Search results for "Media studies"
showing 10 items of 1154 documents
Forms and functions of non-renditions in community interpreting: a corpus-based study
2021
This paper explores flexible language strategies in interpreter-mediated interaction from a corpus-based, quantitative perspective, drawing on data from the Community Interpreting Database (ComInDa...
Confronting blackface
2019
Abstract Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stancetaking, it traces how panelists ‘laminate’ the interview’s participation framework by embedding their assessments of Black Pete in contrasting dialogical fields. Their stancetaking evokes opposing trajectories of earlier interactions and …
The language of recovery
2020
Abstract The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions: What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America’s and Spain’s economic victory? What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in th…
Incivility in online news and Twitter: effects on attitudes toward scientific topics when reading in a second language
2021
Due to the participatory nature of Web 2.0, polite communication on social media and news sites can stand side by side with uncivil comments. Research on online incivility has been conducted with users reading in their mother tongues (L1), while the potential effects of incivility in a second language (L2) have been largely under- explored. This paper analyzes the effects of uncivil comments written in an L2 on attitudes around emerging technologies. Accordingly, study 1 replicates and extends a previous experiment on the effects of incivility to online news on risk perceptions of nanotechnology (Anderson et al., 2014), by adding an ‘L2 condition’ (uncivil comments written in an L2). Then, …
Odysseus the traveler: Appropriation of a chronotope in a community of practice
2020
Abstract In this article we analyze the role of chronotopes in the formation and negotiation of identities. In particular, we consider the case of a superdiverse community of practice formed by minors asylum seekers and teachers in a school of Italian in Sicily, Italy. In our analysis we stress the role of reciprocity on the ways in which the chronotopic figure of Odysseus is reinterpreted and appropriated by members of this community. We look at how through a process of mutual engagement the indexical values associated with the figure of Odysseus are recontextualized by both teachers and students in light of their present experiences. Data for the article come from interviews, narratives a…
Indigenous Identity in Print: Representations of the Sami in News Discourse
2003
This article examines news representations of the indigenous Sami people in the Finnish news discourse and the role of the representations in the politics of Sami identity. Through critical discourse analysis of Finnish newspaper texts collected from the leading daily Helsingin Sanomat, I analyse the representations by examining how the journalists utilized textual and linguistic resources available to them, how journalistic practices limited and enabled choices made and, finally, how the textual choices contributed to the representations. The study suggests that a combination of the minority position of the Sami, journalistic practices and an unawareness of or insensitivity towards the re…
Too good to be true: The effect of conciliatory message design on compromising attitudes in intractable conflicts
2019
The aim of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the use of experimental methods challenges the implicit assumption of progressive discourse analysts that ‘inspiring’ messages will have a positive effect on political attitudes and trust regardless of the recipients’ early political dispositions, and second, to examine the power of conciliatory message design to change political attitudes in favor of a peaceful solution to intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By employing the conceptual frameworks of progressive discourse analysis and experimental critical discourse analysis, we examined the most comprehensive hypothesis formulated thus far in the lit…
Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
2020
Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…
How Trump tweets: A comparative analysis of tweets by US politicians
2021
This paper analyses tweets sent from Donald Trump’s Twitter account @realDonaldTrump and contextualises them by contrasting them with several genres (i.e. political and ‘average’ Twitter, blogs, expressive writing, novels, The New York Times and natural speech). Taking common claims about Donald Trump’s language as a starting point, the study focusses on commonalities and differences between his tweets and those by other US politicians. Using the sentiment analysis tool Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and a principal component analysis, I examine a newly compiled 1.5-million-word corpus of tweets sent from US politicians’ accounts between 2009 and 2018 with a special focus on the q…
Graphic emotion: a critical rhetorical analysis of online children-related charity communication in poland
2019
This study explores dominant applications of graphic affordances in a sample of children-related charity appeals collected from the official websites of nine prominent Polish foundations in late 2016. It provides a systematic description of salient typographic and iconographic resources and an assessment of their rhetorical potential to solicit donations. The analysis focuses on three dominant discursive strategies used by charity communicators, namely how graphic affordances project utility (logos), confidence (ethos) and engagement (pathos). The article offers a critique of strategic emotional stimulation through aestheticized imagery and infantilizing graphics that replace arguments with…