Volume 31, Issue 1

In the context of Hungarian political discourse, critics of contemporary antiracist advocacy argue that the antiracist “hate speech” agenda is motivated by carefully concealed political interests that pose a danger to the integrity of Hungarian society. The aim of the present article is twofold: to capture the themes and rhetorical strategies emerging from discursive challenges to the “hate speech” agenda, and to identify the cultural foundations of that rhetoric. The article identifies four themes in critical responses to the “hate speech” agenda: (i) the “hate speech” agenda is founded on the deliberate corruption of the Hungarian language; (ii) the “hate speech” agenda reveals that antiracists are pursuing an alien political utopia; (iii) the “hate speech” agenda is fraught with ideological inconsistency; and (iv) antiracist proponents of the “hate speech” agenda are themselves filled with hatred. Discursive manifestations of the four themes are analyzed for a shared cultural model of sociation and argumentative strategies. The article ends with a discussion of how findings may inform antiracist activism.

Transformational leadership was first identified as a distinct leadership style in the fields of business and organizational research in the 1970s. Transformational leaders motivate followers by appealing to their higher-order needs, offering incentives for compliance such as feelings of personal empowerment, a sense of moral self-actualization, and an emphasis on the individual's contribution to the community at large (Harvey, Charismatic business leader rhetoric: From transaction to transformation, Continuum, 2004). They have been observed to emerge and thrive within contexts fraught with sociopolitical and economic turbulence, where they maximize the uncertainty of the environment to instigate change. They are also seen to be especially adept at using discourse to foster strong, persuasive interpersonal relations with their followers. This article reports on the interpersonal dimension of Clem Sunter's discourse in three of his texts written in 1996, a time conducive to the rise of a transformational leader like Sunter. The text analyses are grounded in appraisal theory (Halliday, An introduction to functional grammar, Edward Arnold, 2004 [1994], Studies in English language, Continuum, 2005; Martin, Beyond exchange: appraisal systems in English, Oxford University Press, 2000a, Close reading: Functional linguistics as a tool for critical discourse analysis, Cassell, 2000b), with special focus on the Affect and Judgment choices. Analysis of the Judgment choices reveals that Sunter evokes high levels of Tenacity (typical in transformational leadership discourse), whereas the high frequency of Disquiet revealed in the analysis of Affect choices is completely inconsistent with this leadership paradigm. We suggest that the unique sociopolitical context of South Africa in 1996 enabled Sunter to maximize this Disquiet/Tenacity configuration in order to instigate change in his ideal reader, making Sunter a decidedly different kind transformational leader.

Drawing on a dialogical approach inspired by Bakhtin, we start from the assumption that a concrete discussion is an intermingling between dialogue in praesentia and dialogue in absentia , and we refer to the notion of “enunciative positioning” to account for the various relations that a speaker may express toward the voices that he or she invokes. Our data are based on a first therapeutic interview between a therapist, a mother, and a child in a counseling center for children and adolescents. We identify the various voices invoked in this interview and show that three levels of discursive process were involved: (a) the speakers invoked absent speakers; (b) at the same time they developed their own discourse on the basis of their interlocutors' discourse which (c) itself drew on absent speakers or voices. We highlight the various discursive processes through which the speakers integrate their own voice into absent voices, or integrate a distant voice so that it loses its property of being a distant (and borrowed) voice. As a theoretical and methodological contribution to dialogism, our results show that absent voices and their specific intermingling with hic et nunc exchanges were a major resource for therapeutic processes.

Hedging plays a significant role in both scientific writing proper and its popularized form. However, most research has concentrated on the former text type, while comparatively little attention has been paid to the phenomenon in popular science. The present study uses a corpus of English popular scientific articles, their German translations, and original German popular scientific articles to investigate the use of epistemic modal markers (such as might, could, perhaps ), which represent a common form of hedging, as they serve to mark the speaker's uncertainty about the truth of a proposition. The analysis shows noteworthy differences in usage between English and German. The English texts make use of epistemic modal markers much more frequently than the German original texts. Markers expressing mere possibility (e.g., maybe ) are particularly more frequent in English, while German rather uses markers of high probability (e.g., probably ). These differences can be related to divergent communicative preferences, specifically to a preference for indirectness and addressee-orientation in English texts, contrasting with a preference for directness and content-orientedness in German. The German translated texts are situated inbetween English and German originals, i.e., they exhibit some degree of adaptation to German textual conventions as well as some degree of “shining-through” of the English conventions.

This paper proposes a conceptual model to study the discourse of initial negotiation meetings between members of New Zealand and Chinese corporations. It attempts to make two contributions to existing cross-cultural negotiation research, especially to rapport management. Firstly, it develops a conceptual position where negotiation meetings require mutual effort for building intercultural alliances. Secondly, the application and further division of initial moves (initiating moves-relational [IM-R] and initiating move-transactional [IM-T]), responding moves (responding move-cooperative [RM-C] and responding move-uncooperative [RM-UC]), and strategies into politeness strategies (PS) and uncooperative strategies (UC-S) offer an in-depth analysis of the nuances of positioning construction between parties. The findings indicate that a successful negotiation meeting establishes and develops intercultural alliances through appropriate use of moves and strategies. Negotiations, however, derail if inappropriate moves and strategies are used, and potential conflicts and communication breakdowns are not addressed in time.