The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological synthesis (...) in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop. (shrink)

Malaysian corporations have to disclose corporate social responsibility, and a typical genre for disclosure is CSR reports. These reports incorporate other discourses which indicate the presence of interdiscursivity. The article examines interdiscursivity in Malaysian CSR reports. It selects the CSR reports of 10 major corporations and pursues an interdiscursive analysis which involves four sequential stages. CSR reports contain discourses of public relations, sustainability, strategic management, compliance and financial accounting. Although the discourses are often multisemiotic, language maintains primacy in content, while (...) image tends to exemplify or simplify content. These discourses constitute an interdiscursive profile, and it has central and auxiliary discourses. The central discourse is public relations discourse, and it promotes corporations helping and not harming society. The auxiliary discourses are sustainability, strategic management, compliance and financial accounting discourses, and these discourses mitigate the promotional focus. Interdiscursivity enables the primarily promotional CSR reports to not seem overtly promotional. The choice of discourses is probably influenced by coercive, mimetic and normative reasons. These discourses enhance the reliability of CSR reports because their disclosure is anchored to various CSR aspects, international or reporting practices and professional domains. Interdiscursivity helps to build stakeholders’ confidence in disclosure and, therefore, in corporations. It joins other functions in CSR reports to convey corporations as agents of positive social change. The article also probes the relationship between interdiscursivity and intertextuality and advances a matrix of intertextual–interdiscursive use. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the Canadian policy discourse surrounding language and immigrant integration, focusing on the interdiscursive processes through which it recontextualizes discourse elements from a neo-liberal skills discourse, an academic discourse of language as communicative competency, and a research discourse of language as a factor in immigrant incorporation. This dominant discourse on language and integration is based on standard language ideology regarding the functional importance of language skills for economic integration of new immigrants and legitimizes (...) the increased salience of language within the Canadian immigration regime. It also plays a mediating role in changes in discourse practices surrounding language and integration policy associated with a neo-liberal transformation of the Canadian immigration regime. (shrink)

This study views the dispute over ‘996’ work schedule (i.e. working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) as a critical discursive moment in the modernization and marketization of China. It argues that behind the dispute lies the hegemonic struggles between business tycoons and the government amidst China's changing business mode. Drawing on the theories of critical discourse analysis, recontextualization, hegemony and interdiscursivity, this study examines the (de)legitimation of ‘996’ by business tycoons and official news media through (...) the appropriation of different discourses to illuminate the hegemonic struggles behind recontextualizing ‘996’. It concludes that when the business tycoons are blatant enough to whitewash overwork as a ‘blessing’, the age-old curse in China starts to befall them. (shrink)

UK universities have gone through drastic changes driven by the marketization of higher education. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, Fairclough hypothesizes that university discourse will be colonized by business discourse. While a number of studies have been conducted, to my knowledge no study has compared university discourse and business discourse both synchronically and diachronically. This article compares how employer organizations are discursively constructed synchronically and diachronically in 240 academic and business job advertisements. The analytical frameworks are transitivity analysis (...) and modality. The results indicate that academic job advertisements have changed from not mentioning organizations to discursively constructing organizations in a promotional manner like business job advertisements. In addition, universities reframe themselves as businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers. This article contends that universities should be selective in adopting business discourse and maintain their identity as educational institutions. (shrink)

This article explores the compatibility of ethnography and critical discourse analysis for the study of language policy. A perennial challenge facing the field of language policy is how to make connections between the macro and micro, and between macro-level policy texts and discourses and micro-level language use. Hornberger and Johnson [. Slicing the onion ethnographically: Layers and spaces in multilingual language education policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 509–532] propose the ethnography of language policy as a method for examining the (...) language policy processes within and across the multiple layers of policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation. This paper further explores how CDA can be integrated into ethnographic studies of language policy and proposes that the combination of CDA and ethnography is particularly useful for revealing the connections between the multiple layers of policy activity. Based on a 3-year ethnographic study of bilingual education policy and practice in the School District of Philadelphia, this paper examines the intertextual and interdiscursive links between policy texts and discourses to uncover how the recontextualization of macro-level language policy impacts bilingual education. (shrink)

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Hampshire 2008 speech. In Will.i.am's music video ‘Yes, we can’, uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama's speech. This type of communicative strategy results (...) in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper deals with the discursive construction of in-groups and out-groups through a politics of fear and a politics of hope. It draws on the 2015 Greek election and referendum campaigns of the two main political parties – the radical left Syriza and the conservative New Democracy – and emphasises how they legitimised their political decisions via these two forms of politics. The Greek bailout referendum took place on 5 July 2015 in a climate of polarisation and insecurity. We assume (...) that the referendum, at the campaign level, could be considered an extension of the January 2015 election campaign that was shaped on the basis of a synthesis of a politics of fear and a politics of hope. Using the discursive strategies of the Discourse Historical Approach, and especially argumentation strategies and the concepts of topos and recontextualisation, we illustrate the link between political communication, election campaign strategies and political discourse through the prisms of fear and hope. Drawing on the Spinoza ‘affects’, we intend to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the contemporary Greek political scene and to illustrate whether and how political rhetoric and communication strategies are conducive to political dichotomies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article examines the construction of transnational migrant agency in the media of the sending country, starting from the contestation and reinterpretation in the Romanian press of a British documentary about Romanian migrants in the UK. It proposes an analytical framework that allows insights into the ways in which the national mainstream media engage in transnational dynamics. The findings show that Romanian journalists construct a European field of power relations where Romania is in a disadvantageous position, followed by a symbolic (...) appropriation of the migrants’ identities, as a means of rearticulating the country’s position in this field. This is coupled with the emergence of a self-reflexive discourse that informs a stance of collective responsibility and provides well-grounded reasons for a debate about ‘us’. The Romanian media produce a politics of belonging, legitimising particular migrant–non-migrant relationships as well as policies, and position themselves and their publics towards the issue of intra-EU migration. (shrink)

This article explores the interrelationships and tensions between public engagement in higher education and media discourse. It tracks the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, comparing a magazine article in which their opinions first became public, to its recontextualisation across various UK newspapers and their Internet spin-offs. A mediated stylistic analysis reveals the discursive, rhetorical and performative techniques via which a sociologically imaginative attempt to transform a seemingly-personal-trouble into a definitively-public-issue (...) got recontextualised as if merely the public projection of personal angst. The article concludes by noting that in an era where public engagement increasingly means mediated public engagement, to take seriously the interactive, intertextual and rhetorical affordances of media discourse is to understand that and how sociologically imaginative work can – but does not always – end up circulating within public debate. (shrink)