Volume 43, Issue 3

The travesty of the Life Esidimeni project in South Africa, which claimed the lives of 144 mental health users at psychiatric facilities in Gauteng between 2016 and 2017, is multifaceted. One facet involves strategies of blame avoidance designed to escape liability for the deaths that were expressed by the former Member of the Executive Council for Health and other public health officials during the Life Esidimeni Arbitration Hearings. These hearings were broadcast on state television between October 2017 and 2018, and eight samples from the hearings were analysed for specific blame avoidance strategies. Following the principles of qualitative discourse analysis, this paper extends research on blame avoidance behaviour in the public administration and policy domain, exploring three key officials’ micro- and macro-level choices of blame avoidance in the context of the arbitration hearings to develop a more comprehensive account of these strategies. A public hearing is a discourse setting that is reactionary in nature, and our findings on the micro-level, a neglected dimension of research on blame avoidance behaviour, extend our understanding of these behaviours. We propose that at least two continua for blame avoidance are relevant in this setting.

News platforms increasingly cover ongoing events through live blogs. In these texts, individual updates with the latest developments are issued every few minutes and added into a reverse chronology list containing everything published up to that point. Even though the fragments work as a whole – as they make up a single account of a specific event – they must, at the same time, let online users opt in and out at different points of the coverage, while providing the necessary elements for a felicitous interpretation. This article examines the discursive mechanisms that allow live blogs to do this. The discursive analysis of six reports by The Guardian and BBC News shows that cohesive links that make interpretation dependent on items that have already been mentioned, such as pronouns and conjunctions, while common within single posts, rarely ever create ties across them. The study identifies the most frequent types of cohesive devices between posts and explains how they also interact with other elements that provide them with context. Finally, I conclude that the relative autonomy the posts enjoy enable users to navigate the text in non-sequential ways, which reduces the media’s control over the discursive interaction as the final product is assembled by the reader.

This article aims to identify how Chinese and Japanese online English-language newspaper editorials construct their arguments about a group of disputed islands – the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, and the Senkaku Islands in Japanese – from a linguistic perspective. Newspapers in the two countries have played an important role in appealing not just to domestic readers, but also to international readers on this issue. A corpus of 50 editorials published between 2012 and 2016 was compiled from the English-medium Chinese and Japanese newspapers. The article examines evaluative language in the editorials, using an APPRAISAL framework developed within systemic functional linguistics. This project also adopts corpus techniques for selecting the samples. The findings show that the two corpora frequently used negative evaluations towards the opposite country. The two corpora, however, differed in the varieties of evaluations in the editorials. By exploring the discursive construction of the editorials in relation to contextual information, the analytical focus is on the way the discursive resources contribute to realising the ideologies behind the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute. The findings contribute to our understanding of the way conflicting views can be constructed with the use of linguistic resources in the context of online English-medium news media.

This article presents the findings of a corpus-based diachronic discourse study of the representations of the causes of and solutions to China’s air pollution in the official Chinese English-language China Daily (2008–2018) with a view to exploring agency for both causal responsibility and treatment responsibility. The findings reveal that greater prominence is given to treatment responsibility than to causal responsibility. Causal responsibility is mainly attributed to no agents or to physical agents, while treatment responsibility is chiefly assigned to social agents. In addition, a transitivity analysis shows that causer agents are primarily represented by Actors in material processes and Tokens in relational processes, whereas solver agents are principally represented by Actors in material processes, Tokens and Carriers in relational processes, Sensers in mental processes, and Sayers in verbal processes. It is argued that these linguistic features are linked to socio-political factors within which the press operates.

In everyday conversations, after a story of an event or one’s experience is told, the recipient often tells a second story, similar to the previous one in terms of content and structure. A second story exhibits, rather than simply claims, its teller’s understanding of a prior story. While stories are often told with reenactments of an event, this study specifically examines the cases in which second tellers produce reenactments similar to that presented by the prior teller through reusing similar verbal and bodily conduct produced by the prior teller. Drawing on conversation analysis using a total of approximately 16 h of Japanese videotaped everyday conversation, this study explores how reenactments of similar moments contribute to the display of understanding and what they further accomplish. The findings reveal that the second teller’s reenactments similar to the one presented by the prior teller exhibit the understanding of not only the contents, but also the main focal point of the prior story while demonstrating different stances towards it. This study contributes to the body of research on the embodied display of understanding by showing how performing an operation on already shared verbal and bodily resources embedded within the ongoing sequence can exhibit multiple levels of understanding.

Although the phenomenon of “leftover” women and men in China has been hotly debated over the past decade, there are few comparative studies investigating similarities and differences underlying media representations of the two groups. To fill this gap, this study employs a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to investigate the discourses of similarities and differences underlying the representations of leftover women and men in the Chinese English-language news media between 2007 and 2017 by building two corpora. The findings indicate a similar discourse surrounding both leftover women and men, which is heterosexual marriage pressure. The findings also reveal two discourses highlighting differences between leftover women and men: while leftover women are represented as A-grade women facing fertility issues, leftover men are represented as D-grade men confronted with the demographic crisis. These discourses have ideological implications for heteronormativity and patriarchy. The study sheds light on non-hegemonic forms of femininity and masculinity constructed by the media in contemporary Chinese society, as well as the usefulness of employing corpus techniques to examine both similarities and differences in gender representations.