- Home
- e-Journals
- Journal of Language and Politics
- Fast Track Listing
Journal of Language and Politics - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
1 - 20 of 27 results
-
-
The power of language
Author(s): Zouhir GabsiAvailable online: 15 March 2024More LessAbstractOne of the most overlooked areas of study in the post-Arab Spring narrative is the symbiotic relationship between language and politics. Framed by the micro and macro-level approaches to discourse, the paper’s scope is twofold. First, it identifies and discusses how language elements underpin the performative role of language (Austin 1975 [1962]) and considers Searle’s (1969) work on speech-acts and rhetoric through irony and metaphor. Second, it discusses how the study of language, through power and ideology, provides a candid and deeper understanding of Tunisian politics; an ‘internal’ perspective on how participants in these discourses perceive the Tunisian people, society, culture, and politics, reflecting on a decade since the revolution. The paper hinges on various textual genres, such as televised interviews, debates, and rap songs, sampling some emerging new sociopolitical spaces wherein, through discursive themes, participants address Tunisia’s political and economic grievances since the revolution.
-
-
-
“The youths are wiser now”
Author(s): Chioma Juliet Ikechukwu-Ibe and Sopuruchi Christian AbohAvailable online: 15 March 2024More LessAbstractThis study examines several Nigerians’ resistance to the two major political parties and their presidential candidates using positive discourse analysis. Additionally, the study critically investigates Nigerians’ support for the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) during the build-up to the 2023 Nigeria’s general elections. Data for the study comprise 1000 tweets with the hashtags #Obidients, #Atikulated, #Tinubu and tweets that mentioned Peter Obi, Atiku, Atikulated, Jagaban, Tinubu, Emilokan, PDP, APC and LP between June and October 2022. The analysis reveals that tweeps construct resistance via three discursive strategies: critiquing and resisting the APC and PDP, portraying Peter Obi of the Labour Party as a political saviour, and positioning Nigerians as politically wiser. This study provides a fresh perspective on analysing Nigeria’s electoral rhetoric by identifying social media as sites for atypical resistance, social change, and revolution.
-
-
-
From Barack Obama to Donald Trump
Author(s): Jennifer LinAvailable online: 08 March 2024More LessAbstractDo Democrats and Republicans appeal to different sets of moral foundations in their national convention speeches? Do they make efforts to frame their messages so that it is attractive to their base and moderate voters? This study examines the moral appeals that political elites use to communicate to their supporters. I analyze speeches starting from the 2008 to the 2020 Republican and Democrat National Conventions to see if there are differences in appeals to Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority and Purity, which are tenets of the Moral Foundations Theory. I find that Republicans are more likely to appeal to Authority, and in 2020, Purity, while Democrats appeal mostly to Harm. Using qualitative content analyses, we see that both parties apply the moral language favored by the other side in their convention speeches on top of making appeals to moral foundations that are favored by their own base.
-
-
-
A fence of opportunity
Author(s): José Javier Olivas OsunaAvailable online: 07 March 2024More LessAbstractThis article deconstructs the parliamentary discourses regarding two migratory incidents in Ceuta, May 2021, and Melilla, June 2022, when hundreds of people attempted to cross the fences that separate Morocco from Spain. Most of them were immediately deported, many injured, and several died. This analysis compares the density of populist, anti-populist, re-bordering, and de-bordering references in forty-five speeches at the Spanish Congress regarding both tragic events. Vox speakers articulate a distinct discourse that instrumentalises these incidents to convey a sense of existential crisis and to (re)define a populist right-wing political identity based on moral hierarchies, a homogenising conception of society and the exclusion of a dangerous “other.” Meanwhile some parties applied a populist logic to promote de-bordering views and others combined re-bordering and de-bordering claims without imposing a populist frame. This was an opportunity to exhibit a progressive sense of place in borderlands contrasting with Vox’s reactionary one.
-
-
-
The awkward rhetoric of Spanish liberalism
Author(s): José María RosalesAvailable online: 05 March 2024More LessAbstractThis article explores the ideological controversies around Spanish liberalism through the story of the Citizens party – from its rise in 2006 through 2023, after a sequence of electoral defeats that almost certified its demise. Born as a regional party in Catalonia with an anti-nationalist platform focused on linguistic policies, in national politics it fostered a liberal agenda. The article examines Citizens’ politics of language hiding the party’s liberal identity because of its association to right-wing outlooks. At its founding documents there was an amalgam of liberal and social democratic constitutional values inspiring the party’s political approach. No earnest question was made of their difficult accommodation, given their disparity at the policy level. In 2017 an internal debate arouse, and from 2019 a number of electoral setbacks accelerated it. By then the liberal language legitimizing its passage from regional into a national party had lost its civic appeal.
-
-
-
Reactions to interruptions in Finnish, French and German parliamentary debates
Author(s): Johanna Isosävi, Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre, Christophe Gagne and Eero VoutilainenAvailable online: 05 March 2024More LessAbstractThis paper analyses unauthorised turns – namely, interruptions – in parliamentary debates, by focusing on their lesser-studied interactional characteristics, that is, reactions. Drawing upon cross-cultural pragmatics, we compare reactions in Finnish (Eduskunta of Finland), French (Assemblée nationale of France) and German (Bundestag of Germany) parliamentary debates. In doing so, we applied conversation analysis in the sequential analysis of reactions to interruptions while considering restrictions related to written transcriptions. While most interruptions passed without reaction in all three languages, the reactions came from different sources: from unauthorised speakers in French, from authorised speakers in German and from both in Finnish. Our study demonstrates that interruptions serve as resources for micro-interactions within official speaking turns in parliamentary debates, revealing cross-cultural differences in speech styles.
-
-
-
Unveiling ideological shifts in news trans‑editing
Author(s): Yuan Ping and Kefei WangAvailable online: 26 February 2024More LessAbstractThis article expands on previous research on news trans-editing by examining the relationship between ideology and language. Using a conceptual framework that combines critical discourse analysis with narrative analysis, the study analyses a corpus of trans-edited news articles on the 2014 Hong Kong protests. These articles were collected from Reference News, along with their source texts from various English-language international media. Narrative analysis was conducted using NVivo computer-assisted tools, including cluster analysis, word frequency and matrix coding. The findings reveal significant shifts in the narratives between the original and trans-edited versions, indicating that the trans-editors recontextualised the news narratives by determining the narrators, retroversions and frequency of the narrative texts. These results suggest that news trans-editing is not a neutral process, but is rather influenced by the ideological stance of the news outlet.
-
-
-
Interests convergence in global human rights politics
Author(s): Yooneui KimAvailable online: 26 February 2024More LessAbstractWhat explains the convergence and divergence of states’ interests related to global human rights? This study examines the dyadic similarity of the language used in the multilateral dialogue focusing on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). The joint activities of NGOs influence states, and human rights norms are transmitted through IGOs. Using text analysis methods, the similarity between state recommendations during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is systematically quantified. Analyses suggest that a pair of states are more likely to use similar language in UPR recommendations as the number of joint activities of NGOs, shared memberships in IGOs, and shared experience in the UNHRC increases. The effects are robust even after controlling for different types of political relationships between states.
-
-
-
The utility of (political) dogwhistles – a life cycle perspective
Author(s): Asad Sayeed, Ellen Breitholtz, Robin Cooper, Elina Lindgren, Gregor Rettenegger and Björn RönnerstrandAvailable online: 26 February 2024More LessAbstractThe term dogwhistle refers to an expression conveying a message to a subset of an audience which is not perceived by the rest of the group, in addition to a primary meaning directed at the group at large. We follow up on previous work in linguistics and political communication on defining dogwhistles, taking into account how they likely function in real-life political contexts. We consider the utility of dogwhistles in terms of their sensitivity and their specificity, which allows us to consider dogwhistles in terms of an idealized “life cycle”, whose phases we describe in terms of a multi-dimensional utility tradeoff, described in terms of dogwhistle users, the benefit they expect to receive from dogwhistling, and the deniability of controversial dogwhistle meanings. We propose an approach for the longitudinal study of dogwhistles, and describe the first stages of an experiment to characterize dogwhistles in terms of their lexical properties.
-
-
-
Perception of charisma in text and speech
Author(s): Judit Vari, Tamara Rathcke and Aleksandra CichockaAvailable online: 08 February 2024More LessAbstractThe perception of leaders as charismatic personalities has been linked to the level of (positive) emotion in their messages. The present paper reports a cross-modal perception study on the relationship between perceived charisma and positive as well as negative emotions. One hundred forty-nine participants listened or read Brexit speeches by four British politicians (David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage, Theresa May) and rated their charisma using a 7-point Likert scale. Emotions in speeches were quantified on three dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance) and supplemented by analyses of person deixis (I vs. we). Results revealed that effects of emotions on perceived charisma are moderated by the modality of speeches. Emotionally positive words as well as inclusive person deixis increased charisma ratings in written messages, but the effect was reduced or not present in auditory versions of these messages. Implications arise for studies of political discourse that tend to focus on scripted speeches.
-
-
-
Linguistic landscapes of activism
Author(s): Alba Arias ÁlvarezAvailable online: 01 February 2024More LessAbstractThe field of the linguistic landscape has been examined as an arena of negotiation, struggle, and contestation, where individuals and communities play roles in the symbolic construction of the public sphere. Transitory linguistic landscapes show the power struggle between different communities or how individuals claim their rights in the public sphere. Specifically, political demonstrations can influence public opinion and change policies and law. The mass protest analyzed in the present study aimed to inform public opinion about a public healthcare problem and to push the regional government to take action to resolve the issue. Following the frameworks of geosemiotics, interpellation, and dialogism, the focus of the present study is to examine qualitatively how the political and social action of a mass demonstration is mediated and created through multimodal resources.
-
-
-
Humanitarian discourse as racism disclaimer
Author(s): Petre Breazu and David MachinAvailable online: 01 February 2024More LessAbstractRoma communities remain Europe’s most marginalized and disadvantaged population, facing increasing discrimination, especially after the 2015 refugee crisis. European media often portrays them as criminals or anti-social, furthering misunderstanding and social exclusion. This article examines Swedish news media’s representation of Roma, which, at a surface level, appears much less negative. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyze two Swedish newspapers’ coverage of the controversial law which sought to criminalize begging, which targeted Eastern European Roma migrants. Our findings reveal that ‘Swedish exceptionalism’–a discourse of human rights, equality, colorblindness, characterized by limited racial literacy–serves to obscure and act as a disclaimer for anti-Roma sentiment and government actions which in fact resemble those criticized in other EU countries.
-
-
-
New opportunities for discourse studies
Author(s): Katy BrownAvailable online: 01 February 2024More LessAbstractThis paper proposes a methodological framework that integrates poststructuralist Discourse Theory (DT), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). While previous research has discussed potential compatibility between combinations of these approaches, there have been few attempts to bring them all together into a cohesive research programme. Fostering dialogue between diverse methodological perspectives can facilitate multi-level analysis to capture the complex dynamics of sociopolitical issues. In this vein, the article presents the methodological tree, an analogy used to illustrate how these traditions may come together to complement one another. This foundation lays the groundwork for practical application in discursive analysis, with a flexible analytical structure proposed and examples provided to illustrate its implementation. It is hoped that the article can stimulate further discussion around how DT, CDS and CL can be brought together to harness their strengths.
-
-
-
Review of Brookes & Baker (2021): Obesity in the news: Language and Representation in the Press
Author(s): Xiaoli Fu and Yaoting ZhangAvailable online: 23 January 2024More Less
-
-
-
Examining political influence on language
Author(s): Igor IvaškovićAvailable online: 22 January 2024More LessAbstractThis article discusses the problem of evaluating socio-political interventions in language at the case of Croatian. From a theoretical point of view, definitions of such interventions, often called purism, are first analyzed and placed in the context of the ‘one standard axiom’ thesis. To determine why only some historical periods of intervention are labeled as purist, a brief comparative overview is provided of conflicting perspectives on interventions in the Croatian language made between 1918 and 1990. The author argues that partial historical analyses will always find that a particular regime pursued a policy of purism. Moreover, proponents of the Yugoslav period as normal adhere to the thesis of the existence of the ‘One Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian Axiom,’ while their counterparts argue for the distinctiveness of the Croatian language from related South Slavic languages.
-
-
-
Negotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings
Author(s): Orawee Bunnag and Krisda ChaemsaithongAvailable online: 16 January 2024More LessAbstractDrawing from televised COVID-19 press briefings, this study explicates how the interplay between verbal and visual resources help policy makers restore public trust following organization-level failures by neutralizing unfavorable discourses that threaten the public’s perceptions of their competence, integrity and benevolence and by emphasizing positive aspects associated with these factors. The findings reveal that these mediated multimodal speeches not only prioritize the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the surveillance failures, while aggrandizing their ad hoc responses without addressing the causes. This trust repair practice serves to frame the pandemic – initially as an external biosecurity threat and subsequently as a natural and expectable characteristic of an infectious disease that can be handled – hinging largely on the creation of “us-them,” which undermines equitable public health objectives and transmission mitigation in the long run.
-
-
-
The construction of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” in China Daily
Author(s): Jiange Deng and Zhongxuan LinAvailable online: 09 January 2024More LessAbstract“One country, two systems” (OCTS) is the constitutional principle that established Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy after the city’s handover from Britain to China in 1997. This study conducts the first systemic, diachronic analysis of the discursive construction of OCTS in Chinese news media, focusing on Beijing’s mouthpiece and public diplomacy newspaper, China Daily. After reviewing the tripartite representation of the principle in the literature, we identify a refocus from the economic to the legal-political aspect of OCTS and an increasing emphasis on the socio-cultural dimension of OCTS in China Daily’s news discourses from 1997 to 2020. These patterns indicated OCTS’s changing status from a ‘legitimating ideology’ to a political principle struggling to be ‘legitimate’ in Beijing’s political discourses. Despite disputes about OCTS, we anticipate that Beijing and Hong Kong’s opposition will continue to abide by this principle in their future interactions.
-
-
-
Political homophobia
Author(s): Saskia SchäferAvailable online: 09 January 2024More LessAbstractThis article comparatively analyses the rise of anti-LGBT rhetoric in Indonesia and Turkey in the 2010s and early 2020s. In both countries, periods of greater public visibility of LGBTQ+ people in the early 2000s were followed by waves of severe anti-LGBT rhetoric, violence, and legal measures. This analysis focusses on the rhetoric that conservative state and non-state actors use to other non-heteronormative people and to exclude them from the nation or “the people”. My main argument is that state and non-state actors conduct othering of LGBTQ+ people and construct them as dangerous threats to the nation and to the structure of the family. The anti-LGBT narratives are integrated into larger conspiracy narratives of foreign powers undermining the nation.
-
-
-
Rickety democracies
Author(s): Kate S. O’Connor-FarfanAvailable online: 14 December 2023More LessAbstractThis article addresses the narrative and discursive structures underlying popular Peruvian political phrases disseminated through social media, word-of-mouth communication and mainstream media between 2016 and 2022. One goal is to reveal how these constructions suggest patterns of interaction and societal weaknesses. Another goal is to propose a qualitative approach using a narrative semiotics perspective to analyze the structure of these types of objects of study. Four relevant interconnected structures were distinguished: (1) structures of generalized and (2) compartmentalized distrust and (3) structures of vertical and (4) horizontal shame. They all serve to understand how the generalization of distrust and the rise of horizontal shaming in Peru expose the incoherence between a publicized democratic image and a reality characterized by deep social fractures.
-
Most Read This Month Most Read RSS feed
-
-
Radical right-wing parties in Europe
Author(s): Jens Rydgren
-
-
-
Right-wing populism in Europe & USA
Author(s): Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
-
-
-
Uncivility on the web
Author(s): Michał Krzyżanowski and Per Ledin
-
- More Less