Volume 33, Issue 2

This investigation examines the interactional dimension of the preface section of an early form of news discourse. Informed by the framework of metadiscourse and incorporating insights from the study of stance and evaluation, this study explicates the ways in which the witchcraft pamphleteers strategically structured and designed the texts to secure readers' agreement through conceptual interaction. Differences in the selection of metadiscourse contributed to different writer identities and reflected generic conventions that occurred over time.

This paper provides an analysis of heteroglossic mass-mediated discourse for a National Public Radio (NPR) segment. Two Chicago teenagers covered the story of five-year-old Eric Morse, who was pushed to his death from a fourteenth-story housing project window. On a micro-discursive level, each voice represented in this segment is an amalgamated blend of lived experiences with respect to this tragedy and the events surrounding it, as well as participation in speech chains of mass-communicative, historical, and segmental natures. While presented as a documentary examining a major news event in depth through “authentic” correspondents, this segment is edited and packaged to appeal to a certain demographic makeup. Macrosociological constructs of race, class, and social position are reflected in these highly localized discourses as these experiences are edited and “packaged” for a specific listening audience.

According to the traditional mainstream perspective in organizational research, organizations are conceptualized as environments basically oriented toward the production of goods and services and/or to the implementation of the skills mastered by their operators. However, according to a narrative approach to organizations, workplaces – as well as organizations in general – could be conceived of as discursive constructions, that is, as social spaces where a thick network of narrations and discourses are informally produced and “packaged,” thus shaping and featuring the most authentic dimension of organizational identity. Therefore, in order to capture the actual ethos of an organizational context, researchers should be ready to disentangle the network of collective narrations and discourses which is shaped through and by the shared and/or contested/negotiated practices of accounting . In line with such premises, the paper analyzes a corpus of empirical evidence, collected within the organizational context through focus group discussions, in an attempt to show how discursive and narrative cues actually work as yeast for the self, even within a critical moment of transition, such as organizational change, which challenged cohesion and stability of both organizational and individual identities.

Research on metaphor has consistently proven that metaphors always involve a degree of perspectivation, where certain features are highlighted while others remain obscured (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 153). The awareness of this partial mapping is crucial for the construction and reproduction of ideology. Specifically, this study claims that the nation is a person metaphor plays a crucial role in the mass media coverage of conflicts. Through a thorough analysis of a corpus of 17 articles from The New York Times reporting on the Iranian Green Revolution (June 2009), this paper intends to unravel the extent to which both tropes allow the inclusion of the Iranian protesters into the Western “Friendly Us” while rejecting the Iranian government as an “Evil Them.” This work is theoretically framed within critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004), a fruitful intersection between critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk 2001) and conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The synthesis of the results shows evidence of the potentiality of metaphor as an essential resource in the construction and reproduction of ideological discourses in the news.

In the present study a corpus-based approach is employed to compare the use of metaphor describing the global economic crisis of 2008 in the mainstream economic press in Britain and in Russia. The analysis is carried out within the framework of cognitive metaphor theory, involving a comparative study of conceptual metaphors and frequency analysis. The results indicate that a considerable similarity exists in terms of high-level conceptual metaphors, but find subtle differences in terms of frequency and linguistic expression. We particularly focus on economic crisis is a living organism and economy is a sick organism models. The study also points at the universal and culture-specific aspects of the crisis metaphor. It is found that metaphoric expressions are more frequent in English than in Russian articles, which may be attributed to the fact that some metaphors used in Russian economic discourse have been borrowed from English by means of transliteration and have become terms; to some extent, this may also be due to differences in the writing traditions of economic articles. The pragmatic analysis shows that, in the Russian corpus, metaphors of the economic crisis bear more pragmatic force and diversity than in the English one. The results obtained may be useful for economists, financial experts, translators, journalists, and ESP learners.