Identity Politics Past and Present

This new book in Critical Discourse Studies uses detailed and systematic analysis of the discursive construction of Austrian identities across a period of 20 years – from 1995 to 2015 – to trace the re-emergence of nationalism in the media, popular culture and politics, and the normalization of far-right nativist ideologies and attitudes. Contradictory and intertwined tendencies towards re-nationalization and trans-nationalization have always framed debates about European identities, but during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, the debates became polarized. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nation states first reacted by closing borders, while symbols of banal nationalism proliferated. The data, drawn from a variety of empirical studies, suggests changes in memory politics – the way past events are remembered – are due to a range of factors, including the growth of migrant societies; the influence of financial and climate crises; changing gender politics; and a new transnational European politics of the past. The authors assess the challenges to liberal democracies and fundamental human and constitutional rights, and analyze how the pandemic contributes to a new re-nationalization across Europe and beyond.

INDONESIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY

The concept of national identity in the midst of the development of globalization requires a country to strengthen its national identity in order to maintain the integrity and unity of the nation. This paper attempts to provide a contemporary view of the perception of national identity in a country. This paper focuses on the state of Indonesia. This paper uses discourse discourse studies and data collection uses literature studies.

A review on discourse studies concerning migrants in media publications from Brazil and South Africa: towards more Afro-Latin perspectives

This paper reviews scientific literature about representation on migrants in Global South media and in other parts of the world, focusing on comparative studies in Brazil and South Africa, and providing suggestions for less Eurocentric perspectives relating to such topic. We resort to a critical review on theoretical references and multiple studies published between the second half of the last century and the beginning of this century. South African comparative research through meta-studies and their quantitative tendency —alongside French Discourse Analysis, Bakhtinian Circle and Greimas’ influence in Brazil— indicate how this type of research needs to be expanded in the Global South. This paper recommends the construction of more systematic content-based analyses and the exploration of the different degrees and forms through which balanced or patronizing portrayals on migrants are projected in media. Dislocation from a dominant sociocognitive perspective towards inter-semiotic/sociolinguistic approaches is advisable. This work also suggests that Pan-Africanism, African approaches, and/or Latin-American philosophies should be part of this foundation for migration criticism, especially if these migratory processes are analyzed in media or communication context

Determinants of Modern Scientific Discourse in the Context of “Socialization” of Knowledge

The aim of the article is to disclose some general trends in scientific discourse studies that have emerged by the second decade of the 21 st century, to characterize scientific discourse as a means of promoting knowledge, and to consider its contribution to public communication. The notion of scientific discourse incorporates both conventional (scientific articles, reviews, theses, dissertation abstracts) and modern forms of discourse (online academic conferences, symposia, colloquiums, seminars). The research is viewed in the article as a result of scientists' social activity targeted at new knowledge discovery and broadcasting, whilst the scientific text is defined in terms of verbal representation of the research results in a par with new knowledge transmission. Two types of determinants are introduced to regulate the model of scientific text composition – internal and external. The internal determinant is represented by discursive structures, which promote knowledge in scientific text as the element of scientific communication, while the external dominant is represented by extralinguistic factors, which provide the promotion of scientific discourse outside the professional community (socializing). Воth kinds of determinants provide the interpretation of the scientific discourse as open systems. An assumption is made on the increasing role of external determinant in discursive extension of modern scientific text by means of the Internet; the addressee factor wider representation and scientific knowledge inclusion into cross-cultural communication.

Key Noun + Noun Collocations in the Language of Tourism: A Corpus-Based Study of English and Serbian

In this paper, we investigate the main characteristics underlying noun + noun collocations in the English and Serbian language of tourism. Their morpho-syntactic, semantic and communicative features are contrasted and compared in the two languages. Firstly, we compiled two comparable corpora in English and Serbian from the tourism websites of Great Britain and Serbia. Based on their normalized frequencies per 10,000 words, key noun + noun collocations were extracted, using TermoStat Web 3.0 and AntConc. The results showed certain similarities in terms of the prevailing topics in the two corpora, based on the analysis of key noun + noun collocations. However, we found major differences in the two languages in terms of their morpho-syntactic features, communicative focus and the relationship of the collocates. The results of the study have implications for English for Tourism education, tourism discourse studies, language typology and lexicography.

Shifting the Blame: Storm and Wildfire Dramatic Images in American News Media

Some media frames might be likely to seek to evoke a certain sentiment, and that natural disaster coverage by the media focuses on the current impact of disasters. In their coverage, American news media use polar sentiment words to create bleeding images of natural disasters, potentially counter-productive to the wisdom of dealing with the natural disaster. Identifying the sentiment words that lead to a misperception of natural disasters can help journalists adopt the wisdom that natural disasters are not a human enemy. The corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) reported in this article investigates the American media's issues for dramatic reporting and the polar sentiment words utilized in the framing. The corpus is built from 100 news articles reporting wildfires and storms by ten major online American news media published from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2020. It uses AntConc to generate word-list and word-link from which it identifies the dominant issues. Subsequently, it compares the AntConc word-list with A List of Sentiment Words to reveal the tones and dramatic imaging. The findings show that the dominant issues in storm reporting are description, impact, and prediction, while wildfire reporting are cause, impact, action, and prediction. The negative polar words produce dramatic images of storm as a violent beast and wildfire as a vengeful invader. Such description is provocative to blaming natural disasters as a cause of human suffering rather than improving our behaviors to reduce the suffering. Thus, it is counter-productive to acquiring wisdom for dealing with natural disasters.

Trump, memes and the Alt-right: Emotive and affective criticism and praise

Internet memes are the most pervasive and malleable form of digital popular culture (Wiggins 2019: vii). They are a way a society expresses and thinks of itself (Denisova 2019: 2) used for the purpose of satire, parody, critique to posit an argument (Wiggins 2019, see also Ponton 2021, this issue). The acts of viewing, creating, sharing and commenting on memes that criticise or troll authority figures have become central to our political processes becom[ing] one of the most important forms of political participation and activism today (Merrin 2019: 201). However, memes do not communicate to us in logical arguments, but emotionally and affectively through short quips and images that entertain. Memes are part of a new politics of affectivity, identification, emotion and humour (Merrin 2019: 222). In this paper, we examine not only what politics memes communicate to us, but how this is done. We analyse memes, some in mainstream social media circulation, that praise and criticise the authoritarian tendencies of former US President Donald Trump, taken from 4Chan, a home of many alt-right ideas. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies approach, we demonstrate how images and lexical choices in memes do not communicate to us in logical, well-structured arguments, but lean on affective and emotional discourses of racism, nationalism and power. As such, though memes have the potential to emotionally engage with their intended audiences, this is done at the expense of communicating nuanced and detailed information on political players and issues. This works against the ideal of a public sphere where debate and discussion inform political decisions in a population, essential pillars of a democratic society (Habermas 1991).

From the uncertainty of violence to life after abuse: discursive transitions among female survivors of IPV in online contexts

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is undoubtedly one of the most worrying concerns in today’s global societies. Due to the many intertwined factors that explain the persistence of this reality among people from all sorts of backgrounds, finding a uniform strategy to cope with this social issue is far from unproblematic. In this study, I contribute to a growing field of research that examines the discourse of female survivors of IPV in online contexts. The main objective this research pursues is to identify relevant linguistic patterns used by these women to represent themselves and their perpetrators in a publicly-available online forum. More specifically, I seek to ascertain discursive traits that characterise women in an initial stage in contrast to a final stage within an abusive relationship. To this end, I adopt a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies approach (CADS) in a digital corpus of circa 136,000 words, which are analysed with the software tool Sketch Engine (SkE). Findings show the most salient discursive traits that characterise IPV online discourse. Additionally, and drawing from verb patterns and their semantic categorisation, I highlight relevant verbal tendencies that connect linguistic textual evidence that contributes to sustaining the power imbalances that also define this social phenomenon.

Linguistic creativity and discourse profiles of English language children’s novels

Contemporary discourse studies face the necessity to develop the methods of contrastive sub-discourse analysis which apply numeric and comparable data to diversify and describe sub-discourse types. The aim of the research is to propose a method of discourse profiling serving the purpose, and to further test the method in the contrastive study of linguistic creativity in different types of English language childrens novels. The category of linguistic creativity being the leading form of language poesis receives parametric description on all language representation levels (in written form) and provides the discourse values for contrastive analysis. These values are explored in the fragments of non-autobiographic and autobiographic adventure novel sub-discourse types authored by J.C. George, F. Gibson, J.D. Ullman, and G. Durrell (a total amount of 120.000 signs) annotated manually for 52 linguistic creativity parameters on phonological, morphological, word-formation, lexical, syntactic, and graphic levels. The working hypothesis is that the linguistic creativity parametric activity distributions represent the sub-discourse profiles and may serve to contrast sub-discourse types by means of their vectors contingency values. The analysis in individual parameter activity and in parameter groups activity demonstrated significant variance in sub-discourse construal, with autobiographic sub-discourse of G. Durrell manifesting several higher activity values in word-formation (occasional compounding), lexical use (the use of professional language, lexical tropes, allusive names, higher register style) and syntactic use (the use of parallel structures and syntactic intensifiers). In terms of morphological activity, the parameter values tend to be lower (morphological category shifts), the same stands true of some syntactic (the use of elliptical structures) and lexical parameters (the use of lower register types and proper names). The sub-discourse profiles demonstrate several common features, evidently typical of the discourse type itself, and the features differentiating non-autobiographic and autobiographic discourse subtypes. Vector correlation analysis revealed lower correlation values for autobiographic sub-discourse, which proves its specificity and testifies to the discourse profiling method applicability.

Multi-word term variation

Complex nominals (CNs) are frequently found in specialized discourse in all languages, since they are a productive method of creating terms by combining existing lexical units. In Spanish, a conceptual combination may often be rendered with a prepositional CN (PCN) or an equivalent adjectival CN (ACN), e.g., demanda de electricidad vs. demanda eléctrica [electricity demand]. Adjectives in ACNs – usually derived from nouns – are known as ‘relational adjectives’ because they encode semantic relations with other concepts. With recent exceptions, research has focused on the underlying semantic relations in CNs. In natural language processing, several works have dealt with the automatic detection of relation adjectives in Romance and Germanic languages. However, there is no discourse studies of these CNs, to our knowledge, for the goal of establishing writer recommendations. This study analyzed the co-text of equivalent PCNs and ACNs to identify factors governing the use of a certain form. EcoLexicon ES, a corpus of Spanish environmental specialized texts, was used to extract 6 relational adjectives and, subsequently, a set of 12 pairs of equivalent CNs. Their behavior in co-text was analyzed by querying EcoLexicon ES and a general language corpus with 20 expressions in CQP-syntax. Our results showed that immediate linguistic co-text determined the preference for a particular structure. Based on these findings, we provide writing guidelines to assist in the production of CNs.