Volume 30, Issue 5

Discursive deracialization — the use of veiled references to racial groups — is associated with the discourse of new racism, in which racist sentiments are conveyed in a subtle manner. This article presents a specific strategy of deracialization: using place names and terms to index race. In focus groups held in the United States with African American and White parents, this strategy allowed speakers to covertly connect race to school quality. With the White parents, the indexing of race through place names and terms functioned as a defense against interpretations of their words as racist, regardless of whether racialized groups were explicitly presented in a negative light. In contrast, in the African American group, the strategy allowed speakers to indirectly critique racial inequality in education.

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair's (Textus 9: 75–106, 1996, Trust the text, Routledge, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase ‘human rights’ in the corpus as a lexical item shows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues, particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade. This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic, but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon.

This article concerns interviews with politicians taking place on a popular talk show. These interviews are informal and playful in character, and above all are structured around personal narratives of the “real life” or “behind-the-scenes life” of the guest. It is often claimed that such interviews have become more important for the politicians. The approach of the study addressed in the article is influenced by research on conversational storytelling and aims at exploring how politicians' more personal narratives are initiated and elaborated on by the participants. The data are comprised of six interviews with leading politicians on a Swedish celebrity talk show, Sen kväll med Luuk [Late night with Luuk] . The analysis shows that personal narratives progress in close collaboration between the host and the politician, and that this collaboration often aims at exploring the humor potential of the stories and invoking laughter from the studio audience. The main argument in this article is that for politicians an appearance on a celebrity talk show is not such a trouble-free method for self-presentation as is often assumed.

Research on Hebrew and other languages points to a stereotype-based view of gender identities as reflected in language. Some stereotypes related to use of the language and gender reveal that women are more conservative than men and use a more standard version of language. One of the stereotypical claims, which is not always borne out by empirical research, relates to the use of normative and prestigious forms versus nonstandard and vernacular ones. The present article focuses on Be my knife (Grossman, Shetihi Li Hasakin, Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1998), a novel written by the highly acclaimed Israeli author, David Grossman. The book is a classic example of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes, where the author makes clear a distinction between the linguistic features of the novel's main characters, a man and a woman. Not only are the characters themselves portrayed stereotypically, but the linguistic features the author attributes them are determined by gender. While the woman uses prestigious, standard and precise language, both in morpho-phonemic terms and in terms of syntax and discourse, the man generally uses a nonstandard vernacular. This reflects the prejudices Israeli society holds with respect to gender; language and literature are merely the means to emphasize this.

This study investigates the discourse of the job-application video — a video clip in which a job applicant performs self-presentation. First it elucidates the notion of performance — what language can do — both from a functional-pragmatic perspective and a cognitive viewpoint. It examines how performance and relevance shed light on each other. The discussion suggests that the principle of interest emerges from performance-relevance interplay, at least, in the context of job applications. To illustrate these issues, this paper analyzes a job application video for the “The Best Job in the World”, a highly publicized position that has attracted more than 30,000 applicants worldwide. The analytical framework consists of four types of performance: constructing identity, enacting verbal art, performing pragmatic acts, and persuading the addressee. The analysis will demonstrate that, while utterances can fulfill these types of performance, they are both constrained by relevance and charged with performative potential by it. The paper will next examine and confirm the significance of performance and relevance as exemplified in the addressee's comments. The proposed framework is intended to provide an analytical tool for the study of job-application discourse.

This article contributes to the growing body of research that joins critical discourse analysis with corpus analysis. I investigate a one million-word special corpus on US urban redevelopment in an attempt to illustrate that partnerships as popular collaborative coalitions in new capitalism can be identified in representations of social actors at the lexico-grammatical level. Focusing on two recurrent patterns in a Hallidayan framework, I argue that these representations break with the traditional binary of activation–passivation that is frequently used to discuss how key participants are portrayed in discourse. I suggest the category of facilitated agency in order to accommodate representational patterns where actors are depicted as jointly though not necessarily equally contributing to the completion of a process. The analysis further highlights the potential of corpus methods to uncover patterns of language use that may lead to a refinement of CDA's existing analytic repertoire.