Search results for "Discourse Analysis"
showing 10 items of 451 documents
Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines
2013
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…
Subjective definitions of spirituality and religion. An explorative study in Germany and the USA
2015
This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions ofreligionandspirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic…
Teaching the Romanian neighbors Hungarian: language ideologies and the Debrecen Summer School
2016
AbstractThis article is a contribution to the hitherto scant literature on learning a historical minority language and on language ideologies in the context of a study abroad program in Hungary, Debrecen. I analyse the language ideologies of the decision makers in Hungary and in the Debrecen Summer School in relation to the teaching of Hungarian to the neighboring peoples. Drawing on interactional data of participants from Romania, the perspective of learning Hungarian as a historical minority language is examined. The present article combines a historical approach with language ideologies by focusing on an institution offering language education. Language ideologies are presented as they a…
Finnish teachers as policy agents in a changing society
2018
As policy agents, teachers are involved in representing and reproducing language education policies in their talk, practices and classroom interaction. Contemporary Finland and its education system...
Aspects discursifs dans les contes d’ Edgar Allan Poe et leurs traductions en français et en espagnol
2012
It is known that the translation exercise has always been important in the development of the human knowledge. That is why we have considered interesting to analyse the French and Spanish translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales. The aim of this contribution is the study of temporal cohesion in a cognitive approach. We have chosen three Tales of Edar Allan Poe: Berenice, The Oval Portrait, and The Masque of the Red Death. In a first step we’ll find the three markers still, again and then among the three Tales and in a second step we will compare the translations (French and Spanish ) of these markers with the original text. We think that these markers are polysemous and that they have a prot…
Domestic violence and public participation in the media
2013
Recent research suggests that as a social public problem, domestic violence is sustained in a number of social contexts that naturalize violence against women through gendered discourses and ideologies of male violence. This paper examines domestic violence vis-à-vis public participation in the media. In doing so, it seeks to explore the social public aspects of domestic violence and to investigate whether the gendered discourse of male violence is also sustained through the new electronic spaces of public participation. To this end, a corpus of unsolicited digital comments – a form of ‘citizen journalism’ – to a British online newspaper was compiled and analysed. This paper draws from rese…
Barack Obama's South Carolina speech
2010
Abstract In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from the perspective of pragmemes. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin, 1981 , Bakhtin, 1986 ) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of ‘personification’ 1 ( The Economist , December 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just …
Fixing meaning
2012
This contribution looks into a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin after the terrorist attack against a high school in the Northern Caucasian town Beslan in September 2004, widely seen as marking the end of the liberal hegemony in the Russia of the post-soviet period. However, a closer look reveals the many possible readings that are made of the speech. According to the reactions found in a corpus of press articles, the speech activates both “internationalist” and “sovereignist” readings in media discourse. By pointing out the polyphonic organization of discourse, I make the case for a productive exchange between the French tradition of discourse analysis, interactionism and critical…
Parental discourses of language ideology and linguistic identity in multilingual Finland
2018
Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents’ talk. The parents of three families in which at least Finnish, Swedish and English were used on a daily basis were interviewed. A discourse nexus approach showed that the concept of ‘mother tongue(s)’ played a central role and that although all family members were in practice multilingual, there was a strong tendency across the couples to identify themselves and …
Coercive metaphors in news headlines :a cognitive-pragmatic approach
2014
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…