Force-dynamics and the pragmatics of counter proximisation in Iranian media discourse

Cute and Monstrous Furbys in Online Fan Production

At a time when the academic thirty‐year war between embattled factions of literary critics has subsided somewhat, leaving not peace and consensus but what feels like a lack of direction, a kind of ...

Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes and Stavros Assimakopoulos (Eds.) John Benjamins Publishing Company (2017)

Corpus-based genre pedagogy (CBGP), the instructional integration of discourse-based rhetorical analysis and corpus-based linguistic analysis of diverse genres, has gained attention from English for Academic Purposes (EAP) researchers and practitioners aiming to cultivate the academic writing skills of second language (L2) learners. This has led to a need for the continuous conceptualization of CBGP (Lu, Xiaofei, J. Casal Elliott, and Yingying Liu. 2021. “Towards the Synergy of Genre- and Corpus-Based Approaches to Academic Writing Research and Pedagogy.” International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching 11 (1): 59–71). Additionally, usage-based approaches to L2 acquisition (U-SLA), a collection of cognitive and potentially sociocognitive theoretical approaches to language and language acquisition (Ellis, Nick C., Ute Römer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell. 2016. Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Processing: Cognitive and Corpus Investigations. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; Wulff, Stepanie, and Nick C. Ellis. 2018. “Usage-Based Approaches to Second Language Acquisition.” In Bilingual Cognition and Language: The State of the Science across its Subfields, edited by D. Miller, F. Bayram, J. Rothman, and L. Serratrice, 37–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company), have called for more pedagogically oriented research informed by usage-based principles (e.g., Tyler, Andrea E., Hae In Park, Mariko Uno, and Lourdes Ortega, eds. 2018. Usage-inspired L2 Instruction: Researched Pedagogy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company). Responding to such calls, we argue for conceptualizing CBGP as usage-inspired instruction given its intersections with key U-SLA instructional tenets. We first systematically review empirical studies on CBGP. Then, we introduce relevant U-SLA instructional tenets and interpret the CBGP studies to illuminate the extent to which CBGP resonates with different aspects of the U-SLA tenets. Eventually, we argue that CBGP can potentially unify the “social” and the “cognitive” in U-SLA’s accounts of L2 teaching and learning, making it a feasible way to materialize usage-inspired L2 instruction in actual classroom practice. Finally, we discuss future research and practical directions.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsDiscourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China, edited by Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul Chilton. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. vi + 213 pp. €95.00/US$143.00 (hardcover), also available as an eBook.Megan AmmiratiMegan AmmiratiUniversity of California, Davis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 74July 2015 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681743 Views: 90Total views on this site Copyright 2015 by The Australian National University. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Securitization theory has paid extensive attention to transnational issues, actors, and processes. Surprisingly, however, only little attention has been paid to the securitization of diaspora communities, defined as overseas citizens or co-nationals abroad. This article fills this gap by developing an analytical framework to study the securitization of diasporas, focusing on three discursive formations: diasporas as threatening actors, as objects under threat, or as security resources. Building upon the recent literature on state–diaspora engagement and drawing on an analysis of Israeli elite discourse (from 1948 to 2022), this article demonstrates how the securitization of diasporas serves as a discursive mechanism that naturalizes and legitimizes extra-territorial policies towards Jews abroad. Thus, the article complements structural and rational explanations of state–diaspora engagement by examining the intersubjective process that endows diaspora policymaking with meaning. Against the backdrop of extensive securitization scholarship that focuses on attempts to keep “foreigners” out, this article shows how securitization justifies bringing certain people in or governing their national identity abroad.

ABSTRACTPublic health safety belongs to the category of ‘securitization’. However, in some countries, there is a tendency of discourse manipulation and desecuritization in COVID‐19's discourse. This paper first embarks from the perspective of the Copenhagen School's securitization theory and employs an analytical framework of discourse manipulation to deconstruct the process of Bolsonaro's ‘desecuritization’ crisis discourse construction in response to the COVID‐19 threat in his country, which consists in discourse restraint, discourse framing, discourse positioning. The results show that: in terms of discourse restraint strategy, Bolsonaro's government realizes this strategy by reducing the frequency of epidemic topics, continuously suppressing scientific discourse on epidemic prevention and control and suppressing public health and safety discourse through political discourse. In terms of framing strategies, the nature, severity, causes and responsibilities of COVID‐19 problem are diagnosed, respectively. Through the negative frame of other programmes and the positive frame of the epidemic plan, the president constructs the expected frame of COVID‐19 problem. Through incentive framing, his discourse stimulates Brazilian people's support for the federal government and the president himself and enhances public confidence in Brazil's success in overcoming the epidemic. In terms of discourse positioning strategy, the plots of ‘focusing on economic issues’, ‘life first’, ‘freedom first’ and ‘sovereignty first’ are adopted, respectively. Drawing on the three‐dimensional analytical framework as a Critical Discourse Analysis tool, Bolsonaro's discourse manipulation and desecuritization strategies reflect an antagonistic regard towards the relations between economic development and epidemic prevention and a rival perspective towards the relationship between administrative authority and professional authority, and furthermore, the overlapping left‐right power struggles under the crossover of the era of ‘Great changes not seen in a century’ and the COVID‐19's non‐traditional security crisis.

This paper attempts to assess motion events in Ilami Kurdish through Talmy’s binary typology (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.),Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000a.Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 1: Concept structuring system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000b.Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) according to which, languages could be classified as “Satellite-framed” or “Verb-framed”. Following Berman and Slobin’s approach (1994.Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) in using “The Frog Story”, which paved the way for evaluating numerous languages in terms of their motion verbs, we used this elicitation tool for gathering Kurdish data. Results reveal that Ilami tends towards Satellite-framed languages as the concept of Path is often expressed by the use of satellites. As far as analysis of Path in Kurdish is taken into account, this concept has been analyzed with the help of different criteria proposed by Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008. Path salience in motion events. In Jiansheng Gu, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin Tripp, Keiko Nakamura & Şeyda Özçalışkan (eds.),Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, 403–414. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and typologically compared with other languages too. It seems that in addition to the oral nature of Ilami and its contact with Persian language, “the syntactic sensitivity of satellites” as a new motivation, also affects the amount of details accompanying the Path concept in this dialect.

Some observations concerning mental verbs and speech act verbs

This study explores how the Chinese government manages the trade-off between transparency and national security through the design of government information disclosure (GID) security policies. Based on a qualitative analysis of 259 policy documents issued at central, provincial, and prefectural levels between 2007 and 2024, we construct a two-dimensional framework that integrates policy instrument types (supply, environmental, demand) with policy content stages (readiness, implementation, impact). The findings reveal an overreliance on environmental-type instruments-especially during implementation-and underuse of demand-oriented tools that support public participation and accountability. Through the lens of Governmental Power Marketing (GPM), we interpret this instrument selection not only as a technical response but as a symbolic strategy to project institutional competence and legitimacy. This study contributes to digital governance literature by linking content analysis with political communication theory, offering both an analytical framework and comparative insights applicable to other regimes facing similar transparency-security dilemmas.

An extensive analysis of US news coverage of the French Socialist Party victories in regular elections in 1981 shows how US news media constructed a discourse of crisis. A hierarchy of discourses is identified, as are the mechanisms of nomination and exclusion, paradox and appropriation through which the discourse of crisis became dominant. Specifically, the crises for the French people and for the American government are created through a continued appropriation of the voice of the voters, who are never allowed to speak for themselves, and the construction of the French Left as inherently paradoxical. The paradoxes of depoliticized politics and non-ideological votes for the Socialists functioned to explain away the contradictions between an appropriated discourse of the people and their actions.

Typological analyses (Talmy, Towards a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, 2000) show that languages vary a great deal in how they package and distribute spatial information by lexical and grammatical means. Recent developmental research suggests that children's language acquisition is constrained by such typological properties from an early age on, but the relative role of such constraints in language and cognitive development is still much debated (Bowerman, Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing typological spatial categories in first language acquisition, Benjamins, 2007; Bowerman and Choi, Space under construction: language-specific categorization in first language acquisition, MIT Press, 2003; Slobin, From 'thought to language' to 'thinking for speaking', Cambridge University Press, 1996, Slobin, Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity, MIT Press, 2003a, Slobin, The many ways to search for a frog, Erlbaum, 2003b, Slobin, What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition, Benjamins, 2006). In the context of this debate, we compare the expression of motion in two data bases of child English vs. French: 1) experimentally induced productions about caused motion (adults and children of three to ten years); 2) spontaneous productions about varied types of motion events during earlier phases of acquisition (18 months to three years). The results of both studies show that the density of information about motion increases with age in both languages, particularly after the age of five years. However, they also show striking cross-linguistic differences. At all ages the semantic density of utterances about motion is higher in English than in French. English speakers systematically use compact structures to express multiple types of information (typically manner and cause in main verbs, path in other devices). French speakers rely more on verbs and/or distribute information in more varied ways across parts of speech. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological factors on language acquisition, and raises questions to be addressed in further research concerning the relation between language and cognition during development.

Democracy started over 2,500 years ago in Athens. As the form of government was largely one of direct democracy, the focus of deliberation was the ‘agora’ – a forum in which Athens’ citizenry debated and decided on public policy and law. Modern democracy, on the other hand, is representative, so that policymaking and legislation by definition occurs within the parliament and executive branch. Nevertheless, the shift from public agora to governmental parliament need not in principle remove the populace from the deliberative process – certainly not when it is called upon tomake the only formal decision within the system: election of the representatives. The fact that this generally does not occur in the modern age is less a function of political philosophy than of logistics – how do millions find each other, not to mention carry on some sort of rational discourse? They normally cannot. As a result, election campaigns have also been removed from the purview of the citizenry and given over to the candidates and especially to the mass media. Consequently, almost all political communications researchers have focused on top-to-bottom election discourse: candidates (and parties)-topublic, as well as media-to-public. This traditional situation is now undergoing change for the first time in modern democratic history with the advent of a ‘mass’ medium – the internet – that renders bottom-to-bottom (‘peer-to-peer’) and bottom-totop (citizen-to-party) communication as effortless as its more traditional counterpart: ‘the media is [sic ] still monologic and one-way – the great and the good speak and everyone else listens or turns off. There is a way out of that tradition: a “civic commons” in cyberspace . . . intelligent spaces for public deliberation about policy issues online’. Of course, the internet not only empowers the citizenry, it can also be fruitfully exploited by the parties and the candidates for their own purposes – through top-to-bottom communication. However, as opposed to the public that has not had much opportunity to express itself during

This chapter introduces a theoretical framework for the study of Khomeini’s corpus during the war, which is a combination of CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) and CMT (Critical Metaphor analysis and CMT). This book’s theoretical framework is examined in five stages. The first stage introduces cognitive approaches, constructivist discourse analysis and poststructuralist discourse analysis as the main three potential alternative approaches to CDA. However, after explaining why these approaches cannot be used to analyse Khomeini’s discourse, in stage two CDA is presented as the first part of the theoretical framework of this book. Despite all its advantages, CDA fails to recognise the importance of cognitive approaches (Chilton in Manipulation and ideologies in the twentieth century. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005; Koller in Metaphor and gender in business media discourse: A critical cognitive study. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Therefore, to cover this lapse, stage three suggests that cognitive metaphors should be added to CDA as a complementary theory. Stage four introduces the theoretical framework of the research: a combination of the CDA and CMT. Finally, stage five justifies the use of CDA and CMT as two “Western theories” in a non-Western case study. Although a combination of CDA and CMT per se is not new, the theoretical framework introduced in this chapter mainly focuses on the political aspects of language rather than its linguistic aspects.

Serial Verbs: Grammatical, comparative and cognitive approaches: Claire Lefebvre (ed.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991. 210 pp. Eur. ISBN 90 272 2324 6; US ISBN 1-55619-384-X. Dfl. 85.00; $50.00 (pb.)