Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture

Language Policy in Business: Discourse, ideology and practice provides a critical sociolinguistic and discursive understanding of language policy in a minority language context. Focusing on Welsh-English bilingualism in private sector businesses in Wales, the book unpacks the circulating discourses, ideologies and practices of promoting bilingualism as a sociocultural and economic resource in the globalised knowledge economy. It sheds light on businesses as ideological sites for struggles over language revitalisation, which has been characterised by tensions and discursive shifts from essentialist ideologies about language, identity, nation and territory, to an increased commodification of bilingualism.

The book is premised on the understanding that language is a focal point for articulating and living out historical power relationships and inequalities, and that language policy processes are never apolitical. It adds to a body of literature about bilingualism in minority language contexts and, more broadly, about how the fields of politics, business and society are inextricably related.

This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at ‘unification’, based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

This book offers a critical discourse analytical perspective on the phenomenon of men who voluntarily abstain from relationships with women. Based on a case study of the online Reddit community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, the author engages in qualitative examination of the argumentative and discursive strategies used to justify and legitimise an antifeminist, male separatist ideology. Methodologically, the book draws on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies and investigates how members of this online community represent themselves, relationships with women, and the broader gendered social order. It considers male separatism as part of the new antifeminist social media network known as the manosphere, as well as part of a broader legacy of backlash against feminism and women’s rights. Overall, the book contributes to the growing body of literature on the manosphere and should be of interest to scholars in discourse studies, feminist media studies, and digital communication.

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.

As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Focus group interviews have seen explosive growth in recent years. They provide evaluations of social science, educational, and marketing projects by soliciting opinions from a number of participants on a given topic. However, there is more to the focus group than soliciting mere opinions. Moving beyond a narrow preoccupation with topic talk, Gilbert and Matoesian take a novel direction to focus group analysis. They address how multimodal resources – the integration of speech, gesture, gaze, and posture – orchestrate communal relations and professional identities, linking macro orders of space-time to microcosmic action in a focus group evaluation of community policing training. They conceptualize assessment as an evaluation ritual, a sociocultural reaffirmation of collective identity and symbolic maintenance of professional boundary enacted in aesthetically patterned oratory. In the wake of social unrest and citizen disillusionment with policing practice, Gilbert and Matoesian argue that processes of multimodal interaction provide a critical direction for focus group evaluation of police reforms. Their book will be of interest to researchers who study focus group interviews, gesture, language and culture, and policing reform.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has established itself over the past two decades as an area of academic activity in which scholars and students from many different disciplines are involved. It is a field that draws on social theory and aspects of linguistics in order to understand and challenge the discourses of our day. It is time for A New Agenda in the field. The present book is essential for anyone working broadly in the field of discourse analysis in the social sciences. The book includes often critical re-assessments of CDA's assumptions and methods, while proposing new route-maps for innovation. Practical analyses of major issues in discourse analysis are part of this agenda-setting volume.

This book brings together new research on the practices of newsmaking. Participation, engagement and collaboration have long been heralded as a vision, goal or emerging practice in the news. The claim in this volume is that they have now become sedimented as the common-sense baseline for everyday newsmaking routines. The issue for newsmakers is not ‘whether’ to engage with readers and users, but ‘how’ to engage with them. The contributions span a wide range of newsmaking contexts, including analytics-based online headline testing, the communication efforts of a Brussels-based free marketeer thinktank, collaborative science journalism and rapidly changing journalistic sourcing and writing routines from legacy to social media. Together they argue for a postfoundational perspective, which observes how participation, engagement and collaboration have emerged as a ‘foundation’ which is no longer questioned, but which can lead to new tensions in newsmaking. As such, the book provides inspirational reading for anyone in the social sciences and humanities who is interested in understanding how the ubiquity of participation, engagement and collaboration in the making of the news impacts on issues of power, transparency and control in the twenty-first century.

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains – political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. – it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions concerning language itself. The twenty chapters in the volume, written by specialists in political linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and social psychology, address the diversity of political discourse to propose novel perspectives from which common analytic procedures can be drawn and followed. The volume is thus an essential resource for anyone looking for a coherent research agenda in explorations of political discourse as a point of reference for their own academic activities, both scholarly and didactic.

This edited volume offers new insights into contemporary political discourses in Slavic speaking countries by focusing on discursive and linguistic means deployed in relevant genres, such as parliamentary discourse, commemorative and presidential speeches, mediated communication, and literal and philosophical essays. The depth of the linguistic analysis reflects different levels of linkage between language and social practice constituting the discourse. The theoretical and methodological approaches discussed range from interactional pragmatics over corpus linguistics to CDA. The chapters contain original language material in Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian, and the authors address issues such as the affiliation to different political and social groups within parliamentary settings, national identity, gender and minorities, as well as cultural memory and reconciliation.

This book explores the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in the Caribbean from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. Focusing on political communication in Trinidad and Tobago, it offers unique socio-political insights into one of the most complex and diverse countries of the Archipelago. Through a detailed reconstruction of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s 2010 victorious run for office, this book offers ample empirical evidence of the multimodal discursive strategies that held the key to the success of the first woman PM candidate and her inter-ethnic coalition bid to overcome political tribalism in the country. In parallel, it explores the implications and challenges of the postcolonial Trinbagonian national project, caught between pluralism and creolization. Through its innovative, context-dependent and interdisciplinary CDS approach, this book breaks new ground in Caribbean Studies while at the same time broadening the horizons of the Euro-American tradition of Political Discourse Studies to address the complexities of global postcoloniality.

The volume provides a multidisciplinary approach of the discursive dimension of power. It challenges the usual conception of discourse and power that underlies most of the current theories in contemporary discourse analysis, and shows that it is unsatisfying in so far as it reduces power to domination and discourse to power technology. In opposition to such a conception, an alternative model of power-in-discourse is constructed. It is called "Dialogical Model" in accordance with its being grounded in a dialogical conception of discourse that naturally leads to a participative conception of power (as empowerment). Part One provides the DM with theoretical and philosophical foundations, while Part Two affords empirical evidence by applying the DM to such typical situations as journalistic discourse under censorship, classroom sessions, and children interaction in a problem-solving situation.

This monograph examines the rhetorical nature and function of representations of the future in political discourse, focusing on political actors’ use of hegemonic images of future “reality” to achieve their political goals. It argues that a key ideological dimension of political rhetoric lies in politicians’ use of projections of the future to legitimate policies and actions. This argument is grounded in systemic-functional and critical discourse analyses of the “Bush Doctrine,” the U.S. policy response to the September 11 terrorist attacks which sanctioned a “preemptive” military posture. By focusing on the discursive construction of the future, this project addresses a lacunae in critical discourse studies and calls attention to the crucial role that the discourse and practice of “futurology” has played in post-Cold War politics and society. It will be of value to scholars interested in the discourses of politics, the “war on terror,” U.S. national security, and futurology.

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

Redefining Trial by Media: Towards a critical-forensic linguistic interface applies a range of linguistic models to recast trial by media not as a sensationalist and infrequent phenomenon, but as a systematic and routine process. Using critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic models, this book builds a Spectrum of Trial by Media which views juries in criminal trials as moulded by ideological media-made constructions of crime. The role of these media constructions is enhanced by the isolation levied on jurors by the linguistic composition of trial language, and reinforced by the language strategies of legal professionals in court. Critically deconstructing media portrayals of crime and forensically examining the language of criminal proceedings, this book offers a redefinition of trial by media which casts the role of the press as much more prevalent in the courtroom trial than is presently appreciated.

This volume examines the construction of Turkey's possible European Union accession in French political discourse. In today's France, heated debates regarding Turkey's EU membership are turning into an essential part of European identity formation. Once again, the 'Turkish Other' functions as a mirror for defining not only the 'European Self', but also European values. By providing a genuine and multi-disciplinary approach for studying the Otherness attributed to Turkey, this book contributes to our understanding of the Self/Other nexus in International Relations. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this study explores the socio-historical basis of the construction of Turkey's Otherness in an attempt to identify the processes through which past memories, representations, images and fantasies regarding Turkey are inserted into the French social imaginary. Focusing on these significations, which are (re)produced and become manifest through language, this book strives to uncover the link between discourse and political action.

The eleven studies in this volume illustrate and advance the synthesis of discourse analysis with rhetorical studies. Rhetoric in Detail shows how a variety of techniques from discourse analysis can be useful in studying such concerns as agency, legitimation, controversy, and style, and how concepts from rhetoric including genre and figuration can enrich the work of discourse analysts. The authors’ research sites range from government commissions, political speeches, newspaper reports and letters to interviews and conversations in beauty salons and online. Methodological overviews interspersed throughout survey critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, grounded theory, computer-aided corpus analysis, narrative analysis, and participant observation and provide suggestions for further reading. Rhetoric in Detail is an invaluable source for rhetoricians looking for systematic, grounded ways of approaching new, more vernacular sites for rhetorical discourse and for discourse analysts interested in seeing what they can learn from the tradition and practice of rhetorical analysis.

This book argues for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the language of judges with respect to the issue of gender discrimination. Drawing its inspiration from Dell Hymes' socially constituted linguistics, the author examines the language of the judicial opinions of four U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing social and legal discrimination against women. Through a linguistic analysis that is informed by a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, this book addresses the complex issues of the power of judges and ideologies, the politics of language use, and feminist contributions to the subject of discrimination and women's rights. This book is most suitable for researchers and students in cultural studies, ethnography, feminist legal studies, forensic linguistics, gender studies, ideology research, pragmatics, semiotics, and social studies.

This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.

When the SARS virus began its spread from southern China around the world in spring 2003, it caught regional and international health officials by surprise. The SARS epidemic itself lasted for only a few months, whereas its treatment, in communicative terms, keeps providing us with important lessons that can prepare us all for the much larger pandemic that many are predicting will eventually occur. While the medical aspects of SARS are now relatively well understood, the discursive rhetorical dimensions are much less so.

As an international epidemic, SARS arrived in a number of distinctive societies with the result that different communities handled the crisis in different ways, some far more effectively than others. Accordingly, the 12 chapters in The Social Construction of SARS are studies of how a major health-related crisis was understood and dealt with from a communicative perspective in such diverse places as Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and the United States during the SARS outbreak.

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.

This book proposes an original policy framework for addressing hate speech. Gelber argues that a policy designed to provide support to affected groups and communities to enable them to speak back when hate speech occurs, is a more useful way of addressing the harms of hate speech than punitive measures. She suggests that “speaking back” allows the affected groups to contradict the messages contained in the words of the hate speakers, and to counteract the silencing, disempowering and marginalising effects of hate speech. Gelber’s argument uniquely synthesises the ideas of defending the importance of participating in speech, recognising the harms of hate speech and acknowledging that targeted groups may require assistance to respond.

Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. Communication within and about European institutions has become more challenging in this perplexing political environment, demonstrating the complex nature of EU political discourse. In order to highlight these complexities, the contributors to this volume present different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena. The approaches represent rhetorical theory, metaphor and conceptual theory, cognitive and corpus linguistics, lexical statistics, polyphony, logical semantics, pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Through this multitude of perspectives the book complements existing approaches and suggests new approaches in the study of political discourse.

If politics is a serious matter and humour a funny one, this volume investigates how and why the boundaries between the two are blurred: politics can be represented in a humorous manner and humour can have a serious intent. Political humour conveys criticism against the political status quo and/or recycles and reinforces dominant views on politics. The data analysed comes from European states with different sociopolitical histories and traditions and the methodologies adopted originate in different fields (discourse analysis, folklore and cultural studies, media studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, theatre semiotics). The first part of the volume is dedicated to politicians’ humour as a means of public positioning, deliberation, and eventually attack against political adversaries, while the second one involves political satire as realised in different genres: animation, impersonation, and cartoons. Last but not least, the third part shows how political humour can be manipulated in public debates or become an integral part of postmodern art.

This book is a collection of studies on political interaction in a variety of broadcast, namely news and current affairs programs, political interviews, audience participation programs and radio phone-ins. Following a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, dialogic forms of news production and media talk in general, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars investigate the discursive and interactional practices that give rise to the arena of public politics in contemporary society. Chapters span an array of cultural contexts, as diverse as Sweden, Greece, Belgium (Flanders), the U.K., Spain, Israel, the U.S.A., Australia and China. Authors combine an interest in discourse analysis and conversation analysis with different disciplinary orientations, such as linguistics, media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, and social psychology. The book uncovers current trends in media and political discourse, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of media discourse and politics.