scholarly journals Rhetoric, Accounting and Accountability: COVID-19 and the Case of Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4100
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Gelmini ◽  
Valentina Minutiello ◽  
Patrizia Tettamanzi ◽  
Maurizio Comoli

The current dramatic context of COVID-19 has urged academics and practitioners to tackle the topic of the pandemic not only regarding its medical side but from the perspective of social sciences, accounting and accountability as well. In this sense, our paper moves from the pivotal work of Higgins and Walker (2012) and Merkl-Davies and Brennan (2017) and tries to trace the use and the extent of accounting communication by companies during the peculiar context of the pandemic. Considering the nature of the elements to be evaluated, we applied a manual content analysis, a more suitable technique than software to capture subjective and emotional elements. Among the main preliminary results of the paper, the volume and the importance of emotional content come to the surface, such as self-assessment and emotional tone. The paper confirms the important role of rhetorical analysis in understanding the quality and the meaning of the information provided by companies and contributes to the stream of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies on corporate reporting.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 1472-1480
Author(s):  
Ikusemiju Ayokunle Oluwadamilare ◽  
Anthony Ekwueme

Objectives of the Study: The purpose of this study was to examine newspaper framing of the activities of the EFCC under President Buhari, using four purposively selected newspapers. In doing this, the researchers focused on the prevalence of frames, most prominent frames, and interpretations they gave to the activities of EFCC. Methodology: Content analysis and critical discourse analysis were adopted as the research methods. By means of the constructed week sampling technique, 288 editions of the selected newspapers years were studied. Results: It was found that six (6) frames constituted 75% frame prevalence rate, while two (2) frames constituted 15% non-prevalence rate. The corruption-combating/criminalisation frame was the most prominent. Interpretation of the reports revealed that some newspapers presented EFCC as victimisers, while some appraised its activities at mitigating graft in Nigeria. Application/implications: The implication of these results is that journalists need to improve in their framing anti-corruption efforts as part of their social responsibility to the Nigerian society. Originality/ Novelty: This study has contributed to our understanding of the role of the media in promoting good governance and accountability in a developing country like Nigeria.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Zanettin

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-38
Author(s):  
Phillip Joy ◽  
Matthew Numer ◽  
Sara F. L. Kirk ◽  
Megan Aston

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Kojo Fenyi ◽  
◽  
Georgina Afeafa Sapaty ◽  

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Donoghue

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veera Kangaspunta

The aim of this article is to approach one specific environmental topic and the public debate around this topic from a user-oriented perspective – through online news comments. The article analyses online news and comments sections from three Finnish online newspapers concerning the mining accident of Talvivaara company in November 2012. Discourse and discursive legitimation strategies are used as analytical tools with the focus of critical discourse analysis. The study aims to solve what kind of discourses the public debate contains and how these discourses are connected to certain legitimation strategies. In addition, the article also continues the conceptual deliberation about the concept of the public as a group of people participating in public discussion. The study shows that Talvivaara news and news comments consist four main strategies, authorization, rationalization, moral evaluations and mythopoiesis, used for legitimation, relegitimation and delegitimation. However, the parties differ in the way they utilize these strategies and different discourses. Consequently, online news commenting appears as a unique part of the public debate about the topic, rather than remaining marginal flaming. The users tend to absorb the role of the public as a part of the public showdown about the shared issue.


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.


Society ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 677-694
Author(s):  
Rahma Isnania ◽  
Nanang Martono ◽  
Tri Rini Widyastuti

The upper-class dominates various social spaces in society, including children’s stories. Children’s stories as a means of socializing values also participate in socializing upper-class habitus in the storyline. This study aims to describe the children’s habitus as narrated in short stories published in Bobo magazine. The method used in this study is the quantitative content analysis method and critical discourse analysis. This study’s object is about 174 short stories published in Bobo magazine from January 2019 to August 2020, of which 110 stories were taken randomly as samples. The results show that most of the children’s habitus narrated in the stories were upper-class children’s habitus, reaching out to 87 or 79.1% of all stories. Meanwhile, lower-class children’s habitus was found in 30.9% of all stories. The habitus of upper-class children featured in the story consisting of go on an excursion, luxury living, own electronic goods, own expensive good, wearing nightgowns, reading, and writing. On the other side, the habitus of lower-class children habitus featured in the story consisting of playing traditional games, living in poverty, and doing lower-class work. In conclusion, the upper-class children’s habitus appears more dominantly within short stories in Bobo magazine. This study’s results are expected as recommend to parties related to children’s stories publication to present more balanced stories.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Thi Minh Trang Pham ◽  
Aiden Yeh

This exploratory study investigates politeness strategies employed by Vietnamese EFL learners when writing English request emails sent to foreign and Vietnamese professors and school staff. A corpus-based critical discourse analysis is used to analyze sub-elements of politeness including the degree of imposition, terms of address, request-giving strategy and lexicon-syntactic modifier. The results support the assumption that Vietnamese language pragmatic knowledge is deeply ingrained and has tremendous influence on students’ L2 email writing skills. The study also reveals that Vietnamese students applied a high level of imposition with formal term of address and salutation, directness strategies with the overuse of “please” and other hedges. While gender is not a determining factor, the inflexible adoption of fixed phrases and syntactic-lexical devices were attributed to the lack of sociopragmatic competence. Thus, apart from linguistic knowledge, the role of cultural awareness and socio-pragmatic knowledge should be highlighted in communicative English learning and teaching.


Balcanica ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 165-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Zdravkovic-Zonta

Through perpetuating negative stereotypes and rigid dichotomous identities, the media play a significant part in sustaining conflict dynamics in Kosovo. Examining their discourse in terms of ideological production and representations is crucial in order to understand the power relations between the majority and the minority, the identity politics involved in sustaining them, and the intractability of the conflict. In an effort to provide a deeper understanding of the intractable conflict in Kosovo, and the role of the media in protracting it, this study uses critical discourse analysis to examine articles related to issues affecting the Serb community, published in Albanian language print media. The master narrative that comes out of the analysis is that of ?threat? - the threat that Kosovo Albanians continue to face from Serbs and Serbia; a threat that is portrayed as historical and constant. The discourse further strengthens the conflict dynamics of opposition, polarization and even hatred. This master narrative implies that Serbs are enemies, to be feared, contested, fought against; conflict is thus the normal state of affairs. The study also looks at the implications of media discourse for reconciliation efforts and the prospects of the Serb minority in Kosovo society, arguing that when the Other is presented as dangerous and threatening, fear of the Other and a desire to eliminate the threat, physically and symbolically, become perceived as a ?natural? response, and thus constitute a significant conflict-sustaining dynamic.


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