Volume 11, Issue 1

This paper is a tentative attempt to identify some basic-level conceptual and theoretical problems underlying the mainstream genre theory, which adversely affect the analysis of rapidly evolving, complex and hybrid genres in the modern communicative space. Having discussed these problems, I go on to I argue that the space of contemporary public communication should be viewed as not only an “analytic problem”, but also/rather a domain whose explorations could potentially revise the existing principles of genre theory. In particular, I suggest such explorations should focus on the conception of (public communication) genres as (i) abstractions, (ii) activators and realizers of context, (iii) flexible macrostructures, (iv) social field entities, (v) assigners of interpersonal roles. Notwithstanding a possible advancement of genre theory resulting from this approach, I conclude that it is only a first and admittedly uncertain step in trying to establish a sound theoretical framework for communicative genres in the modern discourse space.

Political discourse is primarily identified as political action, the discourse of deliberating which course of action to follow in accordance with specific political goals (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012: 1). A pragmatic analysis of various sub-genres of political discourse can identify the preference for particular speech acts. The first aim of this paper is to analyze commissive and expressive illocutionary acts in political speeches, as indicators of personal involvement of political speakers, notorious for vagueness and avoiding commitment. A corpus of Serbian, American and British political speeches that address the issue of economic standard of living has been examined to identify commissive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit commitment to a chosen course of action, and expressive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit attitudes to their own or other politicians’ chosen practices. The analysis classifies subtypes of commissives and expressives in the corpus and identifies illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) that constitute them in English and in Serbian, after which the resulting classifications are compared and contrasted. The research results are aimed at explaining the hypothesis that a specific use/lack of commissives and expressives can be the politician’s strategy for adding credibility to their speeches, and in that way, swaying public opinion to serve the politician’s interest; conversely, establishing the relation between the use/lack of these illocutionary acts and the politician’s commitment to actions can be a method for exposing the politician’s lack of credibility and accountability.

The present study aims at explaining how the Relevance Theory could be a viable approach to weigh up the main functions of some concessive Pragmatic Operators (henceforth POs) in Jordanian Arabic at the production and interpretation levels. A sample of twenty-two speeches delivered by members of the Jordanian Parliament the 16th was randomly selected for scrutiny. Three POs (namely, laakin, bal and wa) detected in their speeches were analyzed at the token level in light of three elementary RT assumptions about discourse connectives in general, namely connectivity (Fraser 1996), the conceptual-procedural distinction (Blakemore 1987, 1988, 1992, 2002; Wilson and Sperber 1993; Grice 1989), and monosemy (Fretheim 2000; cf. Borderia 2008). The major finding of this study was that concessive POs, as a subset of contrastives, are used to optimize relevance: highlight certain dimensions and/or suppress others of the scenario to the background. However, the point of departure from possibly all previous treatments is that the speakers, as politicians, still used them more strategically because total ambiguity resolution should not be a viable alternative in social settings laden with politics.

Word order variation in Mandarin Chinese results in two constructions consisting of a noun phrase (NP), a cluster of a demonstrative and a classifier (DM), and a relative clause (RC): the OMN with the RC+DM+NP order and the IMN with DM+RC+NP order. This study used corpus data to show correlational patterns of constructional choices. Specifically, OMN is associated with new and inanimate NPs serving the grammatical role of object in the relative clause that serves the discourse function of identification. By contrast, for IMN, the head NP tends to carry given information, tends to be an animate entity, tends to serve the grammatical role of subject in the relative clause, and tends to have an RC that serves the discourse function of characterization. We suggest that the usage patterns can be interpreted in terms of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

The paper analyses the way two broadsheets, i.e. the Bulgarian Dnevnik and the British The Independent present Muslim identity within the span of two months and over the influence of international events such as the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices. The focus is on the development of the positive image of Muslims through the refutal of the existing negative stereotypes. The study is done on a comparative basis using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis.