Reading against the grain: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of European Commission communications on migration within Tunisia (2017–23)

This paper aims at analysing - from an Italian perspective - the main current issues relating to environmental taxation, in the particular context characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic. The legislation adopted during the health emergency has envisaged three provisions on environmental protection, which deserve careful consideration. Furthermore, the European Green Deal - i.e. the European Commission's Communication COM (2019) 640 final of December 11, 2019 - and the European Commission's Communication COM (2020) 312 final of July 15, 2020, are analysed in this paper. The latter outlines the action plan on tax matters to support economic recovery in the current phase of crisis due to the pandemic, and provides for twenty-five actions that the European Commission has identified in the Communication and has committed itself to proposing and implementing by the end of 2024. Moreover, customs duties are considered taxes which, with some targeted changes, could promote greater protection of the environment within the territory of the European Union.

Foreword Jurgen Trittin, Bundesminister fur Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit (German Federal Minister of Environmental Protection, Conservation and Nuclear Safety) Introduction. Governance towards sustainability: meeting the unsustainable production and consumption challenge Dirk Scheer, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOW), Germany Frieder Rubik, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOW), Germany Part I: The governance approach of integrated product policy 1. From government to governance: political steering in modern societies Renate Mayntz, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany 2. Patterns and key issues of environmental governance: what's new? Andrea Lenschow, University of Osnabruck, Germany 3. Environmental governance and integrated product policy Dirk Scheer, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOW), Germany Part II: Integrated product policy in practice: varieties of multi-level governance 4. The European Commission's Communication 'Integrated Product Policy: Building on Environmental Life-Cycle Thinking' Klaus Kogler and Robert Goodchild, European Commission, Belgium 5. Promoting sustainable consumption and production at the international level: taking a life-cycle approach Guido Sonnemann, Adriana Zacarias and Bas de Leeuw, United Nations Environment Programme, France 6. Integrated product policy in Sweden Ylva Reinhard, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency 7. Integrated product policy in Denmark: new patterns of environmental governance? Arne Remmen, Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Denmark 8. Integrated product policy: the product-related part of the Swiss government's strategy for sustainable development Christoph Rentsch, Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (BUWAL) 9. Integrated product policy as a tool in environmental protection: the Bavarian perspective Hans-Christian Steinmetzer and Uwe Furnier, Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection, Germany 10. The IPP concept: some thoughts and comments Eckart Meyer-Rutz, Federal Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany 11. Integrated product policy: practices in Europe Frieder Rubik, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOW), Germany Part III: Shaping a policy mix: understanding the challenge 12. Integrated product policy and governance: a necessary symbiosis Robert Nuij, Environmental Resources Management (ERM), Italy 13. Integrated product policy in the paper chain Ellen Frings, IFOK, Institute for Organisational Communication, Germany 14. Extended producer responsibility policies in the United States and Canada: history and status Bill Sheehan, Product Policy Project, USA Helen Spiegelman, Product Policy Project, Canada 15. Extended producer responsibility as a driver for product chain improvement Naoko Tojo, Thomas Lindhqvist and Carl Dalhammar, International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University, Sweden 16. The implementation of integrated product policy in southern Italy: the role of community structural funds Ivana Capozza, Orsola Mautone and Maria Angela Sorce, Italian Ministry of the Environment and Territory, Italy Part IV: Getting stakeholders involved: product innovation along the value chain 17. Complexity management with interpretive schemes: the contribution of integrated chain management to integrated product policy Uwe Schneidewind, Maria Goldbach and Stefan Seuring, Carl von Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg, Germany 18. Multi-stakeholder approaches to product development Esther Hoffmann, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOW), Germany 19. The determinants and effects of environmental product innovations Katharina-Maria Rehfeld, German Chamber of Commerce, China 20. Integrated product policy: an integral part of corporate practice Claudia Wohler, Federation of German Industries (BDI), Germany 21. Small and medium-sized enterprises and integrated product policy: attitudes and barriers Paolo Masoni and Roberto Buonamici, Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (ENEA), Italy 22. Notion marketing and praxis transfer: how to bring IPP into reality or how to bring reality into IPP Siegfried Kreibe and Michael Schneider, Bavarian Institute of Applied Environmental Research and Technology (BIfA), Germany

To describe the extent to which the content of the European Commission's Communication on alcohol reflects public health-based scientific evidence. Document retrieval and content analysis. European Union. Background documents leading up to the European Commission's Communication on alcohol, the Communication itself and implementation actions following the Communication. Documents were read and analyzed for evidence-based alcohol policy content. Although the Communication acknowledges and supports existing interventions which have high evidence for effectiveness, such as enforcing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits for drivers, it extensively promotes other interventions which have been shown to be ineffective; for example, recommending education and persuasion strategies as a measure across all its five priority areas. Measures to influence price are mentioned only once in relation to sales in drinking venues limiting two-for-one drinks offers. Measures to control physical availability are mentioned infrequently. The Communication reflects the science, in that it acknowledges the significance of alcohol as a social and health determinant in Europe. However, it places more emphasis on policy actions with less evidence for effectiveness than on those with strong evidence. It also focuses its efforts more on mapping member state actions and coordinating knowledge exchange than on providing concrete recommendations for action or developing Europe-wide policy measures. This may be a compromise between the rights of Member States to develop national policy and legislation and the obligation of the European Union as a collaborative body to protect health. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the European Union's roots as a trading block emphasizes collaboration with industry stakeholders and this influences the ability to prioritize health over trade considerations.

Since 2001 the European Commission has paid increasing attention to two-way communication in its institutional communication strategy. Besides informing the public, the Commission’s strategy has become orientated towards listening to and engaging in a dialogue with citizens. This article explores the rhetoric of the Commission regarding its institutional communication strategy from 2001 to the present time and studies in depth the dialogic dimension of this strategy. This contribution extends the study of the Commission’s communication strategy by offering new insights into the development of the dialogic approach and the Commission’s current understanding of communication. Furthermore, defining institutional two-way communication as a means to facilitate a link between decision making and public opinion, I contribute to the debate on the European public sphere. The data used for the analysis originate from document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews with Commission officials. The analysis indicates the gradual nature of the shift between 2001 and 2009 from a one-way informing approach to a two-way communicating approach. The dialogic dimension in the Commission’s communication strategy is found to be more restricted in terms of subjects for discussion and facilitation. There are indications that engaging in a dialogue and interaction have been played down and are being managed through other means outside the formal communication strategy.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) combine corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis to explore how language reflects and shapes discourse. CADS researchers derive macro-level social explanations based on micro-level description of texts. Interpretation (the meso level of discourse analysis) is mostly accomplished by deriving discursive patterns from linguistic patterns observed across many texts. CADS blends close reading (examining individual examples in concordances) and distant reading (looking at results of keyword and collocation analyses). While effective, we argue that CADS lacks a true integration of qualitative and quantitative techniques, which results in a unidirectional workflow where qualitative-hermeneutic interpretation is detached from quantitative analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose operationalising the grouping of linguistic surface realisations in terms of discoursemes – building blocks for discourse analysis. Discursive patterns can then be approximated by co-occurrences of discoursemes. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by means of a case study analysing the discourse related to refugees in the German federal parliament during two salient moments in Germany’s history. The case study is carried out using a new open-source software toolkit that facilitates the construction of a consistent database of discoursemes and overcomes some of the technical limitations faced by most CADS studies. Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS); Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); German parliamentary debates (GermaParl); Corpus Workbench (CWB); discoursemes

Eighty-six EU policy options for reducing imported deforestation

Over the past years the European Commission launched two communications on multilingualism: 'A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism' (2005) and 'Multilingualism: An Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment' (2008). Their synthetic nature makes both communications suitable to serve as a starting point for a generalising overview of the main points of European language policy as they have been given shape over the past years. Since research has fuelled and will continue to fuel the development of European language policy the overview for the purpose of this contribution is combined with a round-up of current trends in research on multilingualism. The combination of both policy directions and research trends is meant to give way to a generalising reflection on challenges related to European language policy as expressed in the Commission's communications on multilingualism and on the role academia could (or should) play in meeting these challenges.

Various parties relate to the precautionary principle with various understandings, claims and hopes. One of the ways to comprehend this multiplicity of meanings is to examine the composition of this problematic norm in the societal and institutional settings where it occurs. In this paper, I address its elaboration on the European Union institutional terrain with the European Commission's Communication on the Precautionary Principle. This effectuation of the precautionary principle embraces a number of issues of transnational or multilevel governance, expertise, legitimacy and sovereignty. The crucial matter that this paper engages in initially is that of risk analysis, the procedural framework that the precautionary principle confronts with its innovative articulations of science and policy-making, but to which I argue that it succumbs in part. Also explored, in turn, are further framings of the precautionary principle: science versus policy, a given policy domain—environment—in relation to others, as well as action versus inaction (whereas I argue that the precautionary principle ought to be about acting and doubting). These are further evaluated in the conclusions, together with the predicament of establishing a common understanding or defining the precautionary principle. I show that, complementary to drivers of divergence, one finds support for a common approach, though there is no radial symmetry in these tangled stakes, and any ‘diffusion’ of the precautionary principle has to be actively carried out for a shared understanding to be more widely shared. In this process, Europe, the European Commission, its Communication, and the precautionary principle are being shaped into diverse compositions of unity in diversity. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this article, we apply discourse analysis to the European Commission's Communications on reforms of the European Union's Common agricultural policy (CAP). The results of the historical discourse analysis of the European Commission’s strategy documents in the form of Communications on the CAP from 1991 to 2017 showed that the discourse was a hybrid, modified according to the specific political economic context and the European Commission’s need to justify the CAP reforms. In the first two Communications of 1991 and 1997, the neomercantilist and neoliberal discourses dominated to justify the reduction of market price support. In the Communications of the 2000s the neoliberal and multifunctionality discourse dominated to justify further CAP reforms based on decoupling and liberalisation of support. In the last Communication from 2017 the multifunctionality discourse in populist form prevailed to find the new societal argumentation for maintaining the policy.

This study aims to analyse power, dominance, racial discrimination, and power exercise that is narratively established through a subtle network of metaphors in a fiction work, The Kite Runner. The Kite Runner exposes the socioeconomic conditions in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, revealing the differences between power manipulation and the domestic performance of powerful social groups. The work also explores how religious and status dichotomies circumvent the progress of minority groups and align their physical features with their receding power and financial features. An adopted model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) indicates power, economic, and racial dichotomies in the book while revealing the shades of metaphors through conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) in a post-colonial text. Dogmatic ideographs are perpetuated in every public sphere through language and established gradually through unprovoking tools of metaphors. The metaphors are uncovered through CMT, providing a helpful understanding of different conceptual domains. Rhetorically, CDA helped reveal the racial discrimination, human rights violations, and hatred against minorities embedded in the selected metaphors. This investigation is very significant in connection with the current scenario of cross-cultural studies, as it mainly depicts the prevailing social trends regarding two different settings. The study may benefit intelligentsia interested in post-colonial and decolonial discourse and diaspora literature. Keywords: Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Metaphor, Power Expansion, Racial Discrimination Agbo, I. I., Kadiri, G. C., & Ijem, B. U. (2018). Critical metaphor analysis of political discourse in Nigeria. English Language Teaching, 11(5), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n5p95 Burke, K. (2017). A rhetoric of motives. In Routledge eBooks (pp. 154–164). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315080925-15 Chouliaraki, L., & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh University Press. Fairclough, N. (2000). Discourse, social theory and social research: The case of welfare reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(2), 163–195. Fairclough, N. (2012). Critical discourse analysis. International Advances in Engineering and Technology, 7, 452–487. Foucault, M. (1976). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/endsandbeginnings/foucaultrepressiveen278.pdf Foucault, M., & Sheridan, A. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA21964742 Gill, S. (1998). European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and monetary union and alternatives to disciplinary neoliberalism in Europe. New Political Economy, 3(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563469808406330 Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Hosseini, K. (2003). The kite runner. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Jawaid, A., Batool, M., Arshad, W., Kaur, P., & ul Haq, M. I. (2024). English language pronunciation challenges faced by tertiary students. Contemporary Journal of Social Science Review, 2(04), 2104-2111. https://contemporaryjournal.com/index.php/14/article/view/361 Jawaid, A. (2014). Benchmarking in TESOL: A Study of the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013. English Language Teaching, 7(8), 23-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v7n8p23 Jensen, D. F. N. (2006, April). Metaphors as a bridge to understanding educational and social contexts. International Institute for Qualitative Methodology. https://sites.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_1/HTML/jensen.htm Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed., pp. 202–251). Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 284–324). Cambridge University Press. Talib, N., & Fitzgerald, R. (2016). Micro–meso–macro movements: A multi-level critical discourse analysis framework to examine metaphors and the value of truth in policy texts. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(5), 531–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2016.1182932 Van Dijk, T. A. (1988). News analysis: Case studies of international and national news in the press. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926593004002006 Van Dijk, T. A. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society, 4(2), 249–283. Van Dijk, T. A. (2005). Discourse and racism in Spain and Latin America. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Van Dijk, T. A. (2009). Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed., pp. 62–86). London: Sage Publications. Wodak, R. (2001). What CDA is about: A summary of its history, important concepts and developments. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 1–13). London: Sage Publications. Wodak, R. (2007). Pragmatics and discourse analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

This pilot study employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine media portrayals of the Great March of Return (GMR) in two contrasting news outlets: The Palestine Chronicle (PC) and Haaretz. A corpus of 11,611 words was compiled from 18 articles published between March 2018 and December 2020. The data were analyzed using Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework and Halliday's Transitivity Theory to examine narrative framing. Findings indicate that Haaretz emphasizes material processes involving Palestinian actors, which often depict Palestinians as instigators of violence while framing Israel's military actions as defensive. In contrast, PC presents the GMR as peaceful protests while highlighting Palestinian victimization and advocating for nonviolent resistance. Collocation and concordance analyses reveal ideological divergence in framing social actors and events. This comparative approach underscores the role of media in shaping perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and highlights the utility of corpus-based methods in critical media studies.

Despite numerous calls from civil society for mandatory regulation on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the European Commission in its Green and White Paper, emphasised the voluntary character of CSR. This paper tries to go beyond the voluntary / mandatory juxtaposition by reframing CSR as Network Governance. In the paper, we argue that a network perspective is an adequate way to look at corporations, that the European Commission's communications are compatible with that perspective, but that the Commission's role in a European framework on CSR goes further than promoting voluntary actions. Rather, to develop a European mandatory framework on CSR as Network Governance would insure that fair interactions between stakeholders are started up and intensified. However, CSR as Network Governance does leave substantial flexibility for tailoring local integration of business.

- In 2001 a new emphasis on learning for democratic citizenship has been championed by the European Commission's Communication on Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality. The communication recognizes active citizenship as one of the four "broad and mutually supporting objectives" of the lifelong learning strategy. Accordingly, civic competence, which "equips individuals to fully participate in civic life", has been identified by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union as a key competence to be given priority in all member states in the years to come. The article introduces the core principles of a European study aiming at investigating, from a comparative perspective, ways in which adults can achieve competencies relevant for democratic citizenship. Furthermore it presents and discusses selected of findings. The findings suggest that, in spite of the shift from education to learning for democratic citizenship within the European discourse, the emphasis on lifelong learning and the consequent equal recognition of in-school and out-of-school learning activities, most empirical research in the field of education for democratic citizenship remains primarily concerned with school-aged pupils. When available, research which focuses on the links between adult education and learning for democratic citizenship is highly theoretical and rarely supported by empirical evidence.Keywords lifelong learning, democratic citizenship, adult education, European Commission, civic competence.

For a long time the European Community's role in transport field and maritime transport was uncertain. The general constraints and difficulties encountered in establishing a Community wide maritime policy obviously also applied in relation to establishing a policy on maritime safety. The European Commission's Communication ?A Common Policy for Safe Seas' was adopted against the backdrop of two high profile, ship-source oil pollution accidents that took place in European waters, the Aegean Sea in December 1992 and the Braer in January 1993. The sinking of the Erika in December 1999 off the French Atlantic coast represented a turning point in EU maritime safety policy. The accident involving the passenger ferry Express Samina in Greece in September 2000 prompted the Commission to bring forward some proposals in relation to passenger ferries. The green paper seems to confirm a growing trend to consolidate the EU's maritime policy in a more international direction.Keywords: A Common Policy for Safe Seas; Erika; EU maritime safety policy; European Commission

Introduction The reach of the internet grows day by day. Currently there are over 2 billion users and the number continues to rise. The services offered on the internet follow the same exponential trend. Electronic commerce promises ever more varied and ingenious applications, putting the world at one's fingertip with a simple click. Nevertheless concerns have been raised about this virtual universe bringing about the end of our freedoms, especially with respect to privacy. The purpose of this chapter is to bring clarity to the debate and to offer some suggestions. The topic is a timely one in Europe. There are now two European Directives on privacy protection, in particular the general Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC of 24 October 1995 and the more specific Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002/58/EC of 12 July 2002. The latter replaces the Directive 97/66/EC of 15 December 1997 on the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the telecommunications sector. A large number of documents generated within the European Community also are topical – including the European Parliament's 1999 report on Echelon; the European Commission's consultation paper on the surveillance by companies of employee internet use; the European Commission's communication on spam; and finally the Council Framework Draft Decision on Data Retention. In addition, one has to mention the important work done by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party on various privacy issues in order to harmonise the different national approaches.