Arguments and counter-arguments in the debate to decriminalize some forms of incestuous relations in Poland

This study explores argumentation and counter-argumentation patterns emerging from a corpus of readers’ comments found below-the-line of over twenty-five online articles on the subject of incest, the current legal sanctions against it and the possibility to decriminalize consensual incestuous relations between adults in Poland. The comments have been coded line-byline for the types of positioning and argument premises using Atlas.ti software. Using the framework for argument analysis according to underlying premises, the comments were analyzed with respect to stance taken, practical reasoning conducted, and salient rhetorical strategies applied. They are subsequently correlated with the dis…

Fuzzy Identities in (Dis)Integrating Europe: Discursive Identifications of Poles in Britain Following Brexit

This study explores the fuzzy discursive identifications of Polish residents in Britain following the Brexit referendum by using a corpus of Polish-language glocal media materials (Moja.Wyspa.co.uk). Fuzziness is defined and operationalized on three levels: with respect to (1) online media technologies (global/local; above-/below-the-line) that allow diverse voices; (2) identity positions of non-native residents (Polish migrants as EU citizens at a destabilizing moment) who are left with the sense of anomie and “in-betweenness”; (3) discursive strategies of self-presentation mobilized in the ongoing processes of identification, whose analysis sometimes transcends classificatory grids offere…

Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland

This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claimmaking and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, and the Save Women committee that stood behind the ‘black’ protests opposing the project. The textual material is drawn from social media profiles of the two movements following a week of intense street protests and publicity activities (19–26 October…

Rhetoric, Discourse and Knowledge

The authors of this volume explore rhetorical and discursive strategies used to negotiate and establish legitimate knowledge and its disciplinary boundaries, to make scientific knowledge interesting outside academic settings as well, and to manage (c)overt knowledge in different social and political contexts. The volume focuses on the cultural concept of knowledge society, examining diverse linguistic means of knowledge transmission from the perspective of the complex interplay between knowledge and persuasion. The contributors discuss both sociological and philosophical issues, as well as textual processes in different genres that aim to communicate knowledge.

Rhetorical Criticism as an Advanced Literacy Practice: A Report on a Pilot Training

This paper sets out to advance the notion of critical literacy in view of the growing shortage of critical analytic skills even among college students. Critical literacy is defined as a disposition for critical reflection and critical practice. It is employed in the academic context in the systematic interrogation of discursive practices which are sometimes ideologically motivated. Being skilled at critiquing in the advanced EFL context is derivative of a certain general level of critical literacy. It is claimed here that this can be attained through introducing students to categories and procedures of the main rhetorical traditions: neo-Aristotelian rhetoric, the New Rhetoric and Burkean d…

Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines

This article sets out a framework for a language-oriented analysis of sensationalism in news media. Sensationalism is understood here as a discourse strategy of ‘packaging’ information in news headlines in such a way that news items are presented as more interesting, extraordinary and relevant than might be the case. Unlike previous content analyses of sensational coverage, this study demonstrates how sensationalism is instantiated through specific illocutions, semantic macrostructures, narrative formulas, evaluation parameters, and interpersonal and textual devices. Examples are drawn from a corpus of headlines of the ‘most read’ articles in the online outlet of the British mid-market tab…

Graphic emotion: a critical rhetorical analysis of online children-related charity communication in poland

This study explores dominant applications of graphic affordances in a sample of children-related charity appeals collected from the official websites of nine prominent Polish foundations in late 2016. It provides a systematic description of salient typographic and iconographic resources and an assessment of their rhetorical potential to solicit donations. The analysis focuses on three dominant discursive strategies used by charity communicators, namely how graphic affordances project utility (logos), confidence (ethos) and engagement (pathos). The article offers a critique of strategic emotional stimulation through aestheticized imagery and infantilizing graphics that replace arguments with…

Design and Style of Cultural and Media Studies Textbooks for College Students

This paper uses the conceptual framework of multimodal discourse analysis in order to investigate the dominant styles and designs in selected Cultural and Media Studies (CMS) university textbooks. For many EFL students who major in philology, CMS courses are obligatory and thus constitute a type of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The data from a description and evaluation of four popular textbooks indicate that there is a discernible move away from traditional literacy towards visuality and orality in textbook design and style. This tendency is evident in the use of segmentation and listing in composition, dialogic layouts and informal registers in exposition and visual aid…

Communicating environmental science beyond academia: Stylistic patterns of newsworthiness in popular science journalism

Science communication in online media is a discursive domain where science-related content is often expressed through styles characteristic of popular journalism. This article aims to characterize some dominant stylistic patterns in magazine articles devoted to environmental issues by identifying the devices used to enhance newsworthiness, given the fact that for some readers environmental topics may no longer seem engaging. The analytic perspective is an adaptation of the newsworthiness framework that has been applied in news discourse studies. The material is a sample of the 38 most-read environment-oriented articles in the online version of the international science magazine New Scientis…

“Nature needs you”: discursive constructions of legitimacy and identification in environmental charity appeals

Abstract This study traces how discursive constructions of legitimacy and identification are enacted textually and visually with respect to environment-oriented causes, such as landscape or species restoration. Such conservation projects actually clash with human economic priorities typical of the Anthropocene. Drawing on models of social trust and assuming the discursive nature of legitimacy and identification, we explore how environmental charity organizations represent their conservation efforts, reproduce sustainability discourses and advocate self-regulatory practices. We use a sample of mission statements and donation appeals by six prominent environmental charities from the UK. Throu…

Making Biosciences Visible for Popular Consumption: Approaching Image–Text Relations in Newscientist.com Through a Critical Multimodal Analysis

Salience or visibility of science-related issues can be strategically projected by means of linguistic and visual resources. This article presents a methodology for examining the relations between the textual properties of popular science discourse and the visual features of accompanying images. The advantages of this approach are demonstrated through a multimodal analysis of a sample of biomedical articles from New Scientist, which reveals the frequency and distribution of selected properties of visual images, typical aspects of layout, attributed functions of the images, and their relation to the text. Humanization, domestication, and aesthetization are dominant discursive strategies of …

Journalistic practices of science popularization in the context of users’ agenda: A case study of „New Scientist”

The article includes a discussion of two models which describe contemporary communication processes in journalism: agenda-setting and news value, indicating the need to expand their research tools to include qualitative methods, and merging the analyses of the reception and the message. It also includes indications as to the possibility, or even the social relevance, of the methods for applying those research perspectives to analysing journalism popularising science. Later, I present the results of an analysis of the content of a sample of 500 most read popular science texts available on the New Scientist website. I demonstrate which thematic areas were valued by the readers, and what value…

Imagining a “post-carbon” future? Climate change as represented by media and film industries

This study explores current trends in representing and communicating climate change by media industries. It reviews the current literature on mainstream media narratives of climate change focusing on their naturalization of progress and their techno-optimism (e.g., as regards geoengineering). It provides insight on how the media industry’s commercial agenda is linked to the types of disseminated messages and dominant imaginaries. It compares respective codes inherent in news media and film/fictional representations of climate change on representative examples. It traces the evolution of disaster/dystopian genres that involve climate issues. It discusses the implications from such a comparat…

Territorialization in Political Discourse: A Pragma-Linguistic Study of Jerzy Buzek’s Inaugural Speeches

The purpose of this study is to review some discursive strategies used to (de)territorialize the European public sphere by the newly elected President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek. A corpus of his inaugural speeches (over 7,000 words) is examined in order to identify salient pragma-linguistic devices, such as for example high-frequency references, linguistic markers of identities, values and interests, as well as metaphors and argumentative schemata. These are presumed to have been used by Buzek to territorialize the presidential office: to position himself as its leader, to establish his credibility, to become its agenda-setter. Additionally, the analysis focuses on the way Buzek…

De‐bureaucratising organisational culture at a public university: A mixed‐method study of the implementation of a liberal arts programme

Artykuł przedstawia analizę procesu zaprojektowania i zaimplementowania nowego programu studiów Liberal Arts w polskiej uczelni publicznej. Studium implementacji tego in-nowacyjnego rozwiązania zostało oparte na różnych meto-dach badawczych, jak analiza sieci aktorów, analiza dyskursu i etnografia. W artykule zidentyfikowano aspekty kultury organizacyjnej uczelni publicznej ułatwiające wprow-adzenie nowego programu studiów. Analiza dotyczyła trzech płaszczyzn funkcjonowania uczelni jako organizacji „uczącej się”: (1) relacji władzy i odpowiedzialności (styl przywództwa) podczas kreowania innowacji instytucjon-alnej, (2) (nie)formalnych norm i praktyk komunikacyjnych zapewniających ewolucję …

Talking Politics: The Influence of Historical and Cultural Transformations on Polish Political Rhetoric

This qualitative study aims to explore the characteristics of Polish political rhetoric since 2004 when Poland’s political system stabilized after the transformation from a communist to a democratic state. It analyzes a selection of celebratory presidential speeches, PMs’ inaugurals and parliamentary debates, and populist party propagandas targeted at domestic audiences. It looks at content, but mainly at style and rhetorical devices to identify reflections of Poland’s turbulent history (resistance rhetoric), economic instability (crisis rhetoric), national heritage (traditionalism and religiosity), and recent social changes (mediatization). One significant dimension investigated here is th…

Book review: Digital Journalism

Rhetoric, Knowledge and the Public Sphere

Public deliberation depends on how skillful communicators are in establishing their version of what is known to be publicly acceptable. This volume provides rhetorical analyses of institutional websites, political speeches, scientific presentations, journalistic accounts or visual entertainment. It shows the significance of rhetorical construction of knowledge in the public sphere. It addresses the issues of citizenship and social participation, media agendas, surveillance and verbal or visual manipulation. It offers rhetorical critiques of current trends in specialist communication and of devices used when contested interests or ideologies are presented.

Representing the Other in European Media Discourses

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively c…

Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed

This study explores a mediated variety of right-wing populist discourse in the digital context, given the populists’ inclination to bypass legacy media to connect directly to the citizens to garner political support. It analyzes a sample of the Tea Party’s newsfeed headlines posted in the spring of 2019. A corpus of 308 headlines collected according to a “constructed week” formula has been coded first according to selected news values parameters (Bednarek and Caple 2017), and then with respect to stylistic devices operationalized in terms of “casual,” “colloquial” and “commonsensical” expressions. Methodologically, the study aims to combine the perspectives of newsworthiness and stylistics …

Between Multiculturalism and Nationalism - A Discursive Construction of Britishness in the Spectator in the Wake of the London Bombings

Between Multiculturalism and Nationalism - A Discursive Construction of Britishness in the Spectator in the Wake of the London Bombings In his interdisciplinary work Ideology (1998), Teun A. van Dijk proposes to study ideology as a cognitive, social and linguistic enterprise. Such an integrative approach is assumed to model interfaces between social structure and cognition through discourse. The notion of ideology it presupposes may be described as shared social representations (group self-schemata), which become a group's defining attributes, and govern its ideological expression in discourse. It seems that this approach can be productively applied to a study of ideological relations in th…

Book review: Jane Gravells, Semiotics and Verbal Texts: How the News Media Construct a Crisis

Framing disease, ageing and death in popular science journalism

This paper characterizes the dominant frames in popular science-oriented reports devoted to disease, ageing and death. In popular science journalism, framing often consists in the discursive construction of newsworthiness, i.e., foregrounding features of events/issues considered by science editors to be relevant or attractive for audiences, despite the alienating nature of some types of news. A sample of most-read health-related articles from New Scientist (2013-2015) is subjected to content analysis, keyness analysis, concordance analysis and news value analysis to demonstrate how bioscience tends to be framed through consistent and strategic linguistic choices. The analyses reveal that mo…

Coercive metaphors in news headlines :a cognitive-pragmatic approach

This article explores the application of metaphors in news headlines with a view to interrogating their potential for coercion. Coercion in news discourse is understood as a strategic deployment of pragma-linguistic devices, including metaphors, to foreground the representations of socio-political reality that are compatible with the interests of the news outlet rather than those that inform public debate. It is argued that coercion can be exposed through systematic discourse analysis. Methodologically, the study aims to integrate the cognitive and pragmatic approaches to metaphor in regarding it as both a conceptual building block of news representations and a strategic framing device in n…

Managing in Writing: Recommendations from Textual Patterns in Managers’ Email Communication

This study draws from personality psychology and linguistics of written communication to explore the characteristics of self-selected well-written email communications (N=273) solicited from Polish managers who organized and supervised the (remote) work of their units during the COVID-19 period. The focus is on the writing of managers with above-average levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness, as these personality factors are predictors of efficacy in the completion of two work-related goals, Achievement and Communion, according to the Theory of Purposeful Work Behavior. The linguistic patterns responsible for effective email communication are identified through both automated and qu…

Pragmalinguistic Categories in Discourse Analysis of Science Journalism

AbstractDrawing on selected approaches from pragmatics, functional linguistics, discourse space theories and evaluation theories, this article proposes a methodological framework for the study of science journalism. It presents the institutional context of science journalism, which is considered a hybrid discourse, as it combines features of science communication and of market-driven journalism, particularly the need for the coverage to meet the criteria of newsworthiness. To enable the study of how science journalists tend to engage the readers linguistically without foregoing the appearances of credibility, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of such pragmalinguistic categorie…

Book review: Lawrence N Berlin and Anita Fetzer (eds), Dialogue in Politics

Review of Zappettini (2019): European Identities in Discourse: A Transnational Citizens’ Perspective

This article reviews European Identities in Discourse: A Transnational Citizens’ Perspective

Changing Perceptions of Multiculturalism in the British Public Sphere

This paper is devoted to the examination of the evolution of the uses of the term multiculturalism in a corpus of selected speeches by prominent British politicians, officials and diplomats in the United Kingdom within the decade 2001–2011. Britain is considered to be one of Europe’s most multicultural countries and there was a time when its government took pride in its pro-integration policies. That is why within the elite discourses of the Labour governments of the late 1990s, multiculturalism had overwhelmingly positive connotations: it was associated with new opportunities, strength, enrichment, social progress and economic success. However, over the course of the 2000s there was much d…

Crossing borders of academia from the perspective of an internationalizing university (editorial)

Popularity-driven science journalism and climate change: A critical discourse analysis of the unsaid

Abstract This study traces popularity-driven coverage of climate change in New Scientist with the special aim of identifying which aspects of the issue have been backgrounded. Unlike institutional communication or quality press coverage of climate change, commercial science journalism has received less attention with respect to how it frames the crisis. Assuming that the construction of newsworthiness in popular science journalism requires eliminating, or at least obscuring, some alienating information, the study identifies prevalent frames, news values and discursive strategies in the outlet’s most-read online articles on climate change (2013–2015). With the official statement of the World…

Challenges of Interdisciplinary University Programs of Studies: The Case of English in Public Communication

The aim of this study is to track students’ self-assessed successes and failures after taking courses in English in Public Communication (EPC) at the University of Opole. This interdisciplinary BA program combines philological, sociological and public communication courses. Using the data from 204 surveys, the study compares the calculated mean scores for the achievement of “new knowledge,” “new skills” and “new social competences” within two groups of subjects: core curriculum courses and practical English courses as declared by the first- and second-year students of EPC. Results show that there are clearer self-recognized knowledge gains, but consistently lower degrees of confidence when …

Stylistic analysis of headlines in science journalism: A case study ofNew Scientist

This article explores science journalism in the context of the media competition for readers’ attention. It offers a qualitative stylistic perspective on how popular journalism colonizes science communication. It examines a sample of 400 headlines collected over the period of 15 months from the ranking of five ‘most-read’ articles on the website of the international magazine New Scientist. Dominant lexical properties of the sample are first identified through frequency and keyness survey and then analysed qualitatively from the perspective of the stylistic projection of newsworthiness. The analysis illustrates various degrees of stylistic ‘hybridity’ in online popularization of scientific r…

Distance crossing and alignment in online humanitarian discourse

Abstract This article analyzes multimodal genres of current online humanitarian discourse such as mission statements, annual reports and photo galleries to find how the construals of beneficiaries and humanitarian organizations align with the motives, values and emotional dispositions of prospective donors. The discursive reduction of distance between the donor and the beneficiary is likely to produce solicitation effects and enable self-legitimization. First, based on extant literature, the article develops a method to account for the pragmatic operations of textual ‘proximization’ and visually simulated ‘co-presence’ in humanitarian communication. Then it applies it to a sample of multimo…

How to Foster Critical Literacy in Academic Contexts: Some Insights from Action Research on Writing Research Papers

This chapter attempts to identify problem areas and suggest possible remedial means to rectify critical literacy deficits of students who write research papers in Cultural and Media Studies (CMS) at the Institute of English Studies of Opole University, Poland. Despite sufficient levels of English proficiency and ever easier access to CMS sources, students report daunting problems in selecting and framing their research objectives, stating their positions, and arguing for them. They also find it hard to evaluate materials in terms of relevance and credibility. In brief, they often lack what can be described as critical literacy—a set of skills to interrogate the social, institutional and ide…