scholarly journals A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Pre-2019 General Elections Reports in Selected Nigerian Newspapers

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 142-147
Author(s):  
Samuel Oyeyemi Agbeleoba ◽  
Edward Owusu ◽  
Asuamah Adade-Yeboah

Generally, language experts believe that there are inherent ideologies in language use. The aspect of discourse study that discloses such ideologies is known as Critical Discourse Study (CDA). This paper seeks to exhume the various inherent ideologies that presuppose selected news reports on the Nigeria’s 2019 General Elections in Nigerian newspapers. This study is, however, corpus-based. Scholars have established that discourse is a kind of constructively conditioned public exercise. They believe that power relations exist at different levels of daily social interaction; revealing superiority or inferiority of interlocutors involved. News reports relating to the General Elections were electronically collated from the various newspaper platforms for a sizable language corpus. The name Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was selected and analysed purposively with the aid of Digital Humanities (DH) tool to observe the frequency of the acronym INEC and the textual context in which it occurs in five newspapers’ reports about the electoral body via the authority it gives; the warning it issues, and the appeal it makes to the stakeholders. The paper finds out that the negative perceptions of many observers about the elections have actually been predicted by the various reports in the newspapers, prior to the elections. The paper concludes that reporters of news items do not account for issues concerning electoral body with the same constructive and destructive dispositions; and this gives room for subjectivity and prejudice.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Ruiqi Zhou ◽  
Siying Qin

Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse regarding language as a form of social practice. As a specific discourse, news discourse is a representation of the journalists’ expression and construction of events, as well as readers’ understanding and cognition of the events reported. It functions as a carrier that transmits ideologies and social values. Recently, news reports on the trade conflicts between China and the US has been the focus of world attention. A study of news reports on Sino-US trade conflicts with Critical Discourse Analysis approach helps interpret the relation between language use and social contexts and reveal ideological significance and power struggle in language. Twenty pieces of news reports on China’s tariff actions on the United States, collected from The New York Times from 2018 to 2019 are studied and the result shows that the use of language in the news texts is not arbitrary, but rather dominated by the medium. The options of lexical expressions in news, the selection of clause types and the position of participants enable the medium to construct a negative image of China and to define China as an unfavorable country. The reasons deciding the language use in this discourse are the tension and balance of the power relation between the U.S. and China in the trade war, and the institution’s favor of the American interest, the American political hegemony and the advocacy of force.


Author(s):  
Xiuling Cao ◽  
Danqi Zhang ◽  
Qianjun Luo

Abstract Based on Appraisal Theory and critical discourse analysis, this corpus-assisted study examines how China Daily (CD) and South China Morning Post (SCMP) used appraisal resources to express their respective stances towards the anti-extradition bill movement. The results show that both newspapers employed negative resources of Judgement and the predication strategy to convey their stance, but SCMP seemed more refrained in the use of appraisal resources. CD openly stated that any illegal actions should be punished, and SCMP also criticised these actions. Besides, CD emphasized the consequences brought by violence and attributed the breakout of the protests to the opposition camp’s political intention for their own benefit, whereas SCMP highlighted Hong Kongers’ widespread opposition to the bill. These differences in language use and stance might be explained by the different press systems they respectively belong to and related to their respective historical and socio-political contexts.


Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla

This paper presents preliminary findings from a wider study into the form that political debate takes in Scottish and English/UK newspapers’ reporting of the 2001 and the 2005 UK Elections. The research project aims to contribute to the discussion regarding the role played by the Scottish press in political deliberation after devolution and compares its contribution to the electoral debate with that of newspapers bought in England. This paper explores the results of a content analysis of articles from daily Scottish and UK newspapers during the four weeks of each election campaign period. This reveals that, despite some differences, the overall picture of the coverage of major election issues is consistent. A selection of the coverage of taxation, the most mentioned reserved issue in the 2001 campaign, is subsequently analysed using critical discourse analysis, and the results suggest more distinction between the two sets of newspapers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Ebuka Elias Igwebuike

This study investigated lexical labelling of people and their actions in terms of ownership and non-ownership of territories by the Nigerian and Cameroonian newspaper reports on the Bakassi Peninsula border conflict, with a view to uncovering ideologies underlying the representations. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis which relates discursive practices to social and psychological dimensions was used to analyse instances of labelling in three Nigerian and three Cameroonian English-medium national newspapers. The analyses revealed that the newspapers generally labelled Nigerians in Bakassi as both owners (natives and indigenes) and non-owners (inhabitants and residents). Specifically, the Cameroonian news reports deployed more labels of non-ownership to project Nigerians in Bakassi as mere tenants and occupants of the region while the Nigerian news reports employed more labels of ownership to depict Nigerians as aboriginals and owners of the peninsula. The ideologies of economic interests and ancestral roots motivated the labelling of territorial ownership and non-ownership in both nations’ newspapers.


Author(s):  
Altman Yuzhu Peng

Regional discrimination is a significant social issue that leads to divided societies. In China, people from Henan Province, who are verbally abused by non-Henan users on the Internet, are often victims of regional discrimination. This article presents a case study of Chinese Internet users’ discriminatory practice against Henan people in the commentary sections of two major Chinese news portals – Tencent and NetEase. By advancing an affective critical discourse analysis approach with the assistance of content analysis, I analysed user comments on news reports that covered a news event relating to regional discrimination against Henan people. The analysis showed that Internet users’ discriminatory practice was notably amplified by the locative IP-address function in NetEase’s commentary section. The research findings shed light on the interplay between Internet users’ discursive practice and the technological architecture of interactive digital platforms in the context of regional discrimination.


Target ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Pan

This article investigates the Chinese translations of several English news reports on China’s human rights issue carried in Reference News, a Chinese authoritative state-run newspaper devoted to translating foreign reports for the Chinese reader, and aims to establish how evaluative resources are resorted to by the translators to facilitate ideologically different positioning in presenting events and identifying participants in the translated news. The translations are compared with their English source texts using Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) as the micro analytical framework and Fairclough’s (1995a, 1995b) three-dimension model of Critical Discourse Analysis as the explanatory framework.


لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (34) ◽  
pp. 459-464
Author(s):  
Muhannad Hadi Abdul-Ameer ◽  
Tahseen Ali Hussein Al-Romany

AbstractThe present study aims at investigating the Arabic translations of several English news reports on Saudi Iranian conflict to show translators draw on their ideological positioning in introducing events. In the present study, Appraisal Theory and Fairclough's trilateral model of Critical Discourse Analysis have been used to compare the English source texts with their translations into Arabic. The examples have been selected from BBC news reports published in the BBC Website at different dates. The major purpose of this study is to merely highlight the linguistic features of news reports about the Saudi Iranian conflict.


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