Second International Conference

Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis

Aross Disciplines ‘08

B OOKofOF
University ABSTRACTS
Hertfordshire
Orientation
10-12 July 2008
Organisers
Christopher Hart and Dominik Lukeš

University of Hertfordshire
Administrator
Janice Turner
10-12 July 2008

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 Organisers
Christopher Hart and Dominik Lukeš

Scientific Committee
Adrian Blackledge, Paul Chilton, Christopher Hart, Corneilia Ilie, Dominik Lukeš,
Kieran O'Halloran, Bernard McKenna, John Richardson, Christina Schäffner,
Louis de Saussure and Peter Teo

CADAAD ‘08 is hosted at the University of Hertfordshire, supported by the Social Science, Arts and
Humanities Research Institute. The conference is sponsored by
John Benjamins Publishing Company.

http://cadaad.org
discourse@cadaad.org

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 Table of Contents

Useful Information ........................................................................ 4

Plenary Lectures .......................................................................... 7

Theme Session 1 ........................................................................ 10

Theme Session 2 ........................................................................ 19

Theme Session 3 ........................................................................ 30

General Session ......................................................................... 42

Poster Session ............................................................................ 91

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 Useful Information
Business Meeting
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines is an ongoing project which aims to foster
and promote cross-disciplinary communication in critical discourse research. Its platform is
http://cadaad.org - an electronic space providing resources, including a peer-reviewed journal, for
students and scholars critically involved with discourse. CADAAD 2008 is the second international
conference to be organised as part of this project. We are looking for offers to organise another
conference in 2010. The business meeting is an opportunity to discuss possible venues for a third
CADAAD conference as well as the development of the website and ways to take the project forward.
All are welcome.

Chairs
We are asking the first presenter in each block of the general session to chair the remainder of that
block. Blocks have been thematically organised where possible and no block is greater than four
papers. If you are unable to chair your block please inform an organiser or steward in advance.
Chairs should introduce subsequent speakers and are responsible for tight time-keeping.
Presentations should last twenty minutes with five minutes for questions and feedback, leaving a five
minute change-over period. Time cards are provided in each room.

Conference Dinner
The Conference Dinner will take place on Friday 11 July in the Salisbury Suite of nearby Beales Hotel
and is by ticket only. If you signed up for the dinner on the registration form you will find your ticket
included in your conference bag. A limited number of further tickets may be available for purchase from
the Enquiries Desk.
We will meet at the Enquiries Desk at 19.30 prompt to walk to the venue.

Enquiries Desk
The Registration Desk will remain open for the duration of the conference when it will serve as a
general Enquiries Desk.

Free Theme Session

It is our impression that free time at conferences is often the most fruitful time. As such, a ‗Free Theme
Session‘ has been timetabled toward the end of the conference. This session is intended to offer a
space either for discussion and development of any new themes that should emerge during the
conference or for new collaborative projects to be discussed. This space can be booked at the
Enquiries Desk.

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Internet and Email
Computer stations can be found in the Learning Resources Centre. Residential delegates with their
own laptops can also access the internet via the connection in their rooms. Individual usernames and
passwords are required, which can be obtained from Residential Services. Please be sure to log off
after use.

Learning Resources Centre (LRC)

Your conference badge gains you entry into the LRC where you will find computer stations, books and
journals, study rooms and a café, as well as printing and photocopying facilities.

Lunch and Refreshment Breaks

Lunch will be served in the Refectory. Refreshments will be served in the R Block Corridor.

Notice Board
The Notice Board is located near the Enquiries Desk. All programme cancellations and alterations as
well as any other notices will be detailed here. Please ask at the Enquires Desk if you wish to post a
notice.

Posters
Posters will be displayed from the beginning of the conference in the R Block Corridor. Each poster will
remain up for one day. Presenters should put their poster up in the morning and must take it down
again at the end of the day.

PowerPoint
It is imperative that presenters upload any PowerPoint presentations to the computer in the relevant
room before they are due to present. Please do so on the day either in the morning before sessions
begin or during a break.
If you have any problems uploading your PowerPoint please ask an organiser or steward for
assistance.

Printing and Photocopying

Printing and photocopying facilities can be found in the Learning Resources Centre.

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Proceedings
Selected proceedings from the general session will be published in a special issue of the international
journal Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. Papers should be prepared
following the submission guidelines detailed at http://cadaad.org/ejournal/submissionguidelines. All
submissions will be subject to the journal‘s standard peer review process. The deadline for submission
is 1 January 2008.
‗Discussion‘ slots have been allocated at the end of each theme session in the hope that participants
might use this time to organise the compilation of an edited volume. We encourage editors to submit
manuscripts to John Benjamins‘ series Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture. For
submission guidelines see http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/show_html.cgi?file=/jbp/submit.htm. Any
manuscripts will undergo the publisher‘s usual peer review process.

Programme
The programme is included in your conference bag. This programme is accurate as at the time of print
but is subject to minor changes. You will be informed of any changes to the programme during
Announcements and such changes will be listed on the Notice Board.

Publishers and Promotions

Book displays from John Benjamins and Routledge will be permanently positioned in the R Block
Corridor. Some further material is also on display and included in your conference bag.

Technical Support
Technical support is available throughout the conference. Contact an organiser or steward who will call
for assistance.

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Plenary Lectures

Piotr Cap
University of Łódź
strus_pl@yahoo.com

Axiological Proximization in Political Discourse

This paper is a sequel to my earlier work on proximization (cf. e.g. Cap 2006, 2008) which I take as one
of the most effective strategies in accomplishing legitimization effects in political (interventionist)
discourse. Proximization is a pragmatic-cognitive strategy that draws on the speaker‘s ability to present
the events on the discourse stage as directly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or a
threatening way. Once the addressee has construed such threats as personally consequential, he or
she will be more likely to legitimize actions which the speaker proposes to neutralize them.
I distinguish between three aspects of proximization, spatial, temporal and axiological, which
conceptually bind the entities localized inside the deictic center of the stage (the speaker and the
addressee, the so-called IDCs) with the alien, outside-the-deictic-center entities (ODCs). The spatial
aspect of proximization involves the construal of the ODC-instigated events as physically endangering
the IDCs i.e., the addressee and the speaker. The temporal aspect involves presenting the events as
momentous and historic and thus of central significance to both the addressee and the speaker. The
axiological aspect, which this paper is gradually concentrating on, involves a clash between the system
of values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee on the one hand, and, on the other, the values
characterizing the ODCs whose actions affect negatively the discourse stage, including again all of the
IDCs. I will show that the intrinsic mechanism of axiological proximization, which will be defined within
the so-called axiological proximization framework, is such that this kind of proximization is typically used
to compensate for the diminishing role of the other proximization strategies, esp. in temporally
extensive legitimization processes. Crucial to such a compensatory capacity is the axiological mediation
between the spatial domain and the ideological domain: the axiological model accounts for conditions
under which a continuing ideological conflict can materialize in terms of a physical clash between ODC
and IDC entities.
I will illustrate these theoretical observations with samples of the US rhetoric in the recent Iraq war,
where the gradual loss of the material premise for intervention (the alleged possession of weapons of
mass destruction - WMD - by the Iraqi regime) has necessitated a rhetorical switch to a more universal,
ideological rationale.

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Jonathan Charteris-Black
University of West England
jonathan.charteris-black@uwe.ac.uk

Rogue States and Rampant Bodies: Metaphors of Control in

Public and Private Worlds
Metaphor is a means by which humans adapt to changes in their social environment and in their bodies
and for understanding control, and loss of control in private and public worlds. Politicians communicate
power through metaphors that highlight their role in eliminating uncertainty by control and I will
demonstrate how their metaphors represent them as legitimate forces for the elimination of social
disorder. Metaphor therefore contributes to a rhetoric that prioritises the preservation of a moral order. I
will then demonstrate how people experiencing illness employ metaphor to communicate their
understanding of the changed states of embodiment that are associated with illness. Metaphor is
therefore an important linguistic resource for communicating the experience of powerlessness over their
bodies arising from illness, and contributes to a rhetoric that prioritises an emotional order.

Metaphor reflects a common need to gain control over feelings of uncertainty arising from change. In
the public world, metaphors arouse moral beliefs associated with the creation, maintenance or
restoration of control while in the private world they communicate feelings of uncertainty resulting from
a body that has gone out of control. An explanation of metaphor in creating social cohesion and in
therapeutic discourse is that it facilitates an understanding of the complex and frightening processes
associated with change by resolving moral and emotional disharmony. While metaphor can be used by
the powerful to restore balance in the public world, it can be used by the powerless to regain
impressions of control over errant bodies. Metaphor therefore contributes to the moral order by claiming
to reduce uncertainty and to the emotional order by expressing uncertainty.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Teun A. van Dijk

Pompeu Fabra University
teun@discourses.org

Discourse, Communication and Knowledge

Despite the fundamental role of knowledge in language use, discourse and communication, this role
has not yet been adequately investigated in discourse studies. We know from cognitive psychology a
little bit about knowledge (e.g. as scripts) in the production and understanding of discourse. Philosophy
has contributed to our insights into the role of knowledge, discourse and power (Foucault, etc.). Yet, an
integrated theory of the nature of knowledge and its relationships with the structures and functions of
discourse in interaction and society is still on the agenda. Indeed, we still need to examine the very
(pragmatic) definition of knowledge within discourse studies, beyond the abstract definitions of
knowledge as "justified true beliefs" in traditional epistemology. Within the framework of a
multidisciplinary research project, this lecture will focus on some topics within this enormous field of
investigation, namely (i) the relations between knowledge and context as conditions for the interactional
and communicative adequacy of text and talk, (ii) the epistemic strategies of discourse that manage the

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ways new knowledge is related to given knowledge in various discourse genres (iii) the relevance of
this foundational research for Critical Discourse Studies.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Frans van Eemeren

University of Amsterdam
f.h.vaneemeren@uva.nl

A Pragma-dialectical Approach to the Analysis and Evaluation

of Argumentative Discourse
Although descriptive studies are indispensable, the study of argumentation cannot do without a
normative dimension. Van Eemeren explains why this is the case and argues that the normative
dimension and the descriptive dimension of the study of argumentation should in fact be integrated, so
that insights from both perspectives can be systematically combined in the analysis and evaluation of
argumentative discourse. The major research challenge the study of argumentation is confronted with
is answering the question of how such integration can be achieved. In the study of argumentation there
exists a paradigmatic division between rhetorical approaches favouring a descriptive perspective and
dialectical approaches focussing more emphatically on normative problems. The pragma-dialectical
theory of argumentation developed by van Eemeren and Grootendorst, and extended by van Eemeren
and Houtlosser, is an approach to argumentative discourse that integrates insights from rhetoric
methodically in a theoretical framework that is primarily dialectical. In this endeavour, the notion of
―strategic manoeuvring‖ plays a crucial role. Strategic manoeuvring refers to the effort that is continually
made in argumentative discourse to maintain the delicate balance between pursuing, at the same time,
both dialectical aims and rhetorical aims. By taking rhetorical considerations into account when
analysing and evaluating argumentative discourse dialectically, fallacies occurring in the discourse can
be treated as derailments of legitimate ways of strategic manoeuvring in which aiming for rhetorical
effectiveness (―persuasiveness‖) has gained the upper hand over maintaining dialectical standards
(―critical reasonableness‖). With the help of a specimen of argumentative discourse van Eemeren
shows what such a pragma-dialectical analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse amounts to
and what its advantages are.
___________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Potter
Loughborough University
j.a.potter@lboro.ac.uk

Discourse and Cognition: Issues of Interaction, Emotion and

Mental Ontology
Classically, questions of language and mind have focused on the relation between two domains - the
cognitive and the discursive. Indeed, much contemporary social science presupposes some form of
cognitivism in which one domain acts on the other; discourse is often treated as primarily the

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expression of thoughts, intentions or beliefs. Cognitivism has been subject to powerful conceptual
critiques from linguistic philosophers and ethnomethodologists. However, the current paper discusses
the implications of contemporary developments in conversation analysis and discursive psychology.
These have begun to flesh out a very different way of understanding the nature of cognition which
starts from an understanding of the practical tasks facing language users and the way issues of
understanding, shared knowledge, stance and emotion become live within particular settings. The
presentation will be illustrated with examples of tag questions and emotion in a child protection helpline.
Such research raises profound questions about the ontology and future development of cognitive
science, and how critical discourse researchers should situate themselves with respect to these
questions.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Ruth Wodak
Lancaster University
r.wodak@lancaster.ac.uk

The Semiotics of Racism: European Perspectives

This lecture will first provide a systematic overview of current research on ‗the semiotics of racism‘,
while drawing on several interdisciplinary and comparative EU projects as well as on specific case
studies with Austrian and British data, investigated in depth and over time (i.e. with ethnography and
with the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA [DHA]) (f. ex., Delanty, Jones, Wodak 2008;
Krzyzanowski & Wodak forthcoming).
Secondly, I will focus on some examples of recent political discourses, particularly on election posters
of the BNP in the UK and of the rightwing populist Austrian parties FPÖ and BZÖ which illustrate the
manifold ways of excluding and stigmatizing ‗Others‘ (Richardson & Wodak, forthcoming) ; Moreover,
the adequacy of the DHA, sometimes also in combination with corpus linguistics, will be illustrated
(Baker et al 2008). I claim that without such an integrated discourse-historical analysis, many meanings
of (exclusionary) political rhetoric would remain opaque.
To be able to understand the persuasiveness of such exclusionary rhetoric, it is important to analyze
the respective strategies and linguistic means, and to compare these across countries and cultures. In
this way, we can first explore differences and similarities; in a second step, we attempt explaining ‗the
success or failure‘ of such rhetoric due to many contextual factors (i.e. ‗Four-level-model‘ of context;
Wodak 2001; 2007; 2008a, b). One of the most important strategies, ‗positive self- and negative other-
presentation‘, is salient for the discursive construction of in- and out-groups. The division into US and
THEM serves as constitutive and necessary precondition for derogating, debasing and discriminating
‗Others‘, for the possibility to produce and reproduce xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist
stereotypes and beliefs in all possible genres. I will point to the many subtle means of constructing,
conveying, and recontextualizing discrimination and exclusion in all modes of semiosis.
Furthermore and finally, I will discuss oppositional discourses and modes of resistance.

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Theme Session 1
Risk as Discourse

Enric Castelló
Rovira i Virgili University
enric.castello@urv.cat

Local Media and Petrochemical Clusters: News from Tarragona

Frame analysis is a fruitful approach for studying the media‘s coverage of social conflict. Adapting
existing framing research models on media discourses (see Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Hertog and
McLeod, 2003 and Van Gorp, 2007), this work analyses the local media coverage of the petrochemical
industry in the Tarragona region (Spain). The social debate in the area is about the benefits and the
risks of having the main Spanish petrochemical cluster so close to a highly populated area (four
hundred thousand inhabitants and near two million in summer). The coverage of the issue exemplifies
two main frame packages: one is ―petrochemical industries bring progress to society‖ and the second is
―petrochemical industries bring danger and risk to society‖. These frames works through a broad
typology of topics (in the economic, environment, sociocultural, scientific and health fields) which,
through the use of propositions, lexical choice, metaphor, comparison, euphemism and visual images,
shape how these frames convey meaning transmission and effectiveness.
The author selected and analysed the news pieces referring to the petrochemical industry in Tarragona
appearing in five newspapers: the two main locals (Diari de Tarragona and El Punt) and one regional
(La Vanguardia) during 2006 and 2007, and the two free newspapers (Més Tarragona and Aquí) during
2007. The research offers an analysis taking into account the cultural resonances of certain discursive
formations (related to the regional identity around the industry and the social dependence on
petrochemical industry); the sponsors‘ activities (essentially the companies; the institutions; and some
associations) and the media practices in the zone.
In its first stage, the research is based on a quantitative content analysis for measuring the presence of
these frames in the local media coverage. Secondly, a more qualitative analysis is planned in order to
examine how these frames function through a set of discursive proposals around the petrochemical
industries. The results suggest that most of the information is related to the progress frame, which relies
on economic impact, improvement of infrastructures and scientific or technological advances.
Meanwhile, the risk and danger frame are less present and discourses in this frame use a ‗cushioning‘
range of concepts (prevention, security, accuracy, cleaning, decontamination) and stress the non-risk
implications in some reports on petrochemical accidents. Frame packaging from alternative sponsors
(ecologists and neighbour associations) have a scarce presence.

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Maria Pereira
Technical University of Lisbon
mferreira@iscsp.utl.pt

Risk Politicisation Strategies in EU Immigration Policy

My paper concerns the growing security continuum between immigration and security in the European
Union. I try to answer the question: is immigration being considered as a security risk at EU level?
Through critical discourse analysis, I intend to study how European Union‘s institutions are constructing
the linkage between immigration and security, in particular in terms of risk politicisation, and how that
translates into policy-making at European Union level.
My purpose is to combine several approaches on risk politicisation in an attempt to understand the
interplay between cultural contexts, biopower, identity construction and exclusion in European policies
devise to manage immigration flows towards ‗fortress Europe‘. I draw resources from culturalist (risk
and culture / grid-group cultural theory), structuralist (risk and governamentality), critical (risk and
ethics) and post-modern theories (risk and estrangement). As it is acknowledged in literature,
politicisation highly depends on discursive practices.
Although I intend to refer to these diverse types of theoretical perspectives on risk, I specifically explore
in what ways grid-group cultural theory can be used, as a heuristic device, to frame policy outcomes in
European immigration policy.
The grid-group cultural theory was developed mainly through the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas.
The theory claims that two dimensions frame social contexts: grid (individuation/regulation) and group
(social incorporation/membership). From this dimensions four dynamically related cultural types
emerged: hierarchy, fatalism, egalitarianism and individualism, derived from corresponding cultural
biases. These cultural biases entail different risk politicisation strategies.
Policy tracing in European immigration policies besides demonstrating the prominence of the triad
European Parliament, European Commission and Justice and Home Affairs Council, has also shown
that their attitudes towards policy-making reveal different cultural biases according to the grid-group
typology.
In this paper I argue that, concerning European immigration policy, the intergovernmental weight and
the reactive nature of the political process is promoting a fettered environment for policy-making, which
combined with asymmetrical transactions, is favouring a hierarchic rationality. Through a critical
discourse analysis, of existing European legislation regarding immigration and asylum, I assess on
what grounds the predominance of such bias may lead to the securitization of the European Union‘s
immigration policy.

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Sissel H. Jore and Ove Njå
University of Stavanger
sissel.h.jore@uis.no, ove.njaa@uis.no

Risk of Terrorism: A Scientific Valid Fact or a Wild Guess?

Risk management is introduced by the American authorities as a key tool to plan and execute terrorism
mitigation: ‖Risk management, a strategy for helping policymakers make decisions about assessing
risks, allocating resources, and taking actions under conditions of uncertainty, has been endorsed by
Congress and the President as a way to strengthen the nation against possible terrorist attacks.‖ (GAO
2005, United States Government Accountability Office). Others claim that terrorism is a stark reminder
of the limit of risk management; it brings home the potential ungovernability of modern societies, and
how those with little power can work cheaply and effectively to destroy. This article discusses different
discourses of risk and risk management in the light of terrorism and the threat of terrorist attacks. Would
different discourses on terrorism lead to different types of risk management strategies, and would
different discourses on risk management lead to different strategies for protecting the society? In
addition to the risk management-approach, authorities in the USA and the UK have also chosen a
precautionary principle-approach to the risk of terrorism. The precautionary principle implies that
scientific uncertainty or ambiguity is no excuse for inaction against serious or irreversible risks. The
precautionary principle is particularly aimed at overcoming the burden of proving that a risk is real or
imminent, and the principle authorizes protective government action even when the risk is regarded
quite uncertain or remote, but could turn out to be very harmful. This principle implies a different
discourse than the risk management discourse because how to understand the terrorism risk and when
to act upon the terrorism threat is fundamentally different. Whether the decision makers choose a risk-
based or a precaution-based approach to the terrorism risk, will have implications for the level of
security measures implemented in the society. The article identifies three main discourses on the
foundation of risk; the classical natural scientific approach, the Bayesian approach and the social
scientific approach to risk. The different discourses have different implications on what the foundations
of risk are, and what knowledge claims that can be done in its name. The article outlines how different
discourses on risk management could totally disturb the risk communication and the results from
analyses of terrorism threats. The paper concludes on connections between the risk discourses and the
subsequent decision strategies.
___________________________________________________________________________

Ramesh Krishnamurthy and Reiner Grundmann

Aston University
r.krishnamurthy@aston.ac.uk, r.grundmann@aston.ac.uk

The Discourse of Climate Change: A Corpus based approach

Ever since Ulrich Beck published his seminal Risk Society (1986) thesis this has become a focus for
much theoretical and empirical research in the area of environmental and health studies. Our aim is to
investigate public debates and representations of climate change as an instance of risk discourse. In
the past decade or so there have been several studies that looked into CC which could be described as
discourse analyses. Some of these sought to establish if an issue attention cycle could be established

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(e.g. Trumbo 1996), others looked at the differences between nations (Grundmann 2007) or sources of
information (Carvalho and Burgess 2004). We want to develop a novel approach that uses corpus
based analysis in order to analyse discursive structures and their change over time and across national
audiences. We seek to download large quantities of text from the Lexis database through the years
1980-2007 and use textual analysis in order to establish differences and commonalities across time
and across countries. This will provide the opportunity to test the hypothesis that national climate
change policies resonate with the public discourse. While there has been some attention paid to highly
visible countries in the international climate change debate such as the US, the UK and Germany, less
is known about other countries. We will first of all examine various claims makers and their claims as
made in the media. We will base our analysis on a large dataset and include countries that have been
neglected. We will include France in the first instance but aim to include other countries that are crucial
in the international process in the future.
___________________________________________________________________________

Peter Lunt
Brunel University of West London
peter.lunt@brunel.ac.uk

Public Discussion of Risk and Regulation

There has been a shift in the regime of regulation of both financial services and communications in the
UK in recent years. In both markets new style regulators have been created by act of parliament
charged with protecting the interest of citizens and consumers in response to the changing technical,
social and economic environments in both these sectors. Both regulators, as well as their technical
work in the analysis of emerging risks in their respective markets are also concerned to promote public
understanding of risks in these sectors and increase public awareness. As part of a broader study of
the relations between publics and regulators we have conducted focus groups with members of the
public to discuss with them their understanding of the relationship between law and regulation and to
explore with them the role of regulation in their lives. In this paper we map the key themes and varieties
of these discussions and relate them to the theory of regulation. The discussions were wide ranging
and demonstrated that there is widespread public concern over regulation, that this is represented in
diverse and sometimes contradictory discourses raising a variety of critical concerns about the
regulators agendas related to the role of public understanding in the regulatory process.

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Georg Marko
Karl-Franzens-University Graz
georg.marko@uni-graz.at

Heart Disease and Cancer, Diet and Exercise, Vitamins and

Minerals: The Construction of Lifestyle Risks in Popular Health
Discourse
Although recent social theories focus primarily on large-scale ecological risks brought about by
technological progress, the concept of risk itself may be even more strongly associated with personal
health and its connection to lifestyles. My proposed paper will look at how risk informs our conception of
this relation, particular in popular expert-to-lay communication promoting lifestyle changes (keywords:
diet, exercise, stress reduction) to avoid cardiovascular diseases, cancer and premature death.
I start from the assumption that the salience of risk in a discourse is enhanced by a general negative
and pessimistic perspective, focusing on the negative, the critical and the pathological, by a personal
tone and a certain degree of informality, supposed to highlight the central role of the individual
addressed, her or his health and her or his lifestyle, and a scientific aura, increasing the difference in
status between speaker and addressee and increasing the authority of the former‘s voice. My analysis
will therefore concentrate on the following three large-scale discursive strategies:
‗Negativization‘ means intensifying and foregrounding the negative aspects and downplaying and
backgrounding the potential benefits and pleasure dimension of risky acts or habits.
‗Personalization‘ (addressee-orientation) means emphasizing the immediate relevance to, and
responsibility of, the addressee.
‗Scientification‘ means conceptualizing the world in scientific terms, with ‗quantification‘ (the
conceptualization in terms of quantities, measurements and statistical relations) and ‗fragmentation‘
(conceptualization in terms of components rather than in holistic terms, e.g. nutrients, body parts, etc.)
playing important roles.
I will examine the linguistic realizations of these strategies in order to critically evaluate their (partly
heterogeneous) socio-political implications (particularly with respect to aspects such as personal and
individual responsibility and guilt, the status of expertise, the merging of concerns of health and moral
obligations, the creation of a paranoid atmosphere in which constant self-observation and self-
monitoring and a non-hedonistic and ascetic approach to one‘s own body are promoted).
The study draws upon the methods of corpus-based discourse analysis, tracing linguistic patterns in
large electronic corpora with the help of concordancing programmes. For this purpose, I have compiled
a corpus representing the aforementioned popular expert-to-lay discourse on health. It consists of self-
help books concerned with cardiovascular diseases (with titles such as 50 Ways to Lower Your
Cholesterol, Ultraprevention. The 6-Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy for Life, How to Prevent
Your Stroke) and comprises approximately 1.5 million words.

15
Michael Page and Laura Spira
University of Portsmouth and Oxford Brookes University
mike.page@port.ac.uk, laura@spira.fsbusiness.co.uk

Making Risk Meaningful: How Internal Auditors Construct Risk

and Risk Management
Commentators in the field of accounting and corporate governance have recently observed the ways in
which discourse reflexively creates perceptions of reality even in the apparently technical activities of
audit and risk management. Cultural perceptions of risk have evolved markedly over the centuries and
there are incommensurable risk management regimes within and among organisations yet the
discourse within corporate governance is of risk as a unifiable, homogenous phenomenon that can be
subject to management by bureaucratic systems.
Regulatory innovations have the capacity to provide shocks to the system in particular where the
regulation is a requirement for increased disclosure. In this research we analyse the ways in which key
audit professionals tasked with implementing the Turnbull guidance on internal control and risk
management talked about risk and risk management.
Analysis of metaphors is used as an investigatory tool to uncover internal auditors' perceptions of risk.
Previous frameworks have proposed alternative metaphorical approaches such as 'risk as disease' or
'risk as conflict' whereas we find that internal auditors overwhelmingly regard risk as an object, with the
associated concepts that risk can be manipulated and managed.
___________________________________________________________________________

Tiago Santos Pereira, António Farinhas Rodrigues, António Carvalho

and João Arriscado Nunes
University of Coimbra
tsp@ces.uc.pt, afarinhas@ces.uc.pt, amcarvalho@ces.uc.pt, jan@ces.uc.pt

The Subject of Risk in the Portuguese Parliament: The Cases of

the Medically Assisted Reproduction and of the Nuclear Energy
The contemporary societies are decisively marked by issues of Science and Technology. The paradigm
of the double delegation (Callon et al, 2001) is based on the transfer of the authority to work with
subjects of administrative and political order to the elected officials and public servants through
electoral and administrative mechanisms and the authority to deal with scientific or technical issues to
duly certified experts. However, with the emergence of new risks (Beck, 1986) like environmental and
health and food safety crisis, it has became pertinent to involve the citizens in a reflexive process of
deliberation that transforms them in actors and participants of the decisions in matters of SandT. Some
of these exercises include consensus conferences, citizen conferences, citizen juries, citizen panels,
foresight exercises and scenario workshops.
The national parliaments, spaces par excellence of the legislative work, should also reflect these
concerns for the contemporary democracies. In the Portuguese case, due to the inexistence of
interface organizations (as cabinets of SandT), the decisions in matters related with CandT, when they

16
involve controversial subjects, are taken without public debates or through broad debates between
specialists with different positions.
The risk discourse, a constitutive aspect of the debate concerning technological matters, is built and
managed in different way by the several members of parliament.
Through the analysis of two case studies, the debates in the Portuguese Parliament concerning the
nuclear energy and the medically assisted reproduction, we characterized the ways how the
Portuguese MP‘s use different discourses on the risks concerning the discussed technologies,
presenting different characteristics of the point of view of the referred aspects (economic,
environmental, ethical and social), of the collective or individual dimensions, of the ideological
associations and of the legislative results, having in account, through the chronology of the two case
studies, the historical evolution concerning the role that the risk occupies in each one of them.
___________________________________________________________________________

Ágnes Sándor
Xerox Research Centre Europe
agnes.sandor@xrce.xerox.com

Automatic Detection of Discourse Indicating Emerging Risk

Risk assessment aided by automatic text analysis is generally based on the extraction of event
descriptions. The underlying idea is that certain events may lead to danger, and, if such events are
taken into consideration in due time, the danger can be identified and avoided.
There are two strategies for assessing risk based on event extraction. The first consists of extracting all
reported events, after which a subsequent process of some kind (like statistical processing) is needed
in order to estimate which events potentially lead to dangerous situations. The second strategy is to
establish a list of event types that have led to dangerous situations in the past, and search only for
these events (e.g. the event type ―a country hires nuclear scientists‖ might be indicative of nuclear
danger). Both strategies can be executed using various approaches, and both have advantages and
drawbacks. They can be considered as complementary.
We propose a discourse-based approach for the first strategy, i.e. screening risky events out of all the
events extracted, as well as a method for carrying out the screening automatically.
Our approach for screening relies on the observation that in addition to risk-inducing event types,
certain circumstances also typically indicate emerging risk. Based on corpus studies, we have identified
a number of such circumstances: the sudden change of a stable situation; singularity, i.e. deviation
from habits, practices, norms; or the recognition of dangerous trends. In possible future applications,
however, we intend to rely on experts for establishing lists of relevant risk-inducing circumstances in
specific fields (like finance, politics, health), since the scope of our expertise is limited to the
development of the linguistic processing system.
Our method for the automatic detection of circumstances consists in linguistic analysis based on the
concept-matching framework. We have developed within this framework various text-mining
applications including a proof-of-concept system for risk detection. Concept-matching is used to detect
domain-dependent predefined concepts. For each concept a system of rules is constructed that match
classes of bags of words, called constituent concepts, which are in syntactic dependency relationships
with each other in sentences. Our systems have been developed with the XIP (Xerox Incremental

17
Parser) dependency parser. Concept-matching systems yield precise results, and their coverage
depends on the coverage of the constituent concepts and that of the bags of words.
The detection of the discourse indicating emerging risks could be applied in combination with statistical
screening of events and methods based on pre-defined event types.
___________________________________________________________________________

Catherine F. Smith, Donna J. Kain, John Howard, Tom Crawford,

Heather Ward and Roberta Thuman
smithcath@ecu.edu, kaind@ecu.edu

Communicating Hurricane Risk: Problematics in Local Public

Discourse
This proposal speaks to how risk discourse takes place in different social domains. In this case, risk
pertains to hurricanes or tropical storms. The domains are United States local governments, mass
media, and local populations in hurricane-affected regions. In the US, government at all levels has
distributed responsibility for communication as a function of public safety and emergency management.
In addition, populations in locales that are regularly affected by natural disasters have histories of
supplementing official communications with unofficial methods of informing people as they prepare for,
respond to, and recover from storms. Situated between government and communities are various mass
media sources—television, radio, amateur radio, newspapers, and now the Internet—that generally
serve in both official and quasi-official capacities to provide weather warnings and additional
emergency information.
We will report findings in an ongoing case study of hurricane risk and hazard communication in North
Carolina‘s coastal zone. Our approach to data collected in interviews with emergency managers,
municipal public information officers, residents, business owners, and holiday visitors is to analyze risk
and hazard communication as multi-strand public discourse.
For analytic purposes, we distinguish institutional (governmental and mass media) and communal
(conversational and everyday) strands of discourse. We focus on differences in orientation to context.
In preliminary analysis, we find evidence that local governments and mass media differ from local
populations in how they make sense of extreme weather events. We argue that these co-participants
in the storm context orient to different elements of the context and that they base inferences on different
types of knowledge. We generally attribute the differences to differences between organizational and
professional culture that emphasizes instrumental roles and goals with reference to systematic
knowledge contrasted with community culture that emphasizes personal and social objectives with
reference to experiential and historical knowledge.
This case study‘s relevance for general study of the semantics of risk is primarily to highlight the
discursive character of public perception and management of risk. Secondarily, the study identifies
thematic differences between institutional and community characterization of storm risk in one locale
that might be of interest for comparative studies in other locales.

18
Theme Session 2
Health, Science and Education

Yo Dunn
Lancaster University
y.dunn@lancaster.ac.uk

Trends in UK Political Discourses around „Bad Behaviour‟ in

Schools
School discipline has long been a prominent topic in political discourses on education. In the early
years of Tony Blair‘s premiership the social justice implications of this policy area were partially
acknowledged through the discourse of social exclusion. However, a decade on, the role of school
discipline as a confluence of power relations between state and child has become largely invisible in
political discourse. Educational policy research has suggested that resistance to the hegemonic power
relations of the education system is often construed by dominant discourses of ‗bad behaviour‘ in ways
which reinforce those power relations. However these studies have lacked a systematic analysis of
these discourses.
The findings presented in this paper are drawn from research which investigates how political
discourses surrounding ‗bad behaviour‘ in schools, related education policies and the social practices in
which they are embedded, have evolved in the ten years from 1997 to 2006. While the paper is
focussed on deconstructing a deterministic, rational choice perspective on ‗bad behaviour‘, it also
rejects a strong social constructionist position. Instead these issues are considered from a critical realist
perspective (Bhaskar 1989; Sayer 2000; 2005) which, while not reducing social practice to discourse,
nevertheless views discourse as central to understanding social practice.
The paper draws on a Critical Discourse Analysis of UK political discourses around ‗bad behaviour‘ in
schools between 1997 and 2006 which, in the wider research, is developed alongside a more
sociologically-focused critical policy analysis. The research draws on a corpus of relevant press
releases, ministerial speeches and policy documents from across the period. Discursive patterns are
identified through computerized corpus analysis and further investigated in selected individual texts
through the use of an eclectic range of tools from Critical Discourse Analysis. These include
argumentation analysis, metaphor analysis (blending theory) and analysis of lexico-grammatical
features of the texts. The analysis focuses on identifying trends in legitimation strategies and the
representation of social actors which influence the positioning of social actors in discursive space and
the dialogic features of the texts. The paper identifies two such trends which make attempts to resist
social injustice in school discipline increasingly difficult by minimizing spaces in which counter-
hegemonic discourses might be constructed.

19
Alison Ferguson
University of Newcastle
alison.ferguson@newcastle.edu.au

A Critical Discourse Perspective on Speech-Language

Pathology Assessment
This paper applies a critical discourse perspective to two key aspects of the assessment practices of
speech-language therapists working with children and adults who have communication problems:
namely, the notion of ‗appropriateness‘ of communication, and the notion of evidence-based practice
(Ferguson, 2008). A critical discourse perspective can be seen to illuminate the cultural context in
which ‗difference‘ becomes seen as ‗disorder‘, and in which assessment practices may disempower the
individual.
The notion of ‗appropriateness‘ began to be applied within the field of speech-language pathology in the
1980‘s, due to the strong influence at that time of pragmatic perspectives (for example, Prutting and
Kirchner, 1983). This notion of appropriateness in many ways represented a substantial shift in
thinking, since it allowed practitioners to move away from identifying differences in communication in
terms of inaccuracy or error, and instead prompted the question as to the social impact of any particular
pattern of differences. So, for example, the notion of appropriateness directed assessment practices
toward more naturalistic observation (rather than clinically administered standardised testing).
However, just as Fairclough points out with regard to language teaching (Fairclough, 1995), models of
appropriateness make a number of unsustainable assumptions, not least of which is the ease with
which such judgements can be made. Certainly, from the research in speech-language pathology, it
can be suggested that practitioners‘ judgements differ in important ways from those of average listeners
or the individuals concerned, although this is typically interpreted as reflecting a problem in the non-
practitioner judgements (for example, Channon and Watts, 2003). One way in which the field of
speech-language pathology has attempted to improve the validity of assessment practices has been
through the application of evidence-based principles. This scientific paradigm has set up a binary
opposition between what are described in the field as ‗formal‘ and ‗informal‘ assessment practices, and
an examination of the ways in which these terms are used illustrates the privileging of the former over
the latter.
This paper will explore these notions through an analysis (based on systemic functional linguistics) of
four texts: an excerpt from an assessment session using formal testing practices, an excerpt from a
session using informal assessment practices, an excerpt from a discussion between a student speech-
language therapist and her supervisor about an assessment session, and a written assessment report.

20
Veralúcia Guimarães de Souza
Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso
veraluciags@terra.com.br

Collaborative Conversations with Teachers of English: Voices

in Movement
This qualitative research investigates the importance of collaborative conversations between two
teachers of English in a public school, with the purpose of describing and discussing the recurrent
topics in conversations and how such topics relate to the other voices of the school. Based on studies
that deal with critical reflective training of the professor, this research is situated within Applied
Linguistics, conducted by reflections, recorded in audio, that emerged from the study of two texts
(PERIN, 2005 and UR, 1999), and by three analytic categories of Critical Discourse Analysis: modality,
interdiscoursivity and intertextuality, and the political role of the pronouns (PENNYCOOK, 1994). The
results showed three topics present during the study of the first text – "the importance of critical teacher
training," "the problems of teaching English in public schools" and "the question of continued teacher
training" and three related to the second text "teaching focused on the teacher," "the characteristics of
good classroom practice" and "learner autonomy‖. These topics reveal the teachers‘ perceptions of the
current context of teaching English in public schools and the need for critical teacher training as part of
the proposition of a good education, as well as questioning the theories that support the teaching of
English in Brazil. Collaborative conversations are an important tool for continued teacher training
because they make it possible to reveal several theories and practices that are necessary to discuss.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Marleen van der Haar

Hasselt University
marleenvanderhaar@yahoo.com

Normality and Deviance in Legitimating Case Talk of Dutch

Social Workers
Taking a performance approach to identities (Blommaert 2005) I analyse two patterns of argumentation
about normality and deviance in Dutch social work. I compare the ways the dominant discourse on
migrants is enacted in social workers‘ accounts of their everyday work practice with the enactment of
the discourse on the ‗socially weak‘, social work‘s traditional target group.
The data consist of interviews with social workers and meetings among professionals and derive from a
corpus that was collected during an ethnographic study in a social work department of a social service
organisation in The Netherlands (Van der Haar 2007).
Throughout the paper I demonstrate parallels in the lines of argumentation in terms of what is
constructed as ‗normal‘ and ‗deviant‘ and relate this to the professional repertoire as displayed by the
social workers. That is, social workers generally label migrants as others in terms of their culture. This
othering and defining clients as deviating from the dominant way of life is also used where ‗socially
weak‘ clients are concerned.

21
According to Pithouse and Atkinson (1988: 194) a social work case is a bricolage in which bits and
pieces are picked out and reassembled into a narrative format; in this paper I will deconstruct these
narratives or ‗case talk‘ focussing on client categorisation. Secondly, I analyse the accounts as ways of
justifying the institutional and professional stance (Hall, Sarangi and Slembrouck 1997: 274).
The studied professionals characterize social work as ‗easily accessible‘ for their clients and aiming at
‗linking up where the client stands‘. Yet, from a social policy perspective, their public task of stimulating
self-realisation, self-reliance and participation to society requires a directive attitude as well, which
makes them subject to a political-normative project framing the practices of professionals in the social
sector (De Boer and Duyvendak, 2004). In the last part of the paper, I will relate the categorisations of
migrants and ‗socially weak‘ to the institutional discourse.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Joy Hardy
University of New England
joy.hardy@une.edu.au

Discourse and Identity in Environmental Education: An Analysis

of Recruitment Advertisements in Australia
Whilst environmental education has fervently engaged the kind of ‗environmental identities‘ it ought to
endorse and strive to cultivate, the qualifier ‗environmental‘ has been treated as problematic, whereas
‗identity‘ has been largely treated as intuitive and unproblematic. As Payne (2000) notes: ―There is a
major ‗lack‘ in the discourse of environmental education research. Too little in environmental education
… has been said directly about ‗identity‘‖ (p. 68). The lack to which Payne refers is an under-
theorisation rather than a complete absence. This paper responds to the under-theorisation by focusing
on the role of organisational discourse in identity construction and the preferred subject positions that
are being constructed.
The paper analyses a corpus constructed from recruitment advertisements for environmental education
positions placed with major Australian online recruitment agencies in 2006. Using Althusser‘s theory of
‗interpellation‘ (1977) as the overarching conceptual framework, the analysis employs content analysis
(Crowl, 1993), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) and APPRAISAL (Martin and Rose, 2003;
Martin and White, 2007) to analyse questions embedded within the advertisements. This facilitates the
explication of the discursive construction of organisational versions of the environmental education
subject position. The questions that are analysed invariably occupy the byline position in the
advertisements. This is a privileged position that serves as the first ‗hail‘ to the reader (Althusser, 1977).
The byline position also enables the questions to act as hyperThemes (Martin and Rose, 2003), i.e.
they serve a predictive function, establishing ―expectations about how the text will unfold‖ (p. 181). The
advertisements are then analysed in their entirety to determine the (mis)match between the hails, the
hyperThemes and the job/employee descriptions.

22
Zhe-yuan Liang
National Cheng Kung University
gianni-3189@yahoo.com.tw

Types of Talk in Clinical Discourse: In the Case of Pediatric

Dental Treatment
Studies show that verbal exchange has both referential and affective components (Holmes, 1992). Two
distinct views concerning the talk types have been proposed: dichotomy and continuum. Researchers
such as Malinowski (1923), Laver (1975) and Schneider (1988) argue that discourse can be neatly
classified into instrumental talk, which focuses on the task at hand, and relational talk, which expresses
affective feelings. On the other hand, Holmes (2000) suggests that the presence of instrumental talk, in
addition to the task itself, also indicates a certain level of relational interests of the interlocutors. In line
with Holmes, researchers like McCarthy (2000), Ragan (2000) and Koester (2006) argue that the
dichotomous categorization over-simplifies the complexity of institutional discourse, and thus suggest
there is no clear-cut between the two types of talk. To avoid a polarity between the types of talk,
Holmes (2000) based on workplace discourse proposes a continuum with the ―core business talk‖ and
―phatic communion‖ at the two ends. She argues that phatic communion that serves social functions is
context-independent, while core business talk that serves transactional functions is context-dependent.
Insufficiency and ambiguity arise when applying Holmes‘ continuum in analyzing conversations of
pediatric dentists with patients. For example, doctor‘s greetings such as ―How are you?‖ may be a total
task-oriented question if the response is a medical complaint, or a pure social greeting if the reply is a
phatic response. Furthermore, studies on pediatric-patient discourse indicate that doctors maintain a
socially relaxing relationship with children by relational talk such as joking to facilitate the achievement
of medical task (Aronsson and Rundström, 1989; van Dulmen, 1998).
This paper proposes a further classification on ―context‖ based on Holmes‘ continuum. In addition to the
two extremes between medicine-focused (content-focused) talk and phatic communion (relation-
focused) talk, medicine-related (content-related) talk and relational (relation-related) talk are added to
the system. Furthermore, we suggest five criteria to facilitate reliable data analysis: relevance to the
task, informativity, phaticity, lexical choice and ritualization. This new coding system allows researchers
to identify the types of talk in clinical contexts based on different degrees of focus on task and phaticity.
Since this system takes the ―flexibility of talk‖ into consideration, it is useful in evaluating clinical
interaction with multi-layer and -function. This system is now being tried on data obtained from pediatric
dental treatment sessions in Taiwan. This paper will present the details of the coding system with
examples from actual data collected in our on-going project.

23
Zohar Livnat
Bar Ilan University
zohar@livnat.co.il

Grammatical Metaphor as a Rhetorical Strategy in Scientific

Discourse
The grammatical metaphor, and more specifically, the nominalization that characterizes it, was
identified by Halliday (2004) as a clear linguistic feature of scientific discourse. According to Halliday, its
common appearance in scientific discourse has various reasons. Firstly, it helps to create technical
meaning. The nominal group is the most powerful resource for creating taxonomies: categories and
sub-categories. Secondly, it serves the movement from Theme to Rheme, which is characteristic of
scientific discourse as a chain of reasoning. The Theme is typically construed as a noun, which is a
result of the packaging of preceding information. Thirdly, the grammatical metaphor reconstructs
qualities, processes and logical relations as "things," and makes it possible for the researcher to
observe, measure and experiment with them. "It is holding the world still, giving it stability and
permanence" (p. 129).
In the present paper, I wish to add a point of view related to the argumentative nature of scientific
discourse and its persuasive goals. The scientific paper is a suasive discourse, whose purpose is to
convince the scientific community to accept the new arguments and make them part of the body of
―scientific knowledge‖ or ―facts‖ regarding which there is a general consensus in the relevant discipline
(Latour and Woolgar 1979; Hyland 1998). In order for the research to appear ―scientific,‖ that is,
research that can be repeated and is not dependent on the identity of the researcher, a deliberate effort
is made to use a ―strategy of objectivity,‖ which is based on the myth that ―facts speak for themselves.‖
This strategy uses various kinds of impersonal formulations, among them the grammatical metaphor.
The impersonal tone creates an impression of distance between the researcher and the research, and
enhances the ethos of the credible and uninvolved researcher. Especially, it helps to present
conclusions and inferences not as a result of a cognitive activity being carried out by the author, but
rather as something that arises naturally and unproblematically from the data. By using a grammatical
metaphor, the author can distance herself from the research and apply it as an independent entity.
From this point of view, the grammatical metaphor has a metonymic, rather than metaphoric quality.
This corpus-based research, based on Hebrew scientific articles in the field of the social sciences, will
also demonstrate the nature of grammatical metaphor in a language that although originally unrelated
to English, is actually heavily influenced by it.

24
Jamie Murdoch, Fiona Poland and Charlotte Salter
University of East Anglia
jamie.murdoch@uea.ac.uk

The Discursive Construction of Prophylactic Medicine-Taking:

Ideologies, Interactions and Linguistic Resources
Many people with chronic illness do not take medication that is intended to prevent worsening
symptoms. The medical term ‗non-adherence‘ used for this behaviour has been used to replace the
term ‗non-compliance‘ following a shift in both how the doctor-patient relationship is conceptualised and
also in how medicine understands the medical prescription. This shift has been called ‗patient-centred
medicine‘ and has been regarded by some as a form of resistance to the parallel emergence of
Evidence-Based Medicine and the use of the randomised-controlled trial as a gold standard of
evidence. This is set against a backdrop over the same period, of the development of the ‗reflexive
consumer‘ prevalent in British society and by traditional attitudinal research that focuses on the
individual as the predictor of behaviour.
Using data from interviews with people participating in an asthma trial this paper discusses how and
whether this ideological context informs the discursive construction of prophylactic medicine-taking for
people with chronic illnesses. To understand these issues my PhD thesis blends the use of Potter and
Wetherell‘s analysis of rhetoric with Critical Discourse Analysis. However it also examines the
interactional conditions, activity type, processes of transcontextualisation, micro turn-taking exchanges
that offer important reflections on the use of CDA in this field.
A rhetorical analysis provides insight into the devices and interpretative repertoires that participants
deploy to legitimise attitudes and behaviour. This enables the use of CDA to gain insights into the
dominant and marginalised discourses of participant‘s accounts. However, the specification of the
conditions and processes leading up to the ‗research interview‘ highlights how the allocation of linguistic
resources is critical to an understanding of the discursive construction of health and illness.
I will discuss how ‗performances‘ within interactions are dependent on having the ‗right‘ linguistic
resources and how inequalities in access to particular resources may result in inappropriate
categorisation of people with chronic illness as ‗non-adherent‘ or ‗in denial‘ .
___________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Pawelczyk and Eva Graf

Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan and Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt
pasia@ifa.amu.edu.pl, eva-maria.graf@uni-klu.ac.at

Feminine Discourse and the Modern Self in Psychotherapy and

Coaching
Current debates underline the ascendancy of psychotherapeutic modes of constituting the self (cf.
McLeod and Wright 2003; Cameron 2000a). The (ideal) self is to incorporate the psycho-based
knowledge and expert systems discourses to understand oneself and to mediate the social and
personal experience. This is one of the instantiation of the impact or infiltration of the therapeutic into

25
everyday life. Similarly, (person-oriented) coaching represents an institutionalized format of such
infiltration into everyday as well as professional life (Tolan 2003; Whitworth et al. 2003).
The aim of the present project has been to investigate whether the conversational practices and
strategies applied by the psychotherapist and coach in their interactions with clients overlap with what
is commonly referred to as (symbolic) feminine discourse (cf. Cameron 2000b). This, in turn addresses
the question whether the modern selfhood is achieved by reliance on features of feminine discourse
and if so, which of them are the most salient.
For this purpose we have analyzed the recordings of actual psychotherapeutic and coaching sessions
with the methods of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to capture both discourse-
internal patterns of monitoring, grounding and the negotiation of joint projects (Clark 1996) as well as
discourse-external patterns of professionalism or common social practice (Mullany 2007).
At this point we see the mirroring of some aspects of feminine discourse in therapeutic/coaching
discourses in two ways. The first one is exemplified by the therapeutic alliance that should (ideally)
characterize the relationship between a psychotherapist/coach and his/her client, and women‘s
friendship is considered to be a model way how (ideal) relationships should be (Coates 1996).
On the other hand, this friendship, based on talk, enables women to explore both their positive as well
negative experiences. Out of this talk, i.e., in fact by relying on certain communicative strategies,
women in their conversations with one another are able to arrive at a new understanding of themselves
(Coates 1996). This is to say that through talk women are able to challenge the dominant discourses of
femininity and, at the same time, enact more competing or subversive discourses regarding their
positions in society as mothers, daughters, etc. Thus talk is experienced as emancipatory and agentive
(McLeod and Wright 2003). In this sense the women talk resembles very much
psychotherapeutic/person-oriented coaching interaction which similarly offers conversational space
both to female and male clients to challenge, question, resist and perform multiple discourses and
identities.
___________________________________________________________________________

Graham Smart
Carleton University
gsmart@connect.carleton.ca

Intertextuality, Representations of Science, and the Social

Construction of Argumentation: The Case of Climate Change
As scientific, political, economic, cultural, and moral debates over the state of the global environment
intensify , researchers in various disciplines —including Political Studies (particularly Environmental
Politics), Geography, Environmental Studies, Mass Communication, Sociology, and Urban Planning—
have turned to methods of discourse analysis to study socially constructed argumentation within
contesting professional discourses ( Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Hovden and Lindseth, 2004;
Livesey, 2002). To contribute to this body of interdisciplinary research, I have begun to examine the
discursive field (Bourdieu, 1984; Foucault, 1999; Liepins, 1998) jointly enacted by various professional
organizations—including environmental NGOs, political parties, government agencies, scientific bodies,
business corporations, and think-tanks—as these organizations construct and deploy arguments about
the reality and consequences of climate change in efforts to influence public opinion and government
policy. This paper reports on one part of this research: an inquiry into the ways in which science—seen

26
as comprising the social institution of science, the different scientific disciplines, scientists as individual
personalities, scientific practices, and scientific knowledge—is variously represented in socially
constructed arguments over climate change advanced by different professional organizations.
After reference to a number of key texts that have animated the historical debates over global warming
and climate change, I will outline a theoretical framework for analyzing socially constructed
argumentation within a contested multi-participant discursive field, drawing on theories of discourse
(Dryzek, 1997; Fairclough, 1992; Gee, 1999, Hajer, 1995), genre (Artemeva and Freedman, 2006;
Bazerman and Russell, 2003), intertextuality (Bauman, 2004; Bazerman, 2004; Devitt, 1991;
Fairclough, 1992) and disciplinary knowledge-making in science (Wynne, 2004; Latour, 1988; Knorr
Cetina, 1999; Gross, 2006; Beck, 1999). This theoretical framework is augmented by ―argumentative
discourse analysis‖ (Hajer, 1995), an approach that provides a conceptual framework for examining the
social construction and deployment of arguments by opposing ‗discourse coalitions‘ of social actors.
I will then apply this analytic framework in discussing a corpus of texts produced by a range of
professional organizations in advancing public arguments on climate change. The first part of the
analysis describes two opposing discursive positions regarding climate change: what I term the
‗discourse of global action‘ and the ‗discourse of skepticism‘. The second part of the analysis,
employing theories of genre and intertextuality, looks at differing textual responses by various social
actors—actors holding to one of these two opposing positions mentioned above—to a set of four
reports released sequentially during 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing
on how science is variously represented as authoritative, uncertain, unreliable, or misleading across
these responses.
___________________________________________________________________________

Anastasia G. Stamou
University of Thessaly
astamou@uth.gr

The Scientific and Humanities Rhetoric of Environmentalist

Discourse: The Case of Environmental Information to Visitors
of Protected Areas
Several scholars have identified the heterogeneous nature of environmentalist discourse, by combining
scientific information with moral and aesthetic claims (Harré et al. 1999, Veel 1998). On the one hand,
‗Greenspeak‘ (Harré et al. 1999) relies extensively its argumentation on scientific facts. On the other
hand, being realized as a movement in the socio-political plane, it attempts to attribute responsibilities
for the environment to humans and motivate them for action. Therefore, environmentalist discourse
draws on two corresponding forms of rhetoric, a ‗scientific‘ and a ‗humanities‘ one (Veel 1998). Yet, the
two rhetorics are shaped by contrasting lexico-grammatical features, which build contradictory
representations of the natural world and the humans-nature relationship. Specifically, scientific rhetoric
constructs nature as something ‗out there‘, which scientists merely observe and record, whereas
humanities rhetoric represents nature as a structure being tightly connected to human intervention.
Focusing on a specific context in which environmentalist discourse is articulated, i.e., the environmental
information provided to visitors of protected areas, the aim of this presentation is to explore how these
rhetorics are combined and what image of the natural world is shaped in this particular context, through
a Critical Discourse Analysis of the textual material of the information centre of a Greek reserve and of

27
articles on Greek protected areas in a travel magazine. Adopting the systemic-functional grammar of
Halliday (1994), ideational (i.e. transitivity) and interpersonal (i.e. modality) meanings of texts were
considered.
Given the educational role of the particular texts, the analysis revealed that a particular emphasis was
put on scientific rhetoric, and especially in the information center of the reserve. Nature was
constructed as the major agent of the texts, while human agency was systematically put at the bottom
of ‗causality scale‘ (Stamou 2001), being obscured by means of passive syntax, nominalizations and
passive non-transactive processes. Consequently, human activities rather than humans themselves
were represented as affecting nature, or human intervention was constructed as a stimulus forcing
nature to respond in a certain way. This systematic suppression and obscurity of human agency
associated with scientific rhetoric generates doubts about whether such texts contribute to the
allocation of human responsibilities for the environment and to environmental awareness
which they are called to raise (Stamou and Paraskevopoulos in press). Moreover, the present
analysis indicates that the use of scientific knowledge for rhetorical exploitation (process of
recontextualization) leads to the naturalization of scientific truth (absence of epistemic modality) as well
as to the insertion of subjective comments on the transmission of scientific information (use of
appreciative modality).
___________________________________________________________________________

Laura Straková
University of Birmingham and Charles University
laura.strakova@cerge-ei.cz

Constructing „Borderline Personality Disorder‟: Some Corpus

Evidence from Research Psychiatry
In this talk I discuss linguistic attempts at diagnostic standardization in psychiatric research, and spell
out some implications such attempts have for validating the scientific facticity of mental disorders and
their treatment. Utilizing a diachronically-organized corpus and applying corpus linguistic principles as
the basis for studying meaning in discourse, my main focus is the retrieval of definition statements for
‗borderline personality disorder‘.
I extract definition statements which may be used as input for determining the meaning of this concept
computationally by selectively applying the scheme of Pearson (1998). I consider cases where the
term‘s definition is offered as being new or as a modification of an existing definition (defining
exercitives), and cases where its definition is being repeated or slightly paraphrased, but the definition
essentially remains the same (defining expositives). Although Pearson argues that defining expositives
are more characteristic of an expert-expert communicative setting, in my corpora of published research
psychiatry, defining exercitives may appear to be more frequent. If defining expositives characterized
the corpus, we would expect there to be a higher frequency of identical phraseology (repeated n-
grams) or very similar phraseology (repeated n-frames). In defining exercitives, however, this
expectation might not be fulfilled. Exercitives may signal that borderline personality disorder is
undergoing modification and negotiation and is not yet a concept diagnostically validated or even
recognized by members of the psychiatric research community, in spite of it being ‗standardized‘ in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and International Classification of Diseases.

28
Although corpus evidence only gives a glimpse of how this disorder has been defined in the discourse,
the ‗relevance principle‘ (Teubert, in Halliday et al. 2004) of corpus linguistics suggests that those
definitions picked up by subsequent texts will be the most important to establishing what is known
about the disorder, and the most powerful to fixing its place in psychiatric research, practice, and
treatment. By extracting and tracing definitions diachronically, we go some way towards determining
what the mainstream understanding of this disorder is for the psychiatric research establishment, if
there is any. Defining exercitives and defining expositives can hence tell us something about how
‗borderline personality disorder‘ is constituted in the discourse.
___________________________________________________________________________

Anne Thwaite and Judith Rivalland

Edith Cowan University
a.thwaite@ecu.edu.au, j.rivalland@ecu.edu.au

Critical Analysis of Classroom Discourse: What Teachers Can

Learn
Description is only the first stage of a Critical Discourse Analysis. This paper will describe what
teachers can learn from a critical analysis of discourse from their own classrooms and how this can
affect their practice. We investigate the effects of introducing explicit knowledge about language in a
unit for pre- and in-service teachers which we taught for a number of years in one of the largest teacher
education programs in Australia.
Teachers used tools of analysis, primarily taken from Systemic Functional Linguistics, to examine such
things as: deology and what is valued in the classroom; distribution of power in the classroom;
questioning and challenging moves; interrelationship of management and ‗content‘ discourse; structure
of lessons and how knowledge is shaped in lessons
Functional analyses used included: genre - teachers looked at the elements which made up their
lessons and how they unfolded over time; register - teachers used a description of Field, Mode and
Tenor to relate the classroom discourse to its context; speech function - teachers researched Questions
and Commands in terms of their congruency and inclusivity; exchange structure - teachers examined
the function of both synoptic and dynamic moves in the discourse; cohesion - teachers reflected on
both ideational and interpersonal aspects of the cohesion and coherence of the discourse.
The concept of interactive trouble, taken from Conversation Analysis, was also used successfully by the
teachers to explore any problematic areas of their lessons and investigate how to avoid similar pitfalls
in future lessons.
Our presentation will be illustrated by excerpts of classroom discourse collected by our students.

29
Theme Session 3
(Cognitive) Semantics and Pragmatics in CDA

Mona Attia
Helwan University
monafouada@yahoo.com

Analysing Egyptian Political Discourse: A Critical Metaphor

Approach
It has been widely argued that an integration between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cognitive
Linguistics (CL) is essential for the development of both fields, - indeed the development of language
research. A combination of both approaches is clearly manifested in Charteris-Black‘s Critical
Metaphor Theory. It incorporates the work of two influential approaches: Conceptual Metaphor Theory
and CDA. It ―is an approach to the analysis of metaphor that aims to identify the intentions and
ideologies underlying language use.‖ (Charteris-Black, 2005, p. 26) Such a combination of both
approaches could add much richness and significance to the study of metaphor.
Charteris-Black‘s Critical Metaphor Theory is used as a methodology based on the idea that the use of
metaphors can help in conveying the underlying ideologies of the writer. The data explored in this
study are drawn from Heikel‘s –journalist, writer and political analyst- monthly articles during the years
2000-2001. His articles tackle different topics including Egypt‘s internal affairs as well as its relations
with the Arab World; international politics; the role of the USA in the Middle East.
The study attempts to investigate Heikel‘s underlying ideologies with respect to Egypt‘s internal affairs
as well as its relations with the Arab World. The study aims at tracing the use of metaphors in Heikel‘s
articles, explaining their conceptual meaning, and identifying the ideological motivation of language
use. Thus, it is hoped that applying the Critical Metaphor Theory to Heikel‘s articles will reveal the
text‘s underlying ideologies.
___________________________________________________________________________

Sol Azuelos-Atias
University of Haifa
sol4@netvision.net.il

Manipulative Discourse by Means of Unspoken Assumptions

According to van Dijk, manipulation is one of the discursive social practices of dominant groups geared
towards the reproduction of their power; manipulation enables speakers to violate the rights of
recipients. According to Wodak and van Dijk, manipulative use of language requires a special kind of
knowledge; it is possible when the recipients lack the specific knowledge that might be used to resist
manipulation.

30
In this lecture I will show that a clever use of one of the general properties of discourse processing –
the context models of the participants – can be manipulative. In the pragmatics of discourse approach,
the notion of context models is based on a broad definition; for example, Wodak distinguishes between
different concentric circles of contextual influence, beginning with the discourse itself and stretching
towards societal and historical contexts. Context models define what prior knowledge is relevant,
therefore, without adequate context models, contextually sensitive discourse is impossible.
Context models are crucial, then, since as Van Dijk emphasises knowledge is defined relative to the
communities in which it is ratified and shared. The context model defines what knowledge should be
included in the explicit semantic representation of a discourse and what knowledge may be left implicit
as unspoken assumptions. In order to elucidate the manipulative use of implicit presentation of
information, I will analyse two cases of clever use of semantic triggers that direct hearers to the
pragmatic inferences that evoke unspoken assumptions.
I will elucidate one presentation of implicit information in Israeli legal discourse from the text of an
indictment from a criminal file. In the community of speakers of lawyers' language, this text presents the
implicit information in bona fide. What is manipulative about it is the fact that it is presented in the
indictment which is supposed to be understood by the defendant and should be written, therefore, in
plain language. In van Dijk's terms, it may appear that the use of lawyers' language is one of the
discursive social practices of lawyers geared towards the reproduction of their power. I will elucidate
another manipulative use of implicit information from the wording of the text of an advertisement of an
insurance company. What makes this advertisement manipulative is the fact that it misuses a certain
widespread but baseless belief to direct hearers who entertain the belief in question to a pragmatic
inference that evokes in them an urge to yield to the scheme of the advertiser.
___________________________________________________________________________

Vincent Tao-Hsun Chang

National Chengchi University
94555001@nccu.edu.tw

Emotions, Poetic Effects, and Pragmatic Interpretation in

Advertising Language
If sentence like Colourless green ideas sleep furiously is seen as semantic anomaly (Chomsky 1957) or
syntactic deviance solely from linguistic structural viewpoint, the discussions within the scope of
semantics would fail to catch the panorama of linguistic facts and shall be unable to engage in
multifaceted communication of various contexts. This is inappropriate for the explanatory power
concerning form and function in language use, but epistemologically unconvincing for elaborating
implicit meanings in discourse. Figurative speech in this regard plays an indispensable role in human
cognition and communication, and the ramifications of verbal arts are quite prominent in advertising and
media discourse in their own right.
This paper thus aims to explore the hearer‘s comprehension and interpretation regarding emotions and
poeticity in media communication under relevance-theoretic account (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995,
Noveck and Sperber 2006, Forceville 2005) by looking into contemporary Chinese print ads. Poetic
effects refer to the peculiar effect of an utterance that achieves most of its relevance through a wide
array of weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 222, Pilkington 1991, 1992: 38, Blakemore 1992:
157). For example, the repetition in ―(Oh!) Absalom, my son, my son‖ connotes more contextual

31
assumptions than the expressions of ―Absalom‖ and ―Absalom, my son,‖ which the hearer could infer
and process further. Meanwhile, not all the usage of repetition will bring the hearer a wide range of
weak implicatures and produce poetic effects (Pilkington 1992: 38-40). Since poetic effects suitably
illustrate the reasoning and pragmatic inference towards emotions via larger units of utterance/text
processing and inferred implicit meanings, the current study centres on the audience‘s inferential
processes over long(-er) texts (Blakemore 1992: 165-6; macrostructure, van Dijk 1977: 130) against
institutionalised discourse, advertising.
The rhetorical strategies of syntactic parallelism and repetition of name and metaphor are artfully
manipulated through literary styles within the ads to attract the audience‘s attention, to initiate cognitive
poetic effects and advertising literariness, and to perform diverse pragmatic/communicative functions.
Placing little emphasis on target commodity, they invite/encourage an active/imaginative audience to
consume the texts and spell out a variety of weak implicatures involving feelings, attitudes, emotions
and impressions along the textual lines. They too invisibly persuade her to recognise the significant
inter-/cultural values and shape the corporate image as a landmark of cultural empowerment.
People often mean more than they say. Grammar on its own is typically insufficient for determining the
full meaning of an utterance, the assumption that the discourse is coherent or ‗makes sense‘ has a vital
role to play in determining meaning as well (Asher and Lascarides 2005). Just as syntactic surface
structures display complexity of underlying structures, we can well appreciate the implicit meanings
conveyed and enriched by lexical items and syntactic-semantic-pragmatic interplay in media discourse,
as shown in this study. The dialogic relations between form and function in advertising language reflect
the social cohesion/interaction and cognitive dynamics of communicator and audience, thus
maintaining the dialectical relationship between sociocultural structures and social practice (Fairclough
1995).
___________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Duda
Old Dominion University
kt.duda@gmail.com

The Punchline as Protest: Conceptual Blends in Anti-

globalization Discourse
This paper examines the role of conceptual blending in anti-globalization discourse in the public sphere,
specifically focusing on the exploits of the culture jamming Yes Men. Conceptual blends are uniquely
relevant to the discourse being analyzed here; not only do they serve as a means of structuring the
critique of globalization policy, but they are also the end product being performed by the protesters.
Also known as Guerrilla Semiotics, culture jammers employ a politically motivated manipulation of
symbols from the inside out. By using the technique of détournement (Debord and Wolman, 1956:4),
they use a medium of communication to critique the medium itself. The Yes Men practice what they call
―identity correction‖; since, in their opinion, corporations and trade organizations are not accurately
representing their own political and economic positions in the media, it is up to the Yes Men to give
audiences the most honest representation of these corporations' opinions, which they accomplish
through impostor presentations. This paper deconstructs the identities created and the ideologies
articulated by the Yes Men in two public stunts using conceptual integration theory as a tool of analysis.

32
In conceptual blending theory, two or more input spaces combine to form an emergent structure, or
blend, whose information did not previously exist in any of the input spaces (Turner and Fauconnier,
1999). Turner and Fauconnier emphasize that blending is a ―basic mental operation‖ that plays a pivotal
underlying role in human understanding (1999:417). Conceptual integration plays a pivotal role in
humor (Coulson, In Press); moreover, discourse can exploit carefully constructed blends in order to
have a persuasive effect (Coulson and Oakley, 2006). When the blended impostor assumes the role of
World Trade Organization representative, he is lent the power normally accorded to such a personage,
but the discursive tables have now been turned. Conceptual blending presents an interesting avenue
and strategy of institutional critique. In the case of the Yes Men, the surface level humor of their hoaxes
belies a more powerful rhetorical force that relies on recursive conceptual blends to structure and
―perform‖ (Butler, 1988) a discursive critique of the current course of neo-liberal globalization propelled
by the World Trade Organization.
___________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Hart
University of Hertfordshire
c.j.hart@herts.ac.uk

Meaning Construction in Conditional Statements: Ideology,

Argumentation and Implicature
Mainstream critical discourse analysis has largely been concerned with describing texts and social
practices whilst the practice of discourse itself (the production and interpretation of text) has been
neglected. Yet this is an essential dimension of the discourse event, which mediates between text and
social practice. Equally important therefore, is its corresponding dimension of discourse analysis at the
interpretation-stage. Interpretation-stage analysis (processing analysis) requires a cognitive theory of
on-line meaning construction. Whilst Halliday‘s systemic functional grammar has typically provided the
toolkit for description-stage analysis then, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics may provide more
appropriate frameworks for interpretation-stage analysis.
In this paper I conduct an interpretation-stage analysis of conditional statements in discourse on
immigration and asylum. Conditionals are valuable devices in the communication of ideology and
persuasion through argumentation. Despite this, they have received relatively little attention in critical
discourse analysis. In contrast, they have been a focus of attention in cognitive linguistics and
pragmatics. In this paper then, I use cognitive linguistics and pragmatics to show (i) how conditionals
are interpreted and (ii) why they are both ideological and persuasive. In particular, I draw on mental
spaces theory in cognitive linguistics and implicature in pragmatics and focus on hypothetical and
counterfactual conditionality in if-then conjunctions.

33
Katarina Löbel
Humboldt-University in Berlin
katarina.loebel.1@staff.hu-berlin.de

Conceptualising Metaphors in the Higher Education Discourse

The process of meaning construction and meaning conventionalisation involves social, cognitive and
linguistic elements. To investigate this complex process, a socio-cognitive-linguistic approach is
necessary. In this paper, a central place is given to a constructivist linguistic perspective understanding
language as social action by which social reality is constructed. This perspective has implications on
further theoretical and methodological questions and on the concrete research design. On the
theoretical level, pragmatic linguistics is emphasised which views meaning as constructed in a specific
context and not in the term itself. Special emphasis is given to cognitive pragmatic linguistics which
views the cognitive structures as link between the social level and the individual level in the process of
meaning construction in terms of embodiment hypothesis and internalisation (Marmaridou 2000,
Sweetser 1990). Theoretical attempts to analyse this link are the concepts of cognitive mappings,
ICMs, conceptual metaphors and blendings (Fauconnier 1999, Hornscheidt 2006).
The case study is the discussion around quality in Swedish higher education, the corpus bases on
administrative reports. It will be delineated which concrete metaphors are used to conceptualise the
mental concept of quality. The specific concepts are understood as linguistic manifestations of
conceptualisation processes which are shaped in a concrete situational context and which, at the same
time, also shape the broader social context.
The expected results of the paper are both theoretically, methodologically and practically oriented. On a
theoretical level, this paper is a contribution to the scientific discourse dealing with the topic quality
assurance and quality improvement as well as to the research field of meaning construction. On the
methodological level, the aim is the development of an enhanced analysis instrument for investigating
meaning construction building on and elaborating on existing methods.
Furthermore, it will be given a reflective input into the political discussion by uncovering hardest facts
(such as quality) as linguistic constructions. As it will be shown, quality is most often presented as
antecedent to assessment procedures. In this paper, another viewpoint is taken from which quality
assessments are assumed being instruments to establish and maintain a normal field of quality. From
this perspective, and in line with the constructivist perspective, they do not reflect and measure a pre-
existing social reality but they contribute to the construction of a social reality. An awareness of this
constructive nature should be strengthened so that the ‗facts‘ can be the focus of further discussion.

34
Dominik Lukeš
University of East Anglia
d.lukes@uea.ac.uk

Who's in charge?: Text, cognition, socialization and the

freedom of spirit
This paper investigates the conflict between two models of text and cognition available to and made
use of by those who take a critical approach to discourse analysis. The first model treats text and
discourse as a repository of ―concealed‖ messages that lead us in certain inevitable conceptual and
practical directions and over which we have little if any control (cf. Lakoff, van Dijk). The opposing
model looks at text as an unconscious reflection of our mind and therefore its ‗scientific‘ study will
reveal hidden truths about our biases (cf. Fairclough, Wodak). These assumptions are so ingrained
that, in fact, many discourse analysts would not even recognize them as two opposing models of text
and cognition. However, this paper claims that it is precisely the conflict between these two models
(frames) that contributes to many of the issues critical approaches to discourse analysis have been
criticized for by scholars like Stubbs and Widdowson. The solution lies, I will argue, in adopting a
sociologically realistic theory of cognition and cognitively realistic theory of text (based on an essentially
constructionist theory of grammar, cf. Croft, Langacker, Goldberg, Lakoff). Otherwise, it is impossible to
account for the many real instances of discourse cognition to which neither of the above models
applies, as well as the often ignored problem of the role of the analyst.
An analysis of the reactions to Barack Obama‘s speech on race relations during the US presidential
primaries (February 2008) will reveal that the relationship between the text, cognition and the agency of
the discourse participants is much more dynamic and multifaceted than is usually assumed by critical
discourse analysts. The struggle over control between text, cognition and socialization can be seen
played out in the space of just several weeks over vast expanses of text but not a text devoid of human
agency, as is usually the case in traditional analyses, but rather text exhibiting a remarkable freedom of
human spirit within the constraints of the cognitive and social structures within which our existence is
embedded.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Didier Maillat and Steve Oswald

University of Fribourg and University of Neuchâtel
didier.maillat@unifr.ch, steve.oswald@unine.ch

Can Intention-based Theories of Meaning Construction Account

for Uncooperative Communication? Pragmatic Views on
Manipulation
This paper questions the suitability of intention-based accounts of communication when applied to
uncooperative cases of communication.
Post- and Neo-Gricean approaches to meaning (see Horn and Ward 2004, Sperber and Wilson 1995,
Carston 2002) account for the semantic and pragmatic processes by which intentional meaning is

35
recovered. They postulate that full-fledged speaker meaning, in cooperative communication, results
from some cognitive calculus aimed at recovering what the speaker meant (i.e. the informative intention
encoded in the utterance).
We posit that these approaches might not successfully cope with cases of uncooperative
communication on three counts. First, it is difficult to assess and calculate an (uncooperative) intention
which, by definition, should not be retrievable from the utterance, for instance in standard cases of
manipulation. Second, one would be hard-pressed to determine the uncooperative intention in cases of
‗second-hand manipulation‘ where some credulous disciple repeats some manipulative creed. Third, it
is not always clear how any specific uncooperative content could be retrieved at all that would be
distinct from the propositional meaning (e.g. when uncooperativeness aims at distracting the hearer
from relevant information, as is the case of semantic or pragmatic illusions, discussed for instance by
Allott 2005 and Barton and Sanford 1993).
Instead of looking at uncooperativeness from the perspective of intentionality, we will argue that
uncooperative communication as instantiated in manipulative discourse aims at constraining the set of
contextual assumptions against which the hearer will process the information so as to prevent her/him
from deriving those which are not meant to be communicated, and whose recognition would defeat the
manipulative attempt.
We will illustrate the proposed model with a variety of attested examples which try either to deviate
interpretation to a marginally relevant context (i.e. not optimal) or to force the interpretation in a
maximally irrelevant context. We make the claim that constraining context relevance allows to maintain
the manipulative utterance‘s informational inconsistencies covert and, consequently, prevents the
hearer from spotting uncooperativeness.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Juana I. Marín Arrese

Universidad Complutense de Madrid
juana@filol.ucm.es

Effective vs. Epistemic Stance in Political Discourse: A Case

Study
The introduction of the speaker/writer's enunciational position in the discourse reflects his/her stance
concerning the occurrence of events and/or the assessment of the communicated proposition (Biber et
al. 1999; Brandt 2004). In characterising the domain of stance, I draw on Langacker's (2007: 1)
distinction between the effective and the epistemic level. Effective stance would pertain to the
realization of events and situations, to the ways in which the speaker/writer expresses the potentiality of
the event occurring, or his/her inclination, decision or intention to carry out an event, or his/her
emotive/affective position with regard to the event. Epistemic stance refers to the knowledge of the
speaker/writer regarding the realization of the event and/or to his/her assessment of the validity of the
proposition designating the event. Linguistic resources for the expression of the various forms of stance
include modal, evidential and attitudinal expressions. From a dialogistic perspective, the use of these
resources reflect a speaker/writer's interpersonal style and his/her rhetorical strategies (Martin and
White 2005).
In addition to their contenful meaning, these expressions are also indexical of the speaker/writer's
subjective and intersubjective positioning, that is, they evoke the speaker's active consciousness.

36
Subjectivity has been characterized by Langacker (1991, 2002) as the extent to which the information is
implicitly grounded in the perspective of the speaker as subject of conception. Nuyts (2001) conceives
the dimension of subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity as the degree to which the speaker assumes personal
responsibility for the evaluation of the evidence or whether the assessment is 'potentially' shared by
others.
On the basis of these notions, I elaborate a framework for the analysis of speaker/writer's stance in
discourse which incorporates fine-grained distinctions in the domains of effective and epistemic stance,
and which systematically relates stance choices with differing degrees of subjectivity/intersubjectivity
(Marín Arrese 2006, in press).
This paper presents results of a case study on the use of these linguistic resources by the former
British Prime Minister Anthony Blair, and by the present British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in three
distinct types of communicative events: parliamentary statement, political speech and party conference
speech. The paper aims to characterize the interpersonal style of the two politicians and to reveal
similarities or differences in the expression of stance and subjectivity in political discourse.
___________________________________________________________________________

Begoña Núñez-Perucha
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
begonia@filol.ucm.es

What can Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics

Tell us about Feminist Ideology?
This paper analyses the changes in the cognitive structure and discursive manifestation of feminist
ideology over the last three centuries. For this purpose, this study applies the frameworks of Critical
Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics to the analysis of feminist ideological speeches belonging
to three different waves of women‘s movements.
The paper is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the cognitive dimension of feminist
ideology and explores the relevant categories of the group self-schema on the basis of van Dijk‘s
(1998) sociocognitive approach. Among others, the category of Position proves to be a central
category in the conceptualisation of women‘s unequal relation to men throughout history. In this regard,
social conflict appears to result from women‘s unequal situation within different social containers (e.g.
private and public ones), where gender roles are found to be determined by folk models of social order
(Lakoff, 1987, 1996).
The second part examines how inequality is discursively reproduced and (re) constructed in discourse,
thus establishing a link between social change and discursive change (Fairclough, 1992). More
specifically, the study will show how the different ways of understanding inequality and representing the
ideological schema of the women‘s group correlate with changes at the local level of discourse.
All in all, the present study argues that the combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive
Linguistics provides a powerful tool for social research in general, and for feminist ideology, in
particular.

37
Martin Reisigl
University of Vienna
martin.reisigl@univie.ac.at

(Critical) Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics – Commonalities

and Differences
The paper deals with the question of the inner-linguistic relationship between discourse analysis and
pragmatics. Its main focus lies on the significance of pragmatics in various approaches of Critical
Discourse Analysis, particularly on the different ways in which pragmatic concepts are integrated into a
CDA-framework as analytical tools.
The first part of the paper will aim to illuminate the general relationship between pragmatics and
discourse analysis from a historical point of view. It will, among other things, show the proximity of the
two ―branches‖ of linguistics (1) with respect to the refusal of an abstract grammatical theory of
generativity that concentrates on a purely formal description of context-free language, (2) with respect
to the rejection of purely clause or sentence-oriented linguistics, (3) with respect to the emphasis on
language use, i.e. on an understanding of language as action or social practice, (4) with respect to the
tendency to become a trans-linguistic, trans-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary enterprise, (5) with respect
to the attention to ―natural‖, ―authentic language‖, and (6) with respect to the analytical interest in micro-
phenomena of language use. Despite all the general commonalities, it will be argued that a closer look
also reveals differences in all the six aforementioned points, for instance as regards the concepts of
context and context-dependence, the empirical alignments and the additional attention to various
macro-dimensions.
In the second part of the paper, I will examine how various approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis
theoretically and methodically perspectivate the relationship between pragmatics and Critical Discourse
Analysis and how they concretely employ pragmatic principles and pragmatic concepts such as speech
act, presupposition and deixis in their discourse analytical framework. In this discussion, I will ask
whether pragmatic concepts and principles are always employed with the previous meaning they have
in pragmatics, or whether they sometimes become reinterpreted and re-conceptualised in CDA in a
manner that is not always fully compatible with pragmatics.
At the end of my paper, I will argue against one-sided, mono-disciplinary subsumptions, both of
pragmatics under discourse analysis and of discourse analysis under pragmatics, and plead for a
historically sensitive and intra-disciplinarily well-informed viewpoint that avoids adopting concepts from
neighbouring linguistic ―branches‖ as over-simplified analytical categories that run the risk of becoming
analytically obscure.

38
Christine S. Sing
University of Regensburg
christine_ssing@web.de

Retracing the European Map: An Ideological Outline of the Old

vs. New Europe Debate
―You‘re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don‘t. I think that‘s old Europe.‖ These remarks
made by the then American Secretary of Defence in 2003 were to have repercussions on political
discourse on either side of the Atlantic. While tensions have eased off, the ‗labels‘ continue to be used,
framing ongoing debates amongst EU member states, especially concerning EU enlargement or foreign
policy. However, the fact that the semantic opposites convey ideological tensions has not been
acknowledged, nor studied in a systematic way.
This paper proposes an in-depth analysis of the divisive potential of this pair of opposites, using van
Dijk‘s (1998) account of ideology. It revisits the debate as it occurred in European and American media
coverage, evaluating its significance against the background of the salience of newness in American
political discourse. This qualitative-interpretative approach combines the analysis of the local and fully
contextual dimensions of ideological discourse with the global, decontextualised reproduction of shared
representations in a meaningful way.
Following the three analytical stages — identification, interpretation and explanation — specified by
Charteris-Black (2005: 26), the conceptual structure of the adjective new will be explored from a
cognitive semantic perspective, highlighting its polysemy. The importance of metaphor in motivating
polysemy is uncontested within cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff 1987, Evans/Green 2006). Accordingly,
the polysemy of ‗new‘ will be shown to derive from metaphorical extension, chiefly in terms of spatio-
temporal imagery, while its ideologising power unfolds on the discourse level due to disambiguation
processes framed by clearly identifiable sets of spatial and temporal concepts.
At the interpretation stage, the analysis will reveal the adjective‘s potency as a premodifier in assigning
a variety of distinct qualifications, ranging from subtypes of a category to (re)categorising or epithetical
properties (cf. Radden/Dirven 2007: 146), which permits their exploitation for any of the strategic
functions Chilton (2006: 45ff.) has identified for political uses of language. Finally, the meaning
construction in discourse will be argued to hinge upon the construal of temporal and spatial concepts by
virtue of the schematic categories of the human perspectival system. Far from being an arbitrary
choice, newness has been a salient concept from the formative years of American political rhetoric.
Thus the explanation provided situates newness in its contemporary political context and traces it back
to the political, historical and cultural roots of American political discourse.

39
Kim Kwang Sung
Kyoto University
letitbe621@yahoo.co.jp

Doing CDA with Semantic Frame Theory: A Study About The

Articles Related to The Revision of Japanese Constitution
This study deals with articles related to the revision of Japanese Constitution. Recently, in Japan, lots
of discussions are going on about whether they should revise the Constitution or not, and, if they do it,
how they should do it. The most controversial part of the revision is about Article 9 of the Japanese
Constitution, which states that Japan renounces the right to maintain any form of military force.
However, in reality, Japan has been increasing its military force. Plus, the United States, the very
country which was involved directly with the establishment of the Japanese Constitution is now urging
Japan to assume a larger share of the burden of defense of the western Pacific. Given the
circumstances, some have viewed Article 9 as increasingly irrelevant. It has remained, however, an
important brake on the growth of Japan‘s military capabilities.
The treatment of this issue by newspapers has played a big role to the way how people understand the
meaning of the revision. Especially, the issue has started to get more and more attention since Yomiuri,
the biggest newspaper, issued its own version of the revision in 1994. Yomiuri has issued lots of
articles or editorials which imply or directly show the support to a revision. While Yomiuri, a right wing
newspaper, shows the movement like this, Asahi, a left wing newspaper, has tried to argue back. This
study is concerned with the related articles of these two newspapers.
1. Before I deal with this topic, I will suggest one model which represents the relationship between
the texts in a media and CL(Cognitive Linguistics) .
2. With the semantic frame theory from CL, I will analyze what kind of frames these newspapers
are trying to evoke and the relationship among frames, contexts, and encyclopedic knowledge.
3. Intertextually, what kind of development those articles show also will be studied.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Magdalena Szewczyk
University of Dublin
szczukim@tcd.ie

The Notion of Metaphorical Conceptualization in EU-related

Discourse in Poland
Investigation into the role of metaphorical conceptualization in real world discourse exhibits the
imminence of a cross-disciplinary approach to the phenomenon. Seen as a product of mental process,
political discourse approached cognitively aims at proving the importance of storing background
knowledge in long-term memory as the process related to conceptualization of real-life situations and
their expressions in speech.

40
Such an approach gave rise to my research, the aim of which is to investigate both nature and role of
metaphorical conceptualization in EU-related discourse in Poland.
Recent findings seem to suggest that not all metaphors are transferred with fixed meanings. Admittedly,
development of some of them is dependent on socio-cultural situatedness, which means that they
cannot be fully explored in separation from local history, culture or geopolitical situation.
The aim of this presentation will be to arrive at questions about culture-specific discourse-based
metaphorization through analysing EU-related discourse revealing tendency to employing such
schemata as, for example, CENTER-PERIPHERY, BLOCKAGE and COUNTERFORCE.
In addition to drawing on cross-cultural differences, the framework generated in the process of
analysing the data will be also introduced to investigate conceptual metaphorization as a diplomatic tool
of legitimization via proximization. Addressed here will be Paul Chilton‘s Discourse Space Theory and
its importance in analysing metaphorical discourse.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Anna Ewa Wieczorek

University of Łódź
aeww@tlen.pl

Legitimising Physical Aggression – Cognitive-Pragmatic

Aspects
The aim of the present critical-methodological paper is to investigate the nature of the interplay
between pragmatic-cognitive mechanisms assisting the addressee in legitimising acts of physical
aggression for which she/he holds direct or indirect responsibility. Linguistic aspects of legitimisation
are readily observable whenever the speaker seeks justification for actions the general audience finds
unacceptable, such as is the case with physical aggression, a notion covering any past event which
physically threatened the addressee, or people the addressee identifies with. The speaker‘s overall
goal in legitimising such events is justifying and finding support of the past actions presented as having
taken place in the interest of the addressee. Much less frequently, the speaker may attempt to
legitimise acts of physical aggression prior to their occurrence. However, with future reference these
acts would be always implicit and weakly implicated, while with past reference they may even be
brought up explicitly as they are hardly deniable. Therefore, a partial/total exclusion of the agent (unless
it is the speaker her-/himself) of the aforementioned acts, as well as picturing them as accidental or
essential for the realisation of the goal of higher necessity would constitute a justification-generating
macro-strategy employing such pragmatic-cognitive tools as implicature, presupposition, assertive-
directive and thesis-antithesis patterns, as well as proximisation-driven STA model of legitimisation
proposed by Cap (2005, 2006). The main aim of the legitimisation discourse then, is affecting the
addressee‘s stance and psychological state to the effect that she/he accepts the speaker‘s reasoning
and the decisions leading to the events specified above.

41
General Session

Emad Abdul-Latif
Cairo University
e.abdul-latif@lancaster.ac.uk

Who is daring to Say to a GOD "You are a Liar"? Inter-

discursivity between Religious and Political Discourses in a
Speech by Sadat
Religion and politics have complicated relationships in the Arab world. This paper is an attempt to
investigate one aspect of these relationships. It tackles the inter-discoursivity between the religious
discourse and the political discourse in the late Egyptian President, M. A. as-Sadats' speeches.
The religious language is a common feature of as-Sadats' domestic political speeches, especially after
1973 (Mohamed 1990). The paper claims that the inter-discursivity between religious and political
discourse enables the Arab politicians to make use of the persuasive and effective power of the Islamic
religious discourse to manipulate and control their people. From this stand point, the proposed paper's
main goal is to explain how this can be done.
The paper suggests that this sort of inter-discursivity imposes hard restrictions on the responses of the
audience. As the audiences' response to the Islamic sacred texts, which introduced as "the words of
God", is highly restricted, the responses of audiences of the politician discourses, which introduce
themselves as a semi-religious discourses, will be in turn highly restricted. The paper attempts to
analyze one of as-Sadats' speeches to show how he could control the supposed and actual responses
of his audiences by making use of texts from Quran.
The theoretical framework of this paper depends mainly on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Many
writings within CDA have tackled inter-discursivity between different discourses and genres (Fairclough
1995, Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, Chilton 2004). These studies were interested in explaining how
the speaker could get or maintain power by making use of inter-discursivity. This paper benefits also
from recent Arab rhetorical studies that investigate the different aspects of the relationship between
language and the responses of audience (Abdul-Latif 2006, 2007).

42
Décio Bessa
Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Universidade de Brasília
deciobessa@yahoo.com.br

Electronic Political Cartoons of the 2006 Presidential Elections

in Brazil: A Critical Discourse Analysis
This research presents relations between language (and other semioses), media and politics. To
perceive the relevant role of the language nowadays is undoubtedly necessary, therefore, discourse
studies are precious. Development of the technology is responsible for a great part of social changes
in the late modernity; the advances in communication are a great example, and the media in general
and the Internet in particular took a higher position in the western society. Hence, the politics has
changed its characteristics to adapt to the ‗world of the mass media/Internet‘, but the old problems did
not finish – as corruption, impunity and an excluding economic system. A new genre called (in this
research) ―electronic political cartoon‖ emerge from this social background and it is significant to
examine the distinctiveness of the gender with a focus in a context. Then, the aim of this study is to
develop a critical discourse analysis of electronic political cartoons on the first round of the 2006
presidential elections in Brazil. Thus, five texts, published on the site www.charges.com.br in August
and September were chosen. The theoretical framework for this study is Critical Discourse Analysis,
based mainly upon work by Fairclough (1992; 2003) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), who draw
upon Critical Social Science as it relates to linguistic-discursive issues, also considered in this research
study. Given this study‘s qualitative nature and its adherence to Critical Discourse Analysis
methodological precepts, the cartoons are analysed according to ‗action‘, ‗representational‘ and
‗identificational meanings‘. Ideology studied in the corpus is based mainly upon Thompson (1995). With
a view to better contextualizing the analysis, a discussion on electronic political cartoons, the media
and politics is developed. Further, interviews were conducted with research participants as well as with
the political cartoonist. Results indicate the importance of language (and other semioses) in today‘s
world; the relevance of genre, discourse and style studies in grasping social issues; the need for more
research studies on multimodal, electronic/digital texts as well as on relations between the media and
politics. Moreover, it becomes evident that although these virtual political cartoons use symbolic forms
to contest ideology, the former may nevertheless contribute to reinforcing ideology through their
treatment of corruption. At the same time, both the discussion on response to these cartoons as well
as the interviews conducted highlight that there is no one interpretation from the different social actors
with access to these electronic texts.

43
Monika Bogdanowska
University of Silesia
nika.bogdanowska@wp.pl

Discursive Forms of Discrimination Against Women in

Academia.
It is widely assumed that academic discourse is a type of discourse which is used by equal partners
because in such a way scholars ought to be understood. Their main aim should be the quest for the
truth. Therefore, theoretically, academic discourse is expected to be - beyond any divisions - universal.
In practice, however, the situation turns out to be completely different.
In this paper, I will present how discourse reflects the ways in which women are treated in academic
settings. I do not put the question whether women in Academia are discriminated, but ask about the
intensity of this discrimination and about discursive mechanisms through which it is expressed.
The analysis was based on: polemic texts published in journals of literary studies; taped conference
discussions; notes taken during the Institute meetings; the questionnaire carried out among the female
students of the Philology Department of the University of Silesia in Katowice.
The analysis of the data allowed me to distinguish three basic types of gender discrimination (against
females):
1. Undisguised criticism not based on the essence. This type of discriminatory acts includes various
utterances aimed at discrediting the other. Intended negation of the subject as such results from the
disapproval of her relevant characteristics (in this case the characteristics connected with femininity or
stereotypically attributed to femininity): stressing the differences; making direct statements
unfavourable to the other; imposing one‘s own opinions on the other; showing no consideration for the
other; mocking the other; making sarcastic comments; humiliating the other; making impertinent
remarks.
2. Exclusion, leading to the marginalization of the role women play in Academia: playing down the
importance of women‘s statements; disregarding the opinions presented by women; condescension
expressed in laconic reactions.
3. Showing special favours: treating women as particularly delicate and as such not deserving a
serious discussion; unnatural courtesy; signalling that one refrains from making critical remarks on
account of the gender of the interlocutor.
The analysis of the results of the questionnaire carried out among the female students shows that they
are treated worse in comparison to women scholars. The accumulation of several elements that could
form the basis for discrimination (gender, age, institutional dependency) often evokes utterances
characterised by greater sexist markedness.

44
Chris Bunn
University of Cambridge
cjb94@cam.ac.uk

Reading 'the Religious' through Foucault, Bourdieu and Deleuze

and Guattari: Discourse, Practical Complexes and the Rhizome
The question of religious discourse and its place within modern societies has received new impetus in
the twenty-first century. Since the 1990s, scholars have discussed the 'de-privatisation' of religion and
explored facets of its new-found 'public' face (Casanova, 1994). Since 1997 and the election of New
Labour, religious groups in the UK have enjoyed more space in the public sphere, particularly as
providers of welfare. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author within a Christian
social movement, Faithworks, based in the UK, this paper seeks to explore how so-called 'religious' and
'secular' discourses interact, cross-penetrate and hybridise in these posited processes of 'de-
privatisation'. Of particular interest are the discursive strategies deployed by Faithworks in its dealings
with government: how they contest, morph and entangle with government discourses. The approach
that will be developed blurs the lines between dichotomies of 'public/private' and 'religious/secular' and
proposes a relational form of discourse analysis that pays careful attention to the positions discourse
occupies within 'practical complexes', a term used to elaborate Bourdieu's theory of practice (1977,
1990, 1998).
In doing so, the paper seeks to sketch an unholy theoretical alliance between Michel Foucault (1998),
Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1984), through which the situated immanence of
discursive formations can be considered and then critically appraised. Foucault and Bourdieu's
theoretical frames will be used to explore the strategic discursive/symbolic struggles Faithworks enter
into on issues of faith in contemporary Britain, before turning to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the
'rhizome' to elaborate a critical twist to the discussion by considering what it means to place an
analytical 'tracing', such as the present one, back on the 'map' (Ibid: 14). This is no small task and not
one that can be completed in such a short paper, but it is suggested that opening up the question of
Deleuze and Guattari's 'map' provokes the kind of discussion necessary for both interdisciplinarity and
criticism.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Eleni Butulussi
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
butulusi@del.auth.gr

Mass Media Discourse on Immigration in Greece

The last twenty years have been witness to continuous changes in attitudes and practices towards
people considered to be ‗foreigners‘ who live in Greek society. This article presents some results of a
critical discourse-analysis study applied to the discourse on immigration in the Greek mass media. The
corpus consists of newspaper articles, radio and TV talk-shows which were broadcast from 1992 to
2007. The analysis focused on samples where speakers/writers try to justify and legitimize either the
inclusion or exclusion of others.

45
Observations are presented on the following discourse properties, which are characteristic of mass
media debates on topics of immigration, and which provide evidence that makes for a purposeful
analysis:
a) The changes of meanings and uses of key words. For example, recently the meaning of ρατσισμός
(racism) in the Greek language has become more expanded than what it refers to in the English or
German languages (Wodak/Reisigl 2001: 372-397).
b) Argumentation strategies (e.g. of positive/negative self- and other-presentation) and the different
uses/kinds of topoi (e.g. the topoi of danger/threat/uselessness vs. the topoi of humanitarianism/justice/
usefulness), topoi which people employed whenever they argue either for or against discrimination
(Reisigl/Wodak 2001: 69-85).
c) Conceptual and linguistic metaphors which refer to the concepts (target domains) of the OTHERS
and the STATE (Lakoff 2001, Kövecses 2002), and metaphor (implicit meaning) changes which mark
the diversity and struggle of ideologies in this turbulent area of multiculturalism, so providing evidence
for the dialectical relationship between discourse and society (Butulussi 2007).
Given that the mass media both reflect and form the public opinion, thus reproducing racism and
antiracism, the aim of this research is to understand the positioning of several groups within this new
situation and thereby learn to cope with these continuously changing
interpersonal/social/political/economic relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Giuditta Caliendo and Elena Magistro

University of Naples Federico II and University of London Royal Holloway
gcaliend@unina.it, e.magistro@rhul.ac.uk

The Human Face of the European Union: A Critical Study

Recent studies on the informative material made available to the general public by the European Union
(Caliendo, forthcoming; Magistro 2007 and forthcoming) have shown that the community institutions
and bodies notably draw from a variety of different genres and discursive practices to appeal to their
audience. More specifically, the European Union (EU) benefits from orders of discourse that are
generally found in communication in the commodity sector. The spread of consumer culture has
affected the way public entities present and manage themselves, leading to a more commercial
approach in terms of the objects they deal with (i.e. public products), the beneficiaries of these objects
(i.e. customers), and the way public entities represent these objects and address such beneficiaries
(i.e. the adoption of a promotional style). Hence, the public sector has lately been experiencing a
process of commodification of social life, bringing along elements of marketization of public and
institutional discourse (Fairclough, 1993; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997).
Albeit critical research focusing specifically on EU informative documents is still at its early stage, the
above-mentioned trends have been documented under many respects, looking at revealing instances
of lexicon and grammar, as well as larger-scale discursive and visual elements. This paper intends to
broaden investigations on the strategies and genres adopted by the EU to win consensus and promote
its institutional structure. Attention is called to alternative tools supplementing the (ever-growing) array
of discursive devices and structures employed in EU brochures of comparable nature. In particular,
focus will be placed on the ―humanization‖ of the European Union, achieved by means of the
incorporation of EU employees‘ profiles in the Union‘s informative material. The attribution of precise

46
names, faces, roles and objectives to activity carried out at the European Union will be examined and
the social impact of such attribution discussed within the framework of critical discourse analysis.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Kamila Ciepiela
University of Lodz
kciepiela@wp.pl

Discursive Identity Performance in Conversational “Small”

Stories of pre-Adolescent Polish Girls
The study aims to present how identities are constructed and performed in communicative situations.
The view of identity that this paper subscribes to is one that is constantly changing, flowing and subject
to on-going management. It is not perceived as a ready-made, off-shelf product, rather an agentive and
interactive subject is constantly seeking to legitimate itself, situated in language practices (Bamberg,
2004: 224). In this sense identity is a microgenetic process or a situated project that is being created on
the spot when speakers orient or ‗position‘ themselves and others vis-à-vis culturally available ‗master‘
narratives as well toward and against other participants of the interaction. In this way, they reveal new
aspects of the social (shared) and personal (idiosyncratic) development and thereby construct their
identities. The focus of the study is on positioning strategies that speakers adopt when they
simultaneously affiliate with, resist, and refine their identity.
The study is based on the analysis of interactions of a group of pre-adolescent girls, native speakers of
Polish.The current research focuses on how female pre-adolescents use discursive topics in order to
perform their roles in talk, that is, make self-claims, get rejected, or accepted as part of the
maintenance of social life. The analysis proceeds in a three-step procedure detailing the positions (i)
that emerge in the thematic content of what the story is about and how characters are designed (ii) that
emerge from a speaker-audience relationship (iii) that emerge from the participants - dominant
discourses relationship.
A case will also be made for ‗small‘ stories as a window into the resources for identity projects.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Stefania D‟Avanzo and Germana D‟Acquisto

Università di Napoli Federico II
sm_davanzo@libero.it, germana.dacquisto@istruzione.it

The role of English Modality in International Treaties: An

Overview of Translated Prescriptive Texts
Translation is a complex process occurring through two different semiotic systems in a context of
diverse cultures. Complexity in translation is in turn a crucial point in legal discourse, in which obstacles
to comprehensibility are very often due to unstated conventions by which language operates rather
than to the vocabulary and sentence structure (White 1982:423). This means that we usually have

47
expectations about the way in which language operates in legal contexts but they are not stated clearly
anywhere but in legal culture. In order to include all the peculiarities of the presumed culture, legal texts
often contain qualifications ― [...] inserted in various points in the syntax of legislative sentences where
they introduce syntactic discontinuities which become formidable obstacles to an effective processing
of legislative statements‖ (Bhatia 1997:208). Moreover, archaisms and ambiguous verbal forms may
create barriers to an effective understanding of legal issues.
Due to all these reasons, a process of easification in drafting texts is crucial, in order to make them
accessible from one audience to another and from one language to another as well. Our study will
investigate ambiguity of verbs and phrases that can be found in international legal texts and the
consequent difficulties in translating them. More specifically, our attention will be focused on the
modals shall and should, translated into Italian in some very different ways. In particular, shall has been
considered ―ubiquitous‖ in legal texts since it expresses a deontic modality intrinsically projected toward
situations and behaviour located in the future (Williams 2007:116). Also the modal should has been
translated into the Italian language as present tense but hypothetical sentences have also been
employed.
Thus, in translation process, understanding the pragmatic values in the communicative interaction
between the legal authority and the addressees is crucial. As Williams (2005 2007: 11) asserts:
―Interpreting the intention of the lawmakers and those who drafted a particular law inevitably
entails a detailed scrutiny of the language used [...] the mere absence of a definite article in an
expression can give rise to heated and prolonged interpretative debate‖.
A contrastive analysis of the English and the Italian versions of international treaties will provide
evidence of difficulties in mediating between two languages and cultures.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Dimitri della Faille

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco
dimitridf@yahoo.com

Enduring Concerns and Changing Interests: The

Representation of National Problems within Mexican
Sociology‟s (1986-2006)
In my communication, I intend to present some results of an ongoing research on the discourse of
Mexican sociology about the country‘s problems. Taking the scientific production of sociology as a
discursive space covering conflicting theoretical currents and their applications, my research intends to
expose the representation of Mexico‘s national problems and their solutions. This analysis emphasize
the conflicts, the struggles and the exclusions as they appear in a corpus made of all the articles from
three Mexican sociological journals (Estudios sociológicos, Revista mexicana de sociología and Revista
Sociológica). We consider sociological discourse not as the image of reality, but as having a reality of
its own which consists of attempts to occupy this discursive space and efforts to discard contradicting
discourses; or more simply, to prevent them from being expressed. By choosing three journals with
different orientations, we are trying to represent certain diversity within this discursive space. Our
research is based on a lexical analysis both at the statistical (ie. sub-lexical comparisons) and

48
qualitative levels (ie. socio-semantic categories). Because we are interested in exploring changes and
continuities our research covers a rather long period of time of twenty years (1986-2006).
The identification of social problems and their solutions is particularly interesting for the critical
discourse analyst as they are polarizing elements in the scientific discourse. Not only will sociology
disagree on the solutions to problems but it will also largely differ on the identification of what is
problematic and what is the nature of these problems (ie. gender and economic inequalities,
international dependency and globalization, cultural and technological lag, etc.). The existence of a
close relationship between Mexican sociology and political, cultural and economic decision makers is
well documented. Therefore, a critical analysis of sociology‘s identification of Mexico‘s problems is a
great way to better understand the different - and sometimes contradicting - waves of efforts by various
decisions making institutions to shape contemporary society in Mexico.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Eagleton
Macquarie University
jenny@asian-emphasis.com

Be Smart! Avoid the Traps! Choose Democracy!

The 2007 Hong Kong Government‘s Green Paper on Constitutional Development, focuses on the
interpretation of keywords in Hong Kong‘s constitution, the Basic Law, relating to it‘s promise of having
the ―ultimate aim‖ of selecting Hong Kong‘s chief executive and electing its legislative council through
universal suffrage, in the ―light of the actual situation‖ and in a ―gradual and orderly manner‖.
Is ―universal suffrage‖ tantamount to democracy? What is ―universal suffrage conditions‖? How should
―gradual and orderly progress‖ be understood? And what does ―broadly representative‖ mean? The
Green Paper has catalyzed the fight for a kind of discursive hegemony over the meaning of these terms
among various groups in Hong Kong.
This presentation uses a combination of the discourse-historical approach to CDA and critical metaphor
analysis to show how the Hong Kong government, subtly, or not so subtly, is sabotaging the
development of fully democratic elections as much as possible, while at the same time purporting to be
working towards the popular goal of moving towards universal suffrage as rapidly as possible, given the
pertaining constraints. It will also look at how the pro-Beijing/business and pro-democratic camps have
reacted to the contents and format of this public consultation document, the latter seeing the Green
Paper as being ―full of hidden traps for the unwary‖.

49
Philip Eubanks
Northern Illinois University
eubanks1@niu.edu

What Constitutes a Folk Theory of Writing?: Figurative

Resources, Rhetorical Conversations
This paper will present an overview of a book-length project that lays out the fundamental elements of
what I call ―the folk theory of writing.‖ It will touch on prototypes of writer and to write; familiar
metonymies such as to find one’s voice and the authentic self; key metaphors such as the Conduit
Metaphor and Language Is Power; and conceptual blends commonly associated with writing.
The project is a natural extension of work in cognitive linguistics, which has worked to show for some
time that metaphors and other figures function as part of systems. Following that line of thought, the
project describes the systematic relationships between the major figures in the folk theory of writing. Yet
it also does more: It argues that the folk theory is constituted not just by systematic relationships but
also by a cognitive rhetoric: a rhetoric that is, on the one hand, shaped by the cognitive structure of our
language-about-language and, on the other hand, accommodates contradictory points of view.
The study is based on four kinds of data: texts that comment on writing and writing processes,
interviews with people whose careers depend significantly upon writing, and focus groups with technical
writers and teachers of technical writing. The conference overview will provide examples of ordinary
discourse taken from this data.
Although the folk theory is by definition familiar, its workings are often surprising. In many respects, the
folk theory is not at all what scholars have insisted upon. Some key points are as follows:
1. Categories such as writer and to write—as cognitive linguistics would predict—have central
examples (prototypes and ideals). But this graded structure does not fully account for the way we
routinely make sense of the categories writer and to write because the categories are themselves
subject to a rhetoric that always leaves important questions unsettled, questions that are especially
important because of multiple and conflicting ideals.
2. Familiar figures such as the Discovered Voice and Authentic Self are generally dismissed as naïve
and misguided. However, in the folk theory, figures of voice and self correlate most strongly with
sophistication and expertise. Indeed, the greater the writer‘s expertise, the more likely he or she is to
think of voice and self in complex and metaphorical ways.
3. The widely condemned Conduit Metaphor works in conjunction with a metaphor that is broadly
favored, Language Is Power. Rather than exclusively indicating an objectivist, decontextualized view of
written communication, the Conduit Metaphor supports a wide range of approaches to writing.

50
Laura Filardo-Llamas
University of Valladolid
lfilardo@fyl.uva.es

From the RUC to the PSNI: (De)legitimisation of Policing in

Northern Irish Political Discourse
The political game – and therefore political discourse – can be understood as a contest for power which
is manifested in many different ways. In the case of conflict-characterised locations, the opposition
between political parties tends to become exacerbated, and this contributes to the transmission of
diametrically opposed ―discourse worlds‖ (Chilton 2004). This is the case of Northern Ireland, where the
signing of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement resulted in the discursive portrayal of a ―paradoxical
reality‖ (Aughey 2002), which was related to the need of legitimising or delegitimising (Chilton 2004)
certain aspects of this document, and which could be uncovered through linguistic analysis (Filardo-
Llamas 2006).
Nevertheless, in the interim between the 1998 Agreement and the formation of a shared government in
2007, that discursive paradoxical reality has been slightly diluted (Filardo Llamas 2008), mainly
because there was a need for the two most ideologically extremist parties – namely the DUP and SF –
to work together (Turpin and Tomkins 2007). This need has influenced the parties‘ discourses, and a
linguistic analysis of the speeches produced throughout this time shows that not only has there been
variation on the socio-political elements which are (de)legitimised but also on the discursive strategies
used to achieve it (Filardo Llamas 2008).
This dilution of the paradoxical reality throughout time can be seen in the analysis of the discursive
treatment of policing, which has been one of the most problematic issues in the time spam between
1998 and 2007. It is the objective of this paper to show how the diametrically opposed portrayals based
on the characterisation of the RUC that could be found at the time when the Agreement was signed
have moved towards vaguer references to the policing institutions. The analysis will show that this
variation in the results is not fortuitous, but it is related to the socio-political events in which the
discourse practice is embedded. In order to do this, instances of discourse produced by the four main
Northern Irish political parties between 1998 and 2007 will be analysed.
___________________________________________________________________________

Stefan Gandler
Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
stefan.gandler@gmail.com

Ethos and Capitalism, or: Signs and Reproduction

In order to overcome the intrinsic "philosophical Eurocentrism‖, I have carefully analyzed the works of
Bolívar Echeverría (UNAM) and his concepts of cultural mestizaje and baroque ethos. Cultural
mestizaje refers to the melding of European with pre-Hispanic traditions – particularly important to
Mexican culture. Examining the foundations of the cultural mestizaje, Echeverría develops the concept
of historical ethos. This concept is based on the subsumption of the production of use-values through
the production of value – and it is analyzed in its relationship to the production of signs. He

51
distinguishes between four "historical ethe", different ways of living within the ―unlivable‖ capitalist
reality: the ―realistic,‖ ―romantic,‖ ―classical‖ and ―baroque‖ ethos. They result from the potential
combinations of recognition and denial of the contradiction between the logic of value and the logic of
use-values, on the one hand, and the importance given to the value and/or the use-value, on the other.
The realistic ethos denies this contradiction while attributing greater importance to value. The romantic
ethos also denies this contradiction, but leans more toward use-value. The classical ethos
acknowledges the existence of this contradiction and submits to the logic of value, while the baroque
also recognizes this contradiction, but attempts to preserve the dynamics of the use-value.
The baroque and realistic ethe coexist in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, it is a paradoxical
combination of soberness and rebelling. The today dominating realistic ethos, based on the principle of
non-ambiguity, is unable to attain the highest ideal of Enlightenment – the recognition of the other as
conditio sine qua non for the constitution of subjectivity of the self. The baroque ethos, on the other
hand, borrows its name from the baroque art movement, with its capacity to combine and mix diverse
elements and styles which, seen form a ―serious‖ point of view can not be combined or mixed. It was
the only art form in Nueva España capable of integrating elements of indigenous art. A mutual lack of
―comprehension‖ exists on both sides of this ethos; the elements do not "understand" one another but
have agreed to peacefully coexist by turning a blind eye and a deaf ear when necessary. They do not
comprehend or recognize one another; yet, neither seeks to destroy or aggressively exclude the other.
It is this incongruous attitude, garmented in ambiguous speech, that enables the baroque ethos to
tolerate differences among people – what makes it in certain sense more ―modern‖ (open towards other
cultures) than the other ethe.
___________________________________________________________________________

M. Ghiasian
Payam Nur University
mghiasian@yahoo.com

Impact of the Media in Shaping the Image of Islam: A Critical

Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Muslims in News
before and after 9/11
Since September 11 there have been regular reports of mosques being attacked and congregations
receiving telephone threats, and women wearing veils have been the target of violence and abuse. This
paper examines the representations of Islam and Muslims in two British newspapers, the Guardian and
the Daily Telegraph, and two American magazines, Time and Newsweek, during a period of one year
before and after 9/11. Using Halliday's transitivity analysis and Van Leeuwen‘s sociosemantic
framework for analysing the representation of social actors (1996), a corpus of 80 news reports has
been analysed. My findings show that Muslims were represented negatively in both periods: before and
after 9/11. The only difference is the increase of frequency of negative attitudes towards Muslims after
9/11. These results are completely different from the original hypothesis in which it was assumed that,
before 9/11, the representation of Muslims would be positive, without any form of bias, and, after 9/11,
negative, due to 9/11 events. In other words, 9/11 terrorist attacks were taken as an excuse for
imposing " war on terrorism " on Muslim states.

52
Anna Gustafsson
Lund University
anna.gustafsson@nordlund.lu.se

Argumentative Strategies in Early Political Debate: The Role of

Legitimation and Delegitimation.
This paper discusses findings from an ongoing doctoral thesis on the early Swedish debate in political
pamphlets. The study concentrates on argumentative strategies for legitimation and delegitimation (van
Leeuwen and Wodak 1999; Chilton 2004; van Leeuwen 2007) in pamphlets published in 1769 and
1809, both years representing the onset of democracy and freedom of print. The intermediate period,
though, was a period of suppression. The analysis focuses on ‖chains‖ of texts, consisting of pamphlets
and answers on pamphlets, where attitudes and reactions can be visible. Protocols from court trials and
parliament debates, as well as other historical sources, are used to provide background information on
attitudes. In what ways is the preceding suppression visible in the texts? Different types of pamphlets
show different strategies, although it seems that certain strategies are strongly preferred and others
disliked.
CDA has proven to be a powerful tool even for analysing historical texts. Its use will be challenged
when analysing texts as old as 250 years. In the thesis, the different discursive strategies for
legitimation and delegitimation are analysed and both quantitative and qualitative methods are used.
The study provides an inventory of strategies used, as well as a discussion of how they relate to each
other. In political debate, both strategies of legitimation and delegitimation are used. Whereas
legitimation strategies have been discussed in a number of studies, fewer studies have focused on
delegitimation. The legitimation strategy of rationalization (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999; van
Leeuwen 2007) logically has a counterpart in ‖irrationalization‖. Are there such strategies in the
debates, and to what extent are they used? In this paper, irony is discussed as an ―irrationalisation
strategy‖, and other strategies are found in the classical ‖refutatio‖.
The paper concludes with a discussion of how context affects the choice of strategies: to what extent
can one decide whether it is the function of the text in a narrower perspective or rather ideology, politics
or culture that matters?

53
Helena Halmari
Sam Houston State University
eng_shh@shsu.edu

The Language of Death and Dying: A Contrastive Analysis of

the Last Statements Made by Executed Offenders vs. the Death-
row Crime Summaries Issued by the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice
Death and dying are among the most commonly referenced semantic fields in linguistic discussions of
euphemism. This universal yet highly taboo end of everyone‘s worldly existence has produced a
proliferation of metaphors, roundabout expressions, and slang terms that attempt to sooth the sorrow or
veil the approach of the inevitable. This paper offers an analysis of the language referring to death and
dying in two contrastive data sets, both involving death by non-natural causes: (1) last statements given
by 297 executed Texas death row inmates immediately prior to their execution, and (2) the official
Texas offender information, which gives a summary description of the crime that led to the punishment
by execution.
My data come from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) web-page for executed offenders,
complemented with TDCJ brochures and interviews with prison personnel. The starting point is the 405
executions by lethal injection carried out in Texas between 1982 and 2007. Many inmates decline to
give last statements; sometimes their statements may not be clear enough for the transcribers to
record; and sometimes offender information is missing. Hence, the remaining 297 executions, for which
both last statements and crime summaries are available, form the basis for this study. The total word
count for the last statements is over 34,000 and for the crime summaries approximately 40,000.
The research questions are these: While the language describing death by natural causes is often
euphemistic, is this also the case when death is caused by deliberate, external human force? How does
the perspective (speaker/audience/purpose) change the language? How is the victim‘s death
described in the official Texas crime summaries? How do offenders themselves refer to their victims‘
deaths, especially when the victims‘ families are witnessing their execution? And, how do the offenders
refer to their own deaths, just moments away? I will specifically look at the means of expressing vs.
suppressing agenthood, religious metaphors, and slang. Within this framework, I will investigate which
factors seem to govern the choice of expression. While euphemism in various linguistic forms mostly
prevails when the inmates refer to their own deaths or to their crimes, non-euphemistic expressions are
used by the state in the crime summaries, as well as in some inmates‘ references to their impending
execution. Author/speaker, audience, and purpose determine the degree to which euphemism is
deployed. Both the use and avoidance of euphemism in these data involve highly manipulative,
rhetorical functions.

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Ourania Hatzidaki
Hellenic Air Force Academy
ο.hatzidaki@gmail.com

Greek Men‟s and Women‟s Magazines as Codes of Gender

Conduct: The Role of Deontic Modality
The present paper investigates the form and structure of the most frequent recurrent word
combinations (Altenberg 1998 and elsewhere) extracted automatically from an extensive electronic
corpus of Greek men‘s and women‘s magazines, the majority of which are Greek versions of well-
known international titles (Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, FHM, etc.). The quantitative analysis of such
combinations reveals a predominance of deontic forms occurring in equal measure in both categories
of magazines. Such forms include deontic modal verbs (tha prepei na ―must/ought to‖, den prepei na
―mustn‘t‖, den hriazete na ―needn‘t‖, den boris na ―you cannot‖), negative imperatives (ke na min ―and
not to‖), as well as a series of other structures and lexicophraseological phenomena with a deontic
function (gia na min ―so as not to‖, to mono pou ―the only thing that‖). It is worth noting that the overall
most frequent three-word combination both in men‘s and in women‘s magazines is tha prepei na
―must/ought to‖.
From the qualitative analysis of the concordances of deontic structures it emerges that they are
employed as a linguistic means for the formulation of sets of rules to which male and female readers
are apparently expected to adhere. The high frequency and cumulative presence of such forms in the
corpus seems to render magazines a code of binding lifestyle standards and directives for readers of
both sexes, most of which concern issues of corporeal maintenance, social image and intersexual and
employment relations. At the same time, the frequent co-occurrence of deontic structures with various
types of intensifiers creates a highly patronising and, in many cases, intimidating tone, while the
constant use of deontic structures in a context of negative prosody (Louw 1996, Stubbs 2001), serves
to instill a sense of guilt-inducing alarmism in the magazine discourse, especially as regards the usually
exaggerated consequences of potential failure to abide by the rules ascribed.
The present study addresses the following issues. Firstly, it attempts to explain the striking similarity
between men‘s and women‘s magazines as regards the omnipresence and intensity of deonticity.
Secondly, it seeks to inventory the precise functions performed by deontic structures in each magazine
category, especially in connection with the stereotypical gender roles and attributes which such
publications are said to promote (e.g. laddishness, femininity, girl power, etc.). And thirdly, by means of
detailed analyses of the specific contexts in which deontic structures appear, it explores the textual
mechanisms which render tolerable or even pleasurable such crudely canonistic and often
overbearingly authoritarian and face-threatening discourse.

55
Anita Hemmilä
University of Jyväskylä
anita@finola.com

Applying Critical Discourse Analysis to Anthropological

Research: Discoursal and Terminological Representations of
Native American Two-spirits
The term ―two-spirit‖ refers to a Native American gender and sexuality identity, usually considered an
intermediate or third gender category. Although this pan-Indian English term is contemporary,
designating people with two spirits or ―essences‖ – male and female – in one person, this indigenous
concept is ancient. These kinds of people were observed in many North American tribes at the time of
the arrival of Europeans. Due to the decimation of native populations and the disappearance of many of
their traditions, the institution of two-spirit almost completely disappeared before thorough
anthropological studies were conducted. Studies made in the 20th century usually had to rely on scant
and fragmentary mentions of these unique individuals in the journals of early European explorers,
missionaries and travelers. Historical descriptions of two-spirits are confusing because they contain
contradictory propositions on the indigenous institution. In anthropological literature, the basic
assumption is that these descriptions are based on direct observation, yet, from a linguistic point of
view, many discoursal elements seem surprisingly similar in these accounts, as if pre-fabricated and
recycled from earlier texts. The terms used in reference to two-spirits are equally confusing, due to their
variety in both professional and non-professional literature. To date, no systematic study has
concentrated on the way language has been used in describing and defining two-spirits. Therefore, a
new approach in research is needed to examine this anthropological phenomenon within both historical
and contemporary dimensions. This multidisciplinary study takes a critical approach to the use of
language and explores representations of two-spirits over time (e.g., Fairclough 1995, especially for
intertextuality; van Dijk 1993, 1995, for critical semantics, social attitude and mental models). By
applying methodologies of critical discourse analysis in describing and constituting two-spirits, I hope to
illustrate how ideological elements and the use of sociopolitical power have played a role in shaping the
image of two-spirits. The results of this research helps to explain why understanding the role of two-
spirits was so elusive for Euroamericans, and why contemporary two-spirits, though able to have some
voice in recent discussions, still struggle to be understood for who they are. These data are multi-sited,
and include historical descriptions of two-spirits, anthropological studies on them and various
contemporary material (e.g., two-spirit web-sites, academic and other publications, field work and
artistic material).

56
Lise-Lotte Holmgreen
Aalborg University
holmgreen@hum.aau.dk

Constructions of Gender and Career in the Danish Financial

Sector
With the understanding in recent years of male and female communication as being significantly
determined by discursive and contextual factors, and much less so by the existence of an a priori
biological and cultural difference between the sexes, research suggests that instead of referring to the
way men and women talk as gender specific, it would be more appropriate to refer to this process as
one of gendered talk or gendered discourse. This entails that men and women would adopt both similar
and different discursive features, including metaphor, in various communities of practice, thus taking up
particular gendered subject positions (e.g. Holmes 2006, Litosseliti 2006, McConnell-Ginet 2003,
Mullany 2007).
The Danish financial sector is one in which the traditional male occupation of top-managerial positions
is being challenged by an increasing number of women. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how in
the pursuit of a career path men and women in the financial sector discursively construct their
(gendered) identities, career possibilities and constraints as well as to assess the extent to which this
may influence their chances of obtaining a managerial position. Depending on the contextual
constraints determining a given communicative event, it is assumed that both men and women will draw
on cognitive and linguistic features such as metaphor that are either traditionally associated with their
own or with that of the opposite sex, providing different career access points (Cameron and Deignan
2006).
The study will be carried out on the basis of three sets of data obtained from focus group interviews
conducted in a Danish bank. These data contain interviews with female and male employees
discussing their career possibilities in the bank. Furthermore, documents on the bank‘s policy and
communication on management careers will be analysed, providing a basis for comparative analysis as
well as the assessment of career possibilities and constraints.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Katarzyna Horszowska and Kathleen Ahrens

Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University
kaheho@gmail.com, kathleenahrens@yahoo.com

The Analysis of Three Modal Expressions „Musiec‟, „Trzeba‟,

„Powinno Sie‟ in Polish Interviews with Politicians: Corpus-
based and Discourse Analysis Methods
This study claims that the basic meaning of modal verbs is modulated by its collocates (Lorda 2006).
Moreover, there is a difference between the modalities that are used by interviewee and interviewer
(Table 1). This implies that speaker must adjust to the role that s/he is to play in the dialogue (Simon-
Vandenberger 1996). For example, in the corpus we have constructed here, the politician is usually

57
attacked with many questions (Jucker 1986). The collocations in this corpus shed light on the way the
interviewer attempts to trap the politician, forcing her/him to defend herself/himself by using modalities
as part of his/her counterattack.
We collected the corpus from the radio station website (http://www.radiozet.pl/gosc.php?id=11378)
where all morning interviews are transcribed. The spoken corpus of interviews with politicians has
256,548 words. We used two tools for the analysis: Sketch Engine and AntConc. The three most
frequent modal expressions in Polish that express necessity are: MUSIEC, TRZEBA and POWINNO
SIE.
The numbers in the Table 1 indicate the number of tokens of the most frequent collocations with the
modal expressions in the spoken corpus of interviews. The choice of different modal expressions in the
interview aids the speaker's argumentation.
Table 1: The distribution of modal expressions for interviewer and interviewee.
Speaker MUSIEC/MUST TRZEBA/NEED POWINNO
TO SIE/SHOULD
Interviewer 3 1 21
Interviewee 46 20 3
Total 49 21 24

Furthermore, the speaker can choose different features of modality to alter the meaning of his/her
utterance. In the Table 2, there are different modalities for POWINNO SIE/should found in the spoken
corpus.
Table 2: Powinien/should
Modality Tokens
Evidential 10
Necessity 7
Deontic 4
Common knowledge 3

The corpus-based study and discourse analysis methods combined together make a new contribution
to the research on modality. Previously done research in discourse analysis have rarely used corpus
linguistics tools in the data analysis. This study shows how to combine these two approaches in order
to describe the strategies of the interviewer and interviewee. Unlike other studies on modality (Simon-
Vandenberger 1996, Edwards 2006, Lorda 2006) this research combines discourse analysis methods
and corpus based methodology (Palmer 2001, Frazier 2003, Squartini 2004, Nokkonen 2006).

58
John E. Ingulsrud and Kate Allen
Meisei University and Meiji University
katejohn@gol.com

A Critical Analysis of Media Critique Discourse: Contrasting the

Development of Genres in Comics and Manga
Manga, Japanese comics, are increasingly popular around the world, largely because there are genres
available for all ages and genders. There is an enormous range of story types and special interest
content, especially for the higher age groups. By contrast, comics, in English-speaking societies, are
primarily reading material for young boys. In 1954, the American psychiatrist Fredrick Wertham
published The Seduction of the Innocent, a critical analysis of comics, arguing that they negatively
influenced readers not only in terms of sex and violence but also political ideology. This work is
significant for CDA because it was influential in bringing about changes that resulted in virtually
eliminating large segments of a medium, which was considered to be detrimental to society. In other
words, it was a successful critical text that fostered social change.
In this paper, we describe the methods Wertham used to be successful in his endeavor. Some of these
methods, such as analyzing presupposition, framing, and metaphors, are similar to those employed in
CDA studies. Moreover, he provided a great deal of work on genre analysis. We present examples of
this analysis and contrast it with the analysis we have conducted on manga.
Based on historical data, we argue that Wertham‘s critique limited the comics‘ genres just as manga
genres in Japan were being developed and expanded. Although manga have been and continue to be
criticized on similar grounds as comics, the critics have not been as successful as Wertham in limiting
the development of the medium. (248)
__________________________________________________________________________________

Dejan Ivkovic
York University
dejan_ivkovic@edu.yorku.ca

Europe‟s Languages and Governments on the Internet:

Multilingualism in Action
In this paper I analyze multilingualism and use of language(s) as semiotic markers on the websites of
governmental institutions in Europe. Three types of websites are analyzed, including those of a)
national governments and/or parliaments, b) presidents or prime ministers, and c) ministries of foreign
affairs. The types of websites are chosen according to their role in the communicative act, depending
on what type of audience the website primarily targets: domestic (e.g., parliament) or foreign (e.g.,
ministry of foreign affairs).
As a theoretical framework, I use de Swaan‘s notion of constellation and language centrality, which I
adapt to reflect the context in question. According to de Swaan, interlinguistic and inter-ethnic
communication is facilitated by bilingual speakers. Considering the scope (Europe), for the purpose of
my analysis, besides the hypercentral English, I classify other European languages into supercentral, to

59
which belong French and German; central (e.g., Danish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, (former) Serbo-
Croatian, Spanish, Swedish), peripheral (most of national languages not mentioned so far, e.g.
Bulgarian, Icelandic, Latvian). To this classification I add the local type, to which belong languages
spoken exclusively by a particular ethnic community within a state or across state borders (e.g. Basque,
Romani, Romansh, Ruthenian, Sámi), and are not a medium of inter-ethnic communication.
Using critical discourse analysis, semiotics and systemic functional linguistics, I analyse language use
in the multilingual context through a number of taxonomies of its social functions including Jakobson‘s
emotive, conative and referential functions and Halliday‘s ideational and interpersonal functions.
My analysis shows that a) the choice of languages on the web presentations reflects the linguistic
communicative groupings or constellations across Europe; b) the choice of language(s) is determined
by the roles that actors in a communicative act play: voice (who speaks and in whose name), the
represented (who is represented), and the addressee (to whom the message is addressed). In other
words, the type of website is consistent with the voice, the represented and the addressee in the
communicative act; c) the prominence and saliency of linguistic markers of individual languages on
websites, together with the presence/absence dichotomy, also determine the relations within a
language grouping or constellation.
I argue that, at a critical point, linguistic markers become semiotic markers. Second, marked language
choice is potentially premeditated, coercive, strategic, while unmarked language choice is primarily
informative, communicative and pragmatic. Third, language choice may influence beliefs, attitudes and
perceptions about socio-political relations and linguistic power of particular languages.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Olaf Jäkel
University of Flensburg
jaekel@uni-flensburg.de

Discourse on Marriage: Competing Cultural Models in

Intercultural Comparison
The cognitive semantic analysis of denotational incongruencies by means of comparative investigations
of structural field patterns has been introduced recently (see Jäkel 2001, 2003). Here I mean to suggest
that this method of analysis can also be put to use in the investigation of certain kinds of contested
concepts (Lakoff 1993), namely cases in which the field patterns themselves are under dispute (cf.
Jäkel 2006). Such 'boundary disputes' occuring between different interest groups, parties, or ideologies,
are not only a reminder of the fact that denotational boundaries are in general open to change over
time. They can also reveal a particular sort of linguistic and conceptual interplay between language,
culture, and ideology.
The case to be analysed is that of marriage, a cultural concept that has recently come under dispute in
the socio-political discourse of Western countries. Should marriage be open to homosexual couples?
While the liberal-minded and some of those concerned are in favour of extending the denotational
boundary of marriage, conservative forces like the Catholic church defend the traditional boundary
which excludes homosexual couples. Contested issues like these can be analysed as 'boundary
disputes' over the denotations of some crucial lexical items, in which the diction used by opposed
parties or interest groups gives voice to alternative classifications.

60
Competing cultural models to be compared in this context include the traditional/ conservative model as
well as different versions of a more tolerant model and a liberal/ progressive model. As idealized
cognitive models, none of these have their bases in metaphor or metonymy, but instead they can be
analysed as of the image-schematic kind (cf. Lakoff 1987). The analysis will focus on authentic
language data from the recent socio-political discourse in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and
Germany. This primary linguistic material will be supplemented by a diachronic comparison of dictionary
definitions as well as the results of a survey done with young informants of US-American and German
origin.
In this as well as in many other cases of contested concepts, what is at issue is the dislocating or
relocating of denotational boundaries. From a linguistic perspective, contested concepts like marriage
do not only provide a brilliant chance to witness the natural diachronical change of field patterns
happening 'in quick motion'. They may also give us a real insight into the complex and dynamic
interplay between language and ideology. Thus, with the cognitive semantic field analysis of contested
concepts, I hope to provide another useful tool for critical discourse research.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Alona Jumaquio-Ardales
De La Salle Canlubang
ardalesa@canlubang.dlsu.edu.ph

UMPUKAN: A Critical Analysis of the Spoken Discourse of

Selected Urban Poor Women in Manila, Philippines
The study used the CDA framework (Fairclough, 1995) in the analysis of spoken discourse of selected
urban poor women in Manila, Philippines. The objectives of the research were: (a) description of the
strategies used in opening, developing and closing a conversation including the language functions;
(b) interpretation of the roles of participants as producer, co-worker and consumer; and (c) explanation
of the relevance of topics discussed by urban poor women in the context of their situation, institution
and society.
The ethnographic-immersion method was utilized to gather data. It was participated in by 28
individuals, 20 of them were urban poor women and majority were mothers. The researcher immersed
in the target community for almost a month and gathered seven (7) transcripts which were used as the
basis for analysis.
Based on the data, conversational strategies in opening the spoken discourse were asking
about person‘s immediate concerns, social greetings, vocative technique and cracking jokes. In topic
nomination, the strategies used were sharing one‘s feelings, asking information, giving commands,
sharing of personal stories and telling news about their neighbor. The spoken discourse was developed
by using the strategies of repetition, sentence completion, verbal expressions and giving comments. It
was discovered that leaving the group in silence was commonly used by the selected urban poor
women in the Philippines in closing the spoken discourse. Language functions were also included in the
analysis. Results showed that participants‘ language was mostly used in expressing ideas rather than
sharing emotions and maintaining social rapport.
The discourse identities of the participants were also identified. The three roles were the main speaker
or the producer, the autonomous and controlled speaker or the co-workers and the passive receiver or
the consumer (Langford, 1994). It was confirmed that age, position and wealth were used as

61
instruments of power in order to manipulate and control the whole process of spoken discourse. The
main speakers in this study were the oldest among the participants and the mother. Quantitative data
showed that the main speakers used more words and performed more linguistic acts than the other
participants. The main speakers‘ perspective and given information were considered by the group as
their standard of truthfulness and correctness respectively. Furthermore, the controlled speaker
produced linguistic acts which were merely ―shadows‖ and ―echoes‖ of the main speaker while the
autonomous speaker was very participative in terms of initiative to nominate new topics and to give
comments and reactions. Lastly, the passive receiver was a full-time listener due to her complete
silence during the entire conversation. It was the teenage girl who was identified as a passive
receiver.
The topics discussed by the urban poor women in their umpukan (local term for informal and face-to-
face conversation) were not limited to their traditional role of reproduction and domestic duties. Most of
the matters discussed were about their personal experiences in earning money for the family as sales
vendor, wash lady and house helper. They also talked about the housing project of the local
government, their neighbor who was killed and the legal case against them filed by a government
agency. Thus, it served as clear indicators of cultural, economical and political problems of Filipino
society.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Takanori Kawamata
Meisei University
kawamata.takanori@gmail.com

Corpus Construction and Key Word Analysis of Texts Produced

in the Aftermath of Tokai Village's Nuclear Fuel Plant Accident
On September 30th, 1999 a severe accident happened at a nuclear fuel factory run by JCO, a
subsidiary of Sumitomo Metals and Mining Company in Tokai Village, 130 km northeast of Tokyo. The
Tokai Village accident is the third most serious accident in the history of nuclear power, after the 1986
Chernobyl accident and the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. Families living near the plant were
temporarily evacuated and 300,000 people were asked to stay indoors for more than a day. Following
this accident, Tokai village held 16 public briefing meetings. The meetings were intended to reassure
villages of the plants safety measures. This analysis indicates that these meetings provided
opportunities corporate and governmental power to be legitimized.
Based on the minutes from three of the meetings and three documents of publication after the accident,
a Critical Discourse Analysis was conducted. Employing genre analysis, assumed narratives and
patterns of interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 2003) were revealed both used as strategies for political
legitimacy. The identities of victims, and company and village officials are expressed in multiple ways.
Moreover appraisal analysis (O‘Halloran, 2005) involving concordancing and referencing to corpuses
was conducted using keywords in the Tokai Village Corpus. This corpus is a compilation of various
documents, concerning the accident.
In this presentation, the rationale for the corpus construction and the selection of key words will be
described together with the results from the keyword concordancing procedure. These findings will be
interpreted in light of the uses of narratives and genres.

62
Majid KhosraviNik
Lancaster University
m.khosravinik@lancaster.ac.uk

Actors, Actions, Argumentations: Towards an Amalgamation of

CDA Methodological Categories in Representations of Social
Actors
The present article focuses on the methodology of the research project: ―Representation of Immigrants,
Asylum Seekers and Refugees in British Press Between 1996 to 2006‖ which was carried out at
Lancaster University in 2006-7. The project investigates how these groups of people are represented
and what linguistic processes and categories are usually implemented in their representation in the
news papers in Britain.
Major CDA studies on social out-groups e.g. immigrants and foreigners, within Wodak‘s Discourse-
Historical and Van Dijk‘s Socio-cognitive approaches have developed useful methodologies and
proposed several analytical categories through which the representations of these groups in discourse
are accounted for. At the same time these guidelines have inspired many more studies on different
social actors in various contexts. Consequently several listings of relevant analytical categories have
been developed and applied. Nevertheless, a review of the proposed methodological categories shows
that the sheer variety of the proposed methodologies in different studies –though essentially similar-
may cause confusion among researchers. At the same time the link between the macro- structures
(ideologies) and the analytical categories and their ways of interactions seem to have received
insufficient attention in these studies.
The present article mainly draws on mainstream CDA analytical categories including; referential,
predicational, and argumentative strategies (topoi) (Wodak 2001, Reisigl and Wodak 2001), Discourse
topics, Positive self-presentation and Negative-other presentation (Van Dijk 1991, 1995, Wodak and
Van Dijk 2006) and representations of social actors (Van Leeuwen 1996) and proposes a
systematisation of the categories in detailed text analyses and shows how the micro level analytical
categories are linked to the macro structure at work.
Specifically, the paper suggests a three-level analytical framework for CDA studies investigating various
social actors in discourse. This framework divides the analysis into three main categories of Actors,
Actions and Argumentations and looks at what is (not) there in terms of these three levels on the one
hand, and analyses how these three levels are operationalised and realised through a set of linguistics
processes/ aspects which ―perspectivise‖ the realisation of these three levels on the other hand.

63
Veronika Koller
Lancaster University
v.koller@lancs.ac.uk

Analysing Collective Identity in Discourse: Combining

Discourse-historical and Socio-cognitive Approaches
This paper presents an approach to the study of collective identity that combines the discourse-
historical (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, Wodak 2001) with the socio-cognitive (van Dijk 2003, 2006) strand
in Critical Discourse Analysis. Collective identities are understood as socio-cognitive representations of
the group self, including its attributes, relational behaviour, goals and values, which are both constituted
and negotiated by the interactions within a discourse community. Both discourse, as instantiated in
textual interaction at the micro-level, as well as the models of collective identity that are engendered
and negotiated in discourse, are shaped by meso-level contexts of text production, distribution and
reception, which are in turn linked to the changing socio-political context at the macro-level. Combining
discourse-historical with socio-cognitive analysis of discourse thus enables the researcher to
investigate what models of collective identities are salient in a discourse community at a given historical
moment, how changes in those models can be traced in concrete texts and to discuss why these
changes have taken place.
Following from these theoretical considerations, the linguistic analysis at the micro-level addresses
parameters such as actor roles and evaluation, process types and modality, intertextuality and
interdiscursivity as well as metaphor. Textual analysis along these lines shows what attributes and
behaviours are allocated to the collective self, what values and beliefs are ascribed to it and what
concepts it is aligned with and demarcated from.
The theoretical and methodological approach is illustrated with textual data from British and American
lesbian communities after 1970 (Author 2008). The analysis of the data samples shows that in many
cases, out-group construction is much more differentiated than cognitive models of the in-group across
parameters. However, shifts towards a more affirmative model of collective identity can be observed
over time, which is explained as an effect of the changing socio-political context and the increasing
number of options for text production, distribution and reception that have become available to lesbians
in the UK and the US.
Beyond the case study, the theoretical and methodological aspects of the study could act as a model
for the discourse-historical and socio-cognitive analysis of collective identity in discourse more
generally.

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Nelya Koteyko
University of Nottingham
nelya.koteyko@nottingham.ac.uk

Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis: Frames, Storylines and

Keywords in the Debate on MRSA
In parallel with the growing interest in critical discourse analysis, an analytical tool known as frame
analysis has been widely used to study newspaper discourse and political news in particular, especially
in the fields of policy analysis, media analysis and science and technology studies, where frames are
explored as shared cultural tools for the creation and interpretation of meaning in context. In this paper
we want to explore how frame analysis can serve as a methodological bridge between applied
linguistics (namely corpus linguistics), CDA and the social study of science and society in order to foster
cross-disciplinary reflection and innovation. Based on the investigation of the language used in debates
about the rise in deaths associated with MRSA infection in the UK, the paper aims to demonstrate how
corpora collected and interrogated in a principled manner can be effectively used as repositories of
information on particular ways of talking about an event or issue. Together with the concept of frame,
we employ Hajer's (1995) concept of ‗storylines‘ - devices through which actors are positioned, and
through which specific ideas of ‗blame', ‗responsibility‘, ‗urgency' and ‗responsible behaviour' are
attributed in order to explore how different framings of causes for the rise in MRSA led to heated
debates over 'solutions' and generated discourses of blame and counter-blame. In this process, we will
show how data drawn from a specialized corpus can provide empirical grounding to frame analysis, and
demonstrate how the interpretative approach used to identify frames can be combined with the
quantitative methods of corpus linguistics to assist with the much discussed matter of ‗an interpreter‘s
bias‘.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Inger Lassen
Aalborg University
inglas@hum.aau.dk

Gendered Discursive Constructions of Management Positions

in a Danish Bank: Conflicting Social Identities
Human beings are notorious categorizers with a predilection for defining, labelling and evaluating. By
referring to categories like for instance sex, age, religion and occupation, we construct social roles for
ourselves and for our fellow human beings; we thereby develop identities that give us a sense of
security. However, such membership categorization simultaneously functions as a system of social
control (Sacks and Jefferson 1995), seeing that stereotyped perceptions (Schneider 2004) about who
we are (our identities) and what we can do (our actions) constrain our range of freedom. This chapter
subscribes to the social constructionist view that identities are discursively constructed and negotiated
in social practice; it follows that identities are flexible and that subject positions may change in the
course of a communicative event. This will be illustrated on the basis of data from focus group
interviews, in which employees on a career track discuss their prospects of obtaining management

65
positions. My analysis will explore how identities are constructed, and how social roles are stereotyped
and evaluated (Martin and White 2005) by the focus group participants themselves; in the process I
shall pay particular attention to membership categories and focal themes such as uncertainty and
confidence (Roberts and Sarangi 2005).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Le Cheng Jian Li
City University of Hong Kong
chengle163@hotmail.com

Legal Interpretation: Meaning as Social Construction

Some traditional legal schools (e.g. legal positivism) describe methods of sense making in law as a
logical and formulaic application of rules, legal process of interpretation as essentially internal operation
devoid of social and cultural inputs, and the judge‘s task as identification of the original intention behind
the law or the literal meaning in law. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis and legal semiotics, which
concur that meaning no longer presents itself, but socially constructed, to the legal cases related to
interpretation of the Basic Law of Hong Kong on the issue of Right of Abode, the authors noticed the
sharp contrast between the legal interpretations in similar cases heard by Court of Final Appeal of Hong
Kong in terms of the approaches to legal interpretation. The authors found the interpretation of the
same law was not purely a jurisprudential operation, but also power negotiation, policy choices, value
judgments and interest weighing. The authors therefore argue that meaning is not able to be
represented statically, legal interpretation is not as simple as the identification of the literal meaning or
the seeking of the original intention of a legal text, and legal interpretation is a social practice and
meaning making in legal interpretation is an enterprise of social construction.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Diana MacCallum
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
diana.maccallum@ncl.ac.uk

Practising Governance: Multi-party Decision Making in a Multi-

scalar Context
The much vaunted shift from ‗government‘ to ‗governance‘ in recent years involves (among other
things) increased attention to the participation of ‗stakeholders‘ in policy making, a trend affecting not
only the actions of politicians but also the day-today practice of public servants. In my field,
urban/regional planning, this attention has led to a ‗communicative turn‘ in the academy; planning
practice is increasingly seen as discursive rather than technical. This paper is concerned with two
ideological tensions raised by this reframing: between interactive processes and traditional (and highly
inert) forms of rationalist legitimacy; and between local aspirations and strategic concerns at other geo-
political scales. Using discourse-analytical methods derived from systemic functional linguistics in
combination with sociological perspectives on the state, it will describe the emergence of situated

66
decision-making/legitimising practices in an Australian case of participatory local planning, placing
these practices within a context of multi-scalar governance and power relations.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Nicola MacLeod
Aston University
macleodn@aston.ac.uk

“Is this a Genuine Rape or is this Somebody Who‟s Got

Drunk…” Ideologically Laden Language in Officers‟ Accounts
and Force Policies on Investigating Sexual Offences
The continuing decline in the UK conviction rate for rape, reaching an all-time low of 5% in 2007,
compounded by high attrition and low reporting rates, is a matter of great concern. Various methods of
analysis grouped together under the Critical Discourse Analytical approach (CDA) have been used with
great effect to examine the processes at work in media reporting (Clark, 1992) and rape trials (Ehrlich,
2001; de Carvalho Figuiredo, 2002), highlighting the ideological function of grammatical and lexical
choices within the texts: for example, constructions distancing the defendant from the action,
minimisation of the victim‘s resistance, constructions of the victim as ‗prototypical‘ versus ‗non-
prototypical‘, and so on. However, despite claims that the police investigation is perhaps the most
crucial link in the chain, and government research suggesting that 22% of women who report are ―very
dissatisfied‖ with the way the police handle the matter, analyses of the discourses of this stage of
proceedings are few and far between.
This paper aims to address this gap with analysis of a) UK Force policies on investigating sexual
offences, and b) accounts from investigating officers provided through semi-structured research
interviews. A detailed analysis of naming, modality and mood, as well as an examination of the
‗common sense‘ resources being relied upon to construct meaning in the texts reveals that, despite
ostensible attempts over the last 20 years to improve the experiences of women reporting rape, there is
still considerable ideological bias evident within policy and the accounts of investigating officers.
This paper paves the way for further research into similar patterns within authentic investigative
interviews with rape complainants, and concludes by recommending that awareness-raising of the
processes by which particular constructions reflect and invite particular ways of viewing the same
event, and the ways in which such constructions can influence and constrain the contributions of the
complainant, should form the basis for an additional component of police interview training.

67
Danijela Majstorović and Maja Mandić
University of Banja Luka
danijela@blic.net, majaman@blic.net

What it Means to be a Bosnian Woman: Analyzing Women's

Talk between Patriarchy and Emancipation
Presuming discourse to be both socially determined and socially determinative when it comes to
attitudes, opinions and perceptions about the world, we wanted to find out the way in which women in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) speak about themselves is determined by a specific context and
surrounding reflecting a specific space between the patriarchal Balkan tradition, post-WWII modernity
that gave Bosnian and Herzegovinian women the opportunity to paid labor and the most recent postwar
and transitional context in which they are torn between these two opposites.
This research paper is based on a smaller sample of a bigger discourse and gender research in BiH
and includes sociolinguistic and discursive elements of the speech of women belonging to two different
classes: the working class (boutique workers) and the professional class (doctors, lawyers, journalists).
We conducted two pilot focus groups after which we critically tried to analyze the obtained transcripts
with respect to recurrent argumentative and rhetoric strategies, topoi and lexical and syntactic
structures.
Most specifically, we wanted to find out why feminism was so unpopular among Bosnian women and
how a successful woman was constructed with respect to patriarchal and nonpatriarchal social values
by looking at what discursive elements the relations of patriarchy (status quo) rested upon and what
emancipatory potentials (resistance) were used to challenge it. We looked at possibilities of social
change by means of genre hybridity and new forms of gender identity (new subject positions).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Anna Marchi and Charlotte Taylor

Cardiff University and Siena University
anna.marchi@gmail.com, taylor@unisi.it

If on a Winter‟s Night Two Researchers… A Challenge to

Assumptions of Soundness of Interpretation
This paper reports on a quasi-experiment into methodological reliability. In this case the methodology
that we are exploring is the increasingly widely employed combination of corpus linguistics and (critical)
discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Partington 2004, forthcoming, Stubbs 1995, 1997, 2006, Hardt-
Mautner 1997). It has been argued that corpus approaches can offer greater objectivity because they
are data-driven (or at least data-supported), more generalisable as they are based on larger samples,
and more transparent given the research may be replicated on the same data. In order to explore the
extent to which integrating corpus approaches may contribute to the stability of interpretations the
authors set up an exploratory experiment. We attempt to answer the question: would two researchers
starting with the same corpus and research question and (broadly) theoretical /methodological
framework come to the same/similar conclusions? The topic under investigation is how journalists talk

68
about themselves/each other and their profession in a corpus of British media texts, was chosen
because the research question was of interest for both the authors and seemed well suited to analysis
using the combined approach of CL and CDA. It is a clearly defined research question, with could be
operationalised through a close set of lexical items, at the same time it touches on issues which are
relevant to critical linguistics, i.e. how newsmakers frame their own trade. The corpus is a collection of
approximately 33 million words, containing the complete output of four British newspapers (the
Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Western Mail and the Scotsman) over a three month period and of
two TV news programs (from BBC news and ITN) over a two month period, both sets of data were
collected in 2007. Each analyst will interrogate the corpus employing concordance software (Wordsmith
tools and Xaira). The results of the analysis will not be shared in progress and interpretations will be
compared only as final phase of the process.
___________________________________________________________________________

Alexei Medvedev
University of South Australia
meday001@students.unisa.edu.au

The Immanent Phonosemantic CDA of Socio-Political Terms

The work introduces the author‘s (Medvedev 2006) tentative Rigorously Universal Phonosemantic
Hypothesis (RUPH) and proposes it as a new tool for critical discourse analysis (CDA)  an
indispensable linguistic method of social and political theories (Fairclough 1992, 1995; Wodak and
Meyer 2001). A special accent is made on possibility of the complex multidisciplinary scrutiny of a text
by methods, for example, of systemic functional analysis (Halliday 1993; Butt et al. 2000) and the
suggested RUPH. It thus integrates socio-cultural and linguistic discourse analyses for comprehension
and attenuation of sophisticated politico-sociological concepts at their origins as various linguistic
symbolic (Peirce 1955) forms at submorphemic level of discourse.
The RUPH claims the trilateral unity of mouth gesture, thought, and sound in human speech that is
considered to be the ‗common sense of articulation‘ (Humboldt 1999: 75-76) that allows defining and
attributing to each phone its particular syncretic, mostly spatial, immanent meaning to be considered
universal across all human languages. It is supposed that words are built by agglutination of meaningful
phones as primitive descriptions of some qualia of the referents, with their further fossilisation and
complete loss of the primordial meaning.
The immanent phonosemantic CDA is compatible with historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2001:
64-65). It also scrutinises and compares ideological, social, and political concepts in three dimensions:
(1) immanent critique discovers limitations, inconsistencies, (self)-contradictions, paradoxes and
dilemmas in word formation, (2) socio-cultural diagnostic critique reveals persuasive emancipatory or
oppressive character and cultural diversity of discourse, (3) prognostic critique contributes to the
hermeneutic grasping of the meanings of terms in particular human languages, cultures and societies.

69
Karin Milles
Stockholm University
karin.milles@nordiska.su.se

Snippa – A New Word for Girls‟ Genitals: Gender Neutral or

Heterosexist?
In Sweden it has often been claimed there is no neutral word for girls‘ genitals. For boys there is the
word snopp, which is considered a colloquial and neutral term for the penis.
How will girls get a sound view of their body when they don‘t have a word for their genitals? For the
sake of feminism and gender equality there have been different campaigns, usually launched by
journalists, to get the Swedes to decide on a word to use.
In linguistic terms there is no lexical gap at all. On the contrary, through inquiries to pre-school teachers
and students I have collected about 70 words and I‘m sure there are many more.
The problem lies on the level of language use – none of the words seems fit to use when talking about
or to girls. Many of the words have negative or unsuitable connotations, or is also used as words of
abuse (e.g. fitta – cunt).
But then came the word snippa. Ten years ago, the word didn‘t get mentioned at all. According to
different investigations, this word is now one of the most common among pre-school teachers and
students. The word has also been included in the latest edition of the SAOL, the Swedish Language
Dictionary edited by the Swedish Academy.
What made this word so successful? An analysis of the word shows many formal features which can
count for its popularity. The word is well in line with the Swedish language system and more
importantly, also with the cultural understanding of the gender system in a way that makes appealing to
the language-users.
In my presentation I will account for my research on this language planning process. In line with
Cameron (1992) and Braun and Kitzinger (2001) I will also discuss what the different words for girls‘
genitals tell us about the cultural construction of gender and sex. Especially, I will discuss the word
snippas formal features and ask whether it really is the neutral word the feminists asked for.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Gerrard Mugford
Universidad de Guadalajara
gerrymugford@yahoo.com

Liberation or Submission? Ideology and Politics in English

Language Teaching in Mexico
English-language teaching in Mexico is often promoted within an ideologically-free vacuum: pedagogy
emphasises a speaker-message-receiver model of communication while ignoring the social, economic
and political implications of learning English in a country that is heavily influenced by its northern
neighbour, the United States. Already an important requisite in order to obtain work and for professional

70
advancement within Mexico, knowledge of English has become so important educationally that
students who have a low proficiency in the subject may not graduate from university. Within this context
and reflecting a reproductive ideology (Giroux 1983), the teaching of English aims to make students
into useful and productive members of society.
English is all too often taught in Mexico through what Freire identified as the ‗banking‘ concept of
education (1993: 53) as students amass a stock of grammar structures and topic vocabulary and
practise the four ‗skills‘ – speaking, listening, reading and writing. In contrast, teaching practice largely
overlooks the need to develop contextually meaningful understandings so that second-language (L2)
users can interact on individual, social and cultural planes in the target-language environment where
they often need to confront difficult and awkward interpersonal situations, public displays of disrespect
and rudeness and, at a deeper level, racial intolerance and discrimination. Instead of helping students
deal with the stressful and sometimes traumatic challenges of interactional language use, teachers
safely focus on transactional language (i.e. presenting and practising the exchange of linguistic
information) in a conflict-free and syrupy utopian world where using English is naturally a constantly
pleasant and inviting experience.
Given the need to help learners negotiate the stark and sometimes uncomfortable realities of L2 use, I
examine whether teacher trainees are being educated to help their future language students engage in
contextually meaningful interactional language use. In this paper, I study the ideology underpinning a
BA programme in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at a Mexican university. Following a critical
discourse approach, I examine how teachers perceive the dual task of having to help language learners
succeed within Mexico‘s educational system and, at the same time, to empower them to confront and
successfully negotiate real-life social contexts.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Viviane de Melo Resende

University of Brasília
vivianemelo@unb.br

“It‟s Not a Matter of Inhumanity, It‟s Just a Matter of Making it

Difficult for Them to Remain near Our Building” A Critical
Discourse Analysis of a Residential Circular Regarding “Street
Dwellers” in Brasília, Brazil
Based upon Critical Discourse Analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2003), this study
analyses a report of a meeting, distributed as a circular to residents of a middle-class apartment
building in Asa Sul, Brasília, Federal District, Brazil. The circular is the outcome of a meeting held
between the apartment building‘s representative, local businesspeople and Federal District
Government authorities concerning ―street dwellers‖ in the environs of the apartment building and local
business establishments. The circular is considered discursively in terms of its representational and
identificational meanings, as well as takes into account interdiscursivity and evaluation as analytical
categories. Analysis of the text indicates that it serves in a sense to camouflage street dwellers‘
situation. At the same time, it nullifies people in this situation (Thompson, 1995) by legitimating social
apartheid in Brasiliense society (Buarque, 2003). The analysis seeks therefore to discuss the
naturalization of misery in contemporary societies through the internalization of hegemonic discourses

71
that serve to blank out basic social rights. The study argues that this is due to the repetition of these
discourses in different institutional environments and in various text types.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Jacinta Ndambuki and Hilary Janks

University of the Witwatersrand
njacintah@yahoo.com

Political Discourses, Electorates‟ Voices: Contested Sites?

The paper is part of a larger project whose overall aim is to investigate the representation of women‘s
issues in Makueni District, a rural district in Kenya, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study
explores the mismatches between the way politicians select and represent these issues and the way
women conceive of and construct these issues in women‘s groups. This paper focuses on
representations of women‘s agency. How women construct their agency is contrasted with that of
politicians and community leaders. This social science research is multidisciplinary and crosses the
fields of language, gender studies and politics. Data was collected by use of focus group discussions,
political speeches and interviews. The Kikamba texts were first transcribed into English and after which
thematic content analysis was carried out to purposively selected portions of the data. The data for the
entire study consisted of 10 focus group discussions with women‘s groups, 4 political speeches and ten
interviews with politicians and other community leaders. However the data for this study consists of 4
focus group discussions, 1 political speech and 4 interviews. The study has shown CDA as one way of
understanding how prevailing discourses impact on the participation of women in the political process in
Kenya. The analysis uses Halliady‘s Systemic Grammar where the focus is on pronouns and modality
as linguistic features where each provides a different lens on the data. Each of these features provides
insight into the construction of agency. A quantitative analysis of agency in relation to the use of
pronouns and modality across the data set helps one to understand the women‘s construction of
agency in the sense that such an analysis also reveals the close relationship amongst participants,
processes and circumstances. While both women and leaders construct women‘s agency within deficit
discourses, these discourses do not match either women‘s enacted practices, what political and
community leaders say they expect of women, as well as an underlying concern about the power of
women‘s talk. The contradiction inherent in the study is that everyone constructs women as lacking in
agency, yet these women act as agentive subjects.

72
Dr Gerard O‟Grady
Cardiff University
ogradygn@cardiff.ac.uk

A Comparative Case Study of the Construal of the Persona of

Four Individuals Accused of Being the „Worst of the Worst‟
Aim
The presentation aims to firstly contrast the United States government‘s official construal of four
detainees: Saifullah Paracha, Muhammad Faraj, Benyam Mohammed al Habashi and Omar Khadr with
that of the human rights groups – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First.
The four individuals have been chosen because in each case there is an enormous and potentially
contrastive divergence between the opposing construals: successful businessman/terrorist promoter
and sponsor, skilled terrorist operator/innocent economic migrant, terrorist mastermind/gap year
student and coldblooded killer/child respectively. Secondly the presentation examines which discourse
– governmental or human rights – had the greatest resonance in a number of quality newspaper titles
on both sides of the Atlantic. Thirdly it examines the press discourse in order to cast some light on how
the individual newspaper titles positioned themselves vis-à-vis the war on terror.
Corpus
The study will examine (1) a series of US government official press statements as well as the on the
record comments of official spokespeople; (2) press releases and published investigation reports by the
human rights organisations and (3) online newspaper articles and editorials from the Guardian
Unlimited, Times Online, New York Times.com and Washingtonpost.com concerning the four subjects.
Online titles have been chosen rather than printed versions not only for logistical reasons but also
because online editions, especially those published in the UK, simultaneously serve readerships on
both sides of the Atlantic.
Methodology
The presentation adopts a Systemic Functional Linguistic approach and will accordingly investigate the
grammatical metaphors and intertextual allusions to texts as diverse as the Bible and Westerns used to
construe the four subjects. There will be an investigation of the patterned lexico-grammatical choices
which consciously or unconsciously construe the subject relations that the four men are permitted to
occupy in the discourse: terrorists, the victims of injustice or an intermediate position? The analysis
examines the following points:
1. The positioning of the four men along a cline ranging from full active participation to passive
compulsion.
2. The grammatical (and lexical metaphors) used to situate the four men in the wider discourse of
‗good‘ and ‗evil‘.
3. The immediate co-text surrounding the newspaper representations of the four men especially
modality choices. (Unfortunately the choice of online corpus removes some potentially interesting
multimodal co-text found in the printed versions).
4. Overlexicalisation strategies employed in the texts especially official and press.

73
Claudia Ortu
Università degli Studi di Cagliari
claudiaortu@inwind.it

Draining off Trade Unions' Role: Gordon Brown's Speech to

TUC Annual Conference 2007
According to Bourdieu (2001) Trade Unions are one of the obstacles to the success of the neo-liberal
project which is being carried out by powerful social actors, such as the international bodies for
governing the economy and, at national level, by governments - disrespectful of their political colour. It
is thus necessary to analyse the construal (Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer 2002) of trade unions made
by governments to understand what discursive strategies are used to put them in the corner of both the
political and the economic ring.
The recent (2007) changeover of power in Great Britain, from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown had been
awaited for a long time. Both trade unions and political commentators expected that the relationship of
the New Labour Government with the workers' organisations would change with the new Prime
Minister. The analysis of Gordon Brown's Speech to the last TUC annual conference (September 2007)
that I intend to present will show that those expectations have been disappointed.
The framework of the analysis is the approach built by Norman Fairclough in his most recent works
(2003 and 2006), coupled with the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001; Reisigl and Wodak
2001) which provides a useful middle range theory accounting for the spread of topics, arguments, and
ideas across genres. The analysis of the text has been carried out using the framework of
argumentation theory as operationalised by Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992) in order to build a
skeleton of the argumentation(s) used. The actual linguistic realisation of the arguments has than been
analysed using the tools of systemic-functional grammar. The interconnectedness of the linguistic data
with other moments of the social practice will be put in due evidence as the approach used for the
analysis is a post-disciplinary one (Jessop and Sum 2001; Sayer 2001).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Emi Otsuji
University of Technology
emi.otsuji@uts.edu.au

CDA and CA to Performativity

The paper scrutinises Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversational Analysis (CA) to examine
the possibilities and the limitations in applying them as methodological tools to analyse casual
workplace conversations between people from distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds, namely
Japanese and Australians. It argues that strengths and weaknesses exist in the different perspectives
of CDA and CA and that, even though they are seen as taking oppositional stances, that they
complement each other in explaining the impact of global forces if we incorporate Butlerean theory of
performativity in the analysis.

74
One critique of CDA is that it is not able to give a comprehensive account of the accidental and
idiosyncratic nature of discursive practices (Luke 2002), having a tendency to give exclusive
responsibility to ideological and macro factors when interpreting discourse. CA, on the other hand, fails
to consider the impact of macro level socio-cultural factors on language. Performative theory is seen to
be able to bridge the gap between them and avoid being either too deterministic or too micro-centric.
With reference to recorded workplace casual conversation, this paper proposes that the incorporation
of performativity theory can offer a more comprehensive account of what is occurring, and what is being
perpetually constructed socio-culturally and linguistically.
___________________________________________________________________________

Pan Zhangxian
Zhejiang Gongshang University
pampan188@sohu.com

Critical Appraisal of the Chinese Identities in English Discourse

In the context of World Englishes, the multiple identities in English have been more and more clearly
realized. The present author takes English discourse, especially ―contact literature‖ produced by the
Chinese users, as data to explore its nativization, hybridity, and multiplicity from the systemic functional
perspective. She argues that Chinese identities have been more or less transferred or transplanted into
English discourse. She finds that linguistically, there are abundant Chinese characteristics at the levels
of lexis, syntax and discourse. Lexical borrowings, hybrid or mixed formation, semantic shift with
nativized meaning and connotation, coined or created words and expressions can be found.
Syntactically some nativized structures such as left-branching ones transferred from Chinese are
typically preferred. At the level of discourse, the Chineseness is revealed in the nativized discourse
strategies in speech acts, address terms, curses and the like. Culturally, the author finds that in the
process of use, when speakers are faced with the possible confusion and conflicts between Chinese
and English identities, they will try to adjust themselves to the context and make a balance between the
two.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Tryntje Pasma
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
t.pasma@let.vu.nl

Conversationalization and the Role of Metaphor

According to Fairclough‘s (1994) conversationalization hypothesis, there is a tendency of ‗modelling
public discourse upon the discursive practices of ordinary life, ―conversational‖ practices in a broad
sense‘ (1994: 253). This tendency involves a broader sense of personalisation as well as the more
specific use of linguistic features generally associated with conversational discourse in public
discourse. Steen‘s (2003) study of editorials in The Times has focussed on ‗the patterns of stylistic
changes that are involved in the development towards a conversational manner of discourse‘ (2003:

75
115). Using Biber‘s (1988) quantitative multi-dimensional / multi-feature framework of variation, Steen
showed that editorials changed linguistically over time, moving towards a more involved structure of
discourse. One of the general conclusions was that editorials have a tendency for conversationalization
that is in accordance with the general judgments advanced by Fairclough (2003: 123).
The abovementioned studies have predominantly concentrated on the manifestation of linguistic
features such as identified by Biber in relation to conversationalization. The VU-Ster project on
‗metaphors in public discourse‘ has as an aim to see if similar claims can be made in relation to
metaphorical language. Since Lakoff and Johnson‘s (1980) work on conceptual metaphor we know that
metaphorical language is ubiquitous in natural language production. Not all registers of discourse
produce the same kind of metaphorical language, however. Face-to-face conversation, for instance,
seems to contain more fixed expressions such as idioms than other registers, and a higher number of
linguistic metaphors that are manifestations of skeletal mappings such as the ABSTRACT IS CONCRETE
metaphor.
For the VU-Ster project, we are conducting a comparative study of 50,000 words of current news
articles and 50,000 words of face-to-face conversations, concentrating on the linguistic and conceptual
structure and the use of metaphorical language. In the current stage of the project, we lay out the
conceptual structures underlying the numerous linguistic metaphors that have been identified. At the
same time, we want to get an overview of how words are used metaphorically in the two registers, and
to what extent they can be compared in the light of the conversationalization hypothesis. What we have
seen so far is that idiomatic expressions do not only occur regularly in conversations, but are also
prominent in news. Moreover, skeletal mappings seem to be pervasive in conversations as well as
news, and may point to a shift to vaguer language use in news. Also important in the light of
conversationalization is the type-token ratio, specifically for metaphorically used words. All the above-
mentioned issues and examples related to possible conversationalization of public discourse will be
discussed extensively in the current paper.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Oksana Pervezentseva
Moscow Pedagogical State University
pervezenceva2004@mail.ru

The Role of Prosody in Effective Communication between

Native/non-native Speakers
Describing the pragmatic aspect of discourse researchers mention that out of the three levels of speech
act analysis the perlocutional one is the least investigated. In this connection it is interesting to examine
the role of prosody in the realisation of the perlocutional act, that is, to view the results of its impact on
the listener in various situations of speaking.
Prosodic signals vary according to the context and can be ambiguous which might result in a
communicative failure. To analyse the role of prosody in the organisational structure of discourse it is
essential to examine such breaks in communication that sometimes take place in the interaction of
representatives of one community, but are more frequent in the communication between native and
non-native speakers.
The empirical data prove special sensitiveness of native speakers to the inaccurate use of intonation
patterns and show that deviations from the intonation models are perceived mostly in the emotional-

76
modal aspect. The zone conception of intonation and the application of a specific prosodic criterion will
help determine the prosodemic status of speech acts and provide the basis for the development of L2
learners‘ communicative competence thus contributing to their adequate interpretation of emotional-
modal connotations of utterances.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Picard
University of Adelaide
michelle.picard@adelaide.edu.au

Divining „Dangerous‟ Discourses at Gulf Universities

In this paper, I attempt to uncover some of the ‗dangerous‘ Discourses prevalent at universities in the
Gulf and in one institution in particular which I dub ―Gulf University‖ (GU). I employ the tools of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) as my ‗divining rod‘, examining the texts of curriculum, university documents
and student/ lecturer narratives within the analytical framework described by Meyer (2001) and based
on Bhaskar‘s concept of ―explanatory critique‖ (Bhaskar and Collier 1998; Chouliaraki and Fairclough
1999). As suggested by Meyer (2001), I focus on a ―social problem‖, which like most issues tackled by
CDA is ―inherently contested and controversial‖; namely the perception that there is a problem with Gulf
university students‘ acquisition of university literacy/ literacies. This issue is also particularly complex in
that the people whom the study seeks to ―emancipate‖ (students and teachers) are at the same time
both powerful and powerless (Meyer, 2001: 125). I highlight Discourses that Gulf universities share with
the global university community and also those which are particular to the Gulf context. In addition, I
examine Discourses related to gender and ―the War on Terror‖ from the perspectives of the
disempowered/powerful female Arab students and disempowered/ powerful mainly male lecturers. This
paper especially focuses on Meyer‘s third stage of analysis which ―establish[es] through critique that
the social order‖ at universities in the Gulf and globally inherently ―need and generate the problems‖
related to students acquiring academic literacy. This ‗dangerous‘ move leads to an unpacking of the
―relations of power and domination‖ at my research site (Meyer, 2001: 126).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Sharon Pinkney
Open University
s.m.pinkney@open.ac.uk

Competing Discourses of Children‟s Participation: Quality

Protects and Every Child Matters?
This article explores the competing discourses within a contemporary, contested and dynamic social
policy field of children‘s participation. The research data is a possibly unique collection of policy and
interview texts relating to children who are either Looked After in public care or deemed ‗at risk‘ of
significant harm (UK). The study is based on original work involving narrative and discourse analysis of
166 policy documents from Social Services Departments (SSDs) in England and Wales. I followed this

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analysis with collection of further updated texts from several Departments and organisations where I
interviewed staff involved in children‘s participation policy and practice.
The analysis provides fresh insight into the construction of children and young people within the social
policy process. I identify the discourses of protectionism, developmentalism, rights and managerialism
as most significant. I explore how they are made visible, articulated, negotiated, produced and
reworked throughout social policy texts. I show how the settlement reached represents a new
configuration within the specific policy frameworks relating to children where a version of children‘s
rights is being absorbed, appropriated, mainstreamed and represented.
I am interested in how these specific constituencies of children and young people are being constructed
as ‗victims‘ and ‗villains‘ and show how these images and representations are prevalent in normative as
well as within policy discourses. I explore the emergence of ‗voice‘ within children‘s participation in
social care. Exploration of the relationship between children and agency is central to the analysis and
the active/passive binary is developed to a formulation including subject positions for children of
normalised absence, pathologised presence and constrained/subordinated voice.
I engage with UK contemporary social policy and social care discourses within the Quality Protects
(1998) and Every Child Matters (2003) policy frameworks relating to children‘s services. I argue that
there is a dynamic interaction between children‘s rights, managerialism and professional discourses
about children within the policy texts. Based on the analysis, the paper argues that the challenges of
the New Social Movements, feminism and children‘s rights are destabilised under the influence of
managerialism, though they continue to unsettle and disrupt it. Analysis of this possibly unique
collection of policy and interview texts illustrates well the policy process of constructing unique positions
within a field of discourses.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Amalia Plaskasoviti
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
amyjdvp@hotmail.com

The Discursive Construction of Identity in Minority Context: The

Case of the Maltese Community of Corfu
The verbal construction of identity has been an issue for many theoretical approaches based on the
writings of Bakhtin, Mead, Foucault and others. Identity is constructed and transmitted within and
through language. CDA (in its various approaches or combinations) has often been used as a method
to research identity issues.
This paper presents an analysis of the self-definition of members of a minority group in Greece, e.g. the
descendants of Maltese immigrants, who have settled primarely on the islands of Corfu and Cephalonia
since the 19th Century and therefore integrated into the local population.
The starting point for the study was to examine the extent of the maintenance of cultural characteristics
of this community and especially its language. A second aim has been to investigate the attitudes of the
members of the community towards their language and their general ethnic heritage. Those attitudes
were considered as parts of the collective ideology of the group towards language and heritage.
We adopted the approach of Potter/Wetherell (1987), according to whom basic psychological concepts
such as attitudes or identity can be explored through Discourse Analysis. The attitudes of the

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informants were not treated as stable mental predispositions but rather as recognizable discursive
entities. The analysis and interpretation were not limited into the content of the discourse, but also
searched for patterns of variability and consintency in content and form, focusing on lexical,
grammatical and rhetorical choices as well as micro- and macro-textual parameters.
The data collection was operated through non-standardized interviews and consequent formation of a
corpus. The analysis brought up some interesting observations about the use of ethnic adjectives, the
usual ‗we/them‘ polarization, the verbal equations of Maltese and Catholics, indicating the predominant
role of religion for the community, as well as the appearance of repeated topics and arguments in the
discourse of the informants. Although the community seems to be implying a self-definition as a
religious minority, the ethnic consciousness has not totally disappeared. At the same time, they seem to
be constructing a ‗hybrid‘ identity, true to its postmodern definition.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Virginijus Purvys
Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities
vpurvys@yahoo.com

West versus East: the Discursive Construction of National

Identity in German Press Coverage of the 1992 and 2006 Winter
Olympic Games
The unification of formerly divided Germany marked the transformation of the social, economic and
political order. Concomitantly, the 'new' country was confronted with the national identity problem. The
case of Germany is unique in this respect, as prior to unification the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) both sought a distinct identity in fundamental
opposition to one another. International sport was used as a means to compete between two
ideologies. The fusion of different sporting systems and sport in general proved to be a sensitive issue
as it reflected wider socio-cultural contours that shaped society.
This study is carried out to examine what topics and discursive strategies are used in mediated sport to
construct national sameness and distinctiveness. It also aims to identify the discursive change in
national identity construction from 1992 to 2006.
The German daily broadsheets Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as
the weekly magazine Der Spiegel were chosen for the study. The analysis of media material is built on
the discourse-historical approach of the Vienna school. The systematical integration of the background
information is seen as crucial for identifying and understanding discursive practices.
The discursive knowledge obtained from the 1992 Albertville Winter Games was added to the social
scientific data while analysing press coverage of the 2006 Turino Winter Games. It proved to be an
important information to understand and monitor diachronic transformation of the national identity
discourse from 1992 to 2006.
The paper reveals a substantial difference in topics and strategies employed to represent former
'Western' and 'Eastern' Germany. The construction of a national identity in a unified Germany implies
ideological dominance of the West justified by a negative representation of the East. The study also
shows the continuation of discourse topics in 2006, where East-West dichotomy remains the main
theme, although less explicit in discursive realization.

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Sylvia Reitmanova
Memorial University of Newfoundland
sreitman@mun.ca

The Colour of the White Plague: Constructing the Immigrant

Identity in the Canadian Press
Immigrant health problems are often effectively reconstructed by the Canadian press as a crisis of the
immigration system that requires the immediate attention of politicians and public health authorities
(Greenberg, 2000; Hier and Greenberg, 2002; Murdocca, 2003). This effective reconstructive
instrument – the discourse of othering – conceptualizes immigrants as an imagined nation within the
nation to which many negative connotations are often attached (Anderson, 1983). Through this
approach, diseases are constructed as their (immigrant) diseases and not ours (Canadian). What
accounts for immigrant ill health is their otherness rather than anything else. As a result of constructing
the immigrant health issues as a crisis of the immigration system through the employment of othering
discoursive techniques, immigrants are imagined to pose a threat to the national health security of their
recipient countries. Consequently, the focus of disease prevention and health promotion policies shifts
from addressing a variety of social determinants of health shaping immigrants‘ post-migration illnesses
to guarding national health at the national borders by excluding the sick and by monitoring those
immigrants who are already in the country.
This critical discourse analysis of Canadian press coverage of immigrant tuberculosis during the past
decade demonstrates that disease can often transcend its biomedical definitions and categories in
order to serve certain interests and ideologies. In the Canadian press, immigrant tuberculosis serves as
a learning tool to construct the identity of Canadian immigrants rather than to unmask the complex
relations between this disease and the poverty-ridden living conditions of an immigrant population.
Macro- and micro-structural textual analysis of newspaper coverage documents that tuberculosis, often
portrayed as a killer rather than as a preventable and curable infectious disease, is constructed as an
immigrant disease while its distribution in a significant segment of non-immigrant population is ignored.
Constructing a disease (once called the white plague due to the very pale skin colour of its sufferers) as
the coloured plague (since the majority of Canadian immigrants are visible minorities) and representing
immigrants as the inferior other who threaten national health security serves as a tool for Canadian
politicians and health authorities to justify restrictive immigration and public health policies which ignore
the true nature of tuberculosis in Canada.
___________________________________________________________________________

Jenny K. Rodriguez
University of Strathclyde
jenny.rodriguez@strath.ac.uk

Discourses of the Self: Constructions of a Woman Researcher

The importance of reflexivity as part of the research process has been widely discussed yet literature
that analyses the discourses constructed by researchers as a result of the reflexive process are scarce.

80
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implications of the use of reflexivity strategies on the way a
researcher (re)constructs her identity throughout the research process.
The paper uses personal research notes as well as the notes that informed the reflexivity process while
conducting doctoral research. A reading of these notes will be made using discourse analysis. The
analysis will focus on how the process of reflection impacts the articulation of discourses of the self.
The case made by this paper relates to the case of women conducting research in male-dominated
environments, where assumptions about their gender identities obscure their research roles, creating
interaction conflicts and possibly compromising data gathering. The paper draws on the author‘s own
experience conducting research on gender construction in the public sector in a developing country.
The paper is keen to argue that the use of reflexivity strategies involves a re-construction of the
researcher. As an ongoing process, reflexivity serves not only the purpose of self-reflection but also
generates processes of self-articulation. As a result of the constant self-awareness brought about by
reflexivity, the researcher produces multiple discourses of herself based on (re)interpretations of
herself.
This paper has significant implications for the discussion of the limits of reflexivity and the pressure it
imposes on researchers as a means of legitimisation and validation of research practices and
representations.
The paper focuses on discourses of research(er) identity, which are generally acknowledged when
discussing reflexivity but not specifically made the centre of scrutiny. The paper contributes to the
limited discussion on researcher‘s constitution of self and research personhood.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Irina Romanova
Loughborough University
irina@link-sys.com

“Other Greeks”: Discursive Construction of Ethnicity by Greek

Migrants from the Former Soviet Union in Cyprus.
The Greek minority in the former USSR has a long history darkened by Stalin‘s repressions and
discrimination of Khrushchev‘s era. After Perestroika those who migrated in order to ‗live like Greeks
among Greeks‘ soon discovered that contrary to their expectations they still didn‘t fully belong to the
‗titular‘ ethnicity of their ethnic homeland. Labeled ‗Pontians from Russia‘ by Hellenes and Greek
Cypriots, they encountered hostility of the media and double standards of the authorities that affirmed
or denied their ‗greekness‘ depending on the political situation.
The questions ―Am I a Greek or not? Where is my homeland?‖ remain painful for many ethnic Greek
migrants in Cyprus, who at times consider themselves similar to and at times totally different from the
locals. Within the ‗essentialist‘ approach co-ethnic migrants are portrayed as possessing ethnicity of
either their home (Remennick, 2003) or host country (Fuchs et al, 1999) or at best as having ‗double
identity‘ (Al-Haj, 2002, Mittelberg and Borschevsky, 2004)). Constructing co-ethnic migrants this way,
quantitative researchers contribute to the mainstream discourse that denies the newcomers a
possibility of being different (e.g. ‗different Greeks‘). It either forces the repatriates to conform to the
majority and thus to disown the unique experience of their ethnic group or displaces them to the
margins of society.

81
Critical discursive psychology (Edley, 2001) with its focus on language, power and ideology allows a
researcher to grasp the unique ways co-ethnic migrants construct their identity and resist normalization.
The data for this project were collected in 9 semi-structured interviews (14 hours of recording) with 11
Greeks from the former USSR in Cyprus. Four ‗interpretative repertoires‘ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987)
were identified. Firstly, participants often constructed themselves as ‗better Greeks‘ than the locals,
referring to their ‗purer‘ Greek blood, more ancient traditions and dialect, more authentic Orthodox faith
and stronger masculinity. Belonging to the Soviet culture as opposed to ‗capitalist‘ Greece/Cyprus also
marked ‗better Greeks‘. At the same time, the new migrants at times depicted themselves as ‗worse
Greeks‘ using the common in the Greek/Cypriot media clichés about backwardness and criminality of
the repatriates. The repertoire ‗equal Greeks‘ allowed the participants to construct themselves as a part
of the Greek world and hires of the great ancient culture. Finally, the ‗lost identity‘ repertoire enabled
Greek migrants to express confusion about their ethnicity. The four repertoires developed in opposition
to each other and formed ‗ideological dilemmas‘ that reflected the contradictive nature of ‗lived
ideologies‘ (Billig et al., 1988).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
carmen.sguinda@upm.es

Cognitive and Discursive Bases of the New Native American

Feminine Identity as Approached by Contemporary Poetry
After more than five hundred years of imposed colonial silence, the re-invention of Native American
feminine identities appears today as an ongoing process based on a paradoxical politics of presence
and concealment heir to the syncretic structure of cosmogonic myths, iconic to natural cycles, and still
halfway between the experiences of oppression and liberation. The objective of this paper is precisely
to show the inner workings of such politics in the discursive and cognitive planes through the careful
scrutiny of a contemporary pan-tribal corpus comprising 635 poetic samples. Here poetry is conceived
of as a social practice and a complex speech act focused on gaining historical weight and inverting
power relationships with the colonizer.
In the light of Fairclough‘s social theory of discourse (1992) and van Dijk‘s sociocognitivism (1993,
1998, 2003 inter alia), findings reveal a fabric of pragmatic, conceptual and multimodal strategies aimed
at producing effects of both visibility and invisibility in discourse. To the first end, the most outstanding
devices employed are deictic prominence and selective spelling, diverse face threatening acts and
taboos, typographic iconicity, ritual and storytelling rhythmical patterns, intertextuality, metaphor
coinage presenting the new Amerindian femininity by means of selenic, fluid and lithic images, and
intricate conceptual blendings of multiple intercultural mappings. The second purpose is fulfilled mainly
by resorting to paratextual control, voluntary floutings of Grice‘s cooperative maxims, code-switching,
and trans-tribal synechdochical references drawing on shared tribal knowledge and thus fostering
intragroup cohesion. This dual trend of visibility and invisibility, in sum, may be interpreted as a textual
practice of reconciliation and resistance simultaneously encouraging discursive contact with the
domineering Euroamerican societies and forcing them into a rite of passage previous to the communal
construction of meaning, whose phases of isolation and ordeal provoke or affront the reader and
disclose uncomfortable truths while preserving sacred traditions. Furthermore, it parallels the notions of
conceptual integration (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997), survivance (Vizenor, 1999), and cultural mutability

82
and hybridity (Said, 1993; Bhabha, 1994), well-known in the fields of cognition, ethnocriticism, and
postcolonial studies.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Jaffer Sheyholislami
Carleton University
jaffer_sheyholislami@carleton.ca

Discursive Construction of National Identities as Mediated by

Digital Media:The Case of the Kurds
In 2002, Allan Luke called for widening the scope of CDA research: moving beyond a focus on ideology
and domination, and focusing also on discourses of resistance and emancipation among the subaltern
and minorities. Jim Martin (2002) has called such an approach Positive [Critical] Discourse Analysis
(PCDA). This study hopes to make a modest contribution in that direction. It further hopes to
contribute to Ruth Wodak‘s (2006) call for further research with discourse-analytical approaches on
national identities.
Based on PhD dissertation in progress, this paper focuses on the interface between national identity,
discourse, and the new electronic media. I have investigated the ways the Kurds, the largest people
claiming the status of a non-state nation, use satellite television and the Internet to reproduce,
disseminate and articulate discursive and semiotic constructions of their collective identities. Situating
my research within the interdisciplinary approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, I have carried out
analyses of television and the Internet discourses at three levels. At the discourse practice level, I have
mapped the types of television programs and internet constituents used for the practices of identity
construction. At the textual analysis level, I have carried out multimodal and micro analyses of verbal
language, images and music. Finally, at the socio-cultural level, findings from the previous levels of
analysis are explained in light of the historical and political contexts that bear upon the discursive
constructions of identity.
The findings show that far from being sole agents of homogenizing the world, satellite television and the
Internet have enabled non-state actors and marginalized minorities to reify both their territorially and
regionally based and their trans-border identities in unprecedented ways. The findings also underscore
the differences between the two media in their resourcefulness for semiotic and discursive
constructions of identity.
This study illustrates that a CDA approach which includes analysis of the form, content and context of
media discourse is capable of taking into account the contentions with which discourses are saturated.
This is an example of a dialogic analysis of discourse that appreciates the intertextual dimension of
discourses along with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the identities they construct.

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Agnieszka Sowińska
Nicolas Copernicus University
sowinska@umk.pl

Towards a European Identity? A Comparative Study of the

Representations of Europe in the Polish and British Press
On 19 October at an informal summit in Lisbon European Union leaders reached a deal on the new
Reform Treaty, designed to replace the European Constitution jettisoned by French and Dutch voters in
2005. ―The new Treaty of Lisbon was born today. This is a European victory,‖ declared Portugal‘s
Prime Minister José Sócrates. The treaty is set to be signed on 13 December, then ratified by each
member state of the Union and to come into force on 1 January, 2009. However, as it is said to be an
obfuscated version of the failed draft constitution, the treaty causes a lot of controversy and the
European Union is accused of not serving its citizens well.
The aim of the paper is to investigate the construction of Europe as illustrated by the coverage of the
Lisbon Summit in Polish and British quality newspapers. The corpus for the analysis will come from
quality newspapers of both right-wing, conservative (Rzeczpospolita, The Daily Telegraph) and left-
wing, liberal orientation (Gazeta Wyborcza, The Guardian).
Drawing on the strengths of the Discourse-Historical tradition of CDA in particular (Reisigl and Wodak
2001) as well as pragmatic approaches to CDA, the paper will seek to explore the discursive strategies
employed in the construction of Europe and their linguistic forms of realization by answering the
following questions: 1) how is the Lisbon Summit represented in both Polish and British newspapers
and how is it situated in the broader political and historical context of European integration? 2) which
actors are selected in the coverage, which roles are ascribed to them, and who is blamed for blocking
the treaty? 3) what metaphors and strategies of argumentation are applied in discourse formation?
4) what future scenarios are proposed for Europe?
___________________________________________________________________________

Jeanne Strunck
Aalborg University
i12js@hum.aau.dk

Gender and Politeness in a Danish Bank Setting

The use of politeness strategies in communication has earlier been studied with an emphasis on Brown
and Levinson‘s model applied on different kinds of data with results almost always showing that the use
of politeness strategies vary according to gender. But more recent research suggests that people are
who they are partly because of their own and of others‘ discursive constructions which means that the
use of politeness strategies is not necessarily gender bound. The focus of the latest research is on the
gendered discourses constructed by men and women participating in communities of practice where
groups of people engage in mutual endeavours, such as in workplaces, emphasising contextual
impacts. The works on gender and language by Mills (2003), Cameron (1998) and Holmes (1995,
2006) state that even though many studies have shown women to be more polite than men, this
depends on what we mean by being polite and on the settings or communities of practice in which the

84
interactions occur. Furthermore, the context has an important role to play for the interpretation of what
is polite or not or for knowing if the purpose of the discursive act is e.g. to show solidarity and rapport
among the group. To the discussion of face and politeness Scollon and Wong-Scollon (2001) add two
issues: the notions of involvement and independence, involvement referring to the need people have to
be involved with others and independence referring to a person‘s right not to be dominated by others.
This paper is studying discursive constructions of politeness, involvement, independence and solidarity
among coming bank managers during focus group interviews related to the participants‘ motivations
and possibilities for pursuing manager positions. The study pays attention to the ways in which
discourse displays who the participants are, how they want people to see them and whether politeness
strategies and ‗face‘ may help pursuing career opportunities. The analysis is carried out on the basis of
two sets of data from focus group interviews with female and male employees in a Danish bank.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Toyoko Sato
Copenhagen Business School
tsa.ikl@cbs.dk

Representation of Desire and Femininity in Japan‟s Consumer

Culture: A Critical Discourse Analysis
This paper explores representations of femininity and desire in connection to otherness in late
modernity. The paper proceeds as a case discourse analysis of a singularly important 1987 advertising
campaign, ―Hoshii mono ga hoshii (I want what I want)‖ for Seibu Department Store, an energetic
driving force for Japan‘s taste culture.
This paper focuses on both the textual sphere of the campaign and the socio-historical/cultural
background of the Japanese consumer society in relation to the semiotic and the social. Thus, critical
discourse analysis (CDA) as the methodology offered by Chouliaraki and Fairclaugh is chosen. CDA
encompasses three types of analysis: (1) analysis of text, which includes both the verbal and the visual,
(2) analysis of processes of text production, consumption and distribution, and (3) analysis of the
discursive event as a whole. In order to fulfil (2) and (3), this research also chooses interviews to the
advertiser and its advertising creative staff as an ethnographic method.
Theoretically, I employ Judith Butler‘s constructs on gender and articulate concepts of the subject,
desire and otherness as well as femininity in connection to Butler‘s construct of performativities. In
particular, I explore Butler‘s interpretation of a Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, which has threefold
meaning in English: to lift up, to cancel and to preserve. According to Butler, Aufhebung is a
‗developing sequence‘ of desire, ‗consuming desire, desire for recognition and desire for another
desire.‘ Desire is connected to the subject‘s capacity for self-knowledge.
Through analysis of the above mentioned advertising campaign, this paper argues two points. First, late
modernity of Japanese urban lifestyle possesses the notion of Aufhebung in connection to value, self-
awareness and recognition. Second, such a consumer driven society and its saturated affluence,
simultaneously, send Aufhebung, the power of individual desire of self-knowledge, away to ambiguity
and transform it to simulacra, which appears to be a representation of both symbolic annihilation as well
as a plastic hope of femininity.

85
Georgina Turner
Loughborough University
g.turner2@lboro.ac.uk

Us and Them in Diva Magazine: From the Inside Looking Out

Critical discourse analysis is concerned with unequal power relations and the victims of the
discriminatory discourses those imbalances produce. But while much work has exposed elite ideologies
at work in mainstream discourse about minorities, critical approaches have rarely been put to use in
analysing minority discourses. The paper reports from my current research, doing the latter with regard
to lesbian magazine Diva.
Women‘s magazines have long been analysed where the construction of heterosexual womanhood is
under scrutiny; men‘s magazines too have more recently attracted academics concerned with
masculinity. Despite the strength of the scholarship in this area, work analysing in-group media
representations of lesbians and lesbian identity is limited – an omission made all the more striking by
virtue of the highly persuasive nature of ‗specialist‘ magazines. Since the mid-1990s British woman
have read Diva, the only nationwide lesbian magazine, in their thousands, turning to it to make contact
with others and learn about their sexual identity.
My research analyses, through a combination of content and (critical) discourse analysis, the
(re)production of lesbian identity in Diva magazine. The paper includes work from a content analysis
focused on pronoun use, a subsequent exploration of their semantic prosody, and analysis of the
construction of the groups ‗Us‘ and ‗Them‘ across 10 years of the magazine, from its launch in 1994 to
2004. We know or can imagine how the mainstream media represent lesbians. What have lesbian
media got to say?
___________________________________________________________________________

Dorien Van De Mieroop and Wim Bervoets

Lessius University College
dorien.vandemieroop@lessius.eu, wim.bervoets@student.lessius.eu

The Influence of the Changing Context on Identities in

Narratives: The Case of Two Interviews with a Former Hooligan
Narratives can be considered as an important aspect of human life, since through them people are able
to express themselves as individuals. Therefore, it is fairly logical that the study of narratives and
identity became closely intertwined, since it is exactly in these discourses that identity constructions
have many opportunities to flourish. Moreover, narratives are closely related to their contexts: they are
not only context-changing, but they are also context-reflecting (De Fina 2000: 133).
In this paper, we focus on this link between narratives, identity and the changing context by studying
two narratives of a young man who used to be an active hooligan of a Belgian football club a couple of
years ago. The two narratives were co-constructed in two interviews with the same interviewer, but the
context changed because of the time lapse between the two moments of interviewing. The first
interview was carried out six years ago, when the interviewee had just stopped being an active

86
hooligan, while the second interview took place this year, when he was still a fan of the same football
club, had managed to keep on abstaining from violence, and when he had just become father for the
first time.
In our analyses, we look at the way the interviewee constructs his identities, among others by his self-
categorizations as a hooligan, which can be regarded as a ‗transient‘ categorization, as opposed to the
more ‗stable‘ categorization of father (Jayyusi 1984: 66). Under the influence of the latter self-
categorization in the second interview, which has been described to be quite powerful (Wortham and
Gadsden 2006), we expect to find a different way of positioning between the two interviews. However,
the data show us that this link between the context and the interviewee‘s identity constructions is not as
clear-cut as expected.
___________________________________________________________________________

Andy Van Drom

Université Laval
andy.van-drom.1@ulaval.ca

„What‟s the Club Scene Like in Canada‟? The Construction of a

„Humane‟ Identity in Pro- and Anti-seal Hunt Discourse
Since Al Gore‘s An Inconvenient Truth, environmental discourse has gained significantly in economic
and political value, thus resulting in a heightened level of commodification. At the same time, however,
it has become apparent that the discursive power of ecological issues manifests itself in the degree to
which its implicit scenarios permeate through society and force actors to reconceptualize their interests
and recognize new problems and opportunities. Indeed, eco-politics critically depends on the specific
social construction of issues needing attention, inevitably implying a set of social representations
mediated through discursive practices. Whether or not environmental issues appear as problematic
then depends on the way they are discursively framed and constructed. This, in turn, leads to the
emergence of structured ways of arguing, and actors may position themselves differently over time as
part of an overall strategy. As positions shift over time, therefore, it becomes important for all parties to
secure their existing member base through strategies of identity construction.
This contribution on the borders of linguistics, sociology and communication studies sets out to reveal
and evaluate the strength and scope of those elements of environmental discourse that are connoted
by identity. More specifically, we seek to demonstrate which discursive strategies pro- and anti-sealing
actors adopt to construct and stage the opposition between a ‗humane‘ in-group (Us) and an
‗inhumane‘ out-group (Them). To this end, we have constructed a corpus around ‗Seal Hunt‘ (2007),
the first televised documentary to take an openly pro-sealing stance, and the interdiscursively linked
texts produced by the two other actors it depicts : the Humane Society of the United States and the
Canadian Government.
First, we will identify the relevant lexical units in our tripartite corpus, and elaborate a typology of them.
To this end, we have constructed a tetrahedral framework that draws on the two-dimensional approach
of Poirier (1995). Second, we will proceed with a critical discourse analysis, which will allow us to
uncover the identity-connoted sense these units convey (Wodak et al., 1999). Extrapolation of these
observations will allow us to demonstrate how communication strategies exploit the symbiosis between
language as a functional means of communication and language as the carrier of a shared set of
values to discursively construct a ‗humane‘ identity that assures its bearer ethical peace of mind.

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Marco Venuti and Giulia Riccio
Università degli Studi di Napoli ―Federico II‖
venuti@unina.it, giuliariccio@gmail.com

“War and Terror” and the War in Iraq: Collocational Profile of

War in a Corpus on the 2003 Conflict in Iraq
CorDis (Corpora and Discourse) is a modular corpus of political and media discourse regarding the
conflict in Iraq in 2003, gathered by various research groups in the framework of a PRIN project funded
by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. XML-valid, TEI-conformant, CorDis is made up of
independent sub-corpora comprising a total of about 5,000,000 words. Most texts date back to the
period in which the initial invasion of Iraq took place, although some sub-corpora go beyond this time
span. All the sub-corpora, however, relate to the conflict and have been chosen in order to provide an
overview of how this war was talked about in different contexts. For this purpose the project
concentrates on a selection of interrelated political and media discourse types in order to highlight how
political messages are first forged and debated in political arenas, then reworked through negotiation
and argumentation with the press and, finally, reported to the public by news media. Discourse types
include parliamentary debates, news conferences, newspapers, TV news programmes and
parliamentary inquiries, most of which both from the UK and the US.
In line with one of the objectives of the CorDis project, which aims to demonstrate that the combination
of qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis enhances researchers‘ analytical capacity, the present
paper exploits the corpus in order to show how the lexical item war – obviously a highly relevant word in
a corpus relating to the Iraqi conflict – points to different discourse strategies in each of the discourse
types included in the corpus.
Different collocational profiles are thus shown as being associated to war in different discourse types as
well as in different countries (i.e. in the United Kingdom vs. in the United States).
The investigation conducted on the corpus shows that, despite its being a very frequent word, war is
generally not chosen to refer to the conflict in Iraq. Especially in some discourse types, war actually
refers either to previously fought wars (e.g. the two World Wars) or to the war on terror as a justification
of the military action. Therefore, other ways of representing the military operations taking place in
Saddam Hussein‘s country in the discourse types under investigation will be examined.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Warner
University of Melbourne
m.warner@unimelb.edu.au

The Discourse of (In)Security in Political Rhetoric

The public and political language space of the contemporary world is dominated by security discourses
that are fuelled by psychological insecurity. In particular, the rhetoric of the so-called 'war on terror' and
the war in Iraq is transposed to the rhetoric of political leadership, producing a meta-discourse of
ontological fear that is used for strategic domination of Australian federal politics. This paper

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investigates the manipulative aspects of political rhetoric and the linguistic and social-psychological
strategies that shape the dynamic relationship - mediated by fear - between discourse and power. I
identify a number of recurrent motifs (in formulaic phrases, keywords, and metaphorical constructions)
which form a constellation of discursive elements in temporal, spatial, and ideational alignments that
index binary constructions of security and insecurity, certainty and fear, and moral courage and
cowardice.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Yang Mei
Jilin University
r03my6@abdn.ac.uk

Critical Discourse Analysis of American News Reporting on the

Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
Language can be considered a medium for ideological construction: through language, we develop,
express and share our understanding of the way the social world is constructed as intersubjective
concepts. The language of the mass media plays a powerful role in constructing and reinforcing
people‘s understanding of social values. This paper seeks to find out how ideology influences and
frames the American elite news media‘s reporting on the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games using selected
American newspapers from 23/09/2007 to 22/10/2007. These three newspapers are The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times which have been long considered premier
news sources. The study uses qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis and is both descriptive and
interpretative. Moreover, the study will provide description of the actual content and interpretation of this
content in socio-political context. This study aims to explore the relation between language, power and
ideology as well as their effects on the news media themselves. It is intended to raise the readers
critical language awareness.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Yu Yang
Shandong University
cestyu@gmail.com

A Sociolinguistic Study of Language Harmony: A Corpus-based

Approach to Discourses in Contemporary China
The coexistence of the standard discourse and the emergent discourses is the linguistic reflection of
China‘s diversified social culture. Faced with the issue of building a harmonious society, we take the
coexistence of different discourses as the starting point of our study, apply theories of sociolinguistics
and critical discourse analysis (CDA), and explore the significance of language harmony within the
Chinese language.

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First of all, we have done a corpus-based study on the differences between the standard discourse
(represented by the government discourse) and the emergent discourses (represented by the Super
Girls discourse) through a linguistic and an ideological analysis. The major finding is that the formation
of new words in the Super Girls discourse is a metaphorical mapping from the source FOOD to the
target FANS. It is an ―innovation‖ in word-formation, as well as in people‘s mind. The Super Girls group
achieve an identity by their discourse, which starts to influence the mind of people out of the group. The
popularity of the emergent discourses has brought about people‘s different views on the phenomenon.
Second, we have investigated people‘s attitudes toward the coexistence of the two kinds of discourses
through a questionnaire. Statistics have shown that people tend to accept the emergent discourses in
terms of their new vocabulary words, such as ―PK.‖ Although the standard discourse dominates our
social life, the emergent discourses have the controlling power on informal occasions. They are mainly
used and supported by young students. With regard to the view to purify the Chinese language, we
advocate human concern and tolerance for the coexistence of various discourses.
Third, we have proposed the significance of language harmony within the Chinese language based on
the above research. Its connotation includes the tolerant and open mind of discourse users,
normalization of discourses and their appropriate use, and the healthy development of different
discourses. Language planning, education of national consciousness and guidance of the media are
also important in the realization of language harmony.
The present study enriches the connotation of language harmony, brings about a new perspective in
sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, and provides a linguistic exploration for the construction of our
harmonious society.

90
Poster Session

Ehya Amalsaleh and Manijeh Abdollahi

Shiraz University of Medical Sciences
asalehe@yahoo.com

The Representation and Construction of Gender Identity in the

Contemporary Novel “ We are Getting Used to it”
Every person is an out-product of the time and setting in which he/she is brought up. In other words, the
character and identity of a person is constructed by the socio-cultural and or socio-political condition in
which the person is raised. Hence, the identity and social position of a person can be constructed and
confirmed through one‘s interaction with others. Then, one way, among others, to detect the identity of
a person is through the linguistic options used. The present study aims at investigating the effect of
different time and settings on the construction of gender. To do so, it is to study in detail a
contemporary Persian novel in which there are three female characters belonging to different
generations and to find out how they discursively represent and make a sense of self as well as
identity. Of these three characters, One (the grandmother) was born and brought up before the
revolution, the other (middle-aged) was born and raised before the revolution, but has made a living
after the revolution and the third one ( a teenager) belongs to a post-revolutionary one. It is noticed that
the different genders are not necessarily displaying and using distinct linguistic devices; they, in fact,
depending upon the context and their intension may sometimes shift from one discursive device to the
other.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Kamila Bialy
University of Łódź
kamila.bialy@gmail.com

Critical Discourse Analysis and the Biographical Sociology: An

Attempt at Linking both Perspectives. On the Example of
Research on Higher Education in Poland
With reference to the general aim of this project (CADAAD), that is cross-disciplinary communication in
critical discourse research, I would like to put forward and discuss a methodological proposal of
combining a CDA perspective (specifically that, which is expressed in a Norman Fairclough‘s approach)
with the biographical sociology perspective (in its version proposed by Fritz Schütze).
CDA aims at adopting a complex field of discourse studies. It represents a linguistic approach to
discourse on the one hand, concentrated on features of language means that determine an internal text
organization and communicative qualities. On the other hand, its critical research is focused on
macrosociological questions. Last but not least, the centre of interest of CDA is focused on the space

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between these ‗internal‘ and ‗external‘ approaches, that is an ethnographic approach. It offers an insight
into rules of formation of speech acts and their interpretation in the real course of communication
processes located in different contexts.
The programme of CDA, however interdisciplinary it seems to be by its very nature, lacks something.
Although there are the types of CDA that come from conversational analysis and are carried out in
institutional contexts, they still remain critical text analyses, aiming at disclosing cultural repertoires,
symbols and argumentations used in specific situations. The narrative interview, one of a large number
of data collection techniques within the discussed biographical sociology, produces texts as well. And
yet these texts may offer something new to this ethnographical and at the same time microsociological
approach to discourse.
They are the records of temporal aspects of the organization of biographical experiences. What is
more, particular stress is laid here on the link between these experiences in terms of their content and
culturally shaped ways of relating them, which are the result of the participation of an individual in
crossing and discussing social worlds. Although this technique is highly structuralised and thus may be
considered far from the natural conversation, the narrative constraints enable to reconstruct interactions
or, to put it more precisely, interactional implications of specific biographical situations.
To illustrate the proposed link between these two perspectives, I would like to present the results of the
research conducted in the field of higher education in Poland. The research focus was on students‘
associations and organizations as they operate as a part of the system under market pressures and as
such have to respond to the demands of the Bologna Process. The interviewees were asked to
produce their life stories as the members of these organizations.
The results of critical discourse analysis of their web pages, that is cultural repertoires, symbols,
ideologies and myths were confronted with experiences and everyday life practices of the students. In
their stories containing some narratives on the individual strategies of adaptation to the institutional life
and its dilemmas one could see the interplay between their individual and collective identity. This
interplay had an impact, as the analyses shown, on the transformations of these organizations
themselves.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Condamines and Christophe Pimm

CNRS and Université Toulouse Le Mirail
cpimm@univ-tlse2.fr

Linguistics and Risk Prevention: The Example of a

Collaboration with the CNES
Since the ‗70s, firms are concerned with the prevention of industrial risks. From the beginning of this
process, human sciences like sociology or psychology have been implicated in the reflection. One of
their roles was to warn firms against too systematically taking into account norms as the only way to
foresee risks.
Linguists, on the other hand, were not very implicated in this reflection. Yet, we know that
misunderstanding risks linked to the ignorance as to how the language works are high.
As linguists, we interest ourselves with real productions in a professional context. Our goal is to study
how to participate in the management of risks.

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We work on a specific aspect of risk management with the CNES (Centre National d‘Etudes Spatiales –
the French national centre for spatial studies) that involve the notion of evolution through time. Indeed,
the CNES sets projects that can span over a long period of time (sometimes more than 10 years
between the moment when a probe is sent and the moment when it reaches its destination). This
duration can lead to various losses of information because the people involved and the context can
change in the course of the project. To try to anticipate this knowledge loss, we are currently
developing a method using the notion of traceability. Our goal is to identify the objects and processes
considered as hazardous (to a certain degree) at the beginning of a project and to be able to trace them
in time to make sure that this dimension does not get lost. It happens indeed that engineers
acknowledge a particular risk for a given object when the project starts but that this knowledge
disappears at a later stage.
Concretely, from the linguistic point of view, our study can be decomposed in four main parts:
1. The study of the expression modes of risk in a corpus from the CNES and the development of a risk
grammar.
2. The computational implementation of the grammar.
3. The constitution of a corpus partitioned in time.
4. The utilization of the grammar and the analysis of our results.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Stefania D‟Avanzo
Università di Napoli Federico II
ms_davanzo@libero.it

Pragmatic and Semantic Implication in Bush‟s Radio Speech

about War on Terror
Critical Discourse analysis (CDA) is a theoretical approach strongly connected with other disciplines.
(Wodak 2003,Fairclough 1989, 2003). Fairclough (1989) highlighted the important role of
sociolinguistics that has shown that the variation does not depend upon individual choices, because it is
a product of a social differentiation. In fact language varies according social setting, the social identities
of people in interactions and so on.
Thus, the main objective of an analyst should not be just analysing text, but analysing the relationship
between texts, interactions and contexts.
On the basis of this crucial distinction, Fairclough identified three dimensions of Critical Discourse
analysis, - the second point of my investigation:
● Description
● Interpretation
● Explanation
Description is concerned with the analysis of formal properties of the text; Interpretation is focused on
the relationship between text and interaction; Explanation concerns the connection of interaction with
social context.

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Interpretation is a crucial point in order to investigate the relationship between situational context and
discourse type. In this stage the main questions are: what‘s going on?, who‘s involved?, In what
relations? What‘s the role of language in what‘s going on?
The study will investigate the strong connection between Critical discourse analysis approach and
pragmatic, semantic values of linguistic structures and phrases in Bush‘s radio speeches about
terrorism in 2005. In particular, the attention will be focused on specific lexical choices employed to
refer to the two opposite parties in the war on terror, ie terrorists and American troops, and their
semantic and pragmatic implications, that is, the cultural values and concepts conveyed in the
pragmatic interaction between The President and the American people. Moreover, a part of the analysis
will be devoted to the pronominal system with its pragmatic values. Who are the people involved when
they are referred to by the pronoun we? When is the pronoun I preferred to we? The employ of Corpus
Linguistics approach will provide interesting evidence of the promiscuity and ambiguity of pronouns.
In short, in the texts taken into consideration, linguistic, semantic and pragmatic implications in CDA will
reveal a variety of aspects in political and social interactions.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Samira Farhat Bouzgarrou

samirafarhat0212@yahoo.com

Framing the “Just War”: Harnessing Cognitive Science for CDA

Purposes
The fact that some democracies in this neo-capitalist era are based on struggles for power raises
questions as to the methods that are used to achieve this struggle legitimately. It is hypothesized that
democratic leaders who wish to take their countries to war are now obliged to market the war as having
a "just cause‖. Part of this struggle is presumed to be embedded in political discourses. Therefore,
some critics acknowledged that political discourses are used to maintain a facet of democracy and to
resolve clashes of opinions. Bush‘s speeches on the Iraq war are no exception. Understood
linguistically, these speeches are produced to voice some of the political institutions of the state, and to
assert the power and the authority of the government on declaring wars and sending citizens to fight
and risk death or injury. The controversy in representing a struggle for power in the political discourse of
a democratic country implies commitment to and respect of the state institutions terms and obligations
which are protected by constitutions, civil and criminal legal codes as well as interest groups and social
movements. Accordingly, manipulation and deception became part of the political discourse style, and
intrinsic to this style are the strategies of exerting and operationalizing discursively authority, legitimacy,
and consensus with the audience.
The framing theory can be used to explore how war on Iraq is framed as a just war. Framing theories in
social sciences tend to take meaning-making in texts for granted. For example, their practitioners draw
conclusions from texts without making any substantial clarification of how conclusions are drawn
linguistically. This could be due to the difficulty of accounting for all the elements involved in the
intersubjective production of meaning, given all mental processes which are inaccessible to the analyst.
Discourse analysts in social sciences are expected to uncover tacit meaning-making processes.
Frameworks must therefore, clarify how meaning is constructed and how to study such meaning as a
reflection of an established cognitive background that includes psychologial, political, economic,
cultural, and social paradigms. The result has been many uncertainties and controversies over the

94
possible text explanation in the social sciences. Some social theorists have focused on the
constructionist approach which accounts for texts as constructors of realities. Others have opted for the
cognitive approach which draws on member resources and background knowledge to explain texts.
This study rejects this division between constructionist and cognitive approaches. Instead a dialectic
approach is used in order to account for the socio-cognitive dynamics of discourse production.
Understanding the making of meaning (semiosis) and not the meaning of texts is our subject of inquiry.
We suggest a Critical discourse analytic model that harnesses cognitive science and involves different
levels of text production, namely language (text analysis), socio-cognitive relations (discourse analysis)
and ideological contexts (social analysis).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Savitri Gadavanij
The National Institute of Development Administration
savitri@nida.ac.th

Communicating to the Minority?: A Critical Analysis of Health

Science Communication in Thailand
This paper investigates scientific communication, focusing at the topic of health science communication
in Thailand. As one of the developing countries, Thailand is trying to embark on the knowledge-based
society movement. This means propagation of knowledge of all sorts. Science, especially health
science is considered relatively more relevant to people‘s life because it contains tangible information.
This study analyses health science communication in popular magazines in order to see whether such
content is presented in a way that is attainable and digestible for Thai public, thereby serving its
purpose of fostering knowledge-based society.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this study follows Fairclough‘s tradition of analyzing text,
discursive practice and sociocultural practice. The analysis of text reveals four problematic textual
features that potentially obstruct people‘s understanding namely reiteration of known facts,
oversimplification, excessive complex details and excessive technical terminologies. These four
problematic textual features mirror perceived problem in popularizing science solicited from both
science communicators and readers: dull format, impractical information, poor organization of
information and too detailed, too technical information.
When look at these two sets of problem closely in relation to Thai context, it becomes clear that these
are but the tip of an iceberg. Science popularization is a close encounter of two different groups of
people: scientists and ordinary Thai. These two have stark difference in background knowledge, social
status and perception. Scientists‘ self-image is that of people who have high education, thus higher in
social status. They usually communicate in the way they see fit, without paying much attention to
reader‘s constraints and background knowledge. They communicate scientific content in details using
academic argumentation, typical of good academic writing. This format is proven problematic for
ordinary readers. However, when they try to be clear, they usually overdo it, resulting in reiteration of
commonly known facts and oversimplification. This paper therefore argues that, despite their small
numbers, scientists can be considered ‗majority‘. Ordinary Thai, though far outnumbers scientists, are
forced to acquire status of minority. Even though they expect to see science popularization in a more
popular form – straight-to- the-point and fun to read- they are not in the position to impose such format.
The result of such ideological clash has led to a failure in cultivating scientific awareness in Thai

95
people, jeopardizing knowledge-based society movement and potentially marginalizes ordinary people
more than ever before.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Gbenga Ibileye
ibigbs@yahoo.com

De-Citizenship and (De)personalisation in Constitutional

Language
The constitution occupies the most important of the tripartite positions of the legal system of any society
or group, the other two of which are the state and individual citizens and its goal is to demarcate the
extent of the rights, obligations and responsibilities of the stakeholders in the particular society. The
modal auxiliary verbs-‗may‘, ‗shall‘, ‗will‘, ‗can‘, ‗would‘ and ‗should‘ in addition to similar lexical items
help writers of the constitution to specify the particular actions to be taken by, for or against the
respective ‗participants‘ with which the constitution has concern in any particular instance or
circumstance. The whole essence of any constitution therefore seems to be the total protection of the
rights and life of members of society. However, using the Critical Discourse Analysis approach of
Fairclough in the analysis of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria reveals that the
modals rather than specify and guarantee the protection of the rights of the citizens makes them
anonymous. Citizens are obscured in the lexical design of the constitution and the document makes the
citizens the targets of systematic violence. In this paper therefore, I set out to interrogate the place of
the modal verbs in the conception of the constitution as well as show how the constitution makes the
citizens the end receivers of state violence.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Adisa Imamović, Sanja Berberović, Nihada Delibegović-Džanić and

Jasmina Husanović
Tuzla University
adisa.imamovic@untz.ba, sanja.b@bih.net.ba, nihadamirza@bih.net.ba, makjasmina@yahoo.co.uk

Shaping EU Discourse: The Role of Conceptual Metaphors in

the Discourse Related to the EU in Bosnian, Croatian and
Serbian
Conceptual metaphors are known to play an important role in political discourse. The paper sets out to
examine the conceptual metaphors underlying the EU discourse in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. The
three countries are striving to join the EU in the near future. (Croatia is a candidate for EU membership;
Bosnia and Serbia are soon expected to sign the Stabilisation and Association Agreement) Therefore,
the European Union is a ubiquitous topic in the media, and political speeches and debates. As this is
the case, the media and politicians in these countries use a variety of conceptual metaphors to
conceptualize the EU and the process of joining the EU in order to bring the idea of EU membership

96
closer to the citizens. The aim of the paper is to determine the most common conceptual metaphors
and their metaphorical linguistic expressions shaping the EU discourse in the three countries on their
road to Europe. Furthermore, the paper will also try to compare the conceptual metaphors shaping the
EU discourse in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with the conceptual metaphors shaping the EU
discourse in English.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Seth Katz
Bradley University
seth@bradley.edu

„I Paid for this Class, so I Deserve a Better Grade‟: The

Development of a Conceptual Blend
A student who was unsatisfied with his final grade in my class said to me, ―I paid for this class, so I
deserve a better grade.‖ This odd scenario is a variation on the scene in which a student says, ―I spent
so much time/I worked so hard, why didn‘t I get a better grade?‖ These students assume that they
purchase a good grade with their tuition dollars, time, and effort. This attitude about education and
grading arises from the history of grading, and can be explained in terms of the conceptual blend that
these students employ in their assumptions about the nature of education and grading.
Historically, teachers use grades to evaluate student performance, punish poor performance, and
encourage better performance. However, grade inflation and grade compression, coupled with the shift
away from corporal punishment and public shaming, have reduced the evaluative force of grades.
Students no longer expect to be beaten or shamed—or to even receive a ―C.‖
These changes in students‘ assumptions about grading can best be explained in terms of the cognitive
linguistic notion of conceptual blending. Students conceive of education in terms of ‗an exchange of
objects of value‘ schema, wherein the student pays the teacher—in money, time, and effort—for a good
(a body of knowledge) and a service (teaching). However, education traditionally employs a specialized
version of that schema, in which payment is exchanged both for objects of value (knowledge, teaching)
and an evaluation of the payer‘s status or performance (much as one pays a doctor to evaluate one‘s
health). Grade inflation and the shift away from punishing students for poor performance has led
students to develop a blended concept of education, combining elements from the ‗exchange of objects
of value‘ schema with elements from the schema of ‗exchanging an object of value for an evaluation of
the payer.‘ In the blended schema, the grade is no longer an evaluative measure of performance, but
rather is just one more object of value, a part of ‗what the student pays for‘ with tuition dollars, time, and
effort. This complex blended conceptual space also draws elements from such schemas as, ‗time and
effort are objects of value‘; ‗the value of a service may be set arbitrarily by the provider‘; and ‗a grade is
an object given arbitrarily by the teacher‘ (as opposed to an object earned by the student as an
objective measure of their work).

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Surinderpal Kaur
University of Malaya
surinder@um.edu.my

Race, Identity Politics and Marginalization: A Critical Analysis of

the Politics of Racial Oppression and Discrimination in Malaysia
This paper examines the marginalization and oppression of ethnic minority groups in a multi-racial
society in which racial differences are constructed and constituted by both the ruling elite and the ethnic
minority groups.
Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis (specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach [Wodak
2004]) alongside Subaltern studies (Spivak 1987) and Critical Race Theory, I hope to show firstly, that
in the context-specific situation of a multi-racial nation such as Malaysia, racial differences and
discrimination are institutionalized through official political and economic policies that have their roots in
colonial practices and have been institutionalized in post-independence governance. Just as
importantly, I also wish to demonstrate (with specific examples from the ethnic Indian minority group)
that the ‗subaltern‘ who is denied access to fair representation finds strategies for speaking out and
establishing a voice. One main strategy that I will be examining is the valorization of their own
marginalization.
In this paper I will make a case that both the dominant groups as well as the marginalized groups do
not account for the heterogeneity within the minority group of ethnic Indians in Malaysia, and that the
process of ‗othering‘ is a complex issue that does not only involve the oppression and discrimination of
ethnic minority groups by the ruling elite, but also involves a complex and problematic identity politics
(constituted by regulatory powers as well as ethnic minority groups themselves) which seems to
valorize marginalization while critiquing it. These strategies used by the ethnic minority groups to
counter the socio-political structures of prejudices and discrimination that have left them economically
and politically marginalized, do not just challenge discrimination, but also work inadvertently to
subjectify these minority groups as well as reify and reincribe their subordinate position in the multi-
racial society of Malaysia.
It is my belief that a critical analytical combination of CDA, subaltern studies and Critical Race Theory
will work towards helping to challenge and redefine the terms of the minority groups‘ protests, in the
process helping them to achieve a voice that does not reify their subordination.

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Rachel A Kiersey
Dublin Institute of Technology
rachelak@gmail.com

Reading the Rhetoric: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ireland‟s

2nd Report to the UNCRC (United Nations Committee on the
Rights of the Child)
The Irish government ratified the UNCRC in 1992; their 2 nd report was submitted in 2005. Irelands 2nd
report to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) presents the government
case that it is succeeding in protecting and promoting the rights of all children in Ireland. This paper
presents a critical discourse analysis of the report, which aims to explore its rhetorical construction and
discursive frameworks. This analysis aims to emphasize that despite the report representing the
government as doing a great deal for children rights; reading between the lines, analysing the
language, it becomes clear that much of this is rhetoric.
Drawing on the critical discourse analysis methods of Fairclough (2001) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough
(2000), the paper will examine the structure and organisation of the report in the context of the principal
generic features of policy reporting and communication. In strictly adhering to the language of reporting,
in tandem with the careful positioning of paragraphs, the report serves to circumvent the absences of
legislation and provisions which directly influence and impact on children‘s rights.
The report uses a promotional genre listing legislative change and strategy plans intended to have an
impact on children‘s rights. The government‘s case draws heavily on a previous policy document,
National Children‘s Strategy (2000), which is guided by the principles of the UNCRC; but is not itself a
‗rights-based‘ strategy. The report celebrates the strategy which ―seeks to provide a clear direction to all
those concerned with advancing the status and quality of life of children‖ (Ireland, 2005). Significantly, it
is not legislation thus is likely to have only a restricted amount of impact. Therefore, a recurring theme
in the report is that of legislation which ―has not yet commenced‖, ―not yet been commenced‖ or will be
commenced ―when resources become available‖ in relation to a myriad of crucial areas with real
urgency such as mental health, children in care, children with disabilities, and refugee and asylum
seeking unaccompanied minors.
This paper shows that the shrewd use of language, contradictions and confusing positioning of text in
Ireland‘s 2nd report to the UNCRC, presents a politicised and misleading case particularly when viewed
against its conspicuous exclusions.

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E. Dimitris Kitis
King‘s College London
dimitri.kitis@kcl.ac.uk

Street Slogans: An Attempt at Interpreting a Marginalized

Discourse and Culture
The specific interest of the presentation is the discourse produced by a loose association of anti-
establishment groups or youths in Greece, often referred to as ‗hoodies‘, or simply ‗anarchists‘ by the
media. As this ghost group eludes any type of identification, and their identity remains undisclosed,
‗unstudied‘ and totally neglected in scholarly studies to date, the focus of this study will be on how their
identity is constructed and maintained through their graffiti discourse. The discourse in question is a
type of graffiti, which will be termed street slogans so as to avoid confusion with other subcategories of
graffiti. Ferrell (1993) defines all kinds of ‗wall writing‘ as forms of resistance towards ‗legal, political, and
religious authority‘. These street slogans aim at galvanizing a type of resistance to capitalism, nationalism
and globalization with a host of anti-materialist/state/flag/police/elite/immigrant messages. In this
presentation, we will examine how this is effected by a close examination of their produced discourse.
Firstly, their discourse will be examined as enacting speech acts in an attempt at an initial conte xtualization,
since it presents itself as phenomenally (but phenomenologically) disembodied. Even though SAT
methodology provides a taxonomic way of cutting through the jungle of this discourse, concomitant
problems are rife and limiting a rich interpretation, with implications for the methodology. Turning to a more
critically discourse-oriented approach, we subsequently, examine how conventional language is subverted
in this discourse to reflect their authors‘ pronounced effort to subvert society‘s conventional values, received
perceptions and conceptions, and norms. Our methodology employs a CDA approach both in understanding
discourses but also in appreciating modes of subverting received wisdom and conventional knowledge.
Both cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives will be utilized in unraveling street slogan authors‘ identity
and their culture.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Inge N. Korber-O‟Connor
University of Louisiana
ink6870@louisiana.edu

Discourse in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the media all over the United States started referring to people
who had left their homes to get out of harm‘s way as ‗refugees.‘ Some found the use of this label
justified and preferable over the term ‗evacuee‘, while others, like Reverend Jesse Jackson, took a
stand against this term. An Associated Press article on MSNBC.com cites him as stating that ―[i]t is
racist to call American citizens refugees‖ (MSNBC) and President Bush as stating that ―[t]he people
we're talking about are not refugees … They are Americans, and they need the help and love and
compassion of our fellow citizens‖ (MSNBC). Soon a heated debate over the use of this term erupted,
and the main question became who, if anybody, was to say what the media should call us and what we
should call ourselves? This paper, borne out of all the confusion and debate sparked by the use of this

100
seemingly ideologically-loaded term, seeks to get to the core of the meaning of ‗refugee‘ and answer a
question that is of personal importance to me: Were we refugees?
I will begin by using binary feature analysis on the definitions given in prominent dictionaries and legal
documents, including the definition given by the UN Refugee Convention. I will pay special attention to
the seeming controversy surrounding the crossing an international frontier as a necessary feature,
employing corpus analysis of the discourse environment(s) of the term ‗refugee‘ in contrast to the terms
‗displaced person‘ and ‗evacuee‘ in order to examine in detail the necessity of such a feature. I will
further employ frame analysis to show that the concept of a refugee and the concept of being American
are perceived to be mutually exclusive, before attempting a discourse-based explanation of the social
and economic reasons for the United States government‘s opposition to the label as employed in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Kuhn
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
jkuhn@wu-wien.ac.at

Advertising to Canada‟s Official Language Groups:

Standardization or Adaptation? A Critical Discourse Analysis
As linguists of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration we apply discourse
analysis to external enterprise communication, in particular, print advertising. An interesting field in this
context is the ―publicité québécoise‖ (Francophone advertising in Québec), since it targets a part of the
Canadian population that disposes of its own cultural values strongly differing from those of the
(numerically) dominant Anglophone population. According to Billig (1995) national identities are
constantly reproduced through beliefs, assumptions, representations and social practices. Advertising
plays an important role in this process; it reflects and perpetuates national identities. In general,
referring to advertising in Canada, marketers have to decide, whether to adapt their advertising
according to the language group targeted or to use a standardized approach. A qualitative analysis of
advertisements drawn from a Canadian magazine, which is published in English (Chatelaine) and
French (Châtelaine), was conducted. The analysis of the verbal representations was based on
Halliday‟s (2004) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Fairlough‟s (2003) approach of analyzing
discourse. Moreover, for the analysis of the visual representations the Grammar of Visual Design Model
by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) was used as a theoretical
construct. Their model is based on social semiotics and allows for making critical judgements on
discourse. We found that whereas verbal representations in English advertisements stress what is
done, in French advertisements they focus on the results. Furthermore, in view of the communicative
strategy, English advertisements highlight the price-performance ratio, while French advertisements
refer to the pleasure the recipient may derive from the product. We illustrated that there seems to be a
need to adapt advertising to the targeted language groups in Canada. In addition, we showed that it is
worth investigating, in a systematic way, which different strategies are employed. This can help
advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their ads.

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Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
Opole University
molekk@uni.opole.pl

Towards Critical Media Literacy (with CDA)

To state that contemporary information-based societies are pervaded by mass media is almost a
truism, although many particulars of the relation between mass media and society still await
exploration, as the growth of research into media effects seems to indicate. For discourse analysts,
media constitute an ‗order of discourse‘ that bridges the public and private domain of communication
and that entails a set of institutionalized, though constantly evolving and diversifying, discursive
practices aimed at mass audiences. With the increasing significance of media in many spheres of life, a
process sometimes referred to as medialization, the question of media literacy appears to require more
scrutiny.
Literacy is commonly understood as a set of skills that enable people to process and create texts (in the
broad sense of the word). It can be thus assumed that there are also specific skills necessary to
appropriately construe mass-mediated texts, in which discourse elements are frequently complemented
by visual and auditory effects. Skillful ‗decoding‘ of such media messages, sometimes identified as
functional literacy, is obligatory to be able to consume them. However, yet another sort of skills is
needed to deconstruct or challenge dominant representations in the media, especially when they
legitimize social inequalities, cultural oppression or abuse of power. This could be termed critical media
literacy. Arguably, a prerequisite for this type of literacy is gaining awareness that media do not reflect
reality, but rather construct it to suit their audiences and their own interests, as mainstream mass-media
conglomerates are often powerful players on the public scene.
The purpose of this presentation will be to problematize the notion of media literacy by suggesting
which critical skills are needed to become media literate. In addition, it will be argued that critical
discourse analysis is a productive theoretical and methodological platform which could underpin critical
media literacy research, as both share the ideal of fostering empowerment through exposing insidious
ideologies, bias or manipulation. The discussion will be complemented with exemplary analyses of how
popular media tend to report on scientific discoveries and how to critically deconstruct such messages.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Raymond Oenbring
University of Washington
oenbrr@u.washington.edu

The Trials of the Discourse of Human Rights

In this paper I analyze the transcripts of the prosecutions' opening statements in the Nuremberg and
Milosevic trials, tracing changes in the rhetorical strategies used by each prosecution team in order to
craft cultural legitimacy for their respective prosecutorial projects. Using very simple discourse analysis
tools, I analyze the differing strategies used by the two prosecution teams in order to culturally navigate
the broader discourses of human rights and crimes against humanity that govern their respective times.

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I argue that we can look to these legitimation strategies in order to explicate changes that have
occurred in the discourse of human rights over the past half-century.
In the paper I suggest that the prosecution teams in both the Nuremberg trials and international criminal
courts of today recognize the legal precariousness of what they undertake. The prosecutors of the
Nuremberg trial, operating entirely without legal precedent, rely, however, on an entirely different set of
discursive assumptions regarding the legitimacy of the court from international criminal courts operating
today (for which I will use the Milosevic trial as my example). The Nuremberg prosecution constructs
legitimacy through what I shall call a strong rhetorical program, engaging in consciously creative
symbolic formulations and referencing external value systems. Conversely, the prosecution in the
Milosevic trial engages in what I shall call a weak rhetorical program: hiding the agency of the
individuals that brought the trial into existence; using bland, but still value-laden procedural
constructions to describe the court and the atrocities it tries; and accepting the existence of the laws
under which the accused is tried as natural. The language of human rights, I shall argue, has, over the
last half century, become discursivized and disciplinized; the prosecution no longer seeks to explain
their prosecution of the accused in terms of reference to external logics but only in terms of internal
assumptions and systems of precedent.
__________________________________________________________________________________

C. Sánchez
Roosevelt Academy
c.sanchez@roac.nl

The Discourse Representation of the Zapatistas: Universalism

and Regionalism in Discourse
On January 1st 1994, in the Lacandona jungle in the south of Mexico, a deep-rooted historical conflict
with an antiglobalist profile emerged between the indigenous people of Chiapas and the Mexican
government. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) lead by 4 Indian chiefs and
Comandante Marcos declared war on the Mexican state and NAFTA (TLC) . They demanded
elementary rights, land, dignity and freedom. Since then the movement has gone beyond local
boundaries, getting international recognition not only for its challenging way of practising local
democracy but also for its pluralist speeches addressed to local and external(outside Mexico) social
actors.
In this discussion I analyse the argumentative strategies of the Zapatistas' discourse that can be
bounded to conceptualisations of universalism and regionalism. I discuss these strategies under the
framework of political discourse analysis and social theory.

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Sarah Scheepers
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
sarah.scheepers@soc.kuleuven.be

Discourses of Equality and Diversity in the Public Sector

Discourses of diversity have replaced those of equal opportunity or social justice in many Western
democracies. While the notion of diversity is seemingly empowering through its recognition of cultural,
gender, religious and racial difference within nation states, the emergence of this discourse during the
1990‘s has been in the context of neo-liberal managerialist discourses that assume social action is fully
explicable through theories of maximizing self interest (Blackmore 2006). In my (ongoing) PhD-
research, I investigate the assumption that despite their seemingly progressive stance, the discourse(s)
of diversity during the 1990‘s and 2000‘s have been mobilized and operationalized within market and
managerialist (discursive and social) frames that tend to limit the possibilities of delivering its promise of
more inclusiveness and equity.
An analysis of Action Plans for diversity in the Belgian public sector shows that, although the discourse
has shifted from equality/equal opportunities to diversity, the assumptions and presuppositions behind
the actual HR-policy are still directed towards uniformity and a classical view on merit.
As a contrast, the discourse in the DG Administration of the European Commission, has apparantly not
shifted towards diversity. My interviews with persons who work in the Unit that is responsible for equal
opportunities and non-discrimination in the E.C.‘s personnel administration show that this has largely to
do with the fact that the key policy makers are Francophones who do not favour this concept, and
prefer to ―keep on talking” (sic) about equality and non-discrimination.
So, in different (but still comparable) contexts (namely the Belgian federal public service for Personnel
and Organization, and the EC DG Administration), different discourses on diversity and equality/equal
opportunities exist. It is interesting to see what the different discourses are, (that is the research phase I
am now) and which are the defining (contextual and other) factors that influence the hegemony of some
discourses of equality and diversity. In my research, I link discourse to ideology, and I try to recover
markers and traces of ideology (namely what I think is the ideology of diversity) through the use of
pragmatics. Another aim of my research is to show that critical discourse analysis is useful for social
sciences research, and also public administration research, which is up till now rather positivist. The
paper will contain my theoretical framework, as well as the first results of the analysis of my corpus
material.

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Bernadetta Siara
University of Westminster
siarab@wmin.ac.uk

Emergence of Social Movement "Poland is a Woman": Analysis

of Contemporary Discourses on Gender in Poland
This paper will be an analysis of contemporary discourses on gender in Poland. This paper will focus on a
social movement ―Poland is a woman‖ that emerged in Poland in late 2006. Its main goal is to bring the
issue of women‘s rights to the fore of the state politics. This movement‘s priorities, including issues
relating to equal pay, domestic violence, contraception and abortion, generally are not new, but
interestingly this movement emerged in a specific political context, when the most recent right-wing
government has been turning towards traditional (patriarchal) view on women and their place within the
society.
Various authors claim that the situation of women in Poland has worsened during the last two decades
and discrimination against women has deepened (Gontarczyk 1995; Walczewska 2005, Szczuka 2004,
Graff 2001). However, the most recent government has suggested introducing some extreme policies
that could make the situation of women more difficult i.e. prohibiting any contraception or making
abortion laws even stricter or preventing access for women to the job market and making them to stay
at home and look after families
This movement has a very general aim – empowerment of women – which could generally lead to
changing a culture and particularly to enforcing gender equality. Interestingly, this movement neither
sees itself as led by a specific political approach, nor as a feminist movement; it‘s ―everyone‘s‖.
However, it looks upon the European Union Gender Equality Framework and it sees a modern
democratic state as an elastic mechanism that should be adjusting to societal changes, including
gender-related ones.
This paper will be a discursive analysis of the gender discourses surrounding emergence of this
movement and its early days. The analysis will look at both the dominant, government gender
discourse and the gender discourse produced and used by the movement‘s leaders. It will aim at
―deciphering ideologies‖ on which these discourses are based (Wodak 2001).
The analysis will also look at gender assumptions made in these discourses. It will concentrate
amongst the others on the perception of women‘s position in a society, the gender-related decision-
making power, parenting issues, and sex-related views (Litosseliti 2006).

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Maija Stenvall
University of Helsinki
maija.stenvall@helsinki.fi

On Construction of Violence in News Agencies Iraq Reports:

Putting into Context
The paper deals with the representation of violence in Iraq reports of two global news agencies, AP and
Reuters. It aims at showing, in particular, how conventions of news writing affect the ideals advocated
by the two news agencies: those of objectivity and factuality.
The overall picture of the ongoing violence in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 has been
extremely complex. The perpetrators of various attacks come from an abundance of groups. In addition
to the three sects (Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds), there are rival factions within the sects; there
is a possible connection to al-Qaida; criminal gangs carry out kidnappings and murders, etc. Iraqi and
U.S. troops chasing ―insurgents‖ often kill Iraqi civilians, too. President George W. Bush sees Iraq as
the ―central front on the war on terror‖ (March 20, 2006).
Reporting on the Iraq violence in a consistent way is thus a challenging task. Furthermore, the very
conventions of news discourse – the ‗objective‘ writing style (cf. White 1998) and the traditional
structure of news stories (see van Dijk 1988; Bell 1991) – contribute to contradictions. On the one hand,
when news agency journalists report e.g. on a bomb attack, they usually refer to perpetrators by
generic terms (gunmen, insurgents, suicide bombers/attackers, etc.); or give the Actor role (cf. Halliday
1994) to inanimate objects or nominalizations (bomb(s), bombing(s), bomb attacks, etc.). They are also
cautious about categorizing the attack or blaming any specific group. Sometimes they present their
deductions indirectly; saying, for example, that the attacks ―bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq
militants‖ (AP Oct. 15, 2007). On the other hand, sections putting the attacks into context – common in
longer dispatches – show rather explicitly how journalists have interpreted the overall situation. Often
journalists, for instance, unify the otherwise vaguely defined acts of violence under a single label. In my
data, the most popular label of this kind is sectarian violence. The following example comes from
Reuters (Febr. 18, 2007):
―… the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra a year ago unleashed a wave of sectarian violence that
has killed tens of thousands of people‖ (my italics).
My data have been collected from AP and Reuters wire reports in February and October, 2007. A third
batch will be gathered in February 2008, as I want to look at the violence as an ongoing narrative, too;
to discover possible ―changes of emphasis‖ (cf. Toolan 1988:237).

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Untung Yuwono
University of Indonesia
untungy@yahoo.com

When Indonesian Women Oppose Polygamy Loudly

Since long time ago polygamy has entered the public discourse in Indonesia. Yet, the rise and fall of
the discourse tides follow the appearance of the practices, which are especially done by the male
prominent figures. During the past, polygamy as a public discourse had much more often debated by
relating it to religious discourse. The tight unity among ulamas (muslim religious leader) and their
followers who were pro-polygamy produced the pro-poligamy discourse as the dominant discourse. As
the result, antipoligamy discourse has never reached the purpose: to demand the ban of poligamy in
Indonesia. In accordance with more freedom in every aspect of Indonesian life, nowadays people are
able to oppose the polygamy more loudly. Following the greater concern about women issues,
Indonesian women, including muslimahs, now are trying to oppose the practice by including wider
aspects other than religious matters in their antipoligamy discourse whenever they speak against
polygamy in public spheres.
This paper shows how Indonesian women present their opposing ideas on polygamy in sisterhood
actions nowadays and how their opinions are affected by modern values or ideology when they move
against polygamy. The discursive strategies are also discussed following van Dijk‘s ideas on discourse
and ideology.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Jan Zienkowski
University of Antwerp
jan.zienkowski@ua.ac.be

Analyzing political engagement: The case of evolving political

identities among the Moroccan population of Antwerp, Belgium
(1964-present) from a linguistic pragmatic and poststructuralist
perspective
This poster investigates the possibilities of a rapprochement between (1) linguistic pragmatics
conceived as the study of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of their usage properties and
processes and (2) poststructuralist perspectives on discourse conceived as a relational totality of
signifying sequences that constitute a more or less coherent framework for what can be said and done.
Both traditions are infused with an awareness of the hybrid relationship between thought,
representation and reality. Consequently, they find themselves concerned with pragmatic aspects of
meaning generation. The hypothesis that both perspectives could be articulated into a coherent
framework suited for empirical analysis, will be tested by analysis of (a) co-constructed narratives on
identity politics within migrant new social movements and of (b) publicly accessible data of various
genres produced by representatives and sympathizers of these organisations from 1964 onwards.
Empirical ideology research on societal debates demands the inclusion of a variety of discursive genres

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and levels of analysis. Such levels include patterns of word choice, implication, and presupposition-
carrying constructions, interaction profiles and global meaning constructs. Exactly what linguistic tools
are most appropriate for an analysis of ideological patterns of political debates within Moroccan
communities of Antwerp, Belgium, is the principle question informing this poster presentation. The
relevance of this project overflows the porous domains of linguistics and political philosophy. The
poststructuralist concern with open, contingent and productive ideologies is also relevant within other
disciplines informing this project, ranging from oral and poststructuralist history over anthropology and
sociology to political philosophy.

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