The 'We Will Rise' 2010 Election Campaign: the Discursive Construction of Political and National Identities in Trinidad and Tobago

Subject The September 7 opposition victory. Significance Despite pre-election opinion polls suggesting a close contest, the opposition People's National Movement (PNM) won a clear victory against the incumbent four-party coalition of the People's Partnership (PP) in the September 7 general election. The PP's position was undermined by internal divisions, allegations of corruption and a weakening economy, while the PNM was able to project unity and reassure voters that its policy programme was credible. It also benefitted from a strong performance in the campaign by its leader, Keith Rowley. Impacts Challenges to election results will generate uncertainty but not a change in the outcome. Low oil and gas prices will force an uncomfortable economic retrenchment. Crime, corruption and ethnic divisions are further intractable problems Rowley's government must tackle.

This paper investigates the relationship between argumentation and political discourse. More specifically, this study focuses on the discursive and argumentative strategies employed by one of the most prominent Turkish leaders and current ruling president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The aim is to shed light on linguistic elements that fuel the sense of national identity after the coup attempt of 2016 through employing the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) for unveiling the use of specific argumentative strategies in the translated version of Erdogan’s 2016 Republic Day speech. English's growing presence in politics highly influences translation practices (House 2013). Not all politicians are proficient in English, thus, their speeches undergo translation from their native language. These translated speeches are intended for a global audience, which underscores the pivotal role of English analysis in both political discourse and the field of translation studies. Although the original language of the speech is Turkish, the examination of its English translation serves to highlight the significance of analysing translated political speeches and making these analyses accessible to a wider audience. The findings emphasise the importance of argumentative topics (topoi), such as the topos of History, Definition, Comparison, Threat and Favoruable Time in the advocation of national sentiment at various linguistic and structural levels within the translated political speech of Erdoğan. The implications of this research extend to the understanding of the intricate interplay between argumentative language and concepts of national sentiment within political discourse. Future research can further explore the application ofDHA in the analysis of political discourse, allowing for deeper insights into the communicative strategies employed by political leaders.

The present study attempts a political discourse analysis of a spoken Arabic corpus on the death of Nelson Mandela. The corpus mainly consists of the coverage of some Arabic-speaking TV channels that was broadcasted in the aftermath of the announcement of Nelson Mandela's death in 2013. The discourse-historical approach was employed with a view to finding out the various topoi and ideologies deployed in the corpus. For this purpose, the spoken corpus used in this study was first transcribed using EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN), a transcription tool for multimodal texts. Afterward, the corpus was compiled using Sketch Engine to enable researchers to process the data automatically and hence to use different computational tools that can assist in finding the various topoi. A computational analysis using collocations, wordlists, N-grams, and concordance features can provide a more precise analysis of the various topoi in context and hence to uncover the ideologies of participants/politicians. The findings of the study showed that the corpus abounds in topoi that are not necessarily related to Mandela or his death, but they are rather related to heated political issues in various countries of the Middle East. Politicians have shifted their focus from the main topic which is the death of Nelson Mandela to conflicts and political plights in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine. Politicians have used the media coverage as a platform to express their feelings and to compare Mandela with the Arab leaders in their respective countries. The coverage has sometimes transcended speaking about Mandela to the deployment and projection of certain ideologies of the interviewees. Those ideologies are not only confined to one participant's country, but they are representative of the Arab identity and concerns at large.

In this article, we trace the histories of discourses concerning student identity in post-war Greece. Making use of the discourse-historical approach (DHA), textual data are analyzed in student journals published by students’ unions, factions and collectives of the University of Thessaloniki. Student identity is theorized as being constructed and negotiated in discourse, in close relation to sociopolitical context. In light of the discourse-historical approach it is assumed that the intensification of discursive strategies, such as nominations, predications and argumentations, and the reconceptualization of ingroup and outgroup dichotomy relate to student identity shifts. The findings from such an analysis detect successive shifts in student identity during the post-war period. Student identity is constructed upon the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dichotomy. Students sometimes self-identify as agents of change and at other times as followers or recipients thereof, while their discourse is tuned with domestic sociopolitical developments.

UN General Comment No. 25 (2021) emphasizes the importance of safeguarding children’s rights in the digital sphere. However, in Turkey, media coverage often focuses on the negative aspects of the relationship between digital media and children, overshadowing opportunities, and rights. This study aims to analyze news articles focused on digital media and children to address this issue. Key concepts such as moral panic, framing and discourse are incorporated. Initially assuming a perception of digital media as a threat to social norms and children’s interests, the study utilizes a discourse-historical approach (DHA) to contextualize and explore the discursive strategies employed by national daily newspapers. Conducting a cross-sectional study, textual data from national dailies between January 1, 2015 and January 1, 2020, in Turkey are collected, resulting in a corpus of 187 news articles. These articles undergo discourse historical analysis guided by the research question: “How is children’s relationship with the digital world portrayed and discussed in public discourse?” The findings reveal a predominant focus on risks over opportunities and rights, contributing to moral panic and impeding children’s civic participation. In conclusion, this study advocates for the adoption of a child rights perspective in Turkish newspapers to better serve the interests of children.

Political discourses always carry various messages to the public. This can be done through many tools used by decision makers in order to manipulate or persuade the public. Topos (plural is topoi) is tool of developing argumentation in political discourse. It is a part of any political speech used either to persuade people, show the politician's upper hand or produce successful speeches. This paper will discuss the conceptualization of topoi as part of political discourse. It also studies the usage of topoi in Al-Abadi's weekly statement during Basra crisis of 2018. Protests in Basra were the most serious seen in Iraq during Al-Abadi's era because of the importance of the city as a heart of some world's largest oilfields. The paper also shows how Al-Abadi utilizes topoi in his speeches to deal with this robust crisis. Methodology of analysis will be Ruth Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 2011. DHA is designed to integrate systematically all the available background information in the analysis and interpretation of the many layers of written or spoken texts.

The current study explores dimensions of the dialectical relationship between three domains of social praxis: ideological, sociological, and biological (Steffensen & Fill, 2014). The primary interest was to explore a mutually constitutive relationship among the three dimensions as conceptualized in the model of dialectical Ecolinguistics and hypothesized to be represented in the selected textual data. Cartoon strips from the most widely read Pakistani newspapers have been selected as data and treated as multimodal discourse. Visual narrativization, visual grammar, and the dialectical relationship between language and the three dimensions of life have been used for conceptual grounding. A guided close reading of the visuals has been conducted to trace strategic framing of and foregrounding in the stories as reflected in the visual grammatical constructions in the selected visuals/cartoon strips. The purpose was to find a conflation between the three dimensions of discourse production. Such collaborative functioning among ideological, social, and biological was substantiated by how all three factors influenced the meaning-making process. It was found that various processual aspects of meaning-making are contributed by the three factors in point, and any shift in any of them affects a shift in the other two, resulting in a shift in meaning at all stages of production and interpretation. Keywords: Dialectical Ecolinguistics, visual grammar, environmental cartoons, media representation, Dawn Newspaper, Pakistan, ideological, sociological and biological implications, environmental advocacy.

ABSTRACTTelevangelism or preaching religion via TV and YouTube represents an interesting media phenomenon in which religious messages are presented in an entertaining manner. Despite the novelty of televangelism and its popularity, little attention has been paid to the investigation of the features of this genre, which could allow insights into the nature of this phenomenon and the reasons behind its popularity. In this study, I focus on the case study of the American Muslim televangelist Baba Ali who gained popularity through a series of videos on YouTube. With insights from the Discourse Historical Approach and the Framework of Visual Grammar, I analyse four key aspects of Ali’s videos i.e. religious invocation, video-edition and self-representation, use of humour and interactivity. I demonstrate that Ali’s videos represent a novel genre that embeds features of the sermon, video-blogs and YouTube culture. Furthermore, I show that Baba Ali represents a new type of a religious figure whose authority appears to emanate from his ordinariness as he presents himself as one of his audience; and from his playfulness. Thus, I elaborate on contemporary Muslim televangelism and extend the application of Critical Discourse Studies to religious discourse, a domain little examined from a critical perspective.

In this article, the so-called ‘anti-woke’ culture war is deconstructed through the notions of metapolitics in fascist discourses – linked to the Gramscian ‘hegemonisation’ and ‘the war of position’ – as well as the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction coupled with theories of deviance and moral panics. The appropriation of the neo-fascist culture war discourse by the mainstream right in the UK is analysed discursively, combining political discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach and discourse-conceptual analysis. The anti-woke culture war by the British conservative party as well as rightwing media will serve to analyse how social justice struggles like anti-racism, anti-sexism and pro-LGBTQ rights are being abnormalised and positioned as extreme deviant political positions. Linked to this, so-called ‘cancel culture’ is strategically deployed by dominant groups to neutralise contestations against racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ views. Finally, freedom of speech and the right to offend is weaponised to protect racist and discriminatory language and to position these idea’s as valid opinions worthy of democratic debate.

This article advances research on the normalisation of far-right rhetoric on the “migration issue” by analysing statements from the current Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and the ruling political party New Democracy political figures. Having presented the discourse-historical approach (DHA) from critical discourse studies (CDS) as a suitable theory and method of analysis of political discourses, I use an argumentative-based DHA approach and add the argumentative schemes of Aristotelian topoi and fallacies to explore how the leadership of the conservative New Democracy government adopted far-right rhetoric on the refugee issue to justify its tough political agenda on security, law, and order. In particular, I focus on the representation of migration as a threat to national security and public health, the politics of hate, and theories of securitisation via an in-depth analysis of the current and former prime ministers’ discourses, the former government spokesman’s statement on the refugee issue and a popular journalist and New Democracy’s MP television interview, and intend to illustrate how extreme right rhetoric could serve the conservative New Democracy’s political strategies.

Purpose: This study aims to apply critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) to examine representations of feudalism in Vietnamese literary works. The discourse-historical approach (Wodak, 2009) and socio-cognitive framework (Van Dijk, 1993) guide an analysis of how linguistic strategies construct feudal portrayals and situate them within Vietnam's sociohistorical context. Methods: A corpus of five short stories (1930-1945) thematically depicting feudalism is compiled. Detailed textual analysis identifies metaphors, lexical choices, connotations and symbolic spaces that construct vivid feudal imagery portraying oppression and injustice. Results: Findings show the discourse utilizes techniques like animal metaphors, derogatory nouns, and graphic violence to dramatize the dehumanization and brutality endured by peasants under feudalism. This study demonstrates usefulness of CDA for elucidating the complex, nuanced ways literary discourse reproduces and contests dominant power structures and ideologies. Discussion: Findings provide deeper insight into linguistic strategies that critique yet inadvertently reinforce aspects of feudalism. The adoption of CDA can enrich Vietnamese literary scholarship by enabling a more critical examination of discursive constructions of identity, inequality and power relations.

Political ideology classification is crucial for understanding social polarization, monitoring democratic processes, and identifying bias on online platforms. This study compares the performance of long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and bidirectional GRU (Bi-GRU) neural network models in classifying liberal and conservative political ideologies from social media text data. The Bi-GRU achieved the best results with 88.75% accuracy and 89.16% F1-score, highlighting its strength in contextual analysis. These findings suggest their applicability in areas such as election monitoring and the analysis of political discourse. This study contributes to the field of political text classification by offering a comparative analysis of deep learning architectures. The dataset utilized covers a wide range of issues, including social, political, economic, religious, and racial topics, demonstrating its comprehensive nature. Visualizations using WordCloud and uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) reveal distinct ideological patterns, validating the dataset’s quality for training models. The findings underscore the importance of utilizing advanced bidirectional architectures for nuanced tasks, such as ideology classification, where contextual understanding is crucial. These insights open avenues for future research, such as the application of Bi-GRU in analyzing multilingual political ideologies or real-time sentiment tracking during election campaigns.

The U.S. presidential debates are rich in revealing national/international policies of the politicians. More specifically, the 2012 U.S. presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are unique in balancing and predicting the election outcome through the candidates' discourses. A Political Discourse Analysis is integrated to Ruth Wadak's (2011) Discourse-Historical Approach to investigate how the candidates employ the discursive strategies in order to gain the public support. The present study adopts a qualitative design of analyzing the candidates' speeches. The materials are particular extracts selected from the transcripts of one presidential debate. The purpose of the study is to uncover the discursive strategies in the candidates' speeches when they debate the most important issues of USA. The findings indicate that Obama's continuous use of the referential strategy indicates that there is a heavy emphasis on positive self-representation, defending the previous policy of Obama's government and presenting the record of achievement to gain the voters' support. On the other hand, Romney uses the argumentation strategy to attack Obama's previous policy and trigger the topos of threat that the same faults will take place if Obama is reelected. That is, Romney diminishes the public support surrounding Obama.

This paper compares how lexical units created in Catalan discourse, and related to the aspirations of independence, are reproduced by Euronews in Spanish, English, German and French and how their function as linguistic tools of discursive identity construction changes after translation (transediting). Based on the discourse-historical approach, we could detect three main strategies of discursive identity construction (autonomisation, legitimation, and unification) in the 37 selected articles between 2015-2021, which are often due to the discrepancies in terminology and different background knowledge in a particular target culture, together with the need to comply with media format and journalistic register.

This study investigates the ideological composition of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on Instagram, a popular but little researched platform, and attempts to situate it within his broader campaign. To account for the multimodality of Instagram posts, an analytical framework combining methods of the discourse-historical approach and visual grammar is proposed. 330 posts were subjected to a semantic analysis, resulting in a network of discourse topics which defined the Instagram campaign. Trump’s Instagram posts, in contrast to his tweets, are shown to be mostly positive, refraining from nativist attacks on minorities and limiting personal attacks on Hillary Clinton. Trump methodically constructed the positive, populist ‘Man of the People’ image, although in-depth analysis of selected posts reveals his populism to be only superficially inclusive. These findings prompt a reflection on the existence of an internal cordon sanitaire in social media campaigns, a possibly detrimental phenomenon for right-wing populists.