s role as world leader; (2) reconstituting the threat environment; (3) democracy promotion as the strategy for American foreign policy. These three themes can be found throughout Clinton’s foreign policy rhetoric and serve as the basis for a foreign policy narrative used by Clinton, and perhaps, future administrations.

Building on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacque Derrida, the paper examines a statement issued by the Serb Orthodox Church in Kosovo as an example of particular political discourse. The paper draws on the concept of problematization to reveal explicit and implicit aspects of this discourse. Combining the analytical framework used for Critical Discourse Analysis with that designed for analysis of conflict situations, the paper contends that the analyzed discourse contains explicit as well as implicit topics, sometimes complementary and sometimes mutually contradictory. The paper analyzes the practical consequences of the statement’s implicit problematization, arguing that this problematization leads to further confrontation and leaves no option for the Serb community in Kosovo. An analysis of the emotional aspect of the implicit problematization, which the text contains, shows that it represents a discourse of fear and rejection, not that of understanding and reconciliation. In conclusion, the paper introduces some “what if’s” pointing out several topics in the statement’s discourse which can and should be questioned and revised to open up prospects for survival of the Serb community in Kosovo.

This paper provides a critical discourse analysis of presuppositions and strategic functions, in addition to brief comments on the use of propaganda devices in the speech delivered by George W. Bush nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and some other US targets, September 11, 2001. This approach makes it possible to explore the tension between idealism and pragmatism, the conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the other aspects of ideologies and power relationships found in the speech.

Using a computer-assisted content analysis, this study analyzes a 32,000 word corpus drawn from mediated political statements made in response to the July 2005 London bombing. This grounded research led to a focus on the deontic nature of these statements, and also revealed a relative absence of condoling. Although condemnatory, statements did not specifically attribute the ‘evil’ to particular people. Particularly mindful of Widdowson’s (2004) distinction between analysis (text) and interpretation (discourse), the paper first identifies the textual features, but then “hermeneutically” interprets their meaning within a wider context of international political discourse. The paper concludes that the statements performed a positive epideictic purpose, although it tended to occlude the compassionate element of public grieving.

This article examines the application of two approaches from discourse analysis, that is, the ideological square from Critical Discourse Analysis and transitivity which is a component of Systemic Functional Grammar in the analysis of data extracted from the Kenyan print media. These two approaches are used to illustrate how different newspapers’ editorials portrayed various political groups in the run — up to the general elections in 1997 in Kenya. Thus attempts are made to show the role of newspapers editorials in articulating conflicting ideological positions in election reporting. In this paper an analysis is provided on how the Kenya print media represented and constructed political parties in the 1997 elections. The aim of this representation and construction is to show how political groups in the sense of us vs them and the representational processes of transitivity construct ideological discourse. The paper further illustrates how the concepts of ideological square and transitivity assist in making overt the mediation processes and practices that are generally, covertly, often unconsciously used in the construction and evaluation of participants in a political process.

The contextual nature of deictic expressions, including the personal pronoun ‘we’, is a given to linguists, but has only recently caught the interest of social scientists. The following article, firmly grounded in sociology, attempts to introduce some linguistic concepts while looking at the role of the personal pronoun ‘we’ in the discursive construction of national identities in the media. Focusing on Scotland, and looking at media language in the context of constitutional change in the United Kingdom, the article shows how different category relations are created through the ambiguous and under-specified use of deictic expressions. Scotland provides an interesting case study for such analysis, as references to the ‘nation’ during the 20th century have been ambiguous, sometimes referring to Scotland, sometimes to Britain. Consequently, the media/nation relationship has been contested, and this is reflected in media language. The paper introduces the concept of a wandering ‘we’ to describe the shifting reference point of the deictic expressions and situates this phenomenon in the wider nationalism literature. By doing this, the article revisits some of the notions introduced by Billig in his Banal Nationalism.

This article explores the multi-accentuality of the sign ‘gastarbajteri’, used as title word in an exhibition on labour migration that took place in Vienna, Austria, in 2004. Based on an ethnographic study of the exhibition, it addresses a variety of readings of this word, both at the level of production and reception. The analysis of texts shows, firstly, the divergent rationales of the two agents who cooperated as exhibition producers, the minority NGO who wished to signal self-empowerment of migrants on the hand and the city museum who aimed at selling the exhibition to a mainstream audience on the other hand. Secondly, it juxtaposes them with the plurality of readings by its recipients, which range from the recognition of an appeal to migrants via the mis-reading as ‘guestworker’ and its upvaluation through to an insider-perspective based on the knowledge of the word’s connotations in the former Yugoslavia.

An analytic model based on MAK Halliday’s System of Transitivity provides a powerful tool for decoding a journalist’s attitude to the events or individuals being written about. Chen (2005) showed how in the UK Times use of certain verbal processes rather than others to introduce direct or indirect speech could be an indicator that the journalist’s attitude towards the person being quoted was either negative or positive. In this study, using a model for the linguistic comparison of the British and Chinese press developed by Chen (2004), verbal process use in the UK Times and the English-language China Daily is contrasted for evidence of differences in the attitude of British and Chinese journalists towards political figures. The evidence is clear. Times journalists frequently use ‘negative’ verbal processes which indicate doubt or scepticism towards the person being quoted. China Daily journalists, meanwhile, more often use ‘positive’ verbal processes which enhance the authority of the speaker.