Pragmatics and Society - Volume 8, Issue 4, 2017

This contribution investigates the stereotyping of nations in TV news text. It compares the headline appearances of the names Germany and Spain on each other’s leading national evening TV news program during the peak of the European financial crisis (2011–13). The paper combines quantitative analysis of word-frequency and topic-distribution in a 621 headline-corpus, with in-depth case analysis of news values underpinning 32 extracted headline examples. A discussion of literature in media anthropology and Critical Discourse Analysis concludes with the argument that intentions and consequences of media discourse should be separated, whereas differences between ordinary and official language should not be overvalued. The case study shows how the textual display of Germans and Spaniards supports the everyday imagining of national belonging, how othering works through the labelling of nations as “economies”, and how negativity, competition and relatedness are prevailing values underlying the examined news headlines.

This article investigates linguistic metaphors in four English newspapers from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, focusing on their variations at the macro-contextual level. Analyzed in their respective macro contexts were lexicalized and non-lexicalized metaphors in 1,105 full-length news stories. The exploration reveals that: (i) the distributions of non-lexicalized metaphors are far more variable than those of lexicalized metaphors across the four newspapers, (ii) lexicalized metaphors are much more common than non-lexicalized metaphors in all the four newspapers, (iii) non-lexicalized metaphors occur more in the news stories for native speakers than in those for international or global readers, with a decreasing tendency toward those for EOL and EFL readers, and (iv) the lexicalized and non-lexicalized metaphors both have cognitive functions, while the latter serve additional stylistic purposes. The study sheds some light on the affordance between linguistic metaphors and the macro contexts of the news stories.

Recent research has established that Japanese political oratory and audience behaviour ( Bull & Feldman 2011 ; Feldman & Bull 2012 ) are fundamentally different to those found in British political speeches ( Heritage & Greatbatch 1986 ). To further develop these cross-cultural analyses of political rhetoric, speaker-audience interaction was analysed in ten speeches by the two second-round candidates in the 2012 French presidential elections (François Hollande; Nicolas Sarkozy). Analogous to British speeches, French speeches were characterised by “implicit” affiliative response invitations and asynchronous speaker-audience interaction, in contrast to Japanese “explicit” invitations and synchrony. These results were interpreted in terms of Hofstede’s (2001) individualism-collectivism cultural dimensions. Dissimilarities in audience responses between the two candidates were also identified and discussed. The analysis of cross-cultural differences continues to reveal the intricate differences between societies, and ensures academic understanding on rhetoric is not boxed into crude universal rules.

Informed by the major tenets of critical discourse analysis, the present study attempted to expose the chasm between veteran English teachers enjoying a nation-wide popularity and those linguistically talented novices achieving locally mediocre fame in the Iranian EFL context. In so doing, two highly competent English teachers, each as a prime example of the above-mentioned camps, were selected to serve as the main participants of the research. The analysis of their classroom talk indicated that linguistic excellence could not fulfill the role of educated experience as far as discourse competence was concerned. In all, the discursive strategies used by the experienced teacher seemed to manifest his recognition of students' voices and created a more heteroglossic atmosphere in the classroom.

This article investigates how English is exploited in naturally occurring interactions in colloquial Jordanian Arabic to perform acts of impoliteness, drawing on impoliteness model by Culpeper (1996) , its subsequent modifications in Culpeper et al. (2003) and Culpeper (2005) , and its alignment with Spencer-Oatey’s (2002) concept of rapport-management. Attack on face, specifically Quality Face, Social Identity Face, and Association Rights, through code-switching to English were identified in the data. Positive impoliteness and negative impoliteness strategies were employed through using English, sometimes in conjunction with Arabic impoliteness resources. Furthermore, English was used as an indirect impoliteness strategy to do off-record impoliteness to convey impolite beliefs about a third party or a particular state of affairs. These acts of impoliteness were mainly countered defensively by ignoring the attack or offensively through countering the implied face attack with face attack.

This paper conceptualizes dictionary bilingualization as a recontextualizing practice and explores how ideology and power play out in the recontextualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the transformation of meaning. It first proposes viewing the (bilingualized) dictionary as discourse and emphasizes bilingual lexicography as a site of an asymmetrical linguistic and cultural power dynamics. The paper then argues that a synergy of critical discourse analysis and postcolonial studies can reveal the inter-cultural ideological struggle implicit in the bilingualizing lexicographic practice. The body of the study is devoted to the analysis of those shifts taking place in the entries, definition, illustrative examples and pragmatic labels in a bilingualized English-Chinese dictionary, which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly reshape the ideological positioning of the dictionary. The paper discusses the implications for critical lexicographic studies and for research into the interplay between power and resistance between dominating and dominated cultures. It concludes that Periphery English dictionary compilers are able to negotiate the different subjectivities and ideologies inherent in dictionary making and to adopt a subject position favorable to their empowerment in the international English lexicography, although such resistance is far from capable of restructuring the order of lexicography.