Band 13, Heft 2

This paper focuses on short- and long-term migrants between Argentina and Germany, as well as between Argentina and Austria, and their discourses about their lives between their host and home countries. Blogs, journalistic articles, and in-depth interviews are analysed from a qualitative perspective in order to examine hetero- and auto-stereotypes. How can these stereotypes be described from a linguistic and discursive point of view? How do speakers express or avoid the responsibility of uttered stereotypes? To answer these questions, we draw on an overarching Critical Discourse Studies framework. At the same time, Pümpel- Mader’s (2010) approach is helpful to better understand the linguistic properties of stereotypes, as it distinguishes between social categories, the characteristics attributed to them, and a series of modifiers. Within this framework, forms and contents of stereotypes, as well as phenomena like subgrouping and the use of personal experience are referred to. Further, some rhetorical strategies used to display stereotype awareness or leading to actual stereotype avoidance are pointed out.

Reporting on research undertaken under the auspices of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project, the present paper investigates the roots of xenophobic and homophobic attitudes in Malta and the extent to which these can be pinpointed in the lexical choices made in discriminatory comments posted online in reaction to local news stories pertaining to migrants and members of the LGBTIQ community. Adopting Fairclough’s threedimensional framework (1995), we start off by presenting the values that underlie local discriminatory attitudes as social practice, as these were identified by the participants of four focus group interviews that were conducted at the University of Malta. In this respect, while xenophobia seems to be a far more pressing issue in Malta, homophobia, which is still also present, is taken to be predominantly triggered by deep-rooted religious beliefs and allegiance to heteronormative values. Then, when it comes to xenophobia, the main relevant trigger seems to be the perceived threat that the different collective background of a particular subset of migrants in Malta poses to the local culture. In an attempt to show that these values can also be discerned by examining even the most basic textual characteristics of a dataset comprising xenophobic and homophobic talk in the local context, we turn to identify them by looking at quantitative measures pertaining to lexical choice and metaphorical extension in the relevant parts of our corpus. In this way, we provide evidence for the fundamental – for Critical Discourse Analysis – claim that the textual analysis of a relevant dataset can indeed reveal the axiological framework that underlies the negative stance that the general population may have in relation to particular minorities, showcasing the relevance of discourse analytic methods for the broader understanding of discrimination and hate speech.

Framed within cognitive linguistics, Critical Metaphor Analysis and social psychology, the present paper explores the dynamics of the online construction of the Other in the context of migration and current refugee crisis. Thematically, it scrutinizes online refugee- and migrant-related mainstream and social media discourses in two European countries, Cyprus and Poland, in 2015–2016. On the theoretical and methodological level, it looks at the constituted and constitutive nature of metaphorical conceptualisations of migrants/refugees, their axiological and emotional potential for threat construction, and thus impact on possible cognitive-affective attitudes of the host countries’ citizens. It is theorized here, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory, that the choices of particular metaphors and their frequency of usage are likely to influence the salience of issues among the public, activate certain moral evaluations and generate fear, thereby creating grounds for verbal and physical aggression targeted at the Other. The paper addresses the following questions: 1) How is the Other conceptualised as a THREAT in both physical and symbolic sense? 2) To what extent are particular metaphorical conceptualisations within the representation of migrants and refugees common to corpora from both countries and/or socio-cultural context dependent? 3) How can metaphors, including dehumanization, serve as a springboard for individual acts of prejudice, as well as systematic discrimination, and violence? The analysed data was collected within the European project C.O.N.T.A.C.T., exploring various aspects of hate speech and hate crime in ten EU countries.

There were 1525 applications for asylum in the Czech Republic in 2015, and 71 people were granted asylum. Despite this fact migration was the most covered topic in the Czech media (especially television news services) in 2015. The discussed events were labelled as a wave or flood and were framed as a crisis, threat, and risk not only by the journalists but by politicians as well. This paper is based on quantitative and qualitative research on migration and war refugees from August 17, 2015 to September 18, 2015 in six news programmes of the public service broadcaster, namely the Czech Radio. It is a qualitative case study of the program Den podle… (‘Day according to…’) conducted according to steps of the grounded theory (Strauss-Corbin 1999) with the use of semiotic analysis (Chandler 2002) and discourse analysis (van Dijk 1985). We use the constructivist approach and focus on the moral panic theory (Cohen 2002 and Garland 2008) in this text. The theory emphasizes the extent of media power which contributes to social control and the strengthening of group identity through the negative representation of those who are labelled as folk devils disturbing social order. The paper argues that the representation of migration in the public service broadcasting contributed to the moral panic arousal in the researched period.

In this work we study the representation of Muslims on the Internet in Spain. After the terrorist attacks in Europe, Islamophobia and Muslimophobia have grown considerably in our society. There is a strong rejection of Muslim groups and individuals, they are perceived not only as different, but also as dangerous and violent. We follow a cognitive linguistics approach using corpus linguistics as a methodology in order to know which concepts are related to Muslims in discourse. We have used three corpora: the Spanish part of the esTenTen corpus, which is a large web corpus intended to give a picture of the Spanish language on the Internet; a Twitter corpus encompassing tweets published by five main political parties in Spain and their candidates in 2015-2016; and a third corpus of articles on the topic “Muslims” from four important digital newspapers ( El País, La Vanguardia , La Voz de Galicia , and ABC ). We examine word co-occurrence patterns of islámico (‘Islamic’) and musulmán (‘Muslim’) to shed light on the stigmatization of this minority in the online discourse and its frequent presence in negative frames.

This paper explores the discourse of white supremacists in the context of the violent protests that took place in August 2017, in the American city of Charlottesville. During the demonstrations, one person was killed and many others were seriously injured after a car rammed into the anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protestors. The research scrutinizes the utterances of the white supremacist protestors before, during, between, and after the demonstrations, as presented in the Vice News documentary, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror”. The systematic analysis emphasizes that the rhetoric of the white supremacists was blatantly discriminatory and racist, and the significance of this in the assessment of the violent demonstrations shall not be downplayed. The rhetoric of the white supremacists in Charlottesville targeted Black Americans, Jews, and political opponents. The speakers utilized a full-fledged rhetorical arsenal to discriminate against and attack the out-groups. This included (1) plural personal pronouns; (2) the possessive form “ouf”; (3) victim-victimizer reversals; (4) vulgar referencing; (5) dehumanizing metaphors; and (6) appeals to violence. Through introducing the role and relevance of these devices in the language of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the research also maps their interconnectedness in the analyzed discourses in particular and in discriminatory and racist rhetoric in general.

The present paper focuses on a Critical Discourse Analysis of an online discussion opposing 4chan users and pop singer Lauren Mayberry, regarding a video posted on YouTube. The lead singer of the band Chvrches gets targeted for being a feminist activist and appearing in a skimpy dress and occasionally wet hair in a music video, thus raising sexually offensive and negative comments of one of the world’s most prominent online communities. This article uses a methodology combining semantics (Galatanu 2003), cognitive linguistics (Maillat and Oswald 2009) and proximization-legitimization (Chilton 2005, Cap 2014) in order to map a semantic topography of a corpus of 243 negative comments attacking Lauren Mayberry, particularly through the use of semantic nodes (Wagener 2012) and a critical discursive approach (van Dijk 1993), and the way they directly and indirectly produce semantic environments that are not always immediately accessible for the reader.

The conflict in Ukraine has been in the focus of the international politics for the last four years. The fact that it takes place not only on the battlefield but also in form of a discursive war has become strikingly evident. An inherent part of a conflict construction is the legitimization of one’s own positions and actions. According to Chilton (2017: 237, see also Chilton 2004, 2014), the discursive construction of events is “fundamentally grounded in spatial cognition, projected at various levels of abstraction and intimately bound up with human social relations”. This idea is crucial to “the systematic rhetorical arrangement” known as proximization (Cap 2008, 2013, 2017). It aims to “picture the occurring events and their actors as directly affecting the addressee” (Cap 2008, 2013, 2017). It is “a discursive tool [that allows] for the reduction of the temporal, spatial, axiological, cognitive [epistemic] and emotional distance” (Kopytowska 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) between the speaker and his/her audience. This paper draws on these approaches and examines the modalities of the threat representation. Apart from the spatial-temporal grounding, the analysis dedicates a special attention to the axiological, epistemic and emotional dimensions which are projected into the modalities of construction of fear and the argumentative use of historical parallels. We examine the commonalities and the differences of the discursive construction of the Ukraine conflict in the US and the Czech official political discourses. The US discourse is rather transparent and homogenous with clearly defined positive –negative roles, values and actions within IDC and ODC. In contrast, the Czech “Ukraine discourse” is polyphonic and echoes both the Euro-Atlantic and the Russian way of thinking and value judgements, which leads quite inevitably to a discursive clash. Due to the cognitive and also physical closeness of the conflict, there is a lesser need to proximize the conflict in such a powerful and determined way as it is done in the US narrative.

The paper aims to uncover the interactional discourse negative emotion dynamics in online conflict discourses in Polish and English and identify conditions for transitory group emergence. The analysed comments concern the present challenges to the status and position of the European Union as well as its existential legitimacy crisis, including the status of refugees and immigration throughout the years 2012-2017. It is shown that negative emotionality underlying incivility axis patterns as identified throughout the CMC discourse threads, functions as a stronger driving force towards a unity of particular group identification than a comparable set of positive emotionality parameters. There are cultural and language-related aspects of these processes identified with regard to differences between Polish and English in terms of discourse strategies, cultural dimensions, presence of incivility and emotionality dynamics. Considered from the overall level of the relationship between conflict and emotions, what is observed is the radicalization of the attitudes and their language expression, accompanied by the rise in emotional arousal as evidenced both in the English and Polish sets of data, although differences in the degree of its overtness are still distinct.