Search results for " Discourse"
showing 10 items of 452 documents
Semiotics of pride and profit: interrogating commodification in indigenous handicraft production
2014
This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While “pride” associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, “profit” views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, “pride” seems to be increasingly giving way to “profit”. Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in h…
Theresa May’s Representation of Reality in her Brexit Speeches
2020
This study analyses Theresa May’s three seminal Brexit speeches. These describe the kind of desirable post-Brexit EU-UK relationship that she envisioned, and together constitute a corpus of 18,532 words. The speeches can be considered as landmarks on a timeline that was initially meant to lead to the delivery of Brexit. It is hypothesized that there may be meaningful differences between the speeches, and that these affect the representation of reality. These in turn would have a bearing on May’s discursive self-representation as either an individualized or a collectivized social actor. To account for such representational values, the study draws on Halliday’s Transitivity System (1994), sta…
UNESCO and cultural diversity: democratisation, commodification or governmentalisation of culture?
2012
The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was first adopted by its member states in October 2005. The document defines UNESCO's general principles and conceptualisations regarding culture, cultural diversity and expressions. In order to better manage culture, cultural expressions refer above all to goods and services of the markets, but another, more universally humanitarian and participatory aspect is also present. For the United Nations member states and especially countries that ratified it, the Convention offers policy and legal guidelines to support all forms o…
Touring the magical North : Borealism and the indigenous Sámi in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy literature
2017
Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in the tourist industry and also surface in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy fiction. In contrast to the ‘self-orientalism’ of discourses of tourism, where places and people are represented as exotic to a tourist gaze, the portrayals of the North and its inhabitants gain different symbolic meanings in fictional texts produced by outsiders who rely on earlier texts – myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts – rather than on their own lived experience of the North or indigeneity. This article applies the concept of Borealism to examine cross-cultural intertextuality and discou…
Evaluation of Status as a Persuasive Tool in Spanish and American Pre-electoral Debates in Times of Crises
2018
The evaluative function of language is explored from the point of view of the expression of “status,” or how the world is presented, and its persuasive potential in pre-electoral debates in the US and Spain. The types of statements used in two comparable corpora in Spanish and English are examined using Hunston’s model (2000; 2008) for the evaluation of “status”—the degree of alignment of a proposition and the world—to discover similarities and differences between them. The results show that, in general, all politicians prefer to use statements that refer to the actual world—“world-reflecting statements” in Hunston’s classification—rather than “world-creating propositions” in an attempt to …
Popularity-driven science journalism and climate change: A critical discourse analysis of the unsaid
2018
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…
“Cute Goddess is Actually an Aunty”: The Evasive Middle-Aged Woman Streamer and Normative Performances of Femininity in Video Game Streaming
2022
In this paper the focus is on the representations of “middle-aged” or “aging” women streamers in western media. I analyze discussions in Western online media around a case of Chinese DouYu live-streamer. “Qiaobiluo Dianxia,” as her streamer name goes, became a topic in Western media after a glitch in her live stream revealed her to be a middle-aged woman, rather than young woman she was assumed to be. The discussions are analyzed with critical discourse analysis. It is argued that the aging bodies of women, both their presence and absence, should be read and understood through toxic gaming culture and geek masculinity and the hegemonic discourse they constitute.
Beyond the Cultural Turn: A Critical Perspective on Culture-Discourse within Public Relations
2017
International audience; In 1992, Sriramesh and White (1992) pointed to the importance of culture for public relations. Two decades later, public relations scholars had answered their call in force (e.g., Bardhan & Weaver, 2011; Carayol & Frame, 2012; Edwards & Hodges, 2011; Sriramesh & Vercic, 2012). Sriramesh and other PR scholars have criticized much previous public relations research for its focus on the work of Hofstede and cultural characteristics that are apparently common across countries (Sriramesh, 2009), rather than approaches which present culture as a social phenomenon on the level of the social group (Frame, 2012), or as a communication resource or tool-kit (Swidler, 1986). Sri…
Representing the Other in European Media Discourses
2017
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…
Análisis del discurso aplicado al aprendizaje de competencias comunicativas en el dominio del turismo
2017
This paper focuses on possible didactic applications of corpus linguistic analysis results. After having stated the theoretical frame around the concept of specialized discourses within a professional context, it is firstly argued that professional discourses use the same linguistic patterns than « general » discourse; hence, it is not necessary to acquire previous general knowledge before learning language for specific purposes (LSP). Secondly, this paper suggests that corpus linguistic can help to design the contents used for teaching communicative competences what is illustrated through the analysis of the pragmatic patterns present in a corpus made of "short stories". This corpus has be…