Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

This paper analyzes how political aspirations and convictions during Taiwan’s authoritarian period (from the 1940s to 1996) are expressed through first-person plural pronouns. Combining both corpus-assisted method and discourse historical analysis (DHA, Wodak et al. 1999 ), we compared the speeches delivered by the presidents – Chiang Kai-shek (CKS, 1955–1975), Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK, 1978–1988), and Lee Teng-hui (LTH, 1989–1996) – from the one-party domination era to the time of the direct presidential elections in 1996. Moreover, by locating lexical items in the co-texts and checking the collocates, we have tried to find referents of we against changing socio-political contexts. The meaning of we has changed from representing Chinese compatriots on the Chinese mainland and the revolutionary militia in CKS’s speeches to an over-inclusion and more hearer-dominant (HD) we in CCK’s speeches. A “wandering we” was found in LTH’s speeches with which a well-defined national collectivity was difficult to identify in the late 1980s.

Based on identity theory and previous studies of crisis discourse, this paper systematically analyzes the process of identity construction and negotiation between political discourse and social discourse representing the event of a fire at Xinjian Village, Daxing District in the southern suburb of Beijing. It is found that in the first phase, the political discourse focuses on the meta-discourse of “for Renmin’s sake, we carry out a campaign of thorough inspection, cleaning-up and rectification to eliminate safety hazards.” In the second phase of the event the Renmin category is then represented concretely as “residents”, “migrant workers”, “people who need help” and so on. These discursive practices have constructed a relatively acknowledged identification with the social groups concerned, and thus positively affect the governance and management of this crisis event.

This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between utopian thought and political discourse. It demonstrates how utopias frame normative discourse in general and political discourse in particular. The argument is informed by Kenneth Burke’s theory of the negative command and its place at the basis of all human language. I argue that utopias are necessarily based in the hortatory negative and are, in literary terms, like religious texts in general being ‘words about words’ designed to coordinate “the tribe”. Burke calls such texts ‘logological’. The argument I put forward here points to a rapidly crumbling utopia that has beset much of the world and all of the West since at least the Reagan-Thatcher era in which a new corporatist political economy was given global impetus.

The present paper deals with the use of deliberate metaphors in the political discourse. The potential of dehumanising metaphors to create derogatory descriptions used to disparage one’s political opponents is analysed. Also, metaphorical descriptions prove to be very productive in creating polysemy in previously monosemous items which are used in a new capacity in order to create an effect of novelty and surprise. This function appears especially useful in the language of politics in general, and the language of British politics in particular. The paper is maintained within the methodological framework of cognitive linguistics, focusing on the theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.

This paper seeks to apply a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies in an investigation of epistemic stancetaking and types of inter/subjectivity of the speaker in political discourse. More specifically, the paper presents an analysis of responses by three different politicians, i.e. John Kerry, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, to the chemical weapons attack in Syria in August 2013. By incorporating cognitive-linguistic theories in a critical investigation of language, I address diverging representations of the same event and their discursive functions in representing underlying ideologies and motifs of the respective politicians. Specifically, I propose a more nuanced incorporation of epistemic stance in a spatio-cognitive representation of discourse. My analysis shows that type of inter/subjectivity has bearing on the epistemic quality of a proposition. The more prominently a speaker construes him-/herself as evaluator of an event, the stronger his/her assertions become, which is equally visible in a discourse space model.