Constructing legitimacy in crisis: a critical discourse analysis of Modi’s demonetization speech

Literatura recente tem revelado que potencialidades tecnológicas contemporâneas vêm ampliando o papel semiótico da linguagem não-verbal em diferentes gêneros discursivos (KRESS; van LEEUWEN, 2001; UNSWoRth, 2001), alertando para a importância da pesquisa e do ensino sobre o tema para a qualificação de nossa participação (como produtores e/ou leitores) nesses gêneros. Em outras palavras, efatiza-se que o empoderamento semiótico depende também da compreensão das semioses não-verbais que constituem o registro dos gêneros discursivos e que o foco dos estudos de gêneros deve ser ampliado para considerar a função das semioses não-verbais nos mesmos (van LEEUWEN, 2004; hENdGES, 2008). dentro dessa perpectiva, neste trabalho exploramos o conceito de “modalidade retórica” (MEURER, 2002) como uma categoria valiosa em análise do discurso Multimodal, para revelar a função retórica da linguagem não-verbal em diferentes gêneros. Seguindo a caracterização de Meurer (2002), estendemos à descrição de modalidades retóricas para a leitura de imagens no gênero anúncio publicitário. aperspectiva enfatizada neste estudo traz implicações para a pedagogia do multiletramento (CoPE; KaLaNtZIS, 2000).

پژوهش حاضر با هدف بررسی روایت‌های زنان از تجربة شخصیِ خود نسبت به خشونت‌های خانگیِ اعمال‌شده بر آن‌ها و آشکار ساختن ایدئولوژی تولیدکنندگان روایت‌ها نسبت به خود و افراد خشونت‌گر انجام شده‌است. به این منظور، پنجاه روایتی که مستقیماً به وسیلة زنان خشونت‌دیده نقل شده بود، به صورت تصادفی انتخاب شده و با استفاده از مدل کنشگران اجتماعی ون لیُوِن (Van Leeuwen, T. (2008) بررسی شده‌اند. یافته‌ها نشان می‌دهد که در روایت‌های مورد بررسی، کنشگران به صورت برجسته نشان داده شده‌اند و برای بازنمایی افراد خشونت‌گر، در مقایسه با افراد خشونت‌دیده، به میزان بیشتری از مؤلّفه‌های گفتمان‌مدار جامعه‌شناختی- معنایی استفاده شده‌است. تفاوت کاربرد برخی از مؤلّفه‌ها برای بازنمایی افراد خشونت‌گر و افراد خشونت‌دیده چشمگیر است. این تفاوت می‌تواند نشان‌دهنده آن باشد که زنان خشونت‌دیده جایگاه مناسبی برای خود در نظر نمی‌گیرند؛ در متحمّل‌ شدنِ خشونت، افزون بر اینکه افراد خشونت‌گر را عامل اصلی می‌دانند، احتمالاً خود را هم تا اندازه‌ای گناه‌کار می‌دانند؛ اعضای خانوادة خود را، حتی در مواردی که بی‌گمان خشونت‌گر هستند، به طور منفی ارزش‌گذاری نمی‌کنند؛ و نگاه بالا به پایینی که جامعه نسبت به زنان دارد، در گفتار و در نتیجه در ایدئولوژی خود زنان هم نمایان است.

This paper explores how two major Romanian national student organisations (the National Council of Students – CNE, representing high school students, and the National Alliance of Student Organisations in Romania – ANOSR, representing university students) construct legitimacy as civic actors through Facebook activism during times of crisis. Focusing on the period 2019–2022, the study examines how these organisations navigated moments of political and social disruption, including the COVID–19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and national education reforms. Using the legitimation framework proposed by Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) and Vaara et al. (2006), along with the concept of destructive legitimation (Vestergaard & Uldam, 2022), the paper analyses Facebook posts through discourse analysis. Results indicate that both organisations employ strategies such as normalisation, authorisation, rationalisation, moral evaluation, and narrativisation to justify their activism, while also engaging in delegitimation of political opponents. The study contributes to understanding how student movements in post-socialist democracies use digital discourse to assert credibility and mobilise support.

Internet memes, as artifacts of digital culture, quickly spread political ideas and critiques, transcending traditional media. Despite their prevalence, understanding how memes use semiotic elements and (de)legitimization strategies to shape political narratives on social media is limited. This research investigates how semiotic representations and (de)legitimization processes materialize in political discourse through social media memes. Using Van Leeuwen's (2005, 2007) framework of social semiotics and (de)legitimization strategies, we analyzed the visual and textual elements of 47 memes collected from January to July 2024; we selected 11 memes that represent Van Leeuwen's (de)legitimization strategies. The study revealed that memes convey complex political messages using semiotic resources, including color, gesture, and text. Intertextuality, humor, irony, rationalization, and moral evaluation are commonly used to criticize or support political figures and ideologies. This highlights the dynamic role of social media in political communication, where memes rapidly influence public perception. The findings emphasize the importance of understanding semiotic and rhetorical strategies in political communication analysis. The study contributes to the discourse of digital political communication by showing how memes, as cultural artifacts, shape political narratives and legitimacy. The research has significant implications for political strategists, communicators, and academics interested in the intersection of media, politics, and culture.

This article explores the struggle for legitimation associated with the attempt to define the risk of Bt cotton, a genetically modified crop, in Andhra Pradesh, India. Beck asserts that, given the uncertainty associated with risk society, efforts to define risk are creating the need for a new political culture. This article argues that this political culture emerges from attempts to legitimate power within risk definition. This is examined using critical discourse analysis on interview excerpts with key figures in the Bt cotton debate. Legitimation is explored using the categories of legitimation developed by Van Leeuwen. These are (a) authorisation; (b) moral evaluation; (c) rationalisation; and (d) mythopoesis. The analysis highlights that the political culture which emerges in response to risk society is in a state of constant flux and contingent upon the ongoing struggle for legitimation with regard to the definition of risk.

Nigeria has stringent legislation against same-sex identified people and their supporters. Scholarly attention on same-sex relationships in the Nigerian context has mainly been on the legalistic and sociological perspectives, with little attention paid to how language serves as a means of illegitimising same-sex sexualities in the Nigerian media. This study, therefore, examines illegitimation strategies in the representation of same-sex sexualities in news reports of selected Nigerian newspapers. van Leeuwen’s theory of legitimation and Critical Discourse Analysis were adopted as the framework, for their contextual approaches to language. A total of 80 news reports on same-sex sexualities from four purposively selected Nigerian newspapers ( Vanguard, The Punch, Nigerian Tribune and The Sun) were randomly sampled. The newspapers were selected based on their preponderant coverage of reports on LGBT people between 2013 and 2015. Journalists used experts’ authority, role-model/personal authority, authority of tradition, conformity, moral evaluation and analogy to legitimise discrimination against non-heterosexuals in news reports. This paper argues that the media are instrumental in the continuous violence against non-heterosexuals in Nigeria.

This study aimed at exploring legitimation strategies used by two members of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (or Partai Solidaritas Indonesia, abbreviated as PSI) in justifying their party leader’s controversial statement on the abandonment of Sharia Law. To do so, it employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) with Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies (2007, 2008) as its analytical tool. The data were obtained from two separate interviews with PSI members aired on two different Indonesian TV channels. The interviews were transcribed and translated. From this process, a 1.170-word corpus, from which the data were derived, was generated. The findings showed that moral evaluation is the most dominant legitimation strategy, followed by rationalization and authorization. In moral evaluation, abstraction occurs most often, followed by evaluation and analogy. In rationalization, theoretical rationalization is used more often than instrumental rationalization. Finally, in authorization, PSI utilized impersonal authority to reject the Sharia Law by referring to academic studies and legal documents which assess the law as being negative. Meanwhile, expert authority was used to build legitimation by reference to experts who support the negative effects of the law. This study implies the power of language to legitimize a controversial activity by using different linguistics strategies.

The purpose of the proposed paper – which places itself within the field of Postcolonial Critical Discourse Studies (see Esposito, E. (2021).Politics, ethnicity and the postcolonial nation – a critical analysis of political discourse in the Caribbean. John Benjamins Publishing Company) – is to analyse the multi-semiotic practices contributing to the characterisation of the protagonist of Trinidadian short-film “Doubles with Slight Pepper” as a cinematic portrayal of the hybrid Indo-Trinidadian identity. By way of a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996).Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Routledge, London, Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001).Multimodal discourse. The modes and media of contemporary communications discourse. Hodder Educations, London, Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006).Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd ed. London: Routledge; O’Halloran, K.L. (2004).Multimodal discourse analysis. Continuum, London), the study aims to cast light on the strategies exploited by the filmmaker (1) to depict the protagonist (Dhani) as an in-betweener whose ambitions are inhibited by his social status stemming from generations of subjugation and misuse by colonialists; and (2) to promote Indo-Trinidadian cultural specificities. Following an introduction to the key concept of individual and collective identity with a focus on Trinidad and Tobago, and an outline of diasporic cinema as applied to the Indo-Trinidadian community, the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is carried out on the verbal, non-verbal, and visual sub-corpora gathered up in sequences according to the main three identitarian traits exhibited in the short-film: ‘religion/folklore’, ‘food’, and ‘lineage’.

While most of the studies have focused on how female PhDs are stereotypically depicted as a sexless third gender and an ultimate leftover in Chinese mainstream media representation, little attention has been paid to how such negative stereotypic representation and its underlying patriarchy are resisted. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2005, 2014) and legitimization strategies (van Leeuwen, 2007, 2017), this study sets out to investigate how the discursive legitimizing strategies for female PhDs play out on Chinese social media by employing a corpus-assisted approach. The data for the present study comprise 2,124 posts retrieved from China’s most popular community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. It is revealed that Zhihu users commonly employ (1) personal authority, specifically that of female PhDs, to establish legitimacy; (2) moral evaluation, involving negation, affirmation and re-evaluation to legitimize the presence of female PhDs and their marital practices; (3) rationalization, including definition, explanation, means-orientation and goal-orientation to achieve the social empowerment of female PhDs. Also, this study probes into the ideologies implicated by the use of these discursive practices in relation to the wider sociocultural contexts. The implications may hopefully shed light on the optimal ways for female PhDs’ advocacy in contemporary China.

This study applies T. van Leeuwen’s theoretical framework of discursive legitimation to analyze strategies employed by American media in covering China’s demographic issues from 2021 to 2024. Through critical discourse analysis of content from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, the research examines how strategies of authority, moral evaluation, rationalization, normalization, and narrativization are utilized in constructing China’s image. Findings reveal that American media predominantly delegitimize China’s demographic issues while legitimizing Western perspectives, applying double standards when evaluating similar actions by the US and China. The study demonstrates that demographic media discourse functions not merely as an information tool but as a powerful mechanism for shaping a nation’s international image through legitimizing the “self” and delegitimizing the “other.”

This book is divided into two parts, "Argumentation in Critical Discourse Analysis" and "Questions and Doubts about Visual Argumantation", each part containing two chapters. In the first chapter, "Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis", I am concerned with how topoi are used (and misused) in the Discourse-Historical Approach. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), pioneered by Ruth Wodak (see Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, Liebhart 1999; Wodak, van Dijk 2000; Wodak, Chilton 2005; Wodak, Meyer 2006; Wodak 2009), is one of the major branches of critical discourse analysis (CDA). In its own (programmatic) view, it embraces at least three interconnected aspects (Wodak 2006: 65): 1. 'Text or discourse immanent critique' aims at discovering internal or discourse-internal structures. 2. The 'socio-diagnostic critique' is concerned with the demystifying exposure of the possibly persuasive or 'manipulative' character of discursive practices. 3. Prognostic critique contributes to the transformation and improvement of communication. CDA, in Wodak's view, is not concerned with evaluating what is 'right' or 'wrong'. CDA ... should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent.1 It should also justify theoretically why certain interpretations of discursive events seem more valid than others. One of the methodical ways for critical discourse analysts to minimize the risk of being biased is to follow the principle of triangulation. Thus, one of the most salient distinguishing features of the DHA is its endeavour to work with different approaches, multi-methodically and on the basis of a variety of empirical data as well as background information. (Wodak ibid.) One of the approaches DHA is using in its principle of triangulation is argumentation theory, more specifically the theory of topoi. In the first chapter, I am concerned with the following questions: how and in what way are topoi and, consequentially, argumentation theory, used in DHA as one of the most influential schools of CDA? Other approaches (e.g., Fairclough (1995, 2000, 2003) or van Leeuwen (2004, 2008; van Leeuwen, Kress 2006)) do not use topoi at all. Does such a use actually minimize the risk of being biased, and, consequentially, does such a use of topoi in fact implement the principle of triangulation? Judging from the works we analysed in the first chapter, there are no rules or criteria how to use topoi or how to detect topoi in the discourse/text; the only methodological precept seems to be, »anything goes«! If so, why does CDA need triangulation? And what happened to the principle stipulating that CDA »should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent? « We have seen identical and similar bundles of topoi for different purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for identical and similar purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for different occasion; and we have seen pretty exotic bundles of topoi for pretty particular and singular purposes. Which leads us to a key question: can anything be or become a topos within DHA? And, consequentially, what actually, i.e., historically, is a topos? If a topos is supposed to connect an argument with a conclusion, as all the relevant DHA publications claim, one would expect that at least a minimal reconstruction would follow, namely, what is the argument in the quoted fragment? What is the conclusion in the quoted fragment? How is the detected topos connecting the two, and what is the argumentative analysis of the quoted fragment? Unfortunately, all these elements are missing; the definition and the quoted fragment are all that there is of the supposed argumentative analysis. And this is the basic pattern of functioning for most of the DHA works. At the beginning, there would be a list of topoi and a short description foreach of them: first, a conditional paraphrase of a particular topos would be given, followed by a short discourse fragment (usually from the media) illustrating this conditional paraphrase (in Discourse and Discrimination, pp. 75-80), but without any explicit reconstruction of possible arguments, conclusions, or topoi connecting the two in the chosen fragment. After this short "theoretical" introduction, different topoi would just be referred to by names throughout the book, as if everything has already been explained in these few introductory pages. It is quite surprising that none of the quoted DHA works even mention the origins of topoi, their extensive treatment in many works and the main authors of these works, namely Aristotle and Cicero. Even the definition, borrowed from Kienpointner (mostly on a copy-paste basis), does not stem from their work either: it is a hybrid product, with strong input from Stephen Toulmin's work The Uses of Argument, published in 1958. All this is even more surprising because today it is almost a commonplace that for Aristotle a topos is a place to look for arguments (which is true), a heading or department where a number of rhetoric arguments can be easily found (which is true as well), and that those arguments are ready for use – which is a rather big misunderstanding. According to Aristotle, topoi are supposed to be of two kinds: general or common topoi, appropriate for use everywhere and anywhere, regardless of situation, and specific topoi, in their applicability limited mostly to the three genres of oratory (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic). With the Romans, topoi became loci, and Cicero literally defines them as “the home of all proofs” (De or. 2.166.2), “pigeonholes in which arguments are stored” (Part. Or. 5.7-10), or simply “storehouses of arguments” (Part. Or. 109.5-6). Also, their number was reduced from 300 in Topics or 29 in Rhetoric to up to 19 (depending on how we count them). Although Cicero's list correlates pretty much, though not completely, with Aristotle's list from the Rhetoric B 23, there is a difference in use: Cicero's list is considered to be a list of concepts that may trigger an associative process rather than a collection of implicit rules and precepts reducible to rules, as the topoi in Aristotle's Topics are. In other words, Cicero's loci mostly function as subject matter indicators and loci communes. Which brings us a bit closer to how topoi might be used in DHA. In the works analysed in the first chapter, the authors never construct or reconstruct arguments from the discourse fragments they analyse – despite the fact that they are repeatedly defining topoi as warrants connecting arguments with conclusions; they just hint at them with short glosses. And since there is no reconstruction of arguments from concrete discourse fragments under analysis, hinting at certain topoi, referring to them or simply just mentioning them, can only serve the purpose of »putting the audience in a favourable frame of mind. « »Favourable frame of mind« in our case – the use of topoi in DHA – would mean directing a reader's attention to a »commonly known or discussed« topic, without explicitly phrasing or reconstructing possible arguments and conclusions. Thus, the reader can never really know what exactly the author had in mind and what exactly he/she wanted to say (in terms of (possible) arguments and (possible) conclusions). In Traité de l'argumentation – La nouvelle rhétorique, published in 1958 by Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, topoi are characterised by their extreme generality, which makes them usable in every situation. It is the degeneration of rhetoric and the lack of interest for the study of places that has led to these unexpected consequences where »oratory developments«, as Perelman ironically calls them, against fortune, sensuality, laziness, etc., which school exercises were repeating ad nauseam, became qualified as commonplaces (loci, topoi), despite their extremely particular character. By commonplace- es, Perelman claims, we more and more understand what Giambattista Vico called »oratory places«, in order to distinguish them from the places treated in Aristotle's Topics. Nowadays, commonplaces are characterised by banality which does not exclude extreme specificity and particularity. These places are nothing more than Aristotelian commonplaces applied to particular subjects, concludes Perelman. And this is exactly what seems to be happening to the DHA approach to topoi as well. Even more, the works quoted in the first part of the articlegive the impression that DHA is not using the Aristotelian or Ciceronian topoi, but the so-called »literary topoi«, conceptualized by Ernst Robert Curtius in his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1990: 62- 105, English translation). What is a literary topos? In a nutshell, oral histories passed down from pre-historic societies contain literary aspects, characters, or settings which appear again and again in stories from ancient civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories. These recurrent and repetitive motifs or leitmotifs would be then labelled literary topoi. The same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, probably the most detailed study of how topoi work. Actually, he does not use the terms topos or topoi, but the somewhat judicial term “warrant”. The reason for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different “fields of argument”, and not all fields of argument, according to him, use topoi as their argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to Toulmin (1958/1995: 94-107), if we have an utterance of the form, “If D then C” – where D stands for data or evidence, and C for claim or conclusion – such a warrant would act as a bridge and authorize the step from D to C. But warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces qualifiers Q, indicating the strength conferr

Despite various attempts at achieving gender equality in sport, the media is still dominated by stereotypical representations of sportswomen. The purpose of the present research was to describe gender subjectivity and gender stereotyping in the visual portrayal of sportswomen in one of the largest South African sports magazines, and to determine the value of vector analysis as a visual-grammatical analysis instrument in identifying and opposing dominant ideologies. A literature review of published research on under-representation and stereotyping of sportswomen in the media was undertaken. The theoretical and methodological framework was Critical Discourse Analysis and Kress and Van Leeuwen's (1996; 2006) 'visual grammar', with specific emphasis on vector analysis. The types of vectors operating in visual representations and their relationship to the stereotypical constructions of sportswomen in the media were determined. Five photographs were critically analysed, one example from each stereotypical construct: ‘Athletic’ (the positive stereotype) as opposed to ‘homosexual’, ‘loser’, ‘model’ and ‘sex object’ (negative stereotypes) were identified. The most important conclusions are that sportswomen were predominantly stereotyped negatively in the sports magazine under scrutiny, and that vector analysis is a useful heuristic tool in identifying and confirming visual subjectivity.Keywords: Women in sport; Critical discourse analysis; Gender stereotyping in sport; Gender inequality; Gender ideology; Vector analysis; Visual grammarArticle text in Afrikaans

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses two Chinese sex education picture books for children aged between 3 and 6 years of age using van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework, which identifies four types of legitimation strategies: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalisation and mythopoesis. Our findings suggest that personal authority tends to be vested in mothers as the conveyers of sex education to young children. Moral evaluation is realised through values such as responsibility and love, which are embedded in the description of biological events and physical objects, implicitly instilling in children the accepted heterosexual moralities that pervade mainstream Chinese society. Rationalisation is used to suggest a general social need to decrease the degree of directness in discussions about sex-related knowledge and to legitimise the appropriateness of the contents of sex education for young children. With respect to mythopoesis, both texts present a moral tale in which the love and marriage of a man and a woman is rewarded by the birth of a ‘healthy, strong and clever’ child. All these strategies configure to construe a moderately open, highly positive and fundamentally stereotypically heterosexual image of sexuality and procreation for young children in mainland China.

Different representations of social actions create distinct types of discourses. Applying van Leeuwen’s 'Social Actions' framework (2008), the present study critically analyzes the power relations between the main characters of Radi’s dramas From behind the Windows and Hamlet with Season Salad. The objective of our study is to account for the differences between the discourse of the dominant and the discourse of the dominated. In order to elucidate such differences we count and analyze the characters’ social (re)actions and, in turn, identify four types of contrasts: cognitive vs. affective and perceptive reactions; material vs. semiotic actions; transactive vs. non-transactive actions; interactive vs. instrumental actions. Two opposing discourses emerge from these contrasts. On the one hand, the dominant characters mostly react cognitively and their actions are often semiotic, transactive, and interactive. On the other hand, the dominated characters’ reactions are often affective and perceptive, while most of their actions are material, non-transactive, and instrumental. As the results show, the author’s linguistic choices underscore the power relations between the dominant and the dominated characters. Building upon the fact that our analysis sheds light on the underlying ideologies and intentions of the author, we tentatively conclude that despite its being predominantly employed in the analysis of political discourses, van Leeuwen’s framework also proves effective in the critical analysis of literary works.

The article is devoted to formation and development of discourse analysis as an effective method to study functional aspects of political communication in global political space. It reports on main theoretical and methodological approaches to critical analysis of political discourse. Mainly, it deals with theoretical and methodological perspectives of three leading schools of critical discourse analysis: discourse analysis of N. Fairclough, that presents a relational approach to considering social problems in their relation to textual analysis; socio-cognitive theory of T.A. van Dijk, oriented to investigating relations between cognitive structures, discourse and social coordination; discourse analysis of R. Wodak, that uses historical approach to discourse and is aimed at description of powerful language of the elite that helps to maintain dominance in society. The paper characterizes some frameworks of critical analysis of political discourse, including the Duisburg School of Critical Discourse Analysis (S. Jäger, F. Maier), System-Functional and Social-Semiotic Theory (M. Halliday, T. van Leeuwen), and Mediated Discourse Analysis (R. Scollon, S. Scollon). It is stated that within its boundaries critical discourse analysis includes a variety of approaches, analytical tools and methodologies. The author underlines that scientific consideration of critical discourse analysis will demonstrate its potential and prospects for integrating this interdisciplinary qualitative methodology into a set of empirical tools of modern political science.