“We are here to help you”: understanding the role of careers and employability services in UK universities

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Fotiadou
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Job Market ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
The World

Abstract This paper examines the language used by careers services in UK universities. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods and tools, the analysis of 2.6 million words collected from 58 UK university websites shows that the services highlight the quantity and variety of resources and assistance offered to Higher Education (HE) students. In addition, the close analysis of linguistic data brings to light a commonly used semantic pattern where the services act as the enablers of the students’ self-beneficiary actions. The main idea communicated in these webpages is that if HE students want to succeed in the graduate job market they need to prepare for the world of work, follow instructions and develop their employability. This course of action is presented by UK universities as natural or common sense. The interpretation and evaluation of linguistic patterns that emerge from the corpus-based analysis challenges the notion of employability and its association with the idea of ‘empowering’ young people to successfully compete in the graduate job market.

Ideological Underpinnings in President John Dramani Mahama’s 2013 State of the Nation Address

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Kojo Fenyi ◽  
◽  
Georgina Afeafa Sapaty ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Cultural Character ◽  
Economic Difficulty ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Biblical Allusion ◽  
The World

This study sets out to investigate, examine and understand the hidden ideologies and ideological structures/devices in the 2013 State of the Nation Address of President John Dramani Mahama. The study specifically aimed to (i) ascertain the ideologies embedded in the speech and (ii) investigate linguistic expressions and devices which carry these ideological colourations in the speech under review. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework to examine the role of language in creating ideology as well as the ideological structures in the speech. These hidden ideologies are created, enacted and legitimated by the application of certain linguistic devices. The researchers deem a study of this nature important as it will expose hidden motives that Ghanaian presidents cloth in language in order to manipulate their audience through their speeches in order to win and/or sustain political power. Through thematic analysis, it was revealed that Mahama projected these ideologies in his speech: ideology of positive self-representation, ideology of human value, ideology of economic difficulty, ideology of power relations and ideology of urgency. It also revealed that Mahama projects his ideologies through the following ideological discursive structures: pronouns, biblical allusion and metaphor. The study has shown that language plays a crucial role in human existence as a means of socialisation. Language has been revealed as a means of communicating ideologies and events of the world. In the tradition of CDA, this study has confirmed that text and talk have social and cultural character and that discourse functions ideologically.

“They cowardly attack US, so we nobly eliminate them…”

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-315
Author(s):  
Cristina Mayor-Goicoechea ◽  
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The People ◽  
Linguistic Strategies

Abstract The threat of the Islamic State is realised both in its attacks and its discourse. To illustrate the role of linguistic threats, the present study investigates the ISIS online propaganda magazine Dabiq by combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (Romero-Trillo 2008; Baker et al. 2008). Following the two groups described by van Dijk (2003), which are represented by the in-group (ISIS) and the out-group (against ISIS), we propose a third element: the translocal group (i.e., the people in between). The results show the substantial presence of linguistic strategies enhanced by Dangerous Speech (Benesch 2013) to create a high segregation between the groups. Also, the analysis shows the inextricable relationship between conflict and dangerous language and the need to investigate this link further, with special reference to the polarisation of the groups and to the subsequent escalation of violence in discourse.

scholarly journals 'Don Fabio' and the taming of the three lions: the discursive construction of a foreign England manager's identity in the sports online written media

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (54) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Dermot Brendan Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Football Team ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Micro Analysis

<p>This article considers the appointment of a foreign manager to coach a national football team from the perspective of discursive identity construction. The data is comprised of three corpora of online versions of newspaper articles, each corresponding to a phase in Fabio Capello’s first two years of tenure. Reflecting current trends in Critical Discourse Analysis, qualitative close analysis is carried out on two articles from each corpus while quantitative analysis is extended across each corpus to identify salient and consistent aspects of discursive identity construction. Exploiting the multi-disciplinary basis of CDA, the data is examined in terms of transitivity, lexis (comprising vocabulary, collocation, deixis, and intertextuality), and narrative identity construction. Micro-analysis of grammatical and linguistic patterns is applied to indicate patterns in press coverage in each phase, and a corresponding overview considers how aspects of identity work diffused through each corpus cohere into general storylines.</p>

scholarly journals News Media Translation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Zanettin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
News Media ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Daily Consumption ◽  
Digital Convergence ◽  
The Social

As digital convergence marks the transition from print to screen culture, translation plays an increasingly important role of in the production and dissemination of the news. The translation of information in the news media is a pervasive set of practices that affects the daily consumption of the news and a topic of relevance to scholars in several areas of the humanities and the social sciences. This book provides a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to research in news media translation practices, products and processes, illustrating and discussing historical, theoretical and descriptive perspectives. Inter- and multi-disciplinary research spans fields such as Translation Studies, Linguistics, Journalism and Media Studies, and includes approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis and narrative theory to Systemic Functional Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. The book also offers first-hand analyses of news texts in English and Italian, approaching news translation from an ethnomethodological perspective.

scholarly journals Education populism? A corpus-driven analysis of Betsy DeVos’s education policy discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Michael Ian Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Reference Corpus

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, in order to assess the extent to which it aligns with the neoliberal common sense or draws upon discourses of populism that have been gaining traction in the last few years. Using methods of corpus linguistics, I engage in a critical discourse analysis of 59 of DeVos’s public speeches delivered between 2017 and 2019 in comparison with a reference corpus of speeches delivered by DeVos’s predecessors in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. The findings, informed by Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism as political logic and discourse, suggest that DeVos deploys several features of populist discourse even as she advocates policies that are characteristically neoliberal. I consider the implications of this discourse for education policy in the US.

Government Discourses on Entrepreneurship: Issues of Legitimization, Subjugation, and Power

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lew Perren ◽  
Peter L. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Government Power ◽  
The World ◽  
New Business ◽  
Government Involvement ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Government Websites ◽  
The Impact

The belief in market–driven ideology and the assumption that new business ventures create jobs and foster innovation has embedded entrepreneurship into political discourse. Academics have analyzed government policies on entrepreneurship, but they have tended to share the same underlying beliefs in the function of entrepreneurs within the economic machine. This article explores selected dimensions of the impact of those beliefs by using critical discourse analysis to show how government websites around the world portray entrepreneurs and their role in society. Discourses of government power and self–legitimization are revealed that manifest themselves in a colonizing discourse of entrepreneurial subjugation. The article concludes by challenging government rhetoric on entrepreneurship and questioning the motives underpinning the agenda of government involvement in supporting entrepreneurs.

Embracing a New Day

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-38
Author(s):  
Phillip Joy ◽  
Matthew Numer ◽  
Sara F. L. Kirk ◽  
Megan Aston
Keyword(s):  
Body Image ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
The City

The construction of masculinities is an important component of the bodies and lives of gay men. The role of gay culture on body standards, body dissatisfaction, and the health of gay men was explored using poststructuralism and queer theory within an arts-based framework. Nine gay men were recruited within the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Participants were asked to photograph their beliefs, values, and practices relating to their bodies and food. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, using the photographs as guides. Data were analyzed by critical discourse analysis and resulted in three overarching threads of discourse including: (1) Muscles: The Bigger the Better, (2) The Silence of Hegemonic Masculinity, and (3) Embracing a New Day. Participants believed that challenging hegemonic masculinity was a way to work through body image tension.

Dehumanizing to Demonizing: Critical Discourse Analysis of George Bush’s Speeches for Exploring the Influence of Dehumanizing Metaphor in Political Discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-168
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
George Bush ◽  
Sense Of Security ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Justice

To legitimize US invasion of Iraq, Bush fabricated fake intelligence reports, and depended solely on propaganda; he manipulated language in a well-calculated manner; most particularly, the metaphors chosen and devised for his speeches were such that convinced the US citizens about the legitimacy of the invasion, elicited financial support of the European allies and moral support of the majority of the world community. This research work used discourse analysis to study the metaphors that were used by George Bush in the speeches he made on 8 different occasions, and the theoretical framework used in it is the combination of critical discourse analysis CDA with postcolonial theory concept of orientalism.It utilized both qualitative and quantitative data collection tools.It found that most of the task was accomplished through the linguistic manipulation in the shape of metaphor used to dehumanize the enemy, which first made the US citizens feel as victims to the jealousy of rogue Muslim states for intending to completely annihilate them; then, it made appeal to their sense of justice, sense of security, and right to self-defense. By grouping the world citizens into Us and Them groups, the innocent, peace-loving and the war-mongers, the angels and the devils, and then by placing themselves and the rest of the world among the first group and placing the powerfulMuslims states among the second group, the US exploited the feelings and thoughts of all. Despite the UN and the rest of the world having come to know the sheer lies of the US now, the US still has managed to flog a dead horse and blind-fold majority of the world through this linguistic manipulation in the form of using dehumanizing metaphors

Nauczyciel w czasie edukacji zdalnej w polskich tygodnikach opinii. Analiza dyskursu

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Justyna Dobrołowicz
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Specific Power ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
The Press ◽  
The World ◽  
Communication Activity ◽  
The Subject

The aim of the research presented in this article is to identify the ways in which theopinion-forming press presents teachers and their remote work with students. I assume thatby constructing press statements: mentioning or concealing certain topics, using specificlinguistic forms – journalists influence what readers think about Polish teachers, how theyevaluate their attitude to work and its effects. The problems raised in the research fall withinthe field of pedeutology – a pedagogical subdiscipline examining the teaching profession.Pedeutology helps to understand the specificity of a teacher’s work, analyses its determinants,creates models of professional competences. I have made the subject of my research thepress discourse understood as a communication activity, as a result of which we learn tothink about the world in a certain way. Although the concept of discourse is currently a usefuland popular research category, it still causes many definition difficulties. I am closest tothe sociological perspective of understanding discourse, according to which discourse hasa specific power to create the world, because it provides its participants with ways ofunderstanding reality. Getting to know the press discourse about teachers is thereforea very important matter, the way of writing about this professional group determines howpeople perceive it and how to behave towards it. The method of analysing the 18 presstexts selected for the study is a critical discourse analysis, which was used to answer thefollowing research question: what linguistic means were used in the discourse on teacher’sremote work and what the effects of this discourse may be. In the analysed texts about distance education, mainly expressions with a clearly negative semantic character are used,which in turn leads to discrediting teachers and shapes the belief about the crisis situationin education.

scholarly journals Beyond Hegemony: Elaborating on the Use of Gramscian Concepts in Critical Discourse Analysis for Political Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
Asymmetrical Power

The work of Antonio Gramsci is important for the theoretical underpinnings of critical discourse analysis. However, many scholars’ engagement with Gramsci’s work within critical discourse analysis remains surprisingly thin. This article seeks to highlight the detriment to critical discourse analysis of having only a surface engagement with Gramsci. It critically assesses how Gramscian concepts such as hegemony and ‘common sense’ are currently employed within critical discourse analysis and provides more detailed discussion on the import of these concepts for critical discourse analysis. The article also argues that introducing the Gramscian concepts of the war of position and spontaneous and normative grammars enables the further realisation of critical discourse analysis’ ambition to be an emancipatory tool in political and social science. In so doing, the article contributes to work on critical discourse analysis as a method in political studies, particularly concerning the role of discourse in reproducing and maintaining asymmetrical power relations between classes and social groups, and potential challenges to this.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document