Discourse & Society

Coates, Linda; Wade, Allan

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045031pmid: N/A

Part I of this article introduces the interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance, part II illustrates its application to the analysis of sexual assault trial judgments, and part III provides a detailed analysis of an entire judgment. In giving their reasons for verdicts and sentences, the majority of judges accounted for the assaults by drawing on psychological concepts and constructs. These psychological explanations or causal attributions were grouped into one or more of eight categories: alcohol and drug abuse, biological or sexual drive, psychopathology, dysfunctional family upbringing, stress and trauma, character or personality trait, emotional state, and loss of control. The causal attributions in all categories systematically reformulated deliberate acts of violence into non-deliberate and non-violent acts. Psychologizing attributions, that is, causal attributions that functioned to conceal the violence and mitigate the perpetrator’s responsibility, accounted for 97 percent of attributions. Through line-by-line analyses of the full text of one judgment, we show how psychologizing attributions are combined in use with other linguistic devices to (i) conceal violence, (ii) mitigate perpetrators’ responsibility, (iii) conceal victims’ resistance, and (iv) blame or pathologize victims.

Englund, Harri

doi: 10.1177/0957926504038944pmid: N/A

As an institutionalized form of human rights discourses, rights talk plays a prominent role in recently democratized countries. It also poses a challenge to critical analysts of language, because its contribution to maintaining inequalities is not apparent in its emancipatory rhetoric. This article examines rights talk at a non-governmental centre for free legal aid in Malawi. By deploying the notion of narrative inequality, the article shows how legal officers and their clients engage in a contest of contexts from unequal subject positions. While officers subscribe to an individualist concept of rights and seek piecemeal solutions to abuse, clients generally situate their complaints in complex moral narratives. The limited success of their claims leads to subtle forms of resistance against rights talk. The article shows that narrative inequality provides a perspective that both reaches beyond interlocutors’ own terms and asserts the value of rigorous empirical analysis in the critical study of language.

Erjavec, Karmen

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045032pmid: N/A

The aim of this article is to show the usefulness of an expanded version of Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis approach, i.e. an approach that combines text analysis with an analysis of discourse processes in studying text production and interpretation, and also incorporates ethnographic methods, in this case, participant observation and interviews. This expanded approach was checked in the study of illegal promotional news discourse; the study was conducted chronologically in two stages. In the first stage, an analysis of interpractice—which identifies cases in which specific other practices of the process of text production and interpretation are overtly drawn upon within a practice—was used to identify promotional news reports and uncover elements of promotional practice which are drawn upon within journalism, such as having the advertiser, who realizes his/her commercial interest by paying for publishing or killing a certain story, as the key actor in the process of promotional news production. In the second stage, analysis of interdiscursivity revealed how promotional journalism through textual devices (genre, topics, perspective, choice of sources, lexical choice, over-lexicalization, coherence, choice of processes and participants) incorporates discursive elements of promotion which are drawn upon within the news report discourse, such as using representatives of the organization as almost the only participants, partiality, positive-only evaluation of the characteristics/activities of the subject discussed, which is in the interest of those discussed by the texts and not the readers.

Flowerdew, John

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045033pmid: N/A

With the coming of globalization there has been increased competition among cities internationally to become so-called ‘World Cities’, i.e. centres of high technology, industry, trade, banking, finance, professional activity, higher education and the arts. This article describes and analyses how Hong Kong has attempted to discursively construct itself as such a city. Applying ideas from Critical Discourse Analysis, genre theory and branding, the article considers the governmental consultation process designed to promote Hong Kong as a World City and shows how this is influenced not only by the government’s control of the various genres which make up the consultation, but also by its use of language. Textual analysis, as demonstrated in the analysis of three documents, grounded in the political situation, highlights the manipulative nature of the consultation process.

Gordon, Cynthia

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045034pmid: N/A

This article considers how one family, consisting of a mother, father, and son (aged 4 years 10 months), uses language to collaboratively create (and socialize one another into) one aspect of their shared family identity—as Democrats and supporters of Al Gore—through conversations they tape recorded during the week of the 2000 presidential election. I identify four ways in which this family constructs their political identity. Interlocutors (i) use referring terms for the candidates that create closeness to Gore and distance from Bush, (ii) repeatedly discuss Bush’s 1976 drunk-driving arrest, (iii) negatively assess Bush and those associated with him, and (iv) refer to family members as Democrats. Members of this family create alignments vis-àvis the political candidates and each other through their use of referring terms, repetition, laughter, storytelling, and constructed dialogue. This study illustrates how linguistic strategies create a group identity, how political socialization is multidirectional in the family context, and how all family members play a role in constructing the family identity.

Higgins, Michael

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045035pmid: N/A

This article explores the role of location formulation in the expression of nationhood in six Scottish newspapers’ coverage of a domestic political event. The article draws upon a corpus analysis comparing the incidence of ‘location lexical tokens’ in the Scottish papers with a selection from the UK and England. It finds that the Scottish papers stress the national character of the political process, occasionally doing so alongside an inclusive rhetoric. The article also finds that the Scottish papers mobilize an internal political vocabulary around the expression of location, manifest in the widespread adoption of the political metonym ‘Holyrood’ for the Scottish parliament, and in the use of localized political discourses. The article therefore suggests that explicit reference to the home nation is an important component of news discourse, and that the systematic study of location formulation also offers an insight into the generation of an internal and nation-specific political vocabulary.

Pinto, Derrin

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045036pmid: N/A

During the period following the Spanish Civil War, the regime of Francisco Franco utilized an authoritative discourse rooted in Fascist ideology as a means for justifying absolute power and indoctrinating the masses. Perhaps the demographic group most heavily targeted by this aggressive campaign of propaganda was children, who in the eyes of Franco, had to be indoctrinated early before their noble feelings of youth were corrupted. This desire to reach out to the youth is evident in Así quiero ser: El niño del nuevo Estado, an elementary school textbook that imposes a rigid Fascist ideology. The totalitarian rhetoric of the text includes unyielding adoration of the Caudillo, a Utopian vision of reality, and covert strategies of persuasion and control that together comprise a powerful tool of manipulation. Taking into account both the sociopolitical context of the era and the genre of didactic literature, this critical discourse analysis of Así quiero ser incorporates the Bakhtinian notion of authoritative discourse with other approaches to analysing persuasive discourse, such as those employed by Kinneavy (1971), Harré (1985) and Menz (1989), among others.

doi: 10.1177/0957926504045037pmid: N/A