Discourse and Discrimination is a study of how racism, antisemitism and ethnicism are reflected in discourse. The authors first survey five established discourse analysis approaches before providing ...their own model and three case-studies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, they question why racism and anti-Semitism are still virulent worldwide.
Martin Reisigl is based at the University of Vienna and is co-author of The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Ruth Wodak is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna. Her books include Disorders of Discourse, Gender and Discourse, and Language, Power and Ideology.
How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one ...hand, and differences to other national collectives on the o
In cultural as well as social science studies of discourses (e.g. of discourses on climate change), the concept of narrative is used in a very broad sense - as an umbrella term that lacks analytical ...accuracy. From the perspective of linguistics, it seems obvious to acknowledge five elementary generic patterns. In addition to narration, linguists differentiate between argumentation, description, explication and instruction. Each of these patterns fulfils a different basic pragmatic function. This article tries to make clear and justify why it is important, both theoretically and practically, to make a distinction between these five generic patterns. It is argued and shown that narrativization tends to go hand in hand with a relief of action, historicization, potential fictionalization, subjectivization and relativization. With respect to discourses on the climate crisis, these prototypical characteristics of narratives undermine both scientific attempts to justify claims of truth relating to the existence, causes and consequences of global warming as well as practical attempts to motivate people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle.
The concept of the nation as an imagined community has gained importance in the relevant literature during the last decade. How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which ...discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one hand, and differences to other national collectives on the other hand? These questions were investigated in our study on the Austrian nation and identity. Taking several current social scientific approaches as our point of departure, we have developed a method of description and analysis of these phenomena which has applications beyond the discursive production of national identity in the specific Austrian example studied. By focusing particularly on the discursive construction of (national) sameness, this study has broken new ground in discourse-historical analysis, which until now has mainly been concerned with the analysis of the discursive construction of difference.
Zusammenfassung
Kalkulierte Ambivalenz ist ein rhetorisches Prinzip, das in Parteiprogrammen, in der politischen Werbung, in konsensorientierten Kommunikationstypen wie Gedenkreden, in diplomatischen ...Text- und Diskursarten sowie halbherzigen Entschuldigungen gerne verwendet wird. Es dient dazu, die Vereinbarkeit von gegensätzlichen politischen sowie ideologischen Interessen und Positionen zu suggerieren, mehrere Gruppen von Wähler*innen gleichzeitig zu adressieren, Tabus zu brechen, ohne die Verantwortung übernehmen zu müssen, und die Festlegung auf eine eindeutige Position zu vermeiden. Sie kann das Ergebnis der Mitwirkung unterschiedlicher Personen an der Textarbeit sein. Der Beitrag geht darauf ein, wie das Prinzip im rechten oppositionellen ebenso wie im Regierungspopulismus der FPÖ bei der Darstellung von Geschlechterverhältnissen angewandt wird, um die traditionelle Männerpartei als frauenfreundlichere Partei erscheinen zu lassen.
The concept of >stereotype< is used in a variety of disciplines with changing meanings. They intersect – up to synonymity – with neighboring notions such as >prejudice<, >cliché<, >image<, >phrase<, ...>common place< and >prototype<. Stereotypes are related to semantic features such as stenciled simplification, generalization and caricaturing, biased presumption, far-reaching inflexibility as well as independence of experience, habitualisation and emotionally tinted evaluations. They are usually located in the area of preconceptional cognition, but sometimes (especially within linguistics) on the level of semiotic and especially linguistic manifestation. Their ambiguous functional status oscillates among apperceptive economy, linguistic schematizing and the (dangerous) coining of predispositions to act. All this is exposed in detail in the present article after the reconstruction of the linguistic history of the term.
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