scholarly journals A Critical Discourse Analysis of song “Look What You Made Me Do” by Taylor Swift

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 154
Author(s):  
Alek Alek ◽  
Abdul Gafur Marzuki ◽  
Didin Nuruddin Hidayat ◽  
Evi Nurisra Aprilia Sari

The aim of this study was to reveal on how the intended meaning of any figurative expressions delivered through the lyrics and also symbolic signs and gestures which delivered on a popular video clip of Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do” in order to figure out its implication toward language learning as one of the most-watched music videos on YouTube. The data of this study were the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s song “Look What You Made Me Do” and the official video clip on YouTube uploaded by VIVO on August 27th, 2017. Both the lyrics and the symbolic cues shown on the video clip were analyzed through Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis by categorizing any kinds of figurative expressions delivered to reveal the intended meaning of the song and interpret its symbolic expressions through semiotic study as research method. Thus the context is intervening the writing of the song. The results showed that there are many repetitions found to emphasize the message delivered which can be considered as something that viewed as highly really matter for the author or the singer of the song then based on the symbolic or semiotic analysis, most of the clues delivered are trying to express the singers’ transformation regarding to her new reputation as a more powerful and tough person from her past image as an innocent sweet girl. The clues are delivered through the symbols in the forms of animals such as snakes and raven which belief as the symbols of transformation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Amy Burden

EN Gender equality in language learning has received considerable attention in research on classroom policy and materials. Within studies of materials like language learning texts, most research focuses on content analyses of character roles and images, with sometimes purposeful exclusion of non-human characters. However, non-humans in children’s picture books comprise almost 60% of the characters children read. Therefore, their representations of gender, including biases, overt sexism, and covert sexism should be examined. In this study, I examine gendering of non-human characters using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Additionally, I use critical image analysis to discuss pictorial gendering of non-human characters within 12 textbooks in two of the United States’ most widely used textbook series for language learning in elementary schools. Results indicate a strong preference for aggressive and adventurous male characters, male supremacist ideologies, and the suppression of female agency. Key words: CORPUS LINGUISTICS, CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, TEXTBOOK ANALYSIS, GENDER AND LANGUAGE, ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL), CRITICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS ES La igualdad de género en el aprendizaje de idiomas ha recibido una atención considerable en la investigación sobre la política y los materiales en el aula. Dentro de los estudios sobre materiales como los textos para el aprendizaje de idiomas, la mayoría de las investigaciones se centran en el análisis del contenido de los roles y las imágenes de los personajes, con una exclusión de los personajes no humanos. Sin embargo, los personajes no humanos de los libros ilustrados para niños representan casi el 60% de los personajes que leen los niños. Por lo tanto, deben examinarse sus representaciones de género, incluyendo los prejuicios, el sexismo manifiesto y el sexismo encubierto. En este estudio, examino la representación de género de los personajes no humanos utilizando la lingüística de corpus y el análisis crítico del discurso. Además, utilizo el análisis crítico de la imagen para analizar el género pictórico de los personajes no humanos en 12 libros de texto de dos de las series de libros de texto más utilizados en Estados Unidos para el aprendizaje de idiomas en las escuelas primarias. Los resultados indican una fuerte preferencia por personajes masculinos agresivos y aventureros, ideologías de supremacía masculina y la supresión de la agencia femenina. Palabras clave: LINGÜÍSTICA DE CORPUS, ANÁLISIS CRÍTICO DEL DISCURSO, ANÁLISIS DE LIBROS DE TEXTO, GÉNERO E LINGUAJE, INGLÉS COMO SEGUNDA LENGUA (ESL), ANÁLISIS CRÍTICO DE LA IMAGEN IT L’uguaglianza di genere nell'apprendimento delle lingue ha ricevuto una notevole attenzione nella ricerca sulle norme di comportamento nelle classi così come nei materiali didattici. All'interno degli studi su materiali didattici come i testi per l'apprendimento delle lingue, la maggior parte della ricerca si concentra sull'analisi del contenuto dei ruoli e delle immagini dei personaggi con l'esclusione, a volte intenzionale, di personaggi non umani. Tuttavia, i non umani nei libri illustrati per bambini costituiscono quasi il 60% dei personaggi. Pertanto, dovrebbero essere esaminate le loro rappresentazioni di genere, inclusi pregiudizi, sessismo palese e sessismo nascosto. In questo studio si esamina la sessuazione di personaggi non umani usando la linguistica dei corpora e l’analisi critica del discorso. Inoltre, viene utilizzata l'analisi critica delle immagini per discutere la sessuazione di personaggi non umani all'interno di 12 libri in due delle serie di libri di testo più utilizzate negli Stati Uniti per l'apprendimento delle lingue nelle scuole elementari. I risultati indicano una forte preferenza per personaggi maschili aggressivi e avventurosi, ideologie suprematiste maschili e soppressione dell'agire femminile. Parole chiave: LINGUISTICA DEI CORPORA, ANALISI CRITICA DEL DISCORSO, ANALISI DEI LIBRI DI TESTO, GENERE E LINGUAGGIO, INGLESE COME SECONDA LINGUA, ANALISI CRITICA DELLE IMMAGINI


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Asti Prasetyawati

Civil Servant in Indonesia (ASN) has a bad stigma in society. This could decrease the level of public trust in ASN as well as the confidence level of young ASN for their profession. Based on these problems, various movement communities which called themselves as young ASNs were formed, one of which was the Abdimuda Indonesia (@abdimuda_id). As a movement community, Abdimuda Indonesia formed as a medium for young ASN from all regions in Indonesia to jointly develop themselves and maintain positive idealism in order to break down the negative stigma of ASN that already exists. Through Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Barthes' semiotic analysis, this qualitative study wanted to analize the text cracks which formed from framing alignment behind the discourse of ASN in @abdimuda_id. The results indicate that contents uploaded by @abdimuda_id has a tendency to reflect positive values related to ASN which used by Abdimuda Indonesia to do social change and transforming the negative stigma of ASN into a better image.Keywords: Movement community, framing alignment, critical discourse analysis, semiotics, Abdimuda Indonesia


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simphiwe Emmanuel Rens

Stemming from a broader PhD project, this article argues that neoliberal post-feminist cultural sensibilities–entrenched in contemporary popular culture–about empowered, agentic and self-determining women, are regressive for the feminist advancement of gender-relational equality in the African context. To arrive at this conclusion, the central aim was to elucidate whether the gender-performative representations prioritised in the multimodal discourses of Afrobeats music videos are implicated in post-feminist sensibilities and if so, in what ways and to what effect? Given the continent’s richly diverse, yet largely heteropatriarchal, sociocultural formations, I argue that ideas about empowered, agentic and self-determining (black) African women are–based on the limited purview offered through the multimodal discourses of a small corpus of Afrobeats music videos–no more than sociocultural façades as opposed to gender-relational realities in our context. The article relied on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a total of nine music videos drawn from the PhD project’s larger corpus of 25 Afrobeats music videos, their accompanying song lyrics, as well as a selection of YouTube viewer comments extracted from the analysed music videos. In critically exploring the gender-relational depictions prioritised in the analysed music videos, I argue for the consideration of what I am coining “misogyrom”; a gender-relational cultural sensibility which, in tandem with a post-feminist sensibility partly undergirding the multimodal discourses of these music videos, effectively veil this popular musical genre’s evidently sexist and misogynistic undertones that subvert potentialities of empowered, agentic and self-determining black African women.


Author(s):  
Maria Stamatelou

Advertising discourse is one of the society’s ‘most pervasive forms of discourse’ (Delin, 2000: 123). Advertising discourse means a way of speaking about something, or an ideological standpoint from which a product, service or idea are launched.  This article is concerned with advertising discourse Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and how advertising discourse could be used in (E)FL coursebooks and classroom to contribute to language learning. Its central argument is that activities based on the discourse analysis of whole advertising texts provoke learners to ‘…pursue the social and cultural through attention to language’ (Goddard, 2006: 1) contributing to their learning about language and their raising language awareness; indispensable steps before language learning takes place.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Rebecca Lurie Starr ◽  
Christian Go ◽  
Vincent Pak

Abstract Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)*


Hawwa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Shirin Haider

AbstractDrawing on theoretical perspectives from Western feminist research on the genre of women's magazines, I adapt Lazar's model of feminist critical discourse analysis (2005; henceforth referred to as FCDA) to write a critique on the genre of popular Pakistani women's magazines as linguistic and semiotic constructs, which articulate a certain ideology regarding the construction of Pakistani womens' identity. Through semiotic analysis of certain sections of the magazines, I point out the underlying normative and ideological assumptions in order to show how these magazine representations position women; and how semiotics wield power in marginalizing the role of women in society. The restrictive nature of discourses on femininities is highlighted through an analysis of discursive linguistic and semiotic techniques and devices. I argue that the role of semiotics is central in shaping and reinforcing such asymmetrical, gendered and sexist social patterns and practices and that these images (can) have repercussions with regard to women's sexuality(ies) and their social roles and identities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Sofiya Sarkisova

The cult of personality started by the first President of Turkmenistan Saparmurat Niyazov has acquired new dimensions with the present leader of the country. The cult of personality of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is actively constructed via mass media. This paper examines two short clips of a news report dedicated to the President’s birthday celebration that was broadcasted on the Turkmen national TV on 26 June 2020. The paper analyzes a set of specific mechanisms of flattery inflation used in the report and demonstrates special linguistic choices and visual patterns applied to force a specific ideology on the audience. Due to the multimodal nature of the analyzed discourse, multimodal critical discourse analysis has been implemented, additionally informed by the systemic functional linguistics and the visual semiotic analysis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 231
Author(s):  
Parviz Ahmadi Darani ◽  
Alireza Akbari

The critical analysis of images or visual texts, as an emerging and adapted version of critical discourse analysis (CDA), can contribute to distinguish bias or fair gender manifestation. The rationale behind this study is that little systematic and exhaustive studies have been conducted with an eye towards investigating images solely in EFL textbooks. To offset this imbalance, this paper adopted Fairclough’s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social semiotic analysis (SSA) framework by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to interrogate the extent and types of gender bias in the Four Corners series, the commercially-produced English language textbooks (Richards and Bohlke, 2012). By adopting a quantitative and qualitative design, image typologies were tallied, girded and tabulated to see how the probable and hidden portrayal image patterns had been rendered for both genders. The results revealed over-representation persists in all the textbook series in certain degrees for both genders and while a textbook series might over-represent one gender it does not necessarily imply that the individual textbook over-represents the same gender.


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