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.
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.
This article highlights that by focusing on concepts, many contemporary discourses increasingly turn towards (re/definitions of) various abstract ideas while moving their focus away from ...representations of doers as well benefactors of social and politico-economic processes. Focusing on the process of such an increasingly conceptual nature of discourse as one of the key displays of contemporary neoliberal logic in public and regulatory discourse, the article argues that the concept-driven logic – evident in policies, but also in media and political genres – necessitates new theoretical (and analytical) tools in critical discourse studies (CDS). It is suggested that, on the one hand, incorporation of ideas from within conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) into CDS is necessary. On the other hand, it is also argued that an in-depth rethinking of the ways in which CDS approaches recontextualisation as a concept is equally crucial. As is argued, both insights might help tackling the conceptual dynamics in/of discourses by tracing the conceptual logic of discourse and identifying ideological ontologies of contemporary public and regulatory discourses. They also help scrutinise discourses in which social practice is often regulated and where the image of non-agentic ‘invisible’ social change allows for legitimisation of the often-negative social and politico-economic dynamics.
Abstract
Situating journalism as a cultural practice charged with delivering valid accounts of the world necessitates a theory of metajournalistic discourse to explain how meanings around journalism ...develop. Through metajournalistic discourse, various actors inside and outside of journalism compete to construct, reiterate, and even challenge the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practices and the limits of what can or cannot be done. Based on the premises that journalism is variable, reliant on context, and produced through social relationships, this article develops a theory of metajournalistic discourse that connects three components—actors, sites/audiences, and topics—to processes of definition making, boundary work, and legitimation.
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