scholarly journals Discursive Inclusion and Exclusion of Transgressor(s) in English and Arabic Political Condemnations

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 147-153
Author(s):  
Istiqlal Hassan Ja’ afar ◽  
Maitham Sarhan H. Alhamad
Keyword(s):  
Social Actor ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Moral Transgression

Political condemnations are expressive illocutionary acts enacted by political actors to publicly denounce and raise awareness of a certain moral transgression(s) committed by particular transgressors(s). The current article aims to cross-culturally investigate the linguistic devices deployed by politicians to include or exclude the identity of the transgressor(s) in selected English and Arabic political condemnation statements and to investigate how political affiliations and disaffiliations of political actors affect and influence the ways social actors are represented in political condemnations. The article mainly draws on Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Representation framework to analyze the selected dataset. The study concludes that in both languages, condemners adopt, more or less, similar linguistic devices and discursive strategies to including and excluding of transgressor(s). It was also found that unlike the English statements, whereby implicit inclusion, i.e. backgrounding is utilized, transgressor(s) in the Arabic statements is found to be either included or excluded in the condemnation statements. Moreover, transgressors’ inclusion and exclusion were found to be, to a certain degree, ideologically motivated and deeply affected and mostly demarcated by the relationships between the condemners and the condemned parties on one hand, and between the condemning party and the parties affected by the transgression act(s).

“Uma revolução democrática é sempre uma revolução inacabada” — or — “A democratic revolution must always remain unfinished”

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
Discourse Historical Approach ◽  
Ideological Tensions

This article analyses the discursive construction of collective memories and the function of commemorative events for national identity. It focuses on how the 30th anniversary of the Portuguese 1974 revolution was portrayed in the government’s Programme of Action issued for the 2004 commemorations and in forty-three newspaper opinion articles also published in 2004. The 1974 revolution ended a 48-year right-wing dictatorship and has shaped subsequent historical events since the 1970s. When the Programme of Action changed the 1974 slogan ‘April is revolution’ into ‘April is evolution’, the written press responded by conducting a debate on this reframing. Using the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA as the analytical framework, this paper highlights the discursive strategies on which the government’s manifesto was built and explores the opinion articles’ ongoing political and ideological tensions over the revolution, its commemorations, and how it paved the way into Europe, by describing the main macro-discursive strategies and raising issues regarding the (mis)representation of social actors and social action.

scholarly journals Lost in Translation? Multiple Discursive Strategies and the Interpretation of Sustainability in the Norwegian Salmon Farming Industry

Food Ethics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernt Aarset ◽  
Siri Granum Carson ◽  
Heidi Wiig ◽  
Inger Elisabeth Måren ◽  
Jessica Marks
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Salmon Farming ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
Sustainability Concept ◽  
Contextual Environment ◽  
Farming Industry ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractThe term ‘sustainability’ is vague and open to interpretation. In this paper we analyze how firms use the term in an effort to make the concept their own, and how it becomes a premise for further decisions, by applying a bottom-up approach focusing on the interpretation of ‘sustainability’ in the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. The study is based on a strategic selection of informants from the industry and the study design rests on: 1) identification of the main drivers of sustainability, and 2) the application of five different discursive strategies to analyze how the firms maneuver to legitimize ‘sustainability’ in their conduct. We employ the Critical Discourse Analysis framework, which emphasizes how discourses provide different concepts of meaning. The sustainability concept is assessed based on how sustainability is brought into action by social actors in a legitimate way, and how this action results in sustainable practices. The empirical case of the study is the verbal justification of sustainability practices among representatives of the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. We aim to find out how these representatives translate the rather vague directives of the sustainability concept into legitimate choices that resonate with the firms’ contextual environment, hence, how the salmon farmers perceive, explore, interpret, explain, enact, and defend the diverse landscape of sustainability when implementing professional decisions. We found a trend of passive adaptation to external requirements, such as public regulations and regulative requirements from certification bodies. At the same time, there are progressive forces that attempt to improve the sustainability of the farming practices by involvement in research and innovation projects or cooperation with other firms, e.g. the contribution from offshore engineers in developing high seas farms. The strategies outlined and discussed cannot be seen as a typology to categorize the firms. More than one discursive strategy may be involved in one firm’s choice, and the strategies may work on different levels.

scholarly journals The Journalistic Representations of Saudi Women in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): A Corpus Critical Discourse Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Waheed M. A. Altohami ◽  
Amir H. Y. Salama
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
American English ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Context Model ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Saudi Women

This paper is a corpus critical discourse analysis of the journalistic representations of Saudi women as they appear in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008). It follows a sociocognitive approach (van Dijk, 2008) to explore the thematic foci discussing issues related to Saudi women and to discuss the discursive strategies implemented to propagate such issues. The study has reached four findings. First, the thematic foci related to Saudi women are textually and referentially coherent as they were meant to provide a grand narrative underlying a specific context model. Second, Saudi women are negatively represented as no social roles are ascribed to them throughout the corpus. Third, different social actors are also represented alongside Saudi women to put them in a wider socio-cultural context to aggravate their problems. Finally, the most effective discursive strategies which mediated the running context model included victimization, categorization, stereotyping, normalization, and exaggeration.

Portrait of liberal chaos: RT’s antagonistic strategic narration about the Netherlands

2021 ◽  
pp. 175063522110647
Author(s):  
Aiden Hoyle ◽  
Helma van den Berg ◽  
Bertjan Doosje ◽  
Martijn Kitzen
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Psychological Responses ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Media Outlet ◽  
Analysis Of Narratives

Hostile political actors can use antagonistic strategic narration as a means of marring the image of targeted states in the international arena. The current article presents a content analysis of narratives about the Netherlands that were published by Russian state-sponsored media outlet RT between 2018 and 2020, capturing a period of heightened tension between the states. The authors distil and describe six overarching narratives used to portray the Netherlands as a state of liberal chaos. They analyse them using a framework of strategies underpinning Russian state-sponsored media’s narration, and interpret their strategic functions within the context of recent Dutch–Russian relations. Finally, they provide directions for future research, such as expanding on nuances within Russian media’s negative portrayals of different states or exploring the possible psychological responses this narration may elicit in the Dutch domestic audience.

scholarly journals Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Yanshuang Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Air Pollution ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Civil Discourse ◽  
The Common

The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this “green speak”. This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China’s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software—eximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

Home truths: fieldwork, writing and anthropology’s ‘home encounter’

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Rachel Humphris
Keyword(s):  
Social Roles ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Home Space

This chapter presents the methodology of the research including theoretical discussions of ‘anthropological truth’, the researchers’ shifting situated positions throughout the fieldwork and the writing process. This chapter draws on Munn’s conception of the social actor as a mobile spatial field. The home emerged as the most salient site of interaction through this methodology. This has two implications. First, it provides a different entry point to social worlds (resonating with feminist analytics) rather than choosing a space and exploring the social actors that create it. Second, this approach revealed the home as the site where ‘culture’ was located and contested. This opens the home space to studies on diversity and conviviality. It also demonstrates the different terms that encounters in the home took on through the social roles of host and hosting, the materiality of the space, and gendered dynamics.

‘There is no alternative’: How Italian and Spanish leaders’ discourse obscured the political nature of austerity

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Borriello
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policies ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Economic Decisions ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
The Common ◽  
National Governments ◽  
Heads Of Government ◽  
Shed Light

The Eurozone crisis and the remarkable convergence of national governments towards austerity policies draw scholars’ attention to the discursive strategies that they have used in order to legitimate their economic decisions. This article studies the common features of austerity discourse beyond national and partisan boundaries. It relies on an in-depth analysis combining lexicography and the study of metaphors in speeches of the Italian and Spanish heads of government between 2011 and 2013. While drawing on recent work addressing the legitimation of economic policies, this research takes a step back in order to shed light on the broader discourse on which austerity policies rely and in order to explain the common patterns in various political actors’ discourse. Rooted in a post-foundational approach, it identifies several discursive strategies for depoliticising economic issues (e.g. the construction of an economic common sense, the appeal to external constraints and the metaphorical naturalisation of economics), thus unveiling their political nature. The ‘restructuring’ and ‘rescaling’ of social practices are identified as the main mechanisms pertaining to the articulation of such a broader hegemonic discourse.

scholarly journals Social Responses to Media Technologies in the 21st Century: The Media are Social Actors Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Matthew Lombard ◽  
Kun Xu
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Social Responses ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Media

Clifford Nass and his colleagues proposed the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm in the 1990s and demonstrated that we treat computers in some of the ways we treat humans. To account for technological advances and to refine explanations for CASA results, this paper proposes the Media Are Social Actors (MASA) paradigm. We begin by distinguishing the roles of primary and secondary cues in evoking medium-as-social-actor presence and social responses. We then discuss the roles of individual differences and contextual factors in these responses and identify mindless and mindful anthropomorphism as two major complementary mechanisms for understanding MASA phenomena. Based on evolutionary psychology explanations for socialness, we conclude with nine formal propositions and suggestions for future research to test and apply MASA.

scholarly journals Rejecting and challenging illocutionary acts

Pragmatics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56
Author(s):  
Mariya Chankova
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Strategic Interaction ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Basic Premise ◽  
Social Quality ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Felicity Condition

Abstract This paper examines aspects of strategic interaction and the construction of the social actor in a neo-Austinian framework of illocutionary acts. The basic premise of the neo-Austinian framework is conventionality, according to which illocutionary acts depend on social agreement. An important part of the framework is the felicity condition of entitlement, directly related to the hearer’s understanding of the conventions that should hold for an act performance. Two strategies of challenging and/or rejecting illocutionary acts are then identified tentatively dubbed looping and backfiring, related to the hearer’s perception of when the entitlement felicity condition is flouted. Both strategies can be overtly or covertly confrontational and demonstrate that in their social quality illocutionary acts serve to construct the social actor and build up interpersonal relations.

scholarly journals Intonational sentence-type conventions for perlocutionary effects: An experimental investigation

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Jeong ◽  
Christopher Potts
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Sentence Type ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Fundamental Assumption ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Open Issues

One of the major open issues in semantics and pragmatics concerns the role of convention in relating sentence types with illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects. For the type-to-illocution connection, some degree of force conventionalism seems to be widely accepted. In contrast, Austin (1962) and many subsequent researchers have assumed that perlocution is not a matter of convention, but rather arises inexorably from illocution, content, and context. In this paper, we challenge this fundamental assumption about perlocution with evidence from a new perception experiment focused on perlocutionary effects relating to the listener’s conception of the speaker as a social actor. We find that these effects are predictable from sentence type plus intonation (‘type + tune’), that they vary by type + tune, and that they are consistent across a wide range of sentence contents, contexts, and illocutionary inferences. We argue that these conventions are naturally incorporated into existing work on sentence-type conventions.

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