Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2010

The paper is a CDA investigation on discursive strategies employed by various British newspapers between 1996–2006 in the ways they represent refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. The period covers several world events which have impacted such representation, creating a large number of articles on and/or about these groups. A combination of quantitative and qualitative down-sampling technique is then devised to restrict the number of articles to a sensitive sample which takes into account the newspapers’ ideological stands; conservative/liberal, their types; quality/tabloid and the relevant world events. The paper discusses some of the salient issues in the ways these groups of people are represented in British newspapers during these 10 years and shows that despite differences — arising from differences in ideological viewpoints and their types — in some important ways all the newspapers contribute to construct refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in similar ways.

A central journalistic counterstrategy to the communicative ‘professionalization’ of politics consists in a use of political communication experts who comment on political moves and analyse the strategies behind them. This study investigates how the media uses political communication experts in prime time news programmes from the 2005 parliamentary election campaign in Denmark. To this aim, the knowledge positions ascribed to the experts as well as the articulation of the expert voice with the news genre is analysed. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative data on the amount of political communication experts and their professional background. The study situates the analysis within a public sphere perspective on the power relations between politics and media, and discusses implications of the findings for a well functioning public sphere.

This paper presents an analysis of a World Bank document representing a version of the new “Social Capital” approach of International Financial Institutions (IFIs). This stance involves a rhetorical reorientation away from a much criticized unilateral approach to the poor indebted countries and to a more bi-lateral and participatory attitude. Analysis suggests that this “post-ideological” posture is reflected in the text in the form of a copious rhetoric of “complex differentiation”. This consists of characterizing the world in the abstract terms of multiple independent factors which work against any more coherent picture of the historical process and its contradictions. While such formal elements appear to be conditional on and anchored in concrete content, they are shown in fact to reflect the negation of such content (and thus coherence). In this way, an apparently limitless proliferation of free-floating isolated elements substitutes for faithful representation of the underlying social cleavages. The implications of the analysis for contrasting conceptualizations of abstraction in texts, as well as for the notion of utopian discourse, are critically discussed.

Using the principles of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as pioneered by Michael Halliday, this paper compares samples from speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama. Given the world-wide media coverage of the 2008 United States Presidential Election, it was thought to be both relevant and potentially informative to apply such an analysis in attempt to identify ideologies in the texts and to explore the significance of notable differences or similarities. It was discovered that both texts manage the experiential, interpersonal, and textual meanings in ways which provide clear indications of ideology.

Understanding how Middle Eastern rhetoric differs from Western communication can aid in deciphering diplomatic correspondence like the 2006 letter from President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Failure to understand such communications and respond appropriately may result in missed opportunities to avert hostilities or establish effective rapport with other nations. Success in grasping the intent of Iran’s diplomatic overture can provide a basis for creating a response that expresses American sentiments in a way that can be seen as intelligent and appropriate by Middle Eastern recipients. Such correspondence could entail establishing a respectable ethos, arranging content as expected, and emphasizing common values. Knowledge of the Middle Eastern rhetorical tradition can inform a viable understanding for diplomatic correspondence.

This paper focuses on the argumentative approaches and the rhetorical strategies employed by political actors in France in favour of or against the EU Constitutional Treaty (TCE), as they appeared in four French daily newspapers, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération and Aujourd’hui en France (national edition of Le Parisien), before the 29th of May 2005 referendum. In a qualitative discourse analysis and with the aid of argumentation theories and political communication approaches, the study investigates how the European Union’s Constitution, identity and future were represented and discussed by French political actors through the media in their effort to obtain public adherence before the referendum. Inevitably, the role of the media and the mediation process in the construction and transcription of the political discourse is also discussed.

This paper discusses discourses around language and nation as articulated in a public debate on the orthography of place names in Cyprus, triggered during the implementation stage of the standardisation/transliteration process in the 1990s. Adopting a language ideologies framework, the discussion is based on two related premises, first, language debates are indexical of deeper social conflicts and are deeply seated in the history and politics of a specific territory/community, and second, the discourses drawn upon to support/contest a particular orthographic convention are loaded with political, moral and/or historical concerns. I argue that the debate in question can be conceptualised as (partially) the outcome of a conflict between different constructions of a political discourse, here identified as national and community discourses. The focus here is on the different rationalisations of language and identity each of these entails and on their implications for (i) the inclusion/exclusion of the Cypriot Greek dialect from the standardisation process, (ii) the symbolic inclusion/exclusion of the Other from constructions of Greek Cypriot identity. The data consists of a corpus of newspaper texts covering the period of the peak of the debate, 1994–1995. For the analysis, I draw selectively on insights and tools from discourse analytical work in the traditions of linguistic anthropology and CDA to examine discursive links between language, place names and issues such as history, identity and tradition.