Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture

The present volume offers a fresh perspective on political top-down crisis communication across several countries during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes how leaders address the growing awareness of the dangerous impact of social restrictions, along with the controversies surrounding the first vaccination campaigns. Not limited to the Western world, it also offers insights from six East European countries, Uganda, India, and Palestine. Topics discussed range from inconsistent communication patterns to populist xenophobic accents, propagandistic campaigns on vaccines, the impact of authoritarian systems on crisis communication, the contrast between scientific and African folk medicine, and the use of war metaphors.
By adopting a comparative perspective, this volume contributes to the growing body of literature on crisis communication during the pandemic, while highlighting important issues and perspectives that have yet to be extensively explored. Moreover, it aims to bridge the gap between linguistic and communication research on leadership communication during times of crisis, stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

Social Media and Society brings together a range of scholars working at the intersection of discourse studies, digital media, and society. It is meant to respond to changes in discourse technologies, i.e. the techno-discursive dynamic of social media discourses. The book critically engages with the digital dynamics of representations around discourses of identity, politics, and culture. Other than its topical focus on highly pertinent discourses, the book aspires to offer some fresh insights into the theory, methods, and implementation of CDS in digital environments. The book can be viewed as part of the developing research framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies which seeks to integrate the impact of new mediation technologies on discursive meaning-making with its critical contextualisation. In addition to its strongly global outlook, the book incorporates a wide range of research perspectives including CDA, sociolinguistics, political discourse studies, media and technology, discourse theory, popular culture, feminism etc.

This volume offers a critical discursive-argumentative framework that scrutinizes the discursive construction and, moreover, the argumentative justification of authoritarian attitudes on newspaper front pages in highly polarized times of multiple ‘crises’ in Greece. At the same time, it aspires to outline novel research avenues for scholars working in the fields of critical discourse and argumentation studies, multimodality and communication studies, that go beyond the study of the meaning potential of multimodal artifacts and focus on the study of the argumentative inferences that are triggered by multimodal discourses in polarized contexts. It frames the theoretical discussion based on concepts such as Nikos Poulantzas’ ‘authoritarian statism’ as well as Antonio Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ and ‘intellectuals’. Methodologically, it draws on the agenda of multimodal critical discourse analysis, integrating principles and tools from social semiotics and (multimodal) argumentation studies with a particular focus on inference in argumentation.

Hegemony, Discourse, and Political Strategy revisits a question that has long fascinated socialists, progressives, democrats, Greens, and Marxists – how do left-wing forces win at politics? Thirty-five years ago, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe tackled this puzzle in ground-breaking fashion, by drawing on a signature blend of linguistics, Marxist theory, and poststructuralism that came to be known as post-Marxist Discourse Theory (PDT). This book takes up the legacy of Laclau and Mouffe, and elaborates PDT into a full-fledged theory of political strategy for the first time. It argues that post-Marxism provides the foundations for a form of discourse analysis that can explain how political strategies play out as well as why they fail or succeed. Its empirical potential to illuminate the dynamics of hegemonic struggles is demonstrated through a case study focusing on the contestation and politicization of EU trade policy in the European Parliament.

This volume addresses demands on external and internal science communication in times of crisis. The contributions discuss present crises such as COVID-19 (e.g. vaccination campaigns or political reactions towards the pandemic in the context of science scepticism), and climate change (e.g. plausibility judgements or the role of scientists). They also relate their approaches to past crises, e.g. 9/11 or the Galileo affair. This volume is unique in that it is interdisciplinary from a theoretical and methodological perspective. In that respect, the authors apply concepts from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, news values analysis, pragmatics and terminology research to various types of data, such as newspaper headlines, Tweets, open letters, corpora or glossaries. The case studies are situated within different cultural contexts, with various languages being examined, i.e. Polish, Arabic, English, French, German, and Spanish. Elevating our understanding of the interface of science communication and crisis communication, this collection of articles proves valuable to scholars and students from linguistics, communication science, political science, sociology and philosophy of science.

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies, with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics. It offers an alternative way of reading the transformation in such politics via the pattern of deconstruction, reconstruction, and policymaking. It systematically delineates how President R. Tayyip Erdoğan’s political discourse evokes dialog that embodies the grand legacy of history, deconstructs the mentality of the opposition, reconstructs an alternative dialog, and converts discourse into policy. The book breaks a new ground by introducing a theoretical framework on the relationship between political discourse and policy. It traces how political stories sourced largely by appropriated historical themes and figures enable rhetoricians to weave simple yet good and influential stories to legitimize potential political action, by beguiling people’s hearts and minds.

This book brings together new research on the practices of newsmaking. Participation, engagement and collaboration have long been heralded as a vision, goal or emerging practice in the news. The claim in this volume is that they have now become sedimented as the common-sense baseline for everyday newsmaking routines. The issue for newsmakers is not ‘whether’ to engage with readers and users, but ‘how’ to engage with them. The contributions span a wide range of newsmaking contexts, including analytics-based online headline testing, the communication efforts of a Brussels-based free marketeer thinktank, collaborative science journalism and rapidly changing journalistic sourcing and writing routines from legacy to social media. Together they argue for a postfoundational perspective, which observes how participation, engagement and collaboration have emerged as a ‘foundation’ which is no longer questioned, but which can lead to new tensions in newsmaking. As such, the book provides inspirational reading for anyone in the social sciences and humanities who is interested in understanding how the ubiquity of participation, engagement and collaboration in the making of the news impacts on issues of power, transparency and control in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in the Caribbean from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. Focusing on political communication in Trinidad and Tobago, it offers unique socio-political insights into one of the most complex and diverse countries of the Archipelago. Through a detailed reconstruction of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s 2010 victorious run for office, this book offers ample empirical evidence of the multimodal discursive strategies that held the key to the success of the first woman PM candidate and her inter-ethnic coalition bid to overcome political tribalism in the country. In parallel, it explores the implications and challenges of the postcolonial Trinbagonian national project, caught between pluralism and creolization. Through its innovative, context-dependent and interdisciplinary CDS approach, this book breaks new ground in Caribbean Studies while at the same time broadening the horizons of the Euro-American tradition of Political Discourse Studies to address the complexities of global postcoloniality.

The collection of articles in Discourse Studies in Public Communication illustrates that public communication is a fascinating, evidence-based storehouse for research in discourse analysis. The contributions to this volume — in the spheres of political rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and corporate and academic communication — provide good evidence of contemporary social structure, social phenomena, and social issues. In this way, following the parameters of different analytical frameworks (critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory, appraisal theory, multimodality, etc.), the contributors address not only the linguistic aspects of texts but also, and more importantly, the cultural and cognitive dimensions of public communication in a range of real life communicative contexts and kinds of discourse. Although the volume is addressed, first and foremost, to readers with diverse interests in English linguistics, it may also prove valuable to scholars in other non-linguistic research fields like communication studies, social theory, political science, or psychology.

While we tend to divide the world into Us and Them, a number of grey nuances exist beyond this white and black distinction. The purpose of this book is to address the fuzzy areas between Us and Them through the study of European belonging as it is represented in the French elite daily, Le Monde. Corpora collected from 2014 to 2017 are used for case studies in the framework of Discourse Analysis to look at the use of “Europe” in headlines, and the representation of the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Turkey. The combination of these case studies allows to present a conceptual framework for the representation of Europe by Le Monde. However, beyond the study of what belonging to Europe means for Le Monde, this book is about the legitimacy of being “in-between”, i.e. belonging neither totally to Us nor to Them.

Focus group interviews have seen explosive growth in recent years. They provide evaluations of social science, educational, and marketing projects by soliciting opinions from a number of participants on a given topic. However, there is more to the focus group than soliciting mere opinions. Moving beyond a narrow preoccupation with topic talk, Gilbert and Matoesian take a novel direction to focus group analysis. They address how multimodal resources – the integration of speech, gesture, gaze, and posture – orchestrate communal relations and professional identities, linking macro orders of space-time to microcosmic action in a focus group evaluation of community policing training. They conceptualize assessment as an evaluation ritual, a sociocultural reaffirmation of collective identity and symbolic maintenance of professional boundary enacted in aesthetically patterned oratory. In the wake of social unrest and citizen disillusionment with policing practice, Gilbert and Matoesian argue that processes of multimodal interaction provide a critical direction for focus group evaluation of police reforms. Their book will be of interest to researchers who study focus group interviews, gesture, language and culture, and policing reform.

Language Policy in Business: Discourse, ideology and practice provides a critical sociolinguistic and discursive understanding of language policy in a minority language context. Focusing on Welsh-English bilingualism in private sector businesses in Wales, the book unpacks the circulating discourses, ideologies and practices of promoting bilingualism as a sociocultural and economic resource in the globalised knowledge economy. It sheds light on businesses as ideological sites for struggles over language revitalisation, which has been characterised by tensions and discursive shifts from essentialist ideologies about language, identity, nation and territory, to an increased commodification of bilingualism.
The book is premised on the understanding that language is a focal point for articulating and living out historical power relationships and inequalities, and that language policy processes are never apolitical. It adds to a body of literature about bilingualism in minority language contexts and, more broadly, about how the fields of politics, business and society are inextricably related.

The book explores the nexus of intellectual activity and nation-building from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. By examining how public intellectuals from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina commented on key national events in editorials and opinion pieces, it offers unique insights into contemporary nation-building discourses in an enlarging Europe. Through a detailed reconstruction of the debates concerning the selected events, the book also provides fresh empirical evidence of the implications and challenges of post-socialist transition, post-conflict reconciliation, democratisation and European integration in the post-Yugoslav region. Its versatile framework, which innovatively combines sociological and linguistic approaches to the discursive positioning of intellectuals, may be readily applied to the analysis of intellectual engagement with current affairs and public life in general.

In times of crisis, how do people conceptualise and communicate their experiences through different forms and channels? How can original research in cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis and crisis studies advance our understanding of the ways in which we interact with and communicate about crisis events? In answering these questions, this volume examines the unique functions, features and applications of the metaphors and frames that emerge from and give shape to crisis-related discourses. The chapters in this volume present original concepts, approaches, authentic data and findings of crisis discourses in a wide range of organisational, political and personal contexts that affect a diverse body of language users and communities. This book will appeal to a broad readership in linguistics, sociological studies, cognitive sciences, crisis studies as well as language and communication researchers and practitioners.

This book presents a new approach to comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary stance and combines analytical tools from linguistic discourse analysis (keywords, metaphors, argumentation, genre) and political science (political culture, comparative politics, ideologies). It is comprehensive in its introduction of approaches from the German tradition of politico-linguistics. This tradition has not, thus far, been accessible to a non-German speaking readership and hence the volume adds insights into the mechanics of political discourse from a diverse set of viewpoints.
The book analyses the modernisation discourses in social democratic parties in Britain and Germany between 1994 and 2003, a project that was named ‘Third Way’. It demonstrates how political language and political culture are related and how politicians will adapt a global ideology to local political circumstances in order to convince the electorate. At the same time, the book presents new insights into the German political culture and the version of Third Way discourses in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder which have played a key role in shaping current political discourse in Germany. It concludes with a model for the study of political discourse which makes the work relevant to scholars in Social Sciences and beyond.

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade, to shape expectations, to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics, political entities and political issues. Yet, the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation, including features of political leaders (e.g., their age and gender), countries, and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.

This edited volume offers new insights into contemporary political discourses in Slavic speaking countries by focusing on discursive and linguistic means deployed in relevant genres, such as parliamentary discourse, commemorative and presidential speeches, mediated communication, and literal and philosophical essays. The depth of the linguistic analysis reflects different levels of linkage between language and social practice constituting the discourse. The theoretical and methodological approaches discussed range from interactional pragmatics over corpus linguistics to CDA. The chapters contain original language material in Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian, and the authors address issues such as the affiliation to different political and social groups within parliamentary settings, national identity, gender and minorities, as well as cultural memory and reconciliation.

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This edited volume explores the discursive, performative and mediated dimensions of contemporary political discourse. The strengths of the volume are manifold: it contains cutting edge interdisciplinary research on political discourses by international authors (UK, USA, Italy, Germany, Austria, Denmark) in political science, discourse linguistic and social interaction research. The contributions represent a wide range of methodological approaches to political discourse, analyzing a broad variety of genres, some of which have been less analyzed to-date, for example Wikipedia articles in combination with their discussion pages or the interaction between politicians and voters in the constituency office of a British Member of Parliament. The contributions also focus on political discourses of high and relevant topicality, such as EU membership of Britain, populism, migration and xenophobia, terrorism and narratives in international relations.

This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar, facework and rapport management, classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing, conceptual metaphor and blending, mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches, news reporting, and advertising, the book also studies texts that examine book reviews, medieval medical recipes, public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts, pragmaticians and cognitive linguists, this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists, semioticians, historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines.

This volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human identity, each of which can be thought of as an aggregative abstraction with its own complexities: personal identity, group identity and collective identity. The contributions pay special attention to the interplay between the public and private dimensions of the interactions and audiences, as well as the potential impact of social and technical affordances of different communicative settings and online and offline modes of identity construction. The volume is aimed at all researchers concerned with the complex notion of identity, both in linguistics and in neighbouring disciplines.

The volume explores crisis rhetoric in contemporary U.S. American presidential speechmaking. Rhetorical leadership constitutes an inherent feature of the modern presidency. Particularly during times of critical events, the president is expected to react and address the nation. However, the power of the office also allows him or her to direct attention to particular topics and thus rhetorically create or exploit the notion of crisis. This monograph examines the verbal responses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to pressing issues during their terms in office. Assuming an interdisciplinary approach, it illuminates the characteristics of modern crisis rhetoric. The aim of the book is to show that elements of Puritan rhetoric, and specifically the tradition of the jeremiad, although taken out of their original context and modified to suit a modern multiethnic society, can still be detected in contemporary political communication. It will be of interest to students and scholars of presidential rhetoric, political communication, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies.

How is ‘crisis’, one of the most resonating words in the modern world, related to the mass media? Is crisis independent of the discourse practices of media text and talk? This book is a collection of studies that brings together current research into the ways in which crisis is constructed and communicated in contemporary media discourse. Studies in this book advance our understanding of crises as social events that are discursively constructed, performed, responded to, but also ‘rehearsed’ as a form of social practice. Relying on the application of techniques of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), including visual analysis, the book provides a wealth of empirical evidence on how crisis is mediated across a range of written, oral and visual media. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, who combine an interest in discourse analysis with disciplines as diverse as media and cultural studies, political communication, and sociology.

This book discusses transformations in the construction of culinary taste, lifestyle and class through cookbook language style in post-socialist Slovenia. Using a critical discourse studies approach it demonstrates how the representation of culinary advice in standard and celebrity cookbooks has changed in recent decades as a result of general social transformations such as postmodernity and globalization. It argues that compared to the standard cookbooks, where nutritionist ideology is at the forefront, the celebrity cookbooks reflect the conversational, hybrid nature of the genre, through which they promote global foodie discourse, while at the same time localizing the global trends to the Slovene context.
The book lays at the intersection of discourse analysis, sociology, food, cultural, communication and media studies and (post-) socialism and should be of interest to those interested in celebrities, food media, socialism and post-socialism, cookbooks, globalization and discourse change.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

The book explores eleven debates held at the Bahraini Council of Representatives (or the Parliament) over 2007-2010 to comprehend how parliamentary discourse contributes towards identity formation within Bahraini society. Within the framework of critical discourse studies, the book traces the ideological struggle over power in the linguistic content of legislative discourse through a range of discursive strategies and devices.
The authors contend that the discursive choices across the political spectrum in the legislative debates reflected strong sectarian characteristics which contained in it the seeds of political unrest of 2011, the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of Bahrain. Parliamentary rhetoric and its resonance in the public sphere, the authors argue, revealed the underlying contradictions in Bahraini society. The book highlights the significance of legislative discourse as a platform of social cohesion, and its instability being symptomatic of contradictions within society.

Anti-racist Discourse on Muslims in the Australian Parliament examines anti-racist discourse in contemporary Australian politics, in particular, how politicians contest and challenge racism against a minority group that does not constitute a traditional ‘race’. Using critical discourse analysis, this book firstly deconstructs the racist, xenophobic and discriminatory arguments against Muslims. Secondly, it highlights the anti-racist counter-discourse to these arguments. Since blatantly racist statements are less common nowadays, the book focuses on manifestations of ‘culturalist racism’. It does this by investigating how talk about Muslims positions them as not Australian or as not belonging to Australia – the book takes such ‘discursive exclusion from the nation’ as one of the most widespread forms of ‘culturalist racism’ in Western liberal-democracies. In addition to contributing to the theoretical discussion on the relationship between Muslims, racism and anti-racism, the book expands on methods that apply critical discourse analysis and the discourse-historical approach by providing a practical guide to analysing anti-racist political discourses.

Conflicts are inherent to human society, but most of them do not concern us directly as participants or eyewitnesses. How we see social conflicts depends on how they are presented to us.
This volume gathers together writings by contemporary specialists in different fields, from different backgrounds, cultures and locations, but united by a common thread: the conviction that history and current affairs are constructed and presented, not according to the facts themselves, but according to media, culture, politics, gender, religion and other factors.

Since its onset, the Greek crisis has given rise to an abundance of relevant text and talk. This volume offers an insider’s view of the discursive manifestations of the crisis, focusing on discourses in the Greek language and by Greek social actors. The contributions investigate the diverse ways in which the crisis has been communicated to the public by domestic policymakers or debated by elite, non-elite and resistant participants. Crisis discourses are also examined in the light of the rise of neo-nationalism and the extreme Right in both Greece and Cyprus. All contributions seek to meaningfully combine critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives for a better understanding of the Greek crisis as a socio-economic episode and as a discourse construct. Discourse-driven quantification and corpus-driven quantification complement each other in the critical examination of textual data as diverse as official government communications, party leader speeches, newspaper articles, public assembly resolutions, song lyrics, social media commentary and terrorist proclamations.

This collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of a range of identity struggles in the workplace context. It features twenty-two case studies that present an eclectic mix of workplaces in different socio-cultural contexts. They include, among others, household workers in Peru and Hong Kong, female professionals in India and the UK, social workers in Botswana and on Canadian reserves, tourist guides in Europe and construction workers in New Zealand. The volume addresses important questions on professional competence, group membership, (sometimes competing) expectations, and identity boundaries. The chapters establish that identity struggles are a reflection of issues of knowledge, competing norms and attempts for social change.

Does gender condition politicians’ discourse strategies in parliament? This is the question we try to answer in A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament. This book, written by experts in the field of discourse analysis, covers key aspects of political discourse such as gender, identity and verbal and nonverbal strategies: intensification, enumerative series, non-literal quotations, pseudo-desemantisation, lexical colloquialisation, emotion, eye contact and time management. It provides a large number of examples from a balanced gender parliament, the Andalusian Parliament, and it focuses mainly on argumentation, since parliamentary discourse is above all argumentative. This book will prove invaluable to students and teachers in the field of discourse analysis, and more specifically of political discourse, and will also be very useful to politicians and anyone interested in communication strategies.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Redefining Trial by Media: Towards a critical-forensic linguistic interface applies a range of linguistic models to recast trial by media not as a sensationalist and infrequent phenomenon, but as a systematic and routine process. Using critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic models, this book builds a Spectrum of Trial by Media which views juries in criminal trials as moulded by ideological media-made constructions of crime. The role of these media constructions is enhanced by the isolation levied on jurors by the linguistic composition of trial language, and reinforced by the language strategies of legal professionals in court. Critically deconstructing media portrayals of crime and forensically examining the language of criminal proceedings, this book offers a redefinition of trial by media which casts the role of the press as much more prevalent in the courtroom trial than is presently appreciated.

This volume brings together analyses of governmentality from different angles in order to explore the multiple forms, practices, modes, programmes and rationalities of the ‘conduct of conduct’ today. Following the publication of Foucault’s annual lecture series at the Collège de France, scholars have attempted to critically rethink Foucault’s ideas. This is the first volume that attempts to revisit and expand studies of governmentality by connecting it to the theories and methods of discourse analysis. The volume draws on different theoretical stances and methodological approaches including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, dialogic analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach, corpus analysis and French discourse analysis. The volume is relevant to students and scholars in the fields of critical discourse studies, conversation analysis, international studies, environmental studies, political science, public policy and organisation studies.

The discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.

With the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this book approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse. This study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and thirteen governmental speeches are analyzed accordingly. It also provides readers with a theoretical discussion on the nature of political discourse through references to deliberative, agonistic and critical realistic approaches.

Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders focuses on the discourse practices of women in global political leadership. It provides a series of discursive studies of women in positions of political leadership. ‘Political leadership’ is defined as achieving a senior position within a political organization and will often indicate a senior role in government or opposition. The volume draws on a diverse collection of studies from across the globe, reflecting a variety of cultures and distinct polities. The primary aim is to consider in what way(s) discursive practice underpins, reflects, or is appropriated in terms of women’s political success and achievements within politics. The chapters employ differing theoretical approaches all bound by the discursive insights they provide, and in terms of their contribution to understanding the role of language and discourse in the construction of gendered identities within political contexts.

This book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.

Sociology of Discourse takes the perspective that collective actors like social movements are capable of creating social change from below by creating new institutions through alternative discourses. Institutionalization becomes a process of moving away from existing institutions towards creating new ones. While discourses entail openness and enable the questioning of what is instituted, institutions offer continuity and stability to social mobilizations. This dual movement of openness and stabilization explains how social struggles ensure their continuity, without completely assuming the logic of the dominant order. The book proposes an analytical model of social change, which is unfolded through three intertwined areas: discourse, communication, and institution. Collective experiences of social change, from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, illustrate the main theoretical points and concepts. Through the example of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the book concludes by analyzing how social change from below is possible.

This book explores the various forms and functions of follow-ups in a range of political speech events. Follow-ups are conceptualized as communicative acts, in and through which a prior communicative act is accepted, challenged, or otherwise negotiated by ratified participants in the exchange or by third parties. The broad view suggested here accommodates a large variation in the functions of follow-ups, e.g. positioning, third-party involvement, evaluation and argumentation, ratification, support, challenge and attendance to face wants. These variations are explored in a range of cultural environments, such as the UK, The Netherlands, Israel and France. Inter-cultural exchanges are studied through the analysis of diplomatic discourse, interpreting and cross-cultural comparison.

What role do language and discourse play in the advancement of peace? What is the connection between a given society’s “peace language” and the repeated failure of peace initiatives involving it? At the heart of this book lie these basic questions and the attempt to shed light on them from new angles. The book focuses on an analysis of Israeli peace discourse and indicates the need for change in this discourse in order to promote a “culture of peace”. It presents the process of peace-estrangement, a set of linguistic, discursive and cultural devices intended for creating doubt regarding the positive meaning associated with the concept of peace. The approach adopted in this book is the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). This approach aims at exposing the cultural codes embedded in the discourse, which contribute to reproducing abuses of social power. The analytic chapters focus on different historical periods, since the beginning of the 20th century to this day, and deal with various genres found in diverse corpora, such as Knesset records and school textbooks.

The book examines women’s language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. The aim is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women’s language, that, to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse and ideology. The book analyzes multiple discourse examples spanning the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII years, mostly translated into English for the first time, locating them in political, social and academic developments and describing each historical period in a manner easily accessible for those readers not familiar with Japanese history. This is the first book that describes a comprehensive development of Japanese women’s language and will greatly interest students of Japanese language, gender and language studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and history, as well as women’s studies and sexuality studies.

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.

Trust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization, the drive for efficiency and accountability, and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate, it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility, authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists, discourse analysts, communication scholars, and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in society, including interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, ethnography, multimodality and organizational studies.

From Text to Political Positions addresses cross-disciplinary innovation in political text analysis for party positioning. Drawing on political science, computational methods and discourse analysis, it presents a diverse collection of analytical models including pure quantitative and qualitative approaches. By bringing together the prevailing text-analysis methods from each discipline the volume aims to alert researchers to new and exciting possibilities of text analyses across their own disciplinary boundary.
The volume builds on the fact that each of the disciplines has a common interest in extracting information from political texts. The focus on political texts thus facilitates interdisciplinary cross-overs. The volume also includes chapters combining methods as examples of cross-disciplinary endeavours. These chapters present an open discussion of the constraints and (dis)advantages of either quantitative or qualitative methods when evaluating the possibilities of combining analytic tools.

Based on extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of American presidential speeches that includes all inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages from 1789 to 2008, as well as major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945, this research monograph analyzes the various forms and functions of intertextual references found in the discourse of American presidents. Working within an original, interdisciplinary theoretical framework established by theories of intertextuality, discourse analysis, and presidential studies, the book discusses five different types of presidential intertextuality, all of which contribute jointly to creating a set of carefully manipulated and politically powerful images of both the American nation and the American presidency. The book is intended for scholars and students in political and presidential studies, communications, American cultural studies, and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in the American presidency in general.

Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The book offers multiple critical perspectives: in-depth linguistically informed analyses of the discourses of power and collaboration implicated in crisis construal and recovery; detailed examination of the critical role that language plays during the crisis life-cycle; and further problematization of the semiotic-material complexity of crisis and its usefulness as an analytical concept. The research focus is on the discursive and interactive mediation of crisis in organizational, political and media texts. The volume contains contributions from across the world, offering a polyphonic overview of ‘discourse and crisis’ research. This impressive volume will be useful to researchers and academics working on the intersection of crisis, language and communication. It is also of interest to practitioners in organizational management, politics and policy, and media.

This monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies, debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts, and also to investigate salient features of context. This allows a broader discussion of the role of this language in Scotland, and how different ways of constructing a language can percolate through society, appearing in both important, elite texts and discussions among ordinary people. It thus contributes to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots, but also expands the range of possible applications for critical discourse analysis approaches.

Featuring contributions by leading specialists in the field, the volume is a survey of cutting edge research in genres in political discourse. Since, as is demonstrated, “political genres” reveal many of the problems pertaining to the analysis of communicative genres in general, it is also a state-of-the-art addition to contemporary genre theory. The book offers new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights in both the long-established genres (speeches, interviews, policy documents, etc.), and the modern, rapidly-evolving generic forms, such as online political ads or weblogs. The chapters, which engage in timely issues of genre mediatization, hybridity, multimodality, and the mixing of discursive styles, come from a broad range of perspectives spanning Critical Discourse Studies, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and media studies. As such, they constitute essential reading for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary yet coherent research agenda within the vast and complex territory of today’s forms of political communication.

Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. Communication within and about European institutions has become more challenging in this perplexing political environment, demonstrating the complex nature of EU political discourse. In order to highlight these complexities, the contributors to this volume present different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena. The approaches represent rhetorical theory, metaphor and conceptual theory, cognitive and corpus linguistics, lexical statistics, polyphony, logical semantics, pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Through this multitude of perspectives the book complements existing approaches and suggests new approaches in the study of political discourse.

This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.

How do people construct collective identity during profound societal transformations? This volume examines the discursive construction of identity related to important national holidays in nine countries of Central Europe and the Balkans: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia. The chapters focus on the decades during which these countries moved from communism towards democracy and a market economy. This transition saw revivals of national values and a new significance of regional and transnational ties, entangled with negotiations of national identity that have been particularly lively in discourse concerning national holidays.
The chapters apply discourse analysis in addition to approaches from history, sociology, political science, and anthropology. All of the analyses make use of empirical material in the Slavic languages, including newspaper articles, interviews and other media contributions, sermons, addresses, and speeches by members of the political elite.

If politics is a serious matter and humour a funny one, this volume investigates how and why the boundaries between the two are blurred: politics can be represented in a humorous manner and humour can have a serious intent. Political humour conveys criticism against the political status quo and/or recycles and reinforces dominant views on politics. The data analysed comes from European states with different sociopolitical histories and traditions and the methodologies adopted originate in different fields (discourse analysis, folklore and cultural studies, media studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, theatre semiotics). The first part of the volume is dedicated to politicians’ humour as a means of public positioning, deliberation, and eventually attack against political adversaries, while the second one involves political satire as realised in different genres: animation, impersonation, and cartoons. Last but not least, the third part shows how political humour can be manipulated in public debates or become an integral part of postmodern art.

This innovative book critically examines patriarchal hegemonies from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. It challenges the Anglo-American bias of much gender and language research to date by including rich new data and insights from scholars working in countries such as Colombia, Liberia, Kenya, Vietnam, Japan, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden, Denmark and Poland. Within these different geographical contexts, a broadly defined notion of culture incorporates organizational cultures, subcultures of society, cultures of clans or tribes as well as national cultures, depending on the meanings ascribed to the notion by people in public and private spaces. The central question of the volume, which is addressed through a variety of data, different discourse analytical approaches and research methodologies, is: How is gender constructed in social life and in patriarchal systems through discourse in different parts of the world?

News coverage of EU negotiations, children’s war memories or TV series glamourising political processes – images pervade both private and public discourse, and visual communication plays a key role in our social negotiation of values. Conceptualising images as “images in use”, this volume considers the agencies behind visual communication and its impact on society.
Images in Use engages critically with traditional approaches to visual analysis, offers suggestions for alternative, socially situated analyses of images and demonstrates the explanatory force of thinking through “images in use” in a series of case studies. The conceptual contributions consider broader issues of critical theory, representation, as well as the mediatisation of politics. The case studies offer a survey of current visual communication including news coverage, political cartoons, political rhetoric, memory culture, celebrity humanitarianism, reality TV, as well as the narratives of blockbuster cinema and comics.
This volume proposes a new approach to visual communication, situating images in their social contexts and identifying the real, rhetorical and political impact of their use.

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is an exciting research enterprise in which scholars are concerned with the discursive reproduction of power and inequality. However, researchers in CDS are increasingly recognising the need to investigate the cognitive dimensions of discourse and context if they want to fully account for any connection between language, legitimisation and social action. This book presents a collection of papers in CDS concerned with various ideological discourses. Analyses are firmly rooted in linguistics and cognition constitutes a major focus of attention. The chapters, which are written by prominent researchers in CDS, come from a broad range of theoretical perspectives spanning pragmatics, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. The book is essential reading for anyone working at the cutting edge of CDS and especially for those wishing to explore the central place that cognition must surely hold in the relationship between discourse and society.

This book is a collection of studies on political interaction in a variety of broadcast, namely news and current affairs programs, political interviews, audience participation programs and radio phone-ins. Following a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, dialogic forms of news production and media talk in general, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars investigate the discursive and interactional practices that give rise to the arena of public politics in contemporary society. Chapters span an array of cultural contexts, as diverse as Sweden, Greece, Belgium (Flanders), the U.K., Spain, Israel, the U.S.A., Australia and China. Authors combine an interest in discourse analysis and conversation analysis with different disciplinary orientations, such as linguistics, media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, and social psychology. The book uncovers current trends in media and political discourse, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of media discourse and politics.

This monograph examines the rhetorical nature and function of representations of the future in political discourse, focusing on political actors’ use of hegemonic images of future “reality” to achieve their political goals. It argues that a key ideological dimension of political rhetoric lies in politicians’ use of projections of the future to legitimate policies and actions. This argument is grounded in systemic-functional and critical discourse analyses of the “Bush Doctrine,” the U.S. policy response to the September 11 terrorist attacks which sanctioned a “preemptive” military posture. By focusing on the discursive construction of the future, this project addresses a lacunae in critical discourse studies and calls attention to the crucial role that the discourse and practice of “futurology” has played in post-Cold War politics and society. It will be of value to scholars interested in the discourses of politics, the “war on terror,” U.S. national security, and futurology.

Journalism is often thought of as the ‘fourth estate’ of democracy. This book suggests that journalism plays a more radical role in politics, and explores new ways of thinking about news media discourse. It develops an approach to investigating both hegemonic discourse and discursive fissures, inconsistencies and tensions. By analysing international news coverage of post-Soviet Russia, including the Beslan hostage-taking, Gazprom, Litvinenko and human rights issues, it demonstrates the (re)production of the ‘common-sense’ social order in which one particular area of the world is more developed, civilized and democratic than other areas. However, drawing on Laclau, Mouffe and other post-foundational thinkers, it also suggests that journalism is precisely the site where the instability of this global social order becomes visible. The book should be of interest to scholars of discourse analysis, journalism and communication studies, cultural studies and political science, and to anyone interested in ‘positive’ discourse analysis and practical counter-discursive strategies.

This volume examines the construction of Turkey's possible European Union accession in French political discourse. In today's France, heated debates regarding Turkey's EU membership are turning into an essential part of European identity formation. Once again, the 'Turkish Other' functions as a mirror for defining not only the 'European Self', but also European values. By providing a genuine and multi-disciplinary approach for studying the Otherness attributed to Turkey, this book contributes to our understanding of the Self/Other nexus in International Relations. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this study explores the socio-historical basis of the construction of Turkey's Otherness in an attempt to identify the processes through which past memories, representations, images and fantasies regarding Turkey are inserted into the French social imaginary. Focusing on these significations, which are (re)produced and become manifest through language, this book strives to uncover the link between discourse and political action.

In the European tradition, parliaments are central political institutions that play a crucial role in the development of democratic societies. No other institution regularly offers a public arena for open deliberation and dissent, for discussing opposite points of view and for reaching compromise solutions between political adversaries. However, in spite of the growing visibility of modern parliaments, the study of parliamentary language use, interaction practices and discourse strategies has long been under-researched. Based on extensive parliamentary data, this book integrates a rich variety of innovative analytical approaches that explore the far-reaching impacts of parliamentary practices and linguistic strategies on current political action and interaction. Individual chapters problematise and re-evaluate the discourse-shaped identities and roles of Members of Parliament, the structure and functions of parliamentary discourse genres, interpersonal behaviour and intertextual meaning co-construction in post-Communist parliaments. They offer broad cross-cultural perspectives on parliamentary discursive psychology and argumentation. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of language and linguistics, rhetoric, political and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in language and politics.

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on discourses in one national context of post-communist transformation. Proposing a macro-micro approach to discourse analysis and transformation, it examines a spectrum of topics including Polish history, with its ‘interpreters’; changes in political bodies and the media, policies of the Catholic Church and the Institute of National Remembrance; xenophobia and anti-Semitism, with the emergence of unemployment and homelessness; experiences of new gender relations and migrations. In effect, drawing upon unique sets of data, the book shows how post-communist transformation can be understood through analyses of the changing public and private discourses. It shows Polish post-communism as a fragile and uneasy transformation, with people and institutions struggling to make sense of it and of life within it. The volume will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists: discourse analysts, sociologists, modern historians and political scientists, as well as to the informed lay public.

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains – political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. – it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions concerning language itself. The twenty chapters in the volume, written by specialists in political linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and social psychology, address the diversity of political discourse to propose novel perspectives from which common analytic procedures can be drawn and followed. The volume is thus an essential resource for anyone looking for a coherent research agenda in explorations of political discourse as a point of reference for their own academic activities, both scholarly and didactic.

Editorials define at a given time how media construct their socio-cultural environment and where they position themselves in it. In this sense, they are snapshots of media socio-cultural identities whose study is crucial for the understanding of media actions and interactions on the political stage. This book contributes to the study of media roles in politics with a methodological “discursive communication identity framework” and its application to a corpus of editorials. This allows for the definition of editorials as a genre, and it reveals that, thanks to a very adroit interweaving of their socio-cultural identities, news media can play a much more active role on the political stage than studies on framing and agenda setting have hitherto shown. The place of media in political communication models might therefore need to be reviewed. This book is intended for all those interested in media and politics whatever their academic specializations.

The Arab-Israeli struggle is not only a struggle over land, but a struggle over language representations. Arab reporters as well as politicians believe that their political discourses about the Middle East conflict are objective, accurate, and credible. Arab News and Conflict critically examines the role of language in the representations of events and ideologies found in news media.
Drawing on socio-political-linguistic approaches combined with real-case studies, the author offers a unique discourse analysis model for analysing politically sensitive language in the media. The focus in this study is on the Arab media discourse in times of conflict with Israel and the US, spanning the years 2001 to 2009. Using rich examples from outspoken Arab media outlets, the study explores ideological and language facts about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This book is compelling reading for students and researchers of media and cultural studies, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, and translation. It is of equal interest to political analysts, political speakers, journalists, and news editors who need to understand more about the ideological function of the language they use or the political-journalistic-linguistic nexus of power.

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary European societies is the need to promote integration and social inclusion in the context of rapidly increasing migration. A particular challenge confronting national governments is how to accommodate speakers of an ever-increasing number of languages within what in most cases are still perceived as monolingual indigenous populations. This has given rise to public debates in many countries on controversial policies imposing a requirement of competence in a ‘national’ language and culture as a condition for acquiring citizenship. However, these debates are frequently conducted almost entirely at a national level within each state, with little if any attention paid to the broader European context. At the same time, further EU enlargement and the ongoing rise in the rate of migration into and across Europe suggest that the salience of these issues is likely to continue to grow. This volume offers a critical analysis of these debates and emerging discourses on integration and challenges the assumptions underlying the new ‘language testing regimes’.

The eleven studies in this volume illustrate and advance the synthesis of discourse analysis with rhetorical studies. Rhetoric in Detail shows how a variety of techniques from discourse analysis can be useful in studying such concerns as agency, legitimation, controversy, and style, and how concepts from rhetoric including genre and figuration can enrich the work of discourse analysts. The authors’ research sites range from government commissions, political speeches, newspaper reports and letters to interviews and conversations in beauty salons and online. Methodological overviews interspersed throughout survey critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, grounded theory, computer-aided corpus analysis, narrative analysis, and participant observation and provide suggestions for further reading. Rhetoric in Detail is an invaluable source for rhetoricians looking for systematic, grounded ways of approaching new, more vernacular sites for rhetorical discourse and for discourse analysts interested in seeing what they can learn from the tradition and practice of rhetorical analysis.

When the SARS virus began its spread from southern China around the world in spring 2003, it caught regional and international health officials by surprise. The SARS epidemic itself lasted for only a few months, whereas its treatment, in communicative terms, keeps providing us with important lessons that can prepare us all for the much larger pandemic that many are predicting will eventually occur. While the medical aspects of SARS are now relatively well understood, the discursive rhetorical dimensions are much less so.
As an international epidemic, SARS arrived in a number of distinctive societies with the result that different communities handled the crisis in different ways, some far more effectively than others. Accordingly, the 12 chapters in The Social Construction of SARS are studies of how a major health-related crisis was understood and dealt with from a communicative perspective in such diverse places as Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and the United States during the SARS outbreak.

This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants, we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice, the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered, how it is remembered, and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts, historians, sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.

The discursive construction of identity is often under the control of the dominant forces in society and frequently results in forms of manipulation and abuse. This awareness led to the celebration of the First International Conference on CDA (València 2004), where over three-hundred academics working in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis became actively engaged in this important issue.

The seven studies included in this volume have been selected as representative of those areas of human experience that have been given most intellectual attention and considered to be in fact in need for critical unravelling. Ethnic categorization in multicultural classrooms, patriotic discourse construction in Chinese readers, the denial of Palestinian identity in schoolbooks, the diverse constructions of European identities, Arabs constructing themselves on the worldwide web, identity construction in sexual assault trials, the representations of a dangerous ‘other’ in cases of PLWHAs, are the contextual perspectives embraced in this book to account for forms of power abuse in the discursive construction of identities.

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.

In this volume we approach the question of what it is to be European by considering the way in which citizens talk about their everyday lives, as they are perceived against the background of Europe and European issues. Hence, the volume will offer insights into the rarely glimpsed micro political world of ordinary talk and explore the way in which such talk in social interaction and other spheres might help us understand what Europe means to a range of its citizens. Using a range of broadly discursive approaches we will touch on, inter alia, issues of identity, youth, borders, ethnicity, local politics, and minority languages. In the end, we suggest, it is a common sense view of pragmatic utility that centres what it is to be European, and this is something which is continually fluid and shifting within ever changing social, historical and political circumstances.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent is a detailed investigation of proofs of criminal intent in Israeli courtrooms. The book analyses linguistic, pragmatic, interpretative and argumentative strategies used by Israeli lawyers and judges in order to examine the defendant’s intention. There can be no doubt that this subject is worthy of a thorough investigation. A person’s intention is a psychological phenomenon and therefore, unless the defendant chooses to confess his intent, it cannot be proven directly – either by evidence or by witnesses’ testimonies. The defendant’s intention must be inferred usually from the overall circumstances of the case; verbal and situational contexts, cultural and ideological assumptions and implicatures should be taken into account. The linguistic analysis of these inferences presented here is necessarily comprehensive: it requires consideration of a variety of theoretical frameworks including speech act theory, discourse analysis, argumentation theory, polyphony theory and text linguistics.

Discourse since September 11, 2001 has constrained and shaped public discussion and debate surrounding terrorism worldwide. Social actors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere employ the language of the “war on terror” to explain, react to, justify and understand a broad range of political, economic and social phenomena. Discourse, War and Terrorism explores the discursive production of identities, the shaping of ideologies, and the formation of collective understandings in response to 9/11 in the United States and around the world. At issue are how enemies are defined and identified, how political leaders and citizens react, and how members of societies understand their position in the world in relation to terrorism. Contributors to this volume represent diverse sub-fields involved in the critical study of language, including perspectives from sociocultural linguistics, communication, media, cultural and political studies.

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude, investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is, in fact, culturally relative, compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover, event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and, as the basis for technological mega-projects, has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore, the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21^st century, ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises. The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor’s reductionist tendencies.

How do media inform our representations of the Other and how does this influence intercultural / international relations? While officially dialogues between different national societies are conducted by diplomats in bilateral and multilateral settings, in practice journalists also participate every day in such dialogues through the phenomenon of the “international media echo” in which they report on each others’ societies. Until now, media have only been investigated for their potential role in the foreign policy of specific states. In a case study involving media in three national cultures and languages (French, American and Russian), this book presents an interdisciplinary framework that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses for the study of the international media echo in an intercultural / international relations perspective. In particular, the fundamental functioning of “spirals of anti-Other rhetoric”, i.e. media wars, is examined in a Critical Discourse Analysis approach completed with Social Identity Theory and International Relations theories.

This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at ‘unification’, based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) is still in its infancy as a sub-discipline in the macrosociolinguistic tradition. It is therefore no coincidence that the editorial collaboration to produce its first definitive text Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion has involved Joshua A. Fishman, often cited in the literature as one of the founders of the Sociology of Language. Tope Omoniyi brings to the collaboration an insightful and incisive critical eye for engaging with diversity in the treatment of language and religion. Together as editors they have successfully midwived the birth of SLR. The studies and debates contained in this volume revisit those themes that both of the contributory disciplines of Sociology of Language and Religion have common interest in. The contributing authors explore new methodologies and paradigms of analysis that they deem appropriate for this interesting and complex interface in an attempt to demonstrate how the shared interests of these disciplines impact social practices in various communities around the world. The ultimate objective of the discussions is to fashion tools for creating a body of new knowledge that supports the emergence of a better society. Towards this end, the authors have harnessed resources from varied geographical, cultural, linguistic and religious constituencies without compromising analytical depth. In the process, they have opened up new areas of sociolinguistic inquiry. The volume is thus presented as a highly useful reference resource both for undergraduate and postgraduate scholarship.

Citizenship talk refers to various types of discourse initiated to make citizens take part in politically and socially contested decision-making processes (‘citizen participation’). ‘Citizenship’ has, accordingly, become one of the dazzling key words whenever the democratic deficit of modern societies is moaned about. Asking for citizenship to be conceived of as a communicative achievement, the present book shows that sociolinguistics and pragmatics can essentially contribute to this interdisciplinary up-to-date issue of research: the volume offers a theoretically innovative concept of communicated citizenship and it presents a set of methodological approaches suited to deal with this concept at an empirical level (including contributions from Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Positioning Theory, Speech Act Theory and Ethnography). Furthermore, concrete data and empirical analyses are provided which take up the case of decision-making processes around the application of modern ‘green’ biotechnology (‘GMO field trials’). The volume thus illustrates the kind of findings and results that can be expected from this new and promising approach towards citizenship talk.

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

This book is a collection of 12 papers dealing with manipulation and ideology in the 20th century, mostly with reference to political speeches by the leaders of major totalitarian regimes, but also addressing propaganda within contemporary right-wing populism and western ideological rhetoric. This book aims at bringing together researchers in the field of ideology reproduction in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms of speaker-favourable belief inculcation through language use. The book covers a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from psychosocial approaches and discourse analysis to semantics and cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The book’s central concern is to provide not only a reference work with up-to-date information on the analysis of manipulation in discourse but also a number of tools for the scholar, some of them being developed within theories originally not designed to address belief-change through language interpretation. Foreword by Frans van Eemeren.

This volume brings together a number of wide-ranging, transdisciplinary research articles on the interface between discourse studies and economics. It explores in what way economics can contribute to the analysis of discursive practices in various institutional settings as well as investigating what role discourse studies can play in economic research. The contributors are linguists, communication scholars, economists and other social scientists drawing on various traditions including Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, ethnography and the literature on the rhetoric of economics and on economic storytelling. All articles are essentially empirical, focusing on the details of actual language use. The type of data analysed ranges from the minutes of university policy meetings and large-scale corpora of newspaper language, over books of economic theory from both well-respected economists and monetary cranks, to cartoons from The Economist.

In Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World the discourse of politicians and policy-makers in Britain links languages other than English, and therefore speakers of these languages, with civil disorder and threats to democracy, citizenship and nationhood. These powerful arguments travel along ‘chains of discourse’ until they gain the legitimacy of the state, and are inscribed in law. The particular focus of this volume is on discourse linking ‘race riots’ in England in 2001 with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which extended legislation to test the English language proficiency of British citizenship applicants.
Adrian Blackledge develops a theoretical and methodological framework which draws on critical discourse analysis to reveal the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures; on Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic nature of discourse to demonstrate how voices progressively gain authority; and on Bourdieu’s model of symbolic domination to illuminate the way in which linguistic-minority speakers may be complicit in the misrecognition, or valorisation, of the dominant language.

This new book extends Teun A. van Dijk’s earlier research on discursive racism to the Latin world. He presents a first inventory of elite discourse and racism in Spain and Latin America by examining discursive reactions in Spain to recent immigration, as well as age-old racism and ethnicism in text and talk in Latin America (especially Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile). Through careful analysis of the media, political discourse, textbooks and other public discourses in these countries he shows that discursive euro-racism is ubiquitous also in countries outside Europe. Spain reproduces, but as yet in a less radical way, the kind of racist discourse we find elsewhere in Western Europe. In Latin America, ethnicism and racism against the indigenous peoples and against Afrolatins has prevailed in elite discourse since colonialism and slavery.
This is the first integrated study of discursive racism in the Latin world and provides a useful framework for similar research.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has established itself over the past two decades as an area of academic activity in which scholars and students from many different disciplines are involved. It is a field that draws on social theory and aspects of linguistics in order to understand and challenge the discourses of our day. It is time for A New Agenda in the field. The present book is essential for anyone working broadly in the field of discourse analysis in the social sciences. The book includes often critical re-assessments of CDA's assumptions and methods, while proposing new route-maps for innovation. Practical analyses of major issues in discourse analysis are part of this agenda-setting volume.

The volume provides a multidisciplinary approach of the discursive dimension of power. It challenges the usual conception of discourse and power that underlies most of the current theories in contemporary discourse analysis, and shows that it is unsatisfying in so far as it reduces power to domination and discourse to power technology. In opposition to such a conception, an alternative model of power-in-discourse is constructed. It is called "Dialogical Model" in accordance with its being grounded in a dialogical conception of discourse that naturally leads to a participative conception of power (as empowerment). Part One provides the DM with theoretical and philosophical foundations, while Part Two affords empirical evidence by applying the DM to such typical situations as journalistic discourse under censorship, classroom sessions, and children interaction in a problem-solving situation.

What actually happens in counselling interactions? How does counselling bring about change?
How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?
By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.
This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.

The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various analytical tools of functional linguistics, this volume seeks to provide explanatory analyses of parliamentary discourse in different countries – Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States – and to explore its peculiarities. Each chapter outlines a particular methodological framework and its application to instances of parliamentary discourse on important issues such as war, European integration, impeachment and immigration.

(Mis)Representing Islam explores and illustrates how élite broadsheet newspapers are implicated in the production and reproduction of anti-Muslim racism. The book approaches journalistic discourse as the inseparable combination of ‘social practices’, ‘discursive practices’ and the ‘texts’ themselves from a perspective which fuses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. This framework enables Richardson to (re)contextualise élite journalism within its professional, political, economic, social and historic settings and present a critical and precise examination of not only the prevalence but also the form and potential effects of anti-Muslim racism. The book analyses the centrality of van Dijk’s ideological square and the significance and utility of stereotypical topoi in representing Islam and Muslims, focusing in particular on the reporting of Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Iraq and Britain.
This timely book should interest researchers and students of racism, Islam, Journalism and Communication studies, Rhetoric, and (Critical) Discourse Analysis.

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

The Art of Commemoration focuses on a particular historical event that illustrates how nations define their own identities and establish mutual relations in their discourse: the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 and its Commemoration in 1994. This Commemoration was an innovative and unique form of transnational communication because it brought together representative speakers from all parties involved. They considered the commemorated event from different perspectives: the victim (Poland), the former enemy (Germany) and the former allies (England, USA, France and other countries, as well as Russia which liberated Poland but had not supported the Uprising). A letter from the Pope added a Catholic perspective.
The ‘art of commemoration’ consists in invoking the past events from one’s own perspective while simultaneously considering the other perspectives, as well as in making sense of the past and present at the same time. This volume analyses the artful way in which the speakers coped with these complexities in a full discourse analytic reconstruction of each address.

When politicians and pundits in the Middle East discuss democracy, do they mean it? Looking at public discourse about democracy in contemporary Egypt, Dunne proposes a fresh way of reading Arabic political discourse. She charts a method combining ethnographic research into communities of people producing political discourse with investigation of the texts themselves, using tools from anthropology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics — a method with broad applicability to political discourse generally. Taking off from the premise that all discourse is based in social interaction, this book demonstrates that looking at the ways individuals and groups use public discourse to perform critical social and political functions yields entirely new perspectives on the significance of the discourse. Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse is a valuable resource for students of linguistics, political science, democracy studies, Arabic language, and Middle East area studies.

Silencing is not only a physically coercive act. It is also an act of language involving forms of selection, representation and compliance. Discourse and Silencing weaves together theories and examples of discourse from different disciplines in order to put forward a theory of silencing in language: that discursive systems filter, represent and displace types of knowledge into other forms of expression.
Each chapter of the book analyses examples of silencing through discourse in various social and political fields. The examples cover courtroom trials, government censorship, domestic violence, marital conversations, penal institutions, news media, and political rhetoric. They cover societies ranging from Eastern and Central Europe, Canada and the U.S. to New Zealand and Japan. The contributors clarify the difference between chosen silences and the silencing that, as a practice, seeks to limit, alter or de-legitimise another’s discourse. The book also examines the continuous resistances and shifts in discourse and silencing within the social and political frameworks in which interlocutors negotiate their relations to each other.

Human beings are political animals.
They are also articulate mammals.
How are these two aspects linked?
This is a question that is only beginning to be explored. The present collection makes a contribution to the investigations into the use of language in those situations which, informally and intuitively, we call ‘political’. Such an approach is revealing not only for politics itself but also for the human language capacity.
Each chapter outlines a particular method or analytic approach and illustrates its application to a contemporary political issue, institution or mode of political behaviour. As a whole, the collection aims to give a sample of current research in the field. It will interest those who are beginning to carry the research paradigm forward, as well as provide an introduction for newcomers, whether they come from neighbouring or remote disciplines or from none.

This book argues for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the language of judges with respect to the issue of gender discrimination. Drawing its inspiration from Dell Hymes' socially constituted linguistics, the author examines the language of the judicial opinions of four U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing social and legal discrimination against women. Through a linguistic analysis that is informed by a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, this book addresses the complex issues of the power of judges and ideologies, the politics of language use, and feminist contributions to the subject of discrimination and women's rights. This book is most suitable for researchers and students in cultural studies, ethnography, feminist legal studies, forensic linguistics, gender studies, ideology research, pragmatics, semiotics, and social studies.

Gender and discourse interface in many more epistemological sites than can be represented in one collection. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis therefore focuses on a principled diversity of key sites within four broad areas: the media, sexuality, education and parenthood. The different chapters together illustrate how taking a discourse perspective facilitates understanding of the complex and subtle ways in which gender is represented, constructed and contested through language.
The book engages critically with long-running and on-going debates, but also reflects and develops current understandings of gender, identity and discourse, particularly the shift from 'gender differences' to the discoursal shaping of gender. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis thus offers not only insights and methodologies of new empirical studies but also careful theorisations, in particular of discourse, text, identity and gender.
The collection is a valuable resource for researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates working in the area of gender and discourse.

This book proposes an original policy framework for addressing hate speech. Gelber argues that a policy designed to provide support to affected groups and communities to enable them to speak back when hate speech occurs, is a more useful way of addressing the harms of hate speech than punitive measures. She suggests that “speaking back” allows the affected groups to contradict the messages contained in the words of the hate speakers, and to counteract the silencing, disempowering and marginalising effects of hate speech. Gelber’s argument uniquely synthesises the ideas of defending the importance of participating in speech, recognising the harms of hate speech and acknowledging that targeted groups may require assistance to respond.