Search results for " discours"
showing 10 items of 536 documents
Developing a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts
2017
Generally speaking, words can be elusive and they need to be carefully selected when conveying messages, ideas and proposals between parties. This is all the more evident in mediation process as language has to be neutral and mediators should avoid expressions directing parties. In this regard, recent theoretical developments in postmodern social theory and the social constructionist movement in the social sciences and humanities have provided the field of alternative dispute resolution with a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts. These developments are organized around the ‘narrative approach’ which helps us to see how the language we use to describe and understand our conflict…
'The sisters did her every imaginable injury': Power and violence in Cinderella
2012
The main aim of this article is to discuss the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in the Grimm brothers’ <em>Cinderella</em> with the intention of finding out what kind of processes predominate in this tale and whether they can be related to violent actions. The analysis involved firstly, a study of the frequency and concordances of some words belonging to the semantic field ‘violence’, surveying in detail the context in which they appear and secondly, the analysis of transitivity processes. The method proved to be a good strategy to check whether each character’s identity and social position (power) were somehow related to the infliction of violence w…
Heterogeneous knowledge: Trends in German discourse analysis against an international background
2011
This contribution maps the complex field of discourse analysis in Germany by situating its major currents and putting them in historical perspective. In a first step, it presents the major intellectual sources, such as (post-)structuralism, pragmatism/interactionism as well as hermeneutics, which have served as a backdrop for the establishment of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. In a second step, it takes a closer look at the intellectual conjunctures in the social sciences such as Critical Theory and systems theory before turning to the discourse analytical tendencies that have emerged since the 1980s in the light of Foucault's reception in Germany. Finally…
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.