The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-632
Author(s):  
Elda Weizman ◽  
Anita Fetzer

Abstract This paper sets up to show how accountability for communicative action is constructed in online journalism as an object of talk, comparing British English and Israeli Hebrew discourse communities. The analysis utilizes a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference supplemented by cognitive semantics and corpus-assisted tools. The discussion draws on data collected from the websites of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, Ha’aretz and Ynet. Focusing on self- and other-positioning of commenters and columnists as citizens, we explore how the accountability of the elite for communicative action and the accountability of their actions to citizens are discursively constructed by ordinary persons (in their role as commenters) and by non-ordinary persons (in their role as columnists, including journalists, experts and authors). The analysis indicates conceptual similarities coupled with discursive differences between the discourse communities under study.

2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Arshad Ali ◽  
Athar Rashid ◽  
Shahid Abbas

Modal verbs are used to construe an important grammatical expression called modality, which has its various shades in almost every newspaper. Modality is considered of extreme importance in media discourse. This paper presents the comparative study of modal verbs in Dawn, an English Pakistani newspaper, and Guardian, a British English newspaper. For this investigation, a corpus was designed using an equal number of editorials from both the newspapers and the analysis was carried out using Antconc, a corpus tool. The analysis revealed that Guardian editorial writers use a greater number of predictive modal verbs like will and would. On the other hand, Dawn editorial writers use a greater number of obligatory modal verbs like must and should. Also, the editorial writers of Dawn use a higher number of modal verbs like may and might to express possibility and ability.


Kalbotyra ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (69) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Elena Domínguez Romero

This paper is a corpus-based study of the evidential realisations of object-oriented perception verbs in English and Spanish written and oral media discourse. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the different uses and complementation patterns taken by the English words look and sound and their Spanish counterparts se ve and suena. The procedure followed involves a contrastive analysis methodology: (i) description of data, (ii) juxtaposition and (iii) contrast. The data has been taken from oral and written media discourse corpora in English and Spanish. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the uses and complementation patterns adopted by object-oriented perception verbs in both written and oral English and Spanish, thus making a contribution to a debate in which Spanish has been obviated to date.


Author(s):  
Александра Васильевна Сангадиева

Введение. Исследуется метафорическая концептуализация Брексита в новостном дискурсе. Материал и методы. Материалом послужили новостные тексты британских интернет-изданий (The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph и британского интернет-портала BBC News), освещающих тему Брексита; методами исследования – дефиниционный анализ, компонентный анализ, метод сплошной выборки, метод интерпретационного и концептуального анализа, метод метафорической концептуализации. Результаты и обсуждение. Проведен анализ и осуществлена интерпретация метафорической репрезентации социально-политического явления Брексита через религиозные концепты. Религия пронизывала историю всех народов, все сферы человеческого бытия, проникая в сознание и подсознание людей. Значимость религии в современном обществе обусловливает интенцию авторов новостей задать необходимые ценностные ориентации для реципиента в имплицитной форме. Выявлена метафорическая субмодель BREXIT – RELIGIOUS BELIEF (БРЕКСИТ – РЕЛИГИОЗНОЕ УБЕЖДЕНИЕ), в терминах которой Брексит интерпретируется как религиозное убеждение, что значительно увеличивает его воздействующий потенциал. Один из результатов исследования – выявление в рамках религиозной модели субмодели BREXIT – CULT (БРЕКСИТ – КУЛЬТ), которая имеет негативную коннотацию, обозначая псевдорелигиозную организацию. Анализируется когнитивная метафорическая модель Брексита, в которой идеология Брексита как священной войны за возвращение национального суверенитета трансформируется в идеологию «зомбированного» тоталитарного культа как стремления к псевдоценностям. Выявлена метафорическая субмодель BREXIT – SECT (БРЕКСИТ – СЕКТА), посредством которой устанавливаются концептуальные связи между политикой Б. Джонсона в отношении Брексита и террористической организацией Аль-Каида, чьи приверженцы готовы умирать сами и убивать других за свою идеологию. Аргументируется реализация интерпретирующего потенциала религиозной концептуальной метафоры в формировании отрицательного образа Брексита в новостном дискурсе. Заключение. В рамках религиозной метафорической модели БРЕКСИТ – РЕЛИГИЯ выявлены субмодели БРЕКСИТ – РЕЛИГИОЗНОЕ УБЕЖДЕНИЕ, БРЕКСИТ – КУЛЬТ, БРЕКСИТ – СЕКТА. Интерпретирующий потенциал религиозной метафоры реализован. Introduction. The socio-political event of the UK’s exit from the European Union has attracted widespread attention in the mass media since 2016. The article focuses on the metaphorical conceptualization of Brexit in news discourse. Material and methods. The research is based on the news texts on Brexit from the British internet-editions such as The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and BBC News. The research methods used in the paper are the definitional analysis, componential analysis, complete enumeration method, interpretation analysis, content analysis, metaphorical conceptualization method. Results and discussion. The paper gives a detailed analysis and interpretation of Brexit metaphorical representation from a religious perspective. The religion has always played an essential role in the history of human society. It is considered not only to permeate all the spheres of human activity but also consciousness and subconsciousness. Therefore, journalists implicitly try to influence the values of recipients. The metaphorical submodel BREXIT – RELIGIOUS BELIEF revealed in the paper describes Brexit primarily as a religious belief to add more value for the British society. The metaphorical submodel BREXIT – RELIGIOUS BELIEF is transformed into the submodel BREXIT – CULT with a negative connotation as a pseudo-religious organization. The metaphorical submodel BREXIT – SECT considered in the paper has a destructive nature and it compares B. Johnson and his supporters with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda that is ready to murder and die for its ideology. Conclusion. Productive religious metaphorical submodels interpret Brexit as a negative process. The interpretive potential of conceptual religious metaphor is realized.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01151
Author(s):  
Marina Yu. Ryabova

The article deals with the analysis of graphic-stylistic means of the language, such as punctuation, functioning in modern English based on the language material of literary and media texts (on-line site of The Guardian). The aim of the paper is to reveal some actual functional characteristics of punctuation marks compared with their traditional syntactic and stylistic usage. The linguistic analysis is conducted within the methodology of semantic and syntactic interpretation and description. The following new functional usage of punctuation marks is described: the playing (ludic) function (creating an ironic, comic or parody effect in communication) and the expressive function emphasizing the semantics of an element in a communicative context. The importance of the undertaken analysis is to show the necessity of studying the English punctuation functions from the point of view of modern theory of communication and media linguistics as well as with an empirical educational purpose of teaching the English grammar.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thorsten Wojczewski

Abstract Employing a discursive understanding of populism and combing it with insights of poststructuralist international relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article examines the conceptual links between foreign policy and populist forms of identity construction, as well as the ideological force that populism can unfold in the realm of foreign policy. It conceptualizes populism and foreign policy as distinct discourses that constitute collective identities by relating Self and Other. Identifying different modes of Othering, the article illustrates its arguments with a case study on the United States under Donald Trump and shows how the Trumpian discourse has used foreign policy as a platform for the (re)production of a populist-nationalist electoral coalition. Unlike common conceptions of populism as an ideology that misrepresents reality, the article argues that the discourse develops its ideological appeal by obscuring the discursive construction of social reality and thereby promising to satisfy the subject's desire for a complete and secure identity.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Al-Shaer

It is well documented that there is a one-to-many relationship between Arabic and English genitival constructions. However, it is unclear whether, given this syntactic variation, such constructions show equivalence in semantic function. For this purpose, a corpus-based contrastive analysis of these genitive constructions in a bilingual novel is carried out. As a prelude to a quantitative and qualitative inspection of the data, the (non)interchangeability of the alternative English genitives is determined by eliciting intuitive judgments from 10 linguistically naïve native speakers of British English. Quantitatively, the study shows that the Arabic genitive almost covers the semantic functions expressed by the various English genitives found in the corpus. Qualitatively, the study reveals that the flexibility derived from the English genitive variation, as opposed to the fixed word order of the Arabic genitive, allows the speaker to convey additional meaning. However, the Arabic genitive which employs various formal devices such as overt markers of case, gender, number, definiteness and person can express the same semantic functions. These features render Arabic functional with one genitive and require English to vary its genitive relative to certain phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Innocent Chiluwa

This paper attempts to show how social and political crises are constructed, represented/mediated in the Nigerian print media news headlines. Nigeria’s leading newsmagazines and newspapers namely The News, Newswatch, Tell, The Guardian and The Punch are selected for the study. From a corpus of thirty-two news headlines being the publications of the above news media between 2000 and 2006, fifteen headlines and their overlines covering the years that marked the end of military rule and the consolidation of democratic government in Nigeria are purposively selected and analyzed within the framework of the systemic model and critical linguistics. The study shows that socio-political crises have been frequent in Nigeria and that the much anticipated recovery associated with democracy has so far eluded the country. In fact the country has witnessed more social crises, national disasters and ethnic violence in the seven years of civil government than at other times. The study also shows that news headlines — an integral part of media discourse, is an instrument for molding social actions, attitudes and perceptions and are also used as an ideological tool for social criticism. Some of the headlines however, exaggerated the crises and indeed misinformed the general public about the identities and activities of certain people as well as the state of security in Nigeria.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
M. S. Matytsina ◽  
O. N. Prokhorova ◽  
I. V. Chekulai

The paper based on the content of the Facebook group Immigrants in EU and The Daily Mail publications discusses the issue of discursive construction of an immigrant image in media discourse. Using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the authors claim that the image of an immigrant can be viewed as a discursive construct, and the main discursive strategies involved in its construction include the reference strategy and the prediction strategy. As a result of the analysis, the so called CDA-categories (topic blocks) underlying the formation of the immigrant figure, are identified and illustrated by the relevant examples, the need for further study of the social media discourse as part of critical discourse analysis is justified. The relevance of such study is due to the growing research interest in discursive construction of the immigrant figure in the media discourse, since it underpins the definition of discourse as a form of social practice, not only reflecting processes in the society, but also exerting a reciprocal effect on them. The use of both verbal and non-verbal means in the media texts under study reflects the intention of the authors of the messages to use all possible communication channels when constructing an immigrant’s image. The results show that the dichotomy of “friends and foes” is being formed and maintained by the British newspaper The Daily Mail, while the members of the Immigrants in EU group try to mitigate the conflict between immigrants and indigenous people.


2017 ◽  
Vol II (I) ◽  
pp. 273-288
Author(s):  
Haleema Khalid ◽  
Muhammad Shahbaz ◽  
Behzad Anwar

This article aims to investigate Maalik, Pakistani political thriller as the product of ‘politicotainment’, a genre combining politics and entertainment. Keeping in view the nexus of politics, media and language, Discourse Historical Approach from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis with a particular focus on media, discourse, and society is employed. Maalik, is exceptional movie because it is explicitly related to real life socio-political and socio-cultural events of Pakistan; its focus on social and political issues such as exploitation of power and corrupt political system shifts the focus towards the ownership of Pakistan and accepting responsibilities. Therefore, the film connects the emerging political discourse in Pakistan with the rising public pulse against corruption and call for accountability. This research provides insights regarding the discursive construction of contemporary Pakistani narrative in the time of national crisis in order to reveal the projected and recontextualized norms in the context of Pakistan.


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