The action of rejecting the DPR allowances has sparked a variety of perspectives in media coverage, one of which is reflected in the language used to report on the protests. This study aims to analyze the language used by detik.com in framing the rejection of DPR allowances and explain how the use of language shapes certain meanings and biases in news coverage. This study uses a qualitative approach with data collection techniques in the form of documentation and note-taking. The data consists of five detik.com news articles that were purposively selected related to the rejection of the DPR allowance during the period of August 25—30. The analysis was conducted by classifying language elements (diction, phrases, clauses, sentences, coherence, and themes) based on Pan and Kosicki's four framing structures (syntax, script, thematic, and rhetorical). The results of the study show the dominance of the use of diction that implies rioting, the composition of titles that emphasize chaos, and narratives that focus on the destructive actions of the masses so that in the news, the action is framed as rioting in public spaces. This study concludes that the five news reports not only use language as a tool to communicate reality, but also symbolically to construct and delegitimize the action of rejecting the DPR allowance through negative framing in their reporting. These findings enrich the application of Pan and Kosicki's framing model in the analysis of political media discourse in Indonesia and are expected to serve as material for reflection for journalists in their use of language and in constructing balanced narrative structures so as not to appear to delegitimize social protest actions.

Utilising a self-compiled corpus of political interviews broadcast in English on CGTN's The Point with Lin Xin, the present study investigates the frequency and function of the discourse marker (DM) “but” employed by interviewees (IEs) from a socio-pragmatic perspective. Quantitative findings reveal statistically significant disparities in both the frequency and specific functions of the DM “but” utilised by IEs in divergent socio-pragmatic categories (e.g., cultural and linguistic features), and the qualitative analysis illustrates the multifunctionality of the DM “but”. Specifically, the study identifies functions such as contrast, topic, addition, concession, specification, monitoring, reformulation, conclusion, and approximation. IEs from the western culture and native English-speaking IEs use this marker, the “contrast” function, and the “ideational” domain statistically more than their counterparts, suggesting that cultural and linguistic backgrounds are potential factors influencing IEs’ deployment of the DM “but” in political interviews, advancing our understanding of how sociocultural factors shape the use of DMs. The findings have significant implications for the field of pragmatics and political communication, highlighting the importance of considering cultural and linguistic contexts in the analysis of political discourse.

This article analyzes the strategies employed by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering pan-Africanist and Ghana’s independence leader, to legitimize his resistance discourse against colonialism. The findings show that Nkrumah used authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization to formulate a conviction rhetoric intended to expose the iniquities of the colonizers and place a moral responsibility on Africans to vehemently oppose the continent’s saboteurs. These legitimation strategies enable Nkrumah to construct himself as a courageous, selfless leader with noble intentions who will rescue Africa from the perils of colonialism and safeguard the welfare of the continent after independence. This paper extends research on legitimation in a context underexplored in the literature and demonstrates that the discourses of African leaders are a valuable interventionist resource needed to decolonize political processes, decenter hegemonic structures, and divest power. It also builds on understandings of political discourse analysis outside the Euro-American canon, thereby centering Global South perspectives that have received little attention in the political discourse analysis literature.

As scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change has solidified, outright denial in political debate has largely given way to more subtle forms of climate change rejection. These so-called climate delay discourses acknowledge the problem yet justify inaction, posing a growing challenge to effective climate communication and policymaking. This study operationalises Lamb et al.’s (2020) typology of climate delay discourses to examine 25 years of Danish parliamentary speeches (1998–2022). Using a keyword-based retrieval method, we identified approximately 34,000 climate change-related speech segments and applied large language models (LLMs) to classify them according to delay discourse categories. We compared zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, including variations with chain-of-thought reasoning, to evaluate LLM performance on complex rhetorical classification tasks. Few-shot prompting delivered promising results with respect to both recall and accuracy, while chain-of-thought reasoning provided limited benefits and, in some cases, harmed performance. Temporal and partisan analyses reveal that delay discourses have been consistently present in Danish political debate, with a marked increase in recent years. The most prevalent discourse, all talk, little action, reflects the gap between ambitious climate targets and policy implementation, particularly among governing parties. While right-leaning parties often shift responsibility away from Denmark, left-leaning and green parties more frequently invoke appeals to social justice. Our findings demonstrate both the promise and the limitations of LLMs for large-scale political discourse analysis and provide evidence that climate delay discourses are a routine part of Danish parliamentary debates.

This article introduces the concept of "blurring-boundary" to illustrate the ways Nestorianism adopted in Tang Dynasty to secure legal recognition and to conduct its localization within Chinese society. Through an analysis of the Nestorian Stele and the Zhixuan Anle Sutra, this paper demonstrates how Nestorianism expressed Christian doctrine by drawing on the linguistic structures and cosmological terms of Buddhism and Taoism, thereby gaining acceptance in the ideological system within Tang China. Unlike Buddhism's broad popular base and Islam's community-based mode for communication, Nestorianism adopted elite-targeted communication strategies aimed at the imperial and scholar-officialdom, emphasizing political obedience, metaphysical compatibility, and linguistic adaptation in its attempt to participate in the royal network dominated by Buddhism. Through comparative religious and political discourse analysis, this paper highlights a distinctly "non-confrontational" mode of religious adaptation that offers a new perspective on the mechanism of coexistence within dominant cultural systems.While this paper mainly focuses on textual strategies rather than practical networks, it aims to provide theoretical reference for future research on religious transmission and cultural boundary.

This article explores how “development” is discursively constructed and strategically mobilized in local political rhetoric in South Sulawesi through Derrida’s concept of différance and deconstructive semiotics. In recent regional elections, development has become a dominant rhetorical resource, with candidates invoking notions such as “progress,” “modernization,” and “prosperity” as central signifiers. Yet these terms rarely carry stable or measurable meanings; instead, their meaning is deferred to an uncertain future and adapted to shifting contexts. Using a qualitative, interpretive discourse-analytic approach, the study examines speeches, debate transcripts, campaign slogans, and visual materials from mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns in 2023–2024. The analysis maps key development signifiers, identifies recurring binary oppositions, and traces how différance appears through ambiguities, contradictions, and deferred meanings. The study finds that “development” operates as a floating, overdetermined signifier that enables politicians to occupy multiple discursive positions without clear accountability. The use of development rhetoric thus relies on strategic vagueness and temporal deferral. The article contributes theoretically by integrating différance into regional political discourse analysis and methodologically by demonstrating how deconstructive semiotics enriches critical discourse studies. Practically, it offers a critical lens for citizens, educators, and media practitioners to interrogate development narratives in local campaigns.

This study conducts a diachronic analysis of the strategic use of deliberate metaphors in President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 and 2025 inaugural addresses. While political oratory frequently employs metaphors to convey policy intentions and ideological stances, existing frameworks such as Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT)—which distinguishes between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor use—have been critiqued for lacking a concrete methodological approach to contextual analysis. To address this gap, this study integrates Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory (AT), which conceptualizes language use as a dynamic process of contextual adaptation. By applying this integrated DMT-AT analytical model to Trump’s two inaugural speeches, delivered at vastly different moments in his political career and in the nation’s history, this research investigates how and why specific metaphorical frames are deliberately recalibrated to achieve evolving communicative goals. The analysis reveals a systematic shift from metaphors of integrative, future-oriented nation-building in 2017 to metaphors of polarized conflict, existential threat, and historical restoration in 2025. These findings not only elucidate the pragmatic motivations behind strategic metaphorical choices in a consequential mode of political rhetoric but also demonstrate the explanatory potential of combining DMT with AT, thereby contributing to both metaphor theory and the analysis of contemporary political discourse.

This article is a critique of the research perspective that analyzes political myths based on the methods of the study of myths.The author points to the need to supplement this perspective with the Lacanian theory of fantasy, which allows for capture of subjective desire manifested in myths.Theories in the study of myths (of Lvi-Strauss and Barthes) conceptualize myth as an attempt to overcome the original antinomy of human experience by constructing a space of ahistorical meaning deprived of contradictions.Based on the analysis of classic study of myths texts and Marcin Napirkowski's work, the author points to a paradox within the methods of the study of myths: while it describes myth as a tool for getting rid of historical contradictions, it creates ahistorical, and therefore, mythologized, interpretative categories.Supplementing this method with the Lacanian theory of fantasy allows us to overcome this paradox by pointing to historicized interpretation of desire that is manifested in myths.

This paper analyses Zohran Mamdani's speech on his election victory using speech act theory, which focuses on the functions of political language as action rather than just a form of communication. The study aligns itself to the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) applying the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary perspective and the classification of speech acts used in the locutionary according to Searle (1969) assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations, respectively, the study has two objectives; firstly, to determine and categorise the speech acts used in the Mamdani address, and secondly, to analyse how these acts pragmatically enlist audiences and build political meaning. A qualitative discourse-analytic approach was used to transcribe and analyse the speech line by line to discover the pragmatic force of the utterances. These results demonstrate that Mamdani incorporates several speech acts in a stratified manner in his speech. Assertives are claims of ideological truth, and they include claims such as 'housing is a human right' and 'hope is alive'. Orders get the listeners into action and participation. Commissives are promises that would bind the speaker to rent freezes, free buses, and free childcare. The expressives are a sign of appreciation and accessibility that confirms marginalised groups and builds solidarity. Pragmatically, such acts create a sense of hope, build trust, and make passive listeners active participants in a movement. The placement of the speech of Mamdani into the context of a more general tradition of political discourse analysis extends the already existing literature with its emphasis on the role of expressives and directives at the grassroots level of mobilisation, and also innovative ways in which political meaning is generated by means of commitments expressed in a concrete, politically oriented commissive. Finally, the study ratifies the victory speech not only as a celebratory but also as a performative leadership gesture, a gesture of unity, and a gesture of change, with the power to transform political reality and empower the community.

The discussion on the return of the Marbles of the Parthenon of the Acropolis of Greece escalated during the years 2021 to 2022, when the Greek government of New Democracy initiated a new campaign for their relocation. Especially after the official state visit of the Greek Prime Minister to the United Kingdom on November 16, 2021, the discussion that was first initiated back in 1982 by the then Minister of Culture Melina Merkouri, reopened under a new framework. During the years after the pandemic and amid the 200-year anniversary of the Greek Independence, the Greek Government implemented a public diplomacy (PD) campaign to influence the British public opinion toward changing its attitudes and put pressure on the government to return the stolen Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. The issue of the Elgin Marbles is for both countries a matter of prestige, influence, and dominance. On the one hand, the British Museum’s international image as the “Museum of the British Empire” has a very strong interest in keeping the Marbles, whereas, the Greek government would gain a very positive evaluation in case it would succeed in relocating them. Times, however, and attitudes have changed both in museum practice and public opinion. This evolution helped in opening a space for a new framework of discussions on the matter. To this end, the Greek government planned a careful international PD campaign using different channels, methods, and discourses to persuade and put pressure on the British Government and Museum. By analyzing the campaign, it is possible to draw conclusions on how the two countries present and represent themselves in the international community regarding their culture, ethics, and self-images. The paper examines the PD aspects that were used by the Greek government for influencing the British (and global) public opinion during and after the official state visit of the Prime Minister. The method of analysis is qualitative content analysis and political discourse analysis in the speeches, interviews, and other methods of PD from 2021 to 2022.

This study explores the overlooked phenomenon of “political sungkeman “ as a culturally rooted yet politically strategic gesture performed by Prabowo Subianto toward Joko Widodo (Jokowi) during Indonesia’s 2019 and 2024 presidential elections. While symbolic gestures have been widely studied in global political communication, limited attention has been paid to how localized traditions like sungkeman are adapted to mitigate polarization and influence public perception in highly mediated electoral contexts. Utilizing a qualitative literature review combined with political discourse and media framing analysis, this study investigates the role of sungkeman through five analytical dimensions: political reconciliation, cultural symbolism, image strategy, public response, and media narrative. The findings reveal that sungkeman is employed as a calculated political communication tool that evokes familiarity, fosters reconciliation at the elite level, and helps craft a respectful public image. However, public reactions remain divided along cultural, social, and political lines, reflecting tensions between perceived sincerity and performative intent. The widespread use of digital platforms and entertainment politics further amplifies or challenges the authenticity of this gesture. This research contributes to the theoretical development of political semiotics by providing a culturally specific case from the Global South, demonstrating how traditional practices are repurposed for modern political goals. The implications extend to the broader discourse on democracy, suggesting that culturally resonant communication can foster national unity, but only when grounded in genuine accountability and transparent leadership.

ABSTRACT John Pocock, Istvan Hont, and scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment have profoundly shaped how historians understand eighteenth-century debates about commerce and ‘commercial society’. Their influential interpretations – ranging from republican anxieties about corruption to the political-economic dynamics of trade and state power – continue to frame the field. This paper takes these positions as analytical starting points and examines them computationally. Using the largest existing corpus of eighteenth-century printed publications, we extract and model large-scale linguistic patterns to test three hypotheses about the discursive relationship of commerce to other topics of political thought. Against the backdrop of overall ‘commercialisation’ of political thought taking place, the evidence aligns most strongly with Hont’s account of ‘jealousy of trade’, in which commerce is entwined with foreign rivalry and power-political concerns. Pocockian republican scepticism receives more limited support, and the broader Scottish Enlightenment narrative is only weakly reflected at scale. By situating early modern authors within these wider discursive structures, the paper demonstrates how computational methods can clarify, modify, and challenge established historiographical interpretations.

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to analyse the discussions held during the First Argentinean Congress of Physical Education in 1943, with a particular focus on the construction of discourses and meanings surrounding professional training and associationism within Argentine physical education. This event was organised in Buenos Aires in December by the Association of Physical Education Teachers (Asociación de Profesores de Educación Física), the most significant teacher union of the discipline in the country until the mid-1950s. This Association offers a significant opportunity to understand the historical development of Argentine physical culture in a broader social and political context. The present study adopts a flexible, non-experimental, qualitative research approach, employing Political Discourse Analysis to understand a variety of historical primary sources, including the bulletins of the First Argentinean Congress on Physical Education and articles from the Argentine press. This academic event is regarded as a space that facilitates the identification of shared narratives, prevailing logics of meaning, and a certain transnationalisation of disciplinary ideas. In this sense, the Congress can be considered the effect of socially available discourses, and therefore allows for the articulation and consolidation of certain signifiers and not others. These narratives functioned as guidelines, biotypes, and meanings for the configuration of a national and continental disciplinary matrix. This suggests that the APEF, through the Congress, sought to federalise Physical Education, as well as consolidate associative networks and internationalise the ways of educating bodies in Latin America.

This paper presents a hybrid architecture for automatic sentiment analysis of Kazakh-language political discourse. The Kazakh language is characterized by an agglutinative structure, a complex word-formation system, and the limited availability of digital resources, which significantly complicates the application of standard neural network approaches. To account for these characteristics, a multi-level system was developed that combines morphological and syntactic analysis rules, ontological relationships between political concepts, and multilingual representations of the XLM-R model, used in zero-shot mode. A corpus of 12,000 sentences was annotated for sentiment polarity and used for training and evaluation, while Universal Dependencies annotation was applied for morpho-syntactic analysis. Rule-based components compensate for errors related to affixation variability, modality, and directive constructions. An ontology comprising over 300 domain concepts ensures the correct interpretation of set expressions, terms, and political actors. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid architecture outperforms both neural network baseline models and purely rule-based solutions, achieving Macro-F1 = 0.81. Ablation revealed that the contribution of modules is unevenly distributed: the ontology provides +0.04 to Macro-F1, the UD syntax +0.08, and the rule-based module +0.11. The developed system forms an interpretable and robust assessment of tonality, emotions, and discursive strategies in political discourse, and also creates a basis for further expansion of the corpus, additional training of models, and the application of hybrid methods to other tasks of analyzing low-resource languages.

In Nigeria, there is a concubinage relationship between religion, state and politicians. The structural dynamic is such that ‘purely’ religious calculations must contend with ethno-regional and sectional preferences. Previous studies on religion and political mobilization have shown the struggle for state power by religious leaders in the pre and post-independent years as well as a detailed study in the fourth republic. However, there remains a gap in the literature regarding the active involvement of religious clerics speaking as Divine agents of God with a particular message for the masses as to who they should vote. The aim of this paper is to investigate the active role religious clerics played in the 2023 general elections in Nigeria by assessing their messages in favour of their choice aspirant. How was religion weaponized in the articulation of campaign messages and what was the role of religious Clerics in Nigeria during the last presidential elections? How did presidential aspirants resort to religion for political mobilization? Religious Clerics charged their members to vote their faith and thus, the direction of this paper suits the appropriation and mobilization of religious messages by clerics with their strategies in the Nigerian political terrain in 2023. This will be explored through qualitative research methods. This study applies a socio-religious approach in its methodology. It relies on surveys and content analysis of political discourses and religious teachings found in books, audio sermons/ messages, published books, articles and newspapers. The study concludes that religious devotion and messaging is a major determinants of electoral outcomes in Nigeria.

A Political Discourse Analysis in the Iraqi Parliamentary Elections at Al-Anbar Governorate

This study addresses a significant gap in political discourse analysis by conducting a fine-grained pragmatic examination of the speech act of threatening, focusing specifically on the under-researched strategies of implicit coercion and plausible deniability. The primary research objective is to elucidate how threatening illocutionary acts are constructed, communicated, and legitimized within a populist framework. To this end, the study poses the following research questions: How are explicit and implicit threats linguistically encoded? What pragmatic and rhetorical strategies facilitate threat mitigation or amplification? And how do these strategies function to shape political action and in-group identity? The research design employs a qualitative pragmatic analysis grounded in an integrated theoretical framework of Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969), Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995). This tripartite model enables a layered investigation of the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions of threat production. The dataset consists of ten strategically selected excerpts from Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, chosen for their pragmatic salience and relevance to the subsequent Capitol riot. The findings reveal that Trump’s rhetoric relies predominantly on implicit threat strategies—such as off-record intimations and presuppositional assertions—to maintain plausible deniability while mobilizing followers. Key strategies identified include the blending of commissive pledges (vows of resistance) with directive commands (calls to action), often amplified through hyperbole, metaphor, and dichotomous framing ("us vs. them"). Crucially, the analysis demonstrates how positive politeness strategies (e.g., inclusive "we") foster in-group solidarity, while bald-on-record face-threatening acts delegitimize opponents. A central finding is the pervasive use of victim-perpetrator reversal, which morally reframes aggression as righteous self-defense. The study concludes that the pragmatics of threatening in Trump’s discourse is not merely instrumental but constitutive, shaping a political reality where democratic norms are subverted and extra-legal action is legitimized. This research underscores the critical role of pragmatic analysis in decoding the latent power of political language and its capacity to weaponize grievance.

The article examines the cultural and historical archetype of “Japheth’s Strength” through the lens of V. Lypynskii’s concept of statehood, analysing its relevance for contemporary Ukraine. The role of historical archetypes in shaping national identity, mythos, and the functioning of political institutions amid postmodern crisis realities – particularly within the context of the Russian – Ukrainian war is investigated. The study employs a historical-hermeneutic and archetypal-mythological methodology, supplemented by a comparative analysis of modern Ukrainian political discourse. The focus is placed on the “Japheth’s Strength” and its counterpart, the “Ham’s Strength” exploring their influence on national consciousness, political culture, and the potential for these archetypes to foster social cohesion and overcome societal fragmentation. The paper reveals that the archetype of “Japheth’s Strength” can serve as a foundation for cultivating new national elite responsible for state-building, moral leadership, and civic solidarity. At the same time, the research underscores the necessity of reinterpreting this archetype within the postmodern context, characterised by fluid hierarchies and plural identities that require innovative approaches to governance and citizen engagement. The study concludes that institutional reforms are essential for integrating the concept of “Japheth’s Strength” into Ukraine’s current political framework – particularly through educational and informational reforms, enhanced civic participation, and support for cultural initiatives aimed at nurturing a renewed and resilient national consciousness.

by American linguist Zellig Harris, Discourse Analysis. Since then, discourse has gradually established itself as a central object of study within the language sciences, particularly from the 1980s onwards, when the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole was articulated with contributions from rhetoric, argumentation, and pragmatics. Far from being limited to a simple textual description, discourse analysis is conceived as a critical and interdisciplinary approach aimed at shedding light on the complex relationships between language, social context, and communicative action. Within this framework, political discourse analysis occupies a privileged place due to its close connection with the dynamics of legitimation and transformation of power. The notion of ethos plays a central role here, serving as a guiding thread in the interpretation of political discourse. Inherited from ancient rhetoric but constantly updated, this theoretical category has been extensively revisited by scholars such as Patrick Charaudeau, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Amossy. In this article, we will present their main contributions in order to show how the study of ethos can be applied in a precise and rigorous way to the analysis of political discourse like Marine Le Pen’s one.

This article examines the intertwining of migration with identity formation and state power policies in Türkiye and Russia. These two similar political structures have historically mobilized narratives of belonging and exclusion to demarcate their national imaginaries. Drawing on constructivist and post-structuralist theoretical frameworks, this study conceptualizes migration discourse as a constitutive field through which political elites continually articulate the boundaries of national membership and hierarchies of otherness. In Türkiye, migrants are situated within the discursive frameworks of "religious solidarity" and "hospitality," while in Russia, especially Central Asian migrants are simultaneously represented as indispensable economic actors and culturally alien subjects. These strategies demonstrate how each state manages identity through a complex interplay of inclusivity and otherness. Using a comparative discourse analysis of political discourse, media representations, and legal instruments, the study argues that migration governance in both contexts operates as a discursive arena in which issues of sovereignty, legitimacy, and nationhood are constantly negotiated, beyond their demographic and economic dimensions. Ultimately, the article concludes that migration narratives function as state legitimization mechanisms, reproduce exclusionary national myths, and that contemporary states redesign concepts of belonging and identity within the global circulation of people and meaning. Although there are many other parameters in the realpolitik of both countries regarding migration and its consequences, this study has been prepared within the confines of the theoretical framework. The main question of this study explores the ways in which Türkiye and Russia employ migration narratives in order to reinforce national identity, justify state authority and define the boundaries of belonging through dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.