This article investigates sexual and gender ideologies in online dating profiles of Sebian gay men using corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic methods. Selected keywords are analysed in context, ...and particular attention is paid to collocation patterns, including grammatical collocates that are shown to carry discursive relevance beyond style. The analysis reveals that repeated associations centre on concepts of masculinity and normality, in a local indexical order of ‘proper’ manhood, sexuality, global modernity, and national identity. Overall, the texts are most strongly characterized by adversarial distance towards certain gay men, operating in normalizing assimilation to the national (heterosexual) citizen ideal. A broader mechanism, termed recursive normalisation, is described as underpinning the observed patterns. The findings are further discussed as highlighting the pitfalls of theory and social movements focused on social assimilation, arguing for the need for further queer linguistic deconstruction of the normalising discourses that intersect marginalized communities and broader, systemic hegemonies. (Gay men, online dating, masculinity, recursive normalization)
Abstract
Direct metaphor has been widely studied from the cognitive perspective, but its functions in the communicative dimension (
Steen, 2011
) remain less well understood. This study investigates ...direct metaphor as a tool of metaphorical framing (
Ottati et al., 2014
;
Ritchie & Cameron, 2014
) in discourse, by examining a corpus of British newspaper texts on the topic of language and language change. The analysis of direct metaphors is sufficient to point to major ideologies of language and communication in the observed media context, which echo broader anxieties over social change, social organization and control. Most notably, unlike the meanings stressed in existing studies, the vast majority of direct metaphors are here found to serve the specific role of relational argumentation. This function is achieved through a kind of ‘corrective framing’, which explicitly juxtaposes two conflicting representations through an ‘A is B and not C’ type of metaphor. The findings are discussed with respect to deliberateness, metaphorical framing and rhetorical goals in discourse. It is hypothesized that corrective framing is among the major functions of direct metaphor in public discourse, which can influence public opinion in ways different from other metaphorically created representations.
U psiholingvistici i kognitivnoj lingvistici mehanizmi obrade dvosmislenih jezičnih konstrukcija privlače pažnju jer njihovo razumijevanje može mnogo toga reći o fundamentalnim procesima ...razumijevanja jezika – povezivanju pojmova u jednu koherentnu reprezentaciju. U širokome spektru istraživanja o temi kognitivne obrade ovaj se rad fokusira na jednu vrstu dvosmislenosti za koju su različita istraživanja u različitim jezicima utvrdila kontradiktorne principe obrade: na sintaktičku dvosmislenost odnosne rečenice, do danas uvjerljivo najčešću i najkontroverzniju rečeničnu konstrukciju za istraživanje jezične obrade. Tekst nudi pregled empirijskih nalaza, hipoteza i implikacija za šire modele kognitivne obrade, uključujući njihove kontradiktornosti i metodološka pitanja koja zavređuju daljnje ispitivanje. Zaključna razmatranja sumiraju nalaze, nedostatke i nužne pravce za buduća istraživanja.
In psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, mechanisms of processing ambiguous linguistic constructions have attracted great attention, since their understanding can tell us a lot about the fundamental processes of language comprehension — attaching concepts into single coherent representations. From the wide area of research on the topic of cognitive processing, this paper focuses on one type of ambiguity for which contradictory principles of processing have been established in different languages: the syntactic ambiguity of the relative clause, the most common and the most controversial sentence construction in research on language processing to date. The text offers an overview of empirical findings, hypotheses, and implications for wider models of cognitive processing, including their contradictions and methodological questions deserving further consideration. The concluding remarks sum up the findings, drawbacks and needed directions of future research.
The digital era has unlocked unprecedented possibilities of compiling corpora of social discourse, which has brought corpus linguistic methods into closer interaction with other methods of discourse ...analysis and the humanities. Even when not using any specific techniques of corpus linguistics, drawing on some sort of corpus is increasingly resorted to for empirically–grounded social–scientific analysis (sometimes dubbed ‘corpus–assisted discourse analysis’ or ‘corpus–based critical discourse analysis’, cf. Hardt–Mautner 1995; Baker 2016). In the post–Yugoslav space, recent corpus developments have brought table–turning advantages in many areas of discourse research, along with an ongoing proliferation of corpora and tools. Still, for linguists and discourse analysts who embark on collecting specialized corpora for their own research purposes, many questions persist – partly due to the fast–changing background of these issues, but also due to the fact that there is still a gap in the corpus method, and in guidelines for corpus compilation, when applied beyond the anglophone contexts. In this paper we aim to discuss some possible solutions to these difficulties, by presenting one step–by–step account of a corpus building procedure specifically for Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian, through an example of compiling a thematic corpus from digital media sources (news articles and reader comments). Following an overview of corpus types, uses and advantages in social sciences and digital humanities, we present the corpus compilation possibilities in the South Slavic language contexts, including data scraping options, permissions and ethical issues, the factors that facilitate or complicate automated collection, and corpus annotation and processing possibilities. The study shows expanding possibilities for work with the given languages, but also some persistently grey areas where researchers need to make decisions based on research expectations. Overall, the paper aims to recapitulate our own corpus compilation experience in the wider context of South–Slavic corpus linguistics and corpus linguistic approaches in the humanities more generally.
Normal straight gays Bogetić, Ksenija
Gender and language,
01/2013, Letnik:
7, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper is aimed at contributing to the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality by investigating collocation patterns in a corpus of Serbian gay teenagers’ online personal ads. Lexical ...collocations of words denoting masculinity and non-masculinity are found to index the dominant values among the ad writers, revealing strong associations of masculinity with positive characteristics, and effeminacy with a range of negative properties. It is argued that in such subtle but salient ways the ideological construct of hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated by these teenagers, while the cultural stigma associated with homosexuality is discursively shifted only to non-masculine gay men. A process here termed recursive marginalization is used to account for these patterns. The article also aims to make a methodological point by demonstrating that corpus-based collocation analysis offers a productive means for understanding ideology, as lexical co-occurrence may shed new light on complex webs of identities, discourses and social representations in a community.
Abstract The present study contributes to the growing body of work on the pandemic-time use of the war metaphor in public discourse, by focusing specifically on military metaphors in the media ...discourses of two post-Yugoslav, post-conflict states. Using the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis, the paper explores the discursive realizations of the war metaphor in this context, with a particular focus on metaphor extension, metaphor entailments, and effects of earlier conflict memory on discursive use of the metaphor. The results show how metaphor entailments may vary according to the kinds of war made salient in discourse. Several forms of discursive use grounded in linking metaphorical and literal senses of war are identified, as creating specific local meanings, which in the case area observed worked to relate representations of threat to dominant instrumentalizations of historical memory and ongoing nationalist discourses. Beyond the local context, the findings are used to discuss some aspects of pandemic-time war metaphor use important both for the theorizing of adversarial metaphors in public discourse, and for more nuanced analyses of the discourses of crisis.
Politics of resignification Bogetić, Ksenija
Gender and language,
11/2022, Letnik:
16, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Societies of central and eastern Europe are increasingly described as the hub of broader ‘antigender’ mobilisations, which has made them a locus of interest in political science and gender studies, ...yet they curiously remain among the least represented in gender and language scholarship to date. Recent developments in the region tap into some urgent foci for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality, encompassing not only growing frames of right-wing nationalism and antigenderism, but also burgeoning forms of feminist and queer resistance, whose intricacies and paradoxes complicate dominant perspectives in the field. Following a brief overview of the region's developments and contributions to the field, the present article uses this backdrop for an outline of several linguistic semiotic processes pertinent for tracing the dynamics of ‘gender ideology’ in discourse. More broadly, based on the complexities observed, the article emphasises the value of insights from postsocialist societies for rethinking the possibilities of true gender equality, within the wider struggles against the exploitation, marginalisation and dehumanisation pervasive in our current social reality.
O drustvima centralne i istocne Evrope cesto se govori kao o zaristu 'antirodnih' mobilizacija, zbog cega privlace sve vise interesovanja u oblasti politickih nauka i rodnih studija, te iznenaduje da ova drustva spadaju medu najslabije zastupljene u oblasti jezika i roda. Skorasnja dogadanja u ovom regionu ukazuju na vazna pitanja za sociolingvisticko izucavanje roda i seksualnosti, unutar danas rasprostranjenih okvira desnicarskog nacionalizma i anti-rodnih pokreta, ali i novih oblika feministickog i kvir otpora, cije nijanse i paradoksi komplikuju neke ustaljene perspektive u ovoj naucnoj oblasti. Nakon kratkog pregleda postojecih tendencija u izucavanjima jezika i roda u regionu, te teorijske diskusije o lingvistickim semiotickim procesima koji su u osnovi dinamika rodnih ideologija u javnom diskursu, u radu se istice znacaj nalaza iz postsocijalistickih drustava za promisljanje mogucnosti stvarne rodne emancipacije u sklopu sirih borbi protiv eksploatacije, marginalizacije i dehumanizacije kakve odlikuju nasu sadasnju drustvenu realnost.
Abstract The concept of ‘metaphorical framing’ is currently witnessing renewed interest in metaphor research, but for discourse-oriented work it remains a problematic analytical tool given the ...variety of senses it has been employed with. The present paper considers an approach to metaphorical frames in discourse, by proposing the notion of discursive metaphorical frames to capture the complex, systematic metaphorical representations prominent across discourse. The perspective follows the direction of recent integrated approaches to metaphor, frames and discourse (e.g., Burgers et al., 2016 ; Cameron et al., 2009 ; Semino et al., 2016 ) and is proposed as particularly suited to studying public discourses, as ideologically laden, multi-textual and multi-voiced. The approach is illustrated through an analysis of metaphorical representations of language in Serbian and British newspapers. The analysis reveals the deeper social ideologies underlying the newspaper discussions on language in Serbia and Great Britain, including similarities as well as notable differences, pointing to the diverse ideological processes shaping contemporary media metadiscourses. The results are also discussed in relation to the adopted approach, to frames of presentation, (sub)domain representations and the dynamics of metaphor use in public discourse.
Growing interest in meta-language, in linguistics and other disciplines, has highlighted a gap in metalanguage corpora and analytical resources, which remain among the scarcest in corpus-linguistic ...developments so far. This paper is aimed at making a step towards filling this gap, both by presenting our own metalanguage corpus resource and using it in a short sample analysis to discuss the applications of such resources in linguistics and social sciences. Specifically, the paper presents for the first time MetaLangCORP, a multi-element corpus of contemporary media metalanguage in languages of three post-Yugoslav states, linguistically annotated and made available open-access at the CLARIN repository of linguistic resources. To put the corpus in context, the meaning and relevance of metalanguage research is outlined, the existing efforts at compiling corpora of metalanguage are reviewed, and a sample preliminary analysis of MetaLangCORP keywords is presented to open a broader discussion on the potential applicability of metalanguage corpora. More broadly, it is hoped that making this kind of data available will prompt more nuanced analyses of metalanguage, as well as more corpus-building efforts along similar lines in Slavic and other linguistic scholarship.
Sve veći interes za metajezik, kako u lingvistici, tako i u drugim disciplinama, naglasio je prazninu koja postoji u metajezičnim korpusima i analitičkim izvorima koji spadaju među neke od najrjeđih u sklopu suvremenih dosega korpusne linvistike. Ovaj je rad usmjeren ka popunjavanju te praznine na način da u njemu predstavljamo naš metajezični korpus te ga potom koristimo u kratkoj analizi koja služi kao primjer na temelju kojega raspravljamo o mogućnostima primjene takvih izvora u lingvistici i društvenim znanostima. U radu se prvi put predstavlja MetaLangCorp, višeelmentni korpus suvremenoga medijskog metajezika prisutnoga u jezicima triju država nastalih raspadom Jugoslavije, koji je lingvistički anotiran i dostupan u slobodnome pristupu u sklopu repozitorija lingvističkih resursa CLARIN. Kako bismo korpus smjestili u kontekst, dajemo kratki prikaz značenja i značaja metajezika, kratki osvrt na postojeće napore u sastavljanju metajezičnih korpusa te predstavljamo preliminarnu analizu ključnih riječi iz MetaLangCORP-a s ciljem otvaranja šire rasprave o mogućim primjenama metajezičnih korpusa. Nadamo se da će dostupnost ovih podataka potaknuti iznijansiranije analize metajezika kao i daljnje slične napore usmjerene na stvaranje korpusa kako za slavenske, tako i za jezike koji pripadaju drugim jezičnim porodicama.
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