HYBRID DISCOURSE AND THE EMERGENCE OF CONTEXT IN BBC’S QUESTION TIME

This paper explores how hybrid discourse, instantiated in talk and interaction, can be shaped not only by a situational context (TV panel show) and cultural context (TV’s increasing democratisation of laity), but also by human volition in pursuit of recognizable to others and allowed within the confi nes of the setting. It does this by examining the emergence of context in light of a non-mainstream hybrid and refl exive activity. Specifically, it examines a non-normative interview format that has arisen in contemporary broadcasting through the analysis of three transcribed segments which were taken from two key episodes of the BBC’s fl agship political program: Question Time. Using a range of analytical concepts from symbolic interactionism, pragmatics, and conversational analysis, such as frames and footings, activity types, discourse types, and turn-taking, the analysis shows how institutional (political) and non-institutional (normative) practices can come together in the pursuit of individual goals and contemporary media’s goal for increasingly partisan journalism and confrontainment. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of a multidimensional approach to context, whereby meaning both emerges from and is constitutive of the forms and functions of an activity’s discourse, whilst further highlighting the role of hybridity in contemporary discourse.

Transfer of Legal Knowledge to the Narrative Space of a Work of Fiction

The object of this study is hybrid discourse as a result of the integration of language markers and concepts of legal discourse and literary narrative. The subject of the study is the techniques, mechanisms, and means of transfer involved in the formation of hybrid discourse. The transfer of legal knowledge into a literary text is the process of transmitting knowledge marked by the legal sphere into the narrative space of a literary text in order to model the image of a female judge, identify professionally significant personality characteristics and internal contradictions integrated into a personalised concept of morality. The purpose of this work is to study verbal tools of the knowledge transfer, implemented by the language markers of legal discourse and units of a literary text in the process of formation of a heterogeneous text that is the result of functioning of hybrid discourse. The study is conducted with regard to linguistic, psycholinguistic, cultural, logical-philosophical, and cognitive-discursive approaches to the analysis of knowledge transfer and involving the structural-semantic method, methods of contextual and conceptual analysis, as well as more specific methods of profiling, component analysis, etymological analysis, etc. The authors refer to The Children Act, a novel by the British writer Ian McEwan. The thematic core of this work is the moral issues of family law and religious differences between representatives of different confessions and Judge Fiona May’s personified moral and psychological search, dealing with issues of law, personality and society, parenting, life and death. The personal model of behaviour is reconstructed in this study and it reflects professional knowledge and skills, speech characteristics, ethical and moral prerequisites of behaviour, and relationships with others that become a conceptual component of the judge’s activity. This model is regarded from the perspective of the theory of transfer of legal knowledge in the space of a literary text. The authors identify the knowledge transfer mechanisms (inference, (de)focusing, metaphorisation, adjectivisation), the main transfer techniques — textual (reverse editing, syntactic dominant, perspectivisation, antithesis, emphasis) and lexical-semantic (transformation of word meanings, semantic implications, actualisation of word etymology, profiling of individual components of meaning), and means of transfer — linguistic realities (extended context, sentence, word, seme). The selected techniques and mechanisms of transfer manifest themselves at different levels of language: semantic, syntactic, and linguo-pragmatic. The inclusion of linguistic markers and concepts of legal discourse in the space of a literary text creates a single heterogeneous context in which the significant semantic and axiological characteristics of the personified model of the morality of the judge of England are represented. The authors make a conclusion about the mutual influence of the two marked discourses.

Exploring the Construal of Cultural Hybridity in the Maps for Lost Lovers: A Discourse Stylistics Study

This study undertakes an analysis of hybrid discourse with the help of discourse stylistics, an approach to the study of literary texts which combines findings from the fields of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and pragmatics. The analysis aims at highlighting how the cultural hybridity which exists in characters is manifested by the linguistic organization of the exchange as interactive process. The study based on cultural hybridity in hybrid discourse shows that the characters ignore their respective position while interaction because both children and parents treat each other as equal sometimes by scorning, criticizing, satirizing, questioning and sometimes by manipulation to foreground their hybrid culture.

Hybrids in the Age of Post-Truth

The article discusses the hallmarks and markers of hybrid discourse in social sciences, media and communication, in education and in politics. Linguistic hybridity was studied in detail by Maria Georgieva in her papers and chapters on globetalk where she provides excellent examples of lexico-semantic and lexico-grammatical mixes. In the age of ‘post-truth’ hybrids are often associated with the instrumental use of disinformation or the ‘weaponisation’ of information. This paper highlights some groups of hybrids from a socio-pragmatic perspective.

The making of Jewish authenticity: The hybrid discourse of authenticity of New Age Judaism and the complexities of religious individualization

This article offers an ethnographically informed discussion of the hybrid discourse of authenticity of two New Age Judaism (NAJ) communities that were active in Israel in the beginning of the millennium. The article argues that the discourse of authenticity of the two communities was a hybrid discourse which interweaved two overlapping understandings of expressive authenticity: genealogical or historical (origin) and identity or correspondence (expressive content). The members of the communities aspired for self-realization and fulfillment by discovering their authentic self and at the same time articulated and legitimized their mission of renewal by referring to earlier, allegedly more spiritual time periods in Jewish history. This discourse is understood in terms of the “inward turn” and the “turn to tradition” of contemporary Jewish life as well as the penetration of consumer logic into Jewish forms of spirituality. As such it showcases the complexities of Jewish individualization whereby the focus on the self and self-authenticity is tightly linked to the cultivation of identity and communal belonging.

HYBRID DISCOURSE AS A RESULT OF INTERDISCOURSIVE INTERACTION

The article considers the hybridization of political and sport discourses in political texts; this interaction takes place and becomes more relevant during election campaigns. The author also analyzes some cognitive aspects of interdiscoursive interaction. It is concluded that interaction of political and sport discourses constructs a hybrid type of discourse in political texts.

The Hybrid Discourse of the Serbian Antibureaucratic Revolution

This article investigates the discursive logic of the antibureaucratic revolution through discourse analysis of three Serbian dailies: Politika, Borba, and Večernje Novosti. We conceptualize this discursive logic as a “hybrid discourse,” employed by Slobodan Milošević’s faction of the political elite and by prominent Serbian press outlets in their discussions and reporting on the diverse Serbian protest movements of the day. The core of the hybrid discourse, as our analysis demonstrates, consisted of the symbolic interweaving of different types of citizens’ discontent in order to present them as one single demand for societal “reform” that resonated with the agenda of the Serbian political elite. We argue that the hybrid discourse and the antibureaucratic revolution itself had a structural role related to the crisis of systemic legitimacy in Yugoslavia. The hybrid discourse performed the operation of what we term the “reversing of the symbolic fixing of antagonism between the ordinary actors’ discontents and the structurally inevitable reforms,” introducing instead the discursive fusion of the two vocabularies.