Contentious relations between Türkiye and Greece can be traced back centuries to conflicts such as Ottoman Turks conquering Istanbul which was the centre of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and the 182...

Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance from the (...) battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare. (shrink)

The events surrounding the ‘Arab Spring’ have attracted an enormous amount of attention by the international press as well as on social media platforms, especially in its initial phase in early 2011. This article investigates how violent and forceful actions during the ‘Arab Revolutions’ were conceptualised linguistically by incorporating notions of Cognitive Semantics in a critical comparative study of press reports and Twitter posts. Focus is placed specifically on combining Talmy’s theory of Force Dynamics with methods of Critical Discourse Studies (...) in order to investigate diverging forms of schematisation of forceful interactions among protest participants. The most frequently recurring opposing force-dynamic patterns identified are defying a hindrance, prevailing stability and causation of action as well as inaction. Notable differences may be observed between mass media and social media in regard to the representation of dynamic power relations between police and protesters. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

As a part of religious discourse, Christian sermons are a “…persuasive discourse par excellence”. This is more pronounced in the Christian Prosperity Gospel, a system of thought and belief in which preachers The word preacher and speaker are used interchangeably in this paper. attempt to convince audiences to donate to their churches with the expectation that God will reward them with health and wealth. Previous research shows that the use of metaphors and metonymies pervade CPG sermons but an explanation on (...) the mechanisms through which they persuade is rarer. With this in mind and viewing CPG sermons from their persuasive angle; this paper sets out to investigate how metaphors and metonymies are used for persuasion purposes in televised sermons presented in the Gĩkũyũ language Gĩkũyũ is the language of the Agĩkũyũ who are largely found in central Kenya as well as in some other parts of the country. It is a Bantu language classified as a Zone E language by Guthrie. According to the 2019, Population and Housing Census, the gĩkũyũ is the largest tribe in Kenya at 8,148,668 individuals. The community has dominated in televangelism but the position is changing due to the proliferation of many vernacular television stations.. The data is drawn from authentic televised sermons. The findings indicate that metaphors and metonymies engender persuasion in sermons by affecting the perceived altruism and trustworthiness of a speaker in a sermon. This is done by means of manipulating various forms of distance suggested in the Media Proximization Approach. Metaphor is found to affect the axiological, epistemic, temporal and emotional distances while metonymy affects the axiological and spatial distances to activate certain pragmatic presuppositions which make them persuasive in a covert way. (shrink)

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)

In this article, based on a critical metaphor analysis, we identify and describe multimodal metaphors involving the human body and its conceptualizations in five auteur films of the 2010s. Studies on the human body in cinema have documented how it changes according to underlying ideologies. Our research focuses on the role of image schemas and metaphors as they embody meanings and sociocultural paradigms. Metaphors also frame how the body is conceptualized according to dominating ideological practices such as (a) commodification, (b) (...) the integration between artificial and organic, (c) dissatisfaction, (d) dynamics of beautification and idealization, and (e) politicization of the human body. We show how metaphors are creative tools to reframe meanings and representations of the body and how the body is a construct refashioned within the cinematic discourses of these films. (shrink)

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian WhatsApp users during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to exploring the thematic preoccupation, ideology, and the representation of participants and processes in the memes. The data, which were subjected to qualitative analysis, are examined from a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest corruption, perceived government deceit, insecurity, hunger, and inadequate health facilities and other social amenities. These (...) are done in order to project and resist an anti-welfarist ideology and emphasise the negative representation of the government. (shrink)

Verbs in the passive voice have been described as linguistic features which can exert ideological effects because they typically omit the agent, or ‘doer’ of an action. These missing agents are said to be potentially ‘mystified’ to readers. But to what extent are these agents actually mystified to readers, and can we predict when mystification is likely to occur? A text-based analytical framework for inference prediction focusing on agency mystification was applied to two corpora of US newspaper editorials. Eighty-four percent (...) of passive verbs were predicted not to mystify agency for casual readers. To test this method of inference prediction, a reader response study was carried out in which readers were asked to identify agents that had been deleted from texts via the addition of agentless passives. By a standard of 50% accuracy, 74% of passives were found to be non-mystifying. These results suggest that agents missing from texts are likely to be inferred correctly by readers in a majority of cases and that mystification may be predictable from text analysis. (shrink)

This paper continues to develop a programme of research which has recently emerged investigating the ideological functions of spatial construals in social and political discourse from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. Specifically, inspired by principles in Cognitive Grammar, the paper attempts to formulate a grammar of ‘point of view’ and show how this trans-modal cognitive system is manifested in the meanings of individual grammatical constructions which, when selected in discourse, yield mental representations whose spatial properties invite ideological evaluations. The link between (...) spatial organisation and ideological evaluation in these mental models, it is argued, is a function of our embodied understanding of language. These theoretical arguments are illustrated with data taken from online news reports of two political protests. (shrink)

The British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. The significance of media stance towards the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike. Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti-trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal British Broadcasting Corporation report, only recently made public, shows (...) that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’. Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this article, drawing on Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies, I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Miners, persisted through the year-long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representation. (shrink)

The paper focuses on metaphorical representation of military activities of the US-led international coalition and of ISIL which are construed on the basis of systematic metaphors drawn from the com...

Personification, one of major types of metaphors often employed to express an attitude, is also an argumentative tool, especially in media texts on politically contested events. The present investigation aims at disclosing the attitudinal stance in personifying Ukraine, Russia, the Western countries and Lithuania in a corpus of texts collected from Lithuanian media in 2015–2018. The study relies on the three-step Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA, Charteris-Black 2004), involving three levels: linguistic, cognitive and rhetorical. More specifically, they include (1) identifying personification (...) cases, (2) interpreting personification through cognitive metaphorical scenarios (Musolff 2016), and (3) explaining ideological implications encoded in the scenarios. The findings indicate that in the scenario of COMMUNICATION, Ukraine is mostly presented positively: active defender and in need of support, with occasional scepticism whether it is capable to change. The West, Lithuania including, is presented as a supporter, whereas Russia is viewed as a negatively evaluated antagonist. (shrink)

Underpinned by the polemical idea that governments have redefined their role as a penal actor that prioritizes the practices of repressing, punishing, and confining people (instead of tackling the very complex root causes), this study scrutinizes how the press discursively collaborates with the State in ‘governing through crime’ (Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.). Drawing upon a corpus of Thai newspapers, the study analyzes (...) representational choices and identifies polarizing strategies in execution reports that serve to legitimize and neutralize the harshness of executions. The findings reveal that state-inflicted violence is mystified and downplayed by agent suppression and non-aggressive, judicially administered material processes. In contrast, executed individuals are dehumanized and their agency in sensational material processes foregrounded, which in turn constructs ideal victims. It is argued that this exaggerated, at times disturbing, dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ serves to project an image of the State as the champion of citizens’ and victims’ interests. A shift from the use of fault-assigning and consequence-imposing discourses to more holistic ones that attend to offenders’ and victims’ commonalitiesshould be adopted. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present paper analyses the anti-immigration discourse in Poland in terms of Proximization Theory. PT [Cap, P.. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 17–41; Cap, P.. Axiological aspects of proximization. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 392–407; Cap, P.. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Cap, P.. The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; among others] is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the (...) ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. It reveals how top public actors construe closeness of an external threat, to claim leadership and solicit legitimization of preventive measures to offset the effects of the threat. The present paper applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today’s Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures. (shrink)