"Discourse & Society: An International Journal for the Study of Discourse and Communication in their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts"

Filipescu, Corina

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088135pmid: N/A

This article proposes the analysis of synthetic personalization as a new approach in studying and understanding the legitimization of the Crimean annexation. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough, synthetic personalization is a discursive strategy that identifies how aspects of language, which are regarded as commonsensical and normal, have ideological power, as they can become manipulative and controlling. The application of synthetic personalization to the March 2014 address of Russian President Vladimir Putin draws the audience’s attention to traits that unify the masses and thus stimulate their individual features, in particular by relying on presuppositions. The article argues that the address legitimized the annexation of Crimea by framing the annexation as a result of a religious, military, and heterogeneous unity, which unified Crimea and Russia. The findings also question the impact of the one-sided production process and who is the actual producer of the address.

Liu, Yufeng; Li, Dechao

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088122pmid: N/A

Drawing upon a corpus approach to metaphor analysis, stance analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analyzes different stances taken by the Chinese news outlet Global Times (GT) and the American The New York Times (NYT) in 2020 Coronavirus narratives to Chinese and English readers. The database includes all Coronavirus-related GT and NYT bilingual opinion articles in 2020, that is, 97 pairs from GT and 73 pairs from NYT which are comparable in Chinese and English tokens. Results show that the differences between GT and NYT in narrating the pandemic and the involved parties, that is, China and the US, are statistically significant with a moderate to strong effect size. The Lambda test of association demonstrates that the knowledge of metaphor transfer methods can significantly increase the correctness of attitudinal intensity prediction, which bears out metaphor transfer as a representation of stance mediation.

Martínez Lirola, María

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088121pmid: N/A

This paper analyses the main visual characteristics of sub-Saharan immigrants represented as non-citizens in a sample from the Spanish press, and deepens on how this contributes to perpetuating the ‘we-they’ dichotomy. The data consist of all the news items published on sub-Saharan immigrants in the digital editions of the Spanish newspapers El País and ABC from 1 January 2016 to 1 January 2021. Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and van Leeuwen’s model for the visual representation of social actors will be the theoretical frameworks. The findings indicate that there are different visual ways to portray immigrants as non-citizens, which allows establishing this classification: representing immigrants’ arrival as illegal and clandestine, portraying them as invaders, representing immigrants as violent individuals or associating them with animalization. All these can be considered visual dysphemisms that problematize the arrival of immigrants and highlight the differences between Spanish population and immigrants.

Michos, Ioannis; Figgou, Lia; Baka, Aphrodite

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088129pmid: N/A

This study documented the rhetorical constructions of ‘human rights’ in political discourse and the potential implications of their invocation as a frame for LGBTQI+ claims. The minutes of the VI Greek Parliamentary session on a bill related to the legal recognition of gender identity, conducted in 2017, were analyzed. Analysis utilized the concepts of Rhetorical and Critical Discursive Social Psychology, indicating that human rights are flexibly used in arguments oriented to the expansion, the limitation, or the opposition to self-defined gender identity. Varied representations of human rights’ content and boundaries and different constructions of agency concerning their enactment are identified. Although representations of human rights as universal are oriented to the inclusion of LGBTQI+ community, other liberal arguments obscure anti-LGBTQI+ social actors’ accountability. Human rights are also depicted as threatening Westernizing tools. The rhetorical functions of these constructions and their potential implications for queer claims and politics are discussed.

Robles, Jessica S

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088130pmid: N/A

This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and addiction, and how participants manage the complex moral hierarchies associated with drug use and drug user identities. The analysis contributes to enriching an area of empirical research that needs more data and more attention to interaction, while also contributing to theories of categorization, normalization, stigma, and morality of drug addiction.

Statham, Simon; Ringrow, Helen

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088132pmid: N/A

The 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which codified a near-absolute ban on abortion in Ireland, was ratified in 1983 and removed after a high profile campaign to ‘Repeal the 8th’ in 2018. This article analyses the language of the pro-choice group Together for Yes and the anti-choice groups Love Both and Pro-Life Ireland that campaigned to ‘Save the 8th’. We combine an application of the Appraisal framework with an account of conceptual metaphor in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language of both campaigns on the social network platform Twitter. Both sides of the ‘Repeal Referendum’ strategically utilised language across a wide range of semiotic modes. This article assesses the specific role of social media language in the Irish abortion referendum and connects these strategies to the wider campaign tactics of both sides.

doi: 10.1177/09579265221088427pmid: N/A