Search results for "Media studies"

Manipulation as an ideological tool in the political genre of Parliamentary discourses

2022

AbstractThe present study analyzes the discursive strategies of manipulation in the political genre of a discourse in Parliament with an aim to convince the audience that the Prime Minister and his party are innocent of receiving illegal cash donations from a slush fund run in the party. For that purpose, we have usedVan Dijk’s (2006)scheme of strategies of manipulation at several levels of discourse (content, lexis, topics, syntax, rhetoric, and order of discourse). Findings of the study show that the Prime Minister’s speech presents characteristics of ideological discourse, since it follows a general strategy of positive in-group and negative out-group presentation, which has an overall l…

deBot, K. (2015) A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present. New York: Routledge.154 pages. ISBN 978-1-1-138-82066-1

2016

Pragmalinguistic Categories in Discourse Analysis of Science Journalism

2016

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…

“You’re So Not Going to Believe This”:

2017

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…

Introduction to Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions

2018

In the introduction, we have embedded our overview of the contributions to this volume within a narrative that reviews past and extant research on language and digital communication. We have taken special care to highlight the ways in which each chapter advances the field. In order to do so, we have carefully identified new methodological and empirical insights put forth by the different authors. Specifically, we have highlighted the steps contributors to this volume have taken to help establish the so-called third wave of research, and these steps point to future directions in which to expand the field of language and digital communication.

(Im)politeness in Service Encounters

2017

This chapter examines sociopragmatic research on commercial service encounters. It offers a precis of the studies that have utilised service encounters as a vehicle to examine (Im)politeness manifestations. It addresses the methodological advantages of the service encounter as a relatively formalised interactional site in which sociability and efficiency are managed, hence as a locus for the emergence of (Im)politeness orientations. The chapter traces the evolution of (Im)politeness research and discusses the complexities of capturing (Im)politeness practices in transformation: from face-to-face and telephone-mediated encounters to newer communicative arenas resulting from technological adv…

Semi-automated annotation of page-based documents within the Genre and Multimodality framework

2016

This paper describes ongoing work on a tool developed for annotating document images for their multimodal features and compiling this information into a corpus. The tool leverages open source computer vision and natural language processing libraries to describe the content and structure of multimodal documents and to generate multiple layers of XML annotation. The paper introduces the annotation schema, describes the document processing pipeline and concludes with a brief description of future work.

Why being there mattered: Staged transparency at the International Criminal Court

2021

Abstract The International Criminal Court (ICC) represents a criminal justice setting exceptionally welcoming to discourse scholars. The court website provides ample information about ongoing cases, hearings are livestreamed, and transcripts, video footage, and other relevant documents are available online. Against this background of comprehensive transparency, this paper explores the additional value of physically attending ICC trial hearings. An auto-ethnography of how the ICC court landscape structures the visitor's path to the courtroom gallery, it is claimed, brings out the staged nature of the Court's projection of transparency. The ensuing discussion explicates the implications of th…

Dealing with Culture in Schools: A Small-Step Approach Towards Anti-racism in Finland

2017

This chapter discusses anti-racism education by focusing on how culture is used in educational discourses in Finland. More and more studies highlight the pervasive use of culture as a substitute for race, urging scholars to explore how and why cultural claims are made relevant (Breidenbach and Nyiri 2009; Piller 2011). Culture is present in numerous subjects (e.g. religion, literature, history, languages) and anti-racism education should therefore be understood from a holistic perspective. This chapter focuses on the Finnish context which is relevant to examine for two main reasons. First, Finnish school system is globally represented as high quality. Second, the new national curriculum, wh…