Search results for " Political"

One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial

2020

The Latvian referendum on Russian as a second state language, February 2012

2016

On 18 February 2012 Latvian citizens participated in a referendum on making Russian a second official (“state”) language. The proposal was rejected by three-quarters of voters. There is a complex background to language policy in Latvia, where since regaining independence in 1991 the country has promoted Latvian as the only state language, though Russian and other languages are widely used at a societal level. The language law and associated citizenship law in Latvia (as in Estonia) have received considerable commentary, with recent significant writings disagreeing strongly regarding their interpretation. These laws have also very often been criticized by both European institutions and by Ru…

(Im)Politeness and interactions in Dialogic Literary Gatherings

2016

Abstract This article examines the interactions that occur in Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG), a cultural activity in which low literate adults read and debate classic literature. To respect the principle of egalitarian dialogue, participants agree on how to communicate and reflect on their communicative patterns. We analyse the actual interactional behaviour of participants and the pragmatic traits that evidence how this principle is implemented by identifying dialogic and power interactions in connection to (Im)politeness. This study shows the influence of the situated genre (DLG) over status in the prevalence of politeness and how the participants use polite mitigation strategies that…

Software as ideology

2016

Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this…

Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia

2015

This study demonstrates how a single type of sign can be connected to language policy on a larger scale. Focusing on the relationship between language policy and language ideologies, I investigate the private Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Hungarians living in two villages in Slovakia. Through an examination of ‘beware of the dog’ signs, it is shown how such signs can be indicative of different language policies. In Slovakia, the Hungarian public LL is often referred to as a threat to the state language and public order. This ideology is reflected on the LL so that there are mostly Slovak-only public signs in bilingual and Hungarian dominant villages. The private realm is the only significant…

Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies

2016

Although discourse analysts often conceive of their work as critical, there is little theoretical discussion regarding the possibility of normative critique in the scientific community of discourse analysis. Rarely are the normative grounds and normative scope of such a critique clear. Thus, this article attempts to find theoretically robust and practical answers to the following question: ‘How is a normative critique possible?’ In seeking my answer, I first provide a short overview of the possibilities of normative critique in critical discourse analysis. Second, I offer an argument in favour of immanent critique while explaining both its advantages and its theoretical and practical probl…

Tongan-English language contact and kinship terminology

2016

‘[D]o all humans mean the same things by words that can be used successfully to point to the same thing?’ (Leavitt 2015: 51). This study shows that the same words used in different English varieties might not have the same meaning. The typological comparison of standardised English and Tongan kinship terminology reveals that the categorisation is based on different underlying features. While standardised English focuses on the concept of ‘core family’, Tongan merges ‘same-sex siblings’ and emphasises the concept of ‘extended family’. The emerging contact phenomenon in Tongan English is the use of English terminology according to Tongan categorisation, that is, a case of semantic transfer.

La revolución del pudor: escándalos, género y política en la crisis de la Monarquía liberal en España

2018

En este artículo se trata de analizar el carácter performativo de los grandes escándalos morales y políticos en torno a la familia real, que afectaron a la imagen pública y a los mecanismos de legitimación de la monarquía liberal en España durante el reinado isabelino. Abordo el tema desde la perspectiva actual de reflexión sobre la imbricación histórica de las nociones de virtud política y escándalo moral que dio lugar a la idea de «corrupción» en el universo liberal. Una idea que, como trato de demostrar, tuvo fuertes connotaciones de género, estuvo ligada a la dinámica de construcción del Estado nación, obliga a una ampliación sustancial de nuestra noción de «lo político», sugiere el car…

“Languaging the worker : Globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”

2016

In the introduction to the special issue “Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”, we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for the study of governmentality as a viable and growing approach in critical sociolinguistic research. As such, in this introduction, we first discuss key concepts germane to our interrogations, including the notions of governmentality, languaging, peripherality and language worker. We proceed to map out five ethnographically and discourse-analytically informed ca…

Polish Adolescents’ Perceptions of English and Their Desire to Learn It

2016

In the process of foreign language learning the way in which students perceive the language may have a strong facilitative impact on their language acquisition process, especially when this perception is positive (Despagne, 2010). Unfortunately, it has not yet been clearly established whether the relationship between perceptions and foreign language achievement can be explained by the moderating power of the student’s desire to learn the foreign language. For the purpose of this paper it is hypothesized that the learner’s perception of the foreign language is strongly related to the desire to learn it, leading to higher achievement in cases of positive perception. In order to corroborate th…