This book is the first to provide a cognitive analysis of the function of biological/medical metaphors in National Socialist racist ideology and their background in historical traditions of Western ...political theory. Its main arguments are that the metaphor of the German nation as a body that needed to be rescued from a deadly poison must be viewed as the conceptual basis rather than a mere propagandistic by-product of Nazi genocidal policies culminating in the Holocaust, and that this metaphor is closely related to the more general metaphor complex of the nation as a human body/person, which is deeply ingrained in Western political thought. The cognitive approach is crucial to understanding the nature and the origins of this metaphor complex because it goes beyond the rhetorical level by analyzing the ideological and practical implications of the conceptual mapping body-state in detail. It provides an innovative perspective on the problem of how the Nazis managed to ‘revive’ a clichéd metaphor tradition to the point where it became a decisive factor in European and world history. Musolff reveals how such a perspective allows us to explain why the body-state metaphor continues to be attractive for use in contemporary political theories.
Acknowledgments 1: Introduction: Deadly Metaphors That Won’t Die? Bodies and Parasites as Concepts of Political Discourse Part I 2: The Cognitive Import of Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 3: Body, Nature and Disease as Political Categories in Mein Kampf 4: The Public Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery in Nazi Germany 5: Methodological Reflection: Body and Illness Metaphors in the Evolution of Western Political Thought and Discourse Part II 6: Solidarity and Hierarchy: The State-Body Metaphor in the Middle Ages 7: Concepts of Healing the Body Politic in the Renaissance 8: From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology: Modern Scenarios of the Body Politic and its Therapy 9: German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions of the Body Politic Metaphor 10: Conclusion: Metaphor in Discourse History Notes Bibliography Index
Andreas Musolff is Professor of German at the University of Durham.
A considerable flow of information and news stories are being exchanged on social media in several parts of the world. A significant number of news stories are fake and are published to serve certain ...purposes and ideologies. The present study examines how Arab social media users respond to fake news in Arabic in reference to van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square. A dataset of fake news was collected from Twitter, now X platform, comprising tweets on various events. After preprocessing, a topic-modeling algorithm was applied to the dataset to reveal its latent aspects. Instances of the featured topics in the dataset were then analyzed in accordance with the sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis. The findings demonstrate that fake news was leveraged to promote ideological struggle between social groups. Some social media users may interact with misinformation without evaluating its credibility and, therefore, express ideologically loaded beliefs for or against the subject matter of the news story. Fake news stories were also exploited for business and marketing. Misinformation’s discourse structure involves ideological polarization, self-identification and goal-description, and violates norms and values. The discursive structure and strategies revolve around the ideological square.
This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century (2001–2020), ...primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers.
This article addresses the issue of discourse markers as illuminated by the works of Russian scholars. The relevance of the study is justified by the necessity of theoretical understanding of ...existing scientific approaches to the examination of these linguistic units. A review of scholarly works from the XX—XXI centuries is conducted. Key positions in the interpretation of discourse markers within linguistic approaches such as functional-pragmatic and functional-semantic are characterized. Attention is given to aspects of studying this linguistic phenomenon, such as terminological nomination and belonging to a language class or category. The functions of discourse markers in each of the identified approaches are discussed in the article. The polyfunctionality of individual discourse markers is noted. The results of a comparative analysis of current typologies and classifications are presented. As a result, the authors conclude on the necessity of classifying discourse markers based on several indicators of these linguistic units. The predominance of the functional-pragmatic approach in discourse marker research is acknowledged. The unresolved issue of terminological nomination is recognized. The potential for further research in the field of discourse markers from the perspective of other approaches is highlighted.
Legal Media Discourse As a Hybrid Phenomenon Chemeteva, Yuliya
Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serii͡a︡ 2, I͡A︡zykoznanie.,
01/2022, Letnik:
21, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The paper describes legal media discourse, which is a hybrid discourse formation whose preconstructs are legal discourse and media discourse. The study was conducted using general scientific methods: ...induction, generalization, analysis, synthesis, description; and specialized linguistic methods: continuous sampling method, discourse analysis. The texts of legal media discourse presented on the official websites of the English-language media platforms such as The Guardian, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, Washington Monthly, etc. form the empirical basis of the study. Legal discourse and media discourse are institutional discourses whose interaction results in forming an independent hybrid. The article provides the analysis of legal media discourse using the pattern of the institutional discourse description proposed by V.I. Karasik, which consists of the following criteria: typical participants, chronotope, goals, values, strategies, genres, precedent texts, and discursive formulas. The characteristics of the discursive hybrid under study are determined by referring to the preconstruct discourses features identified at the present time. The description of legal media discourse as a specific sphere of the intersection of law and media is viewed as not a mechanical sum of the characteristics of legal discourse and media discourse, but their synthesis which accounts for the independent nature of the hybrid discursive formation.
This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a ...140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.
In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore ...how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and (im)migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism.
This book aims to provide a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English on the basis of the systematic study of deictic, syntactic and semantic properties of ...authentic examples drawn from literary as well as non-literary sources. In the area beyond direct and indirect speech or thought, free indirect discourse has often been implicitly treated as a residual category that can accommodate anything that is neither one nor the other. This book takes a fresh look at the evidence in the area of deixis, particularly through a close study of pronoun and proper name use, and proposes to distinguish the more character-oriented free indirect type from a narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, which is grammatically wholly structured from the narrators deictic standpoint. Unlike free indirect representations, which coherently represent the characters viewpoint, the distancing indirect type sees narrators appropriating character discourse for their own purposes, which may for instance be ironic. The distinctions thus drawn shed new light on the much debated dual voice approach to free indirect discourse. Included in the scope of this book are subjectified uses of clauses such as I think, which no longer primarily construe a cognition process, but rather come to function as hedges. Such speaker-encoding uses are argued to involve an interpersonal type of structure, not based on complementation, whereas the non-subjectified cases receive an interclausal complementation analysis which does not have recourse to the problematic notion of reporting verb. This monograph is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students interested in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of reported speech viewed from a constructional perspective.
This paper discusses web-based public health discursive practices during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. It utilises a multimodal discourse approach to explore how a combination of ...textual and visual resources was deployed to communicate informative and educative public health safety campaigns during the period. Essentially, this study discusses multimodal resources as a rhetorical technique for creating a public discursive engagement space designed to educate the public and mitigate the effect of the pandemic. The dataset was collected during and after the lockdown in 2020 (March–September) through media monitoring and manual downloading of relevant online COVID-19 posts, messages and public health advisories largely from WhatsApp platforms and the portals of some Nigerian national newspapers. Using insights from relevant approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. Multimodal Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis), we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse on how online posts as multimodal resources amplify the role of social media affordances in producing and promoting public safety messages helped to control the spread and mitigate the effects of the pandemic. The study also shows that discursive and multimodal resources were deliberately deployed to increase the effectiveness of the technology-driven public health campaign. To a large extent, multimodal resources were found to complement lexico-semantic properties of online communication, where social media messages are created, crafted and reconstructed within a uniquely Nigerian public discourse context. The study further illustrates the increasing importance of web-based platforms as discursive sites for enacting and negotiating meanings during event-driven social activities and public engagement in the Global South.
The concept of topos(oi) has received considerable attention from both argumentation and discourse studies, although its usage and meaning remain obscure. In this article, I argue that the ...rediscovery of Aristotelian thought might provide a comprehensible explication of topos. Despite the discourse historical approach's (DHA) emphasis on topos, its context is found to be limited and this exposes the argumentation strategies of the DHA to criticism. To overcome any shortcomings and provide a better understanding of topos, a classical approach to the concept is suggested, derived from Aristotle's rhetoric and dialectic. By focusing on Greek media discourses on 'Islamist terrorism', I seek to illustrate the synthesis between the DHA's argumentation strategies and Aristotelian topos as a fruitful analytical and theoretical tool.
