Scholars have recently argued that one of the more urgent tasks for environmentalists is to understand how space is discursively produced. This paper is thus a genealogical, as well as a discourse analytic, account of consideration of how a landscape ‘emerges into history’ through the medium of discourse. This paper analyzes the discourse of an environmental dispute over the Oak Ridges Moraine, a glacial landscape in southern Ontario. I consider a range of different ways the debate was framed, as well (...) as which of those strategies were most likely to be taken up and widely circulated. The paper considers how certain effective strategies for arguing on behalf of environmental issues function both as challenge to, but also ratification of, certain aspects of industrial capitalism. (shrink)

Critical Discourse Analysis/studies has been applied in the study of news discourse for more than 30 years. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the research in this field, this article uses the Web of Science core database to investigate their evolution and envision of the application of CDA/cds in news discourse. Moreover, CiteSpace is employed to draw visualization maps of scientific knowledge of this field, hoping to provide the meaningful guidance for the later research. The results are as (...) follows: The diversification and multi-dimension of theoretical approaches and analytical methods is a highlight of CDA applied in news discourse; Various theories of other disciplines combined with CDA have been embraced by news discourse such as journalism, ecology, politics, sociology, and cognitive psychology, which shows the advancement and diversification of interdisciplinary trends in news discourse; The application of CDA in news discourse covers various research domains from people’s livelihood issues to national strategic issues; The availability of emerging corpus analysis tools has helped the application of CDA in news discourse to spur on further discourse excursions with corpora, promoting the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the research advances in this field. (shrink)

This article continues the line of research that combines the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis with quantitative methods. We propose that Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a software for automated text analysis widely used in social sciences, can enrich the CDA toolkit. The methodological advantage of LIWC is that its semantic categorization was developed and validated independently, which addresses the concerns about subjectivity. In two case studies we use LIWC to analyze the construction and representation of the ‘Other’ in mass (...) media. Study 1 focuses on the representation of Russia in The New York Times before and after its annexation of Crimea; Study 2 analyzes the change in sentiment toward Islam in NYT before and after 9/11. We find that in both cases the change in attitude is driven by an increase in negative emotion words rather than by a decrease in positive words. (shrink)

The Serbian Orthodox Church has been described in scholarship as having had a significant impact onto the social and political life of Serbia, especially since the wars of the nineties. With the coming of the age of the Internet and social science automation, however, more options have gradually become available to researchers in the recent years. For this reason, this article will tackle the official rhetoric of the Serbian Orthodox Church in relation to the sociopolitical with the assistance of social (...) science automation. Forming an examination via the methodological lens of Operational Code Analysis, this article delves into the Church’s discourse on Kosovo, via heavy vetting of all official statements given on the website of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It also expands upon the initial methodology – Operational Code Analysis – to an analysis of an institution with a uniform discourse, which has so far not seen light in scholarly production. (shrink)

A major focus of the study of courtroom interaction in the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis has been the discursive strategies that lawyers use during trials. While acknowledging the role of rhetorical skill in influencing hearers' perceptions, this paper seeks to demonstrate that language has its limits, and that the speaker's personality and identity are key factors in determining how a verbal presentation will be received. The opening statement given by John Allen Muhammad, the ‘Beltway Sniper’, acting as his (...) own lawyer at his murder trial, incorporated many recommended strategies and was surprisingly well crafted, but was widely derided by media commentators. Through a comparison of Muhammad's opening statement with similar presentations delivered by celebrated attorneys, this paper will explore the relationships between language, personality, and identity in the construction of legal persuasion. Specifically, this paper will argue that Muhammad's identity as a criminal defendant, coupled with his inability to project his personality in a way that would command the attention of his hearers, set the stage for a negative reception of his remarks that their content could not overcome. (shrink)

Although the concept of ‘culture’ was once invoked by anthropologists for progressive social purposes, today it is often used to justify racial inequalities. Using theories and methods of critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how such everyday racism is manifest in the explanation offered by ‘Katherine,’ a White middle-class American, of the unequal socioeconomic achievements attained by her own family of origin and by that of her Latino, working-class husband. By basing her explanation on presumed ‘cultural differences’ between European and (...) Latino immigrants, Katherine implicitly denies the existence of race and class barriers impeding poor people of color, and makes it their obligation to renounce their old cultural values and embrace new ones. Yet elsewhere in her discourse Katherine implicitly acknowledges such barriers. The discrepancy between these competing cultural models can be resolved by construing cultures not as timeless entities that determine people's actions, but as historically based in unequal power relations among ethnic groups. By describing the connections between Katherine's discourse and discourses that circulate in more influential, public venues, we seek to encourage speakers, writers, and audiences of all ranks to think more critically about the political implications of ‘culture’ as used by themselves and others. (shrink)

Ways of communicating effectively in spoken English, using technology, in a virtual globalized context have received little attention from applied linguists. The role of language in synchronous computer-mediated discourse used in virtual teamwork is now emerging as a key area of research concern in business management and information technology disciplines. This article uses linguistic frameworks, most particularly critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, in particular appraisal analysis, to demonstrate how interpersonal meanings may create dominance, power and solidarity within a (...) sample of a virtual team management meetings. Focusing on one manager case study, we investigate how language is used, consciously or unconsciously, to dominate and close down discussion with his colleagues. We first present the key findings from a turn-taking analysis and then present, through the application of appraisal analysis, how this manager opens or contracts the space available for others to participate. By revealing how power and control unfold through this analysis, the findings may lead to an enhanced self-awareness among all members in virtual teams and reveal how language plays a crucial role in engaging members during a meeting, or in this case, disengaging them. (shrink)

According to Dascal, controversy is characterised by a special kind of rationality, one result thereof being the unique contribution of this kind of polemics to the growth of knowledge. This, in turn, implies that complete cooperation may be detrimental for the efficiency of communication. In this article I discuss the kind of rationality that characterises controversy in legal discourse, in order to provide additional support to Dascal’s thesis about the uniqueness of the rationality of this kind of polemic exchange. I (...) present empirical evidence supporting the conclusion that we may characterise the rationality inherent in controversy by its tolerance to inconsistency; I elucidate the tolerance to inconsistency of the rationality of legal polemic by showing that the norms recommended by the Israeli Supreme Court in the domain of conjugal relationships between men and women verge on inconsistency: On the one hand, the legal system defends the right of women over their bodies, including a woman’s right to establish a romantic relationship, regardless of the nature of the relationship she has with other men; on the other hand, the court acknowledges a man’s uncontrolled tendency to impose monogamous behaviour on his female partner. (shrink)