Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2009

This paper explores the changes in the media discourse on granting and revoking Bosnian citizenship of foreigners in the most read Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian quality daily newspapers from the end of the Bosnian war in 1995 until the Commission for the Revision of Decisions on Naturalization of Foreign Citizens finished its work in 2007. Critical discourse analysis of news articles shows that all newspapers recontextualised the discourse on granting and revoking citizenship from a nationalistic war discourse to a “war on terrorism” discourse, joining the anti-terrorism global discursive community. Serbian and Croatian newspapers have not only colonised the “war on terrorism” vocabulary and discourse of difference but they have also appropriated a specific local discourse to the more global “war on terrorism” discourse and have represented military actions against the Muslims in the Bosnian war “as our war on terrorism”. A Bosnian daily newspaper similarly represented the Commission’s activities as the “Bosnian war on terrorism”.

This essay offers an analysis of the circulation of World War II and Holocaust analogies in discourses about American military involvement in Kosovo. The essay argues that the World War II/Holocaust analogy provided the public with a new vocabulary for understanding the situation in Kosovo. The essay uses Bill Clinton’s speeches about Kosovo during the first week of American intervention as a representative anecdote for discussing the analogy and its rhetorical force. The essay then probes the circulation of the analogy in other governmental, media, and public opinion outlets. By comparing Kosovo 1999 to Europe 1945, the analogy offers descriptive and prescriptive reasons for American involvement that encourage public approval of military intervention. The essay offers conclusions and implications of this analysis for the understanding of the relationships among rhetoric, public opinion, and international conflict.

This study examines a particular modality of audience participation in Japanese municipal council sessions. As with parliamentary debates elsewhere (Carbó 1992, Antaki & Leudar, 2001), the prescribed participation framework in a Japanese council session is highly structured so as to facilitate deliberation for the public good. Accordingly, the formal institutional rules do not assign the audience ratified speaking rights during question-answer periods. Nevertheless, audience members do insert interjectory remarks with precise timings to accomplish specific social consequences. While official records typically exclude audience voices and therefore fail to capture the relevant social consquences, the analysis of raw data brings them to light. This study investigates audience interjections in terms of their sociolinguistic characteristics, their placement in the on-going discussions, and their “covert” social consequences. The analysis shows that interjections in Japanese council sessions are tools for spontaneous politicking whereas the ostensibly deliberative proceedings are largely scripted performance.

Against the political backdrop of what was arguably the lowest point in the China-Japan relationship in modern times, China had called for Japan to take “concrete actions to face up with … its history of invasion”. In response, Japan’s then Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, issued a public apology at the Asian-African Summit on 22nd April 2005. His choice of words, “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology”, did little to assuage the Chinese. What did these words really mean in the context of speech acts of apology? Was the apology considered to be an apology? How does this episode of apology fall into the current discussion of apology strategies? Was there lexical avoidance? Was there any discourse difference compared to previous apologies? This paper will attempt to answer these questions.

The two Palestinian uprisings have brought about an ideological shift in Israel’s view of the solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The time has ripened for an open debate about ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The debate has limited discursive boundaries, set up by the catch phrase “a Jewish and democratic state”. This article discusses some points of view within this discourse and exemplifies those that remain outside it.

Metaphors construct social reality, including the actors which populate the social world. A considerable body of research has explored this reality-constituting role of metaphors, yet little attention has been paid to the attempts of social actors to influence the metaphorical structure by which they are constituted. The present article conceptualises the relationship between actor and metaphorical structure as one of mutual constitution. Empirically, it analyses how until the late 1990s Liechtenstein was constructed as an attractive financial centre by metaphors such as haven and paradise, how then a metaphorical shift constituted the country more negatively, before Liechtenstein finally fought back: with the help of the new brand-metaphor and also a professional image campaign the country tried to repair its international image.

In the gradual unravelling of Greenland’s colonial relationship to Denmark, an essentialist conceptualization of Greenlandic identity has played a significant role. However, both our scholarly understanding of post-colonial Greenlandic identity and the process towards independence for Greenland could be furthered by bringing politics back in. Based on a discourse analysis of the Greenlandic debate on language, this paper makes three claims: First, the identity projects promoted in Greenland are based on an essentialist conception of identity. Secondly, Greenlandic identity discourse combines elements of traditional Inuit culture and elements of colonial modernity. Thirdly, monolingual Greenlanders are those with the most to gain from abandoning the dichotomy of essentialist identities. Strategically, the paper suggests a post-post-colonial Greenlandic identity as a means of avoiding the exclusion of valuable human resources. One step towards relieving the relation to the Danish Other of identificatory weight could be a gradual shift to English as second language.