Discursive Act Research Articles

Rancière reading Plato: Myth against sociology

This article examines how Rancière contrasts Plato’s philosophy with sociology, specifically that of Bourdieu and Passeron. In The Philosopher and His Poor, Plato is among those who exclude the majority not only from political power but also from thought and discourse. However, Rancière uses the Republic’s founding myth of inequality to identify the arbitrary basis behind the circular reasoning that justifies thought’s legitimate and illegitimate use based on alleged nature. Can Platonic myth constitute what Rancière terms a ‘discursive act’, which triggers political conflict, that is, the debate on equality as first presupposition? This study of Rancière’s Platonic reference examines the conditions under which philosophical myth can challenge sociology. The emancipatory use of myth involves reconfiguring our concepts of science and society and any notion of nature while scholarly discourse is hinged on processes of social othering that align it with the repressive order of social hierarchy. The comparison between Plato and Bourdieu, as analyzed through Rancière’s critique, reveals a fundamental divergence in their approach to societal structures. According to Rancière, all explanations tend to naturalize, whereas the only correct approach is to emphasize the total absence of any foundation for hierarchy. This problem has epistemological implications: how can we construct a discourse that does not reproduce the exceptionality of authorized speech? On this condition, one can catch a glimpse of the collective and temporal extent of Rancière’s resolute commitment to equality. Taking seriously a definition of the social as a series of perceptual rearrangements allows us to question the anti-institutional limit of Rancière’s thinking.

The semantics of language in Eugène Ionesco’s plays

The goal of this paper is to present the characteristics of Eugène Ionesco’s dramatic texts, a reason why the genre of avant-garde and theatre of the absurd are also considered, with a view to revealing their major ways of functioning. By pointing out the different dimensions of dramatic language, the emphasis is on those elements that differ from current oral and written language. Starting from the times of decadentism, a crisis of character can be noted in the theater around a type of individual who, as an alienated individual, cannot find his identity in a hostile surrounding world. One of the direct consequences of this crisis will be the impossibility of interpersonal communication, which will be best demonstrated with the concept and tenets of the theater of the absurd. In this context, the study of the theater of the 20th century is done from the perspective of cognitive semantics, as an autonomous level of language. The approach is organised around two notions: dramatic conventions and the actual language of the dramatic texts. The interpretative theory rooted in semantics is applied while analysing Ionesco’s short plays. The starting point is the linguistics of the text as described by Eugen Coşeriu. Capturing the meaning and the means by which it is constructed is one of the objectives in accord with the main principles of cognitive linguistics. The way of analysing the meaning in a text is given by the presence of some textual functions, as possibilities provided by language through relationships that the linguistic sign establishes in the discursive act. The specificity of the discourse comes from the combination of verbal and non-verbal elements, in order to highlight the playwright’s original style. The particularities of this type of language based on an ontological representation of the actional nature in human existence are also investigated. There are two dimensions recognisable in the language of literature: one is specific to the genre and the other one is particular, giving originality and uniqueness. The textual meaning in between these dimensions needs to be reconstructed from all their constituents identifiable at different levels of analysis. Ionesco distanced himself from the conventional and traditional theatre, finding a new formula for the dramatic genre in his own vision of what drama should be like. Ionesco’s dramatic work includes short plays and extensive plays in which the author expresses his adversity against totalitarian regimes. He is the representative of the theater of the absurd and anti-theater. The corpus for this research is composed mainly of the plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chairs, the most representative plays for the avant-garde spirit, short plays on the theme of language emptied of meaning and non-communication. Language has an impact on thinking and the resulting actions, which relates it to the ontology of human existence. As dramatic language is preponderently structured on dialogical interactions (and less on monologues, soliloquies and asides), its essence can be revealed by decomposing and recomposing them, from the angle of the conventions specific to the dramatic genre. The analysis of the selected fragments from the corpus has the role to highlight their semantic features in terms of conceptual representations.

Beyond ‘Lulz' and ‘Keyboard warriors': exploring the relationship between trolling and radicalization

ABSTRACT Despite the similar psychological profiles of internet trolls and radicalized political actors, as well as the historical connections between trolling and the alt-right, little research has studied how trolling corresponds with the process of radicalization. Our study examines this relationship between trolling and radicalization by interrogating two pieces of folk wisdom about internet trolls, that they only care about ‘the lulz’ and that they are merely ‘keyboard warriors.’ Using the issue of racial inequality in the United States as a case study, we ask whether someone’s enjoyment of trolling is affected by their attitudes about racial inequality as well as whether those who enjoy trolling are more likely to engage in politically motivated activist and radical activities related to their views about race. Based on a nationally representative survey (N = 739), our study finds that those who enjoy the discursive act of trolling also intend to participate in other forms of political engagement, including both activist and radical activities. Overall, our findings reveal significant overlaps between trolling, activism, and radical activities when it comes to the topic of racial inequality, demonstrating the value of considering discursive acts like trolling within the broader context of studying the adoption of extremist ideologies and actions.

Multimodal metapragmatics of German advertising discourse

The article analyzes metacommunicative utterances in German advertising discourse, which proves the possibility of integrating metapragmatics with multimodal pragmatics. Metapragmatics studies metacommunication, i. e. the organization and management of speech interaction by means of linguistics. Multimodal pragmatics focuses on the properties of linguistic units in discourse types, which are based on the combination of several sensory and communicative modes. Multimodal metacommunicative utterances use combination of several sensory and communicative modes to express meanings regarding the course of communication itself. German advertising discourse shows two types of metacommunicative utterances according to the criterion of authorship: protagonist’s and advertiser’s comments. The protagonist’s comments are about his speech act and about himself. The advertiser’s comments are about the protagonist, utilitarian information, image and product quality. Metacommunicative utterances can be placed in almost all structural parts of the advertising text: visual context, title, subtitle, main text, slogans, enter utilitarian information and be integrated into the product image or logo. Serving as a local strategy for attracting and maintaining contact with the recipient, metacommunicative utterances belong to perlocutionary intensifiers, which aim to increase their influence on him in order to achieve perlocutionary success – to encourage the recipient to buy a product or use a service. At the same time, a discursive act of metacommunicative contactive is realized, which can be explicit or implicit. The indicating devices of its explicitness are: lexemes of locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary and epistemic semantics; prepositions, pronominal adverbs and pronouns that correlate in terms of content with the previous or following utterances; graphic means of direct speech. If such indicating devices are not available, the metacommunicative utterance implements an implicit metacommunicative contactive, where the metacommunicative component of meaning is contained in the implicature. From a structural point of view, metacommunicative utterances are declarative, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative sentences, as well as parenthetical phrases.

Attitude Realization in Omicron News Reporting: Appraisal in Critical Discourse Analysis

News production is a discursive act and a value-laden process through which media reports social issues using various stances to articulate certain ideologies. However, how reporters construct their stance and relationship with their readers has yet to significantly be an object of systematic investigation. This study sheds some light on the attitude of The Jakarta Post towards the spread of Omicron to reveal the media’s stances and ideological positions, in which certain interests play a role in discourse production. The principles of appraisal system and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) were deployed to examine 25 news articles about Omicron. The results reveal how language construes attitude and enables writers to position themselves evaluatively in certain aspects. While politically it deploys attitudinal resources to portray its neutral position, economically The Jakarta Post discloses itself as a media that accommodates its plural readers to maximize advertising revenue and reading traffic. This ideological stance is interpreted in light of the socio-political dimension that shapes news reporting.

Multifunctionality of mas ‘but’ in Portuguese

Hengeveld/Mackenzie (2008: 52) consider that the constructions with mas ‘but’ result from the combination of two Discursive Acts with different communicative statutes, there being a Nuclear Discursive Act, with greater communicative weight, and a Subsidiary Discursive Act, which will have a rhetorical function named “Concession”. This paper aims to investigate the various uses of mas ‘but’, according to Functional Discourse Grammar, in order to determine the pragmatic, semantic, and morphosyntactic properties of each case in real occurrences of Portuguese. The combination of linguistic units through mas ‘but’ always indicates interpersonal strategies, which are differentiated by the communicative intention of the speaker as well as reflected in the layer involved. However, mas maintains the capacity to attribute the most salient status of information to the unit it scopes or operates on. We identified four uses of mas ‘but’ in different layers: Move Operator in the Move layer, Emphasis Operator and Concession rhetorical function in the Discursive Act layer, and the Contrast pragmatic function in the Communicated Content layer.

Modern Academic Discourse and the Typology of the Тext in Theory and Practice (a Comparative Study of the Abstract Genre)

This article discusses the abstract as a typological genre as well as the components that comprise its structure and content. Abstract writing as a discursive act is viewed from two angles: internationally and from within the isolation of national perspectives. Comparing the development of the genre within and beyond a single linguistic culture, the article describes the different approaches to the genre in Western and Russian research. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of such categories as textuality and “cultural markedness” and discusses the main characteristics of the genre in relation to the lingua franca. Through a close reading and comparative analysis of student abstracts, the article examines 1) mistakes occurring in these abstracts in order to make inferences about the typological features of the genre, and 2) specific structural and content components against the backdrop of the lingua franca in order to draw conclusions about the structure of the genre. This analysis reveals discrepancies between the structural components of the text and the transfer of the general meaning of the text as well as textual lacunae in the matrix of the genre of another linguistic culture. It subdivides the genre of specific types of texts according to their structure and content, and also identifies the precedent genre in Russian and English linguistic culture. Furthermore, it argues that an ethnomethodology should include information about the specificity of the genre within contemporary academic discourse. The article recommends further research in the following areas: divergences from norms within the genre; optional components in the typology of the text and national academic discourse; a three-tier model for analyzing the genre in the foreign-language classroom: the language being studied — the native language — the lingua franca.

Câteva aspecte privind dificultățile de comunicare în limba română ale studenților străini

"In the process of learning the Romanian language the foreign students may encounter various difficult grammatical problems, because language mistakes are an integral part of the process of learning a foreign language. Among the effective ways to approach the difficulties of the Romanian language for foreign students are the structured dialogue on a certain theme, targeted exercises based on grammatical problems, free compositions as a basis for vocabulary development. Oral and written communication is an important component of the realization of the discursive act and the act of communication, all the more so as notions related to speech acts and sometimes non-verbal communication or certain cultural skills are introduced (politeness formulas, registers of the language, ways of communication depending on the environment/context). The organization of the teaching-learning process of the difficulties of the Romanian language as a foreign language is one of the main problems that the specialists in the field still have to deal with"

Peripheries of Narration and Spatial Poetics in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

This study explores narratological aspects and tools that are employed in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone within the framework of a postcolonial narratology. Postcolonial narratology directs its attention to the representation of the peripheral and the marginalized within the scope of narratorial investigation. There will be some considerations regarding the representation of focal and voiceless characters, the function of the implied author, authorial audience as well as multiple narrators or representing voices. The deployment of multitopicality in The Moonstone brings forth the issue of marginalization predicated on colonizer/colonized relationships. Spatial poetics in the novel functions in a way in which despite the myriad of settings that constitute the story, narrative discourse privileges some places while putting the others into the peripheries. The concept of space in the narrative proves to be active, fluid and purposeful rather than being passive, static or innocent as in the status of a background setting. Alongside temporal-spatial aspects, narratological presentation of the characters also plays a fundamental role in relation to power dynamics and the issue of representation. In the same vein, it is manifest that not only the description of space and characters but also the placement of multiple narrators and authorial audience concurrently contribute to the treatment of imperial ideologies. As part of the implied author’s scheme, the narrators’ act of narration is flawed and ideologically loaded rather than consistent or neutral. All these narratological clues in the novel attest to the idea that narration is always a discursive act.

What’s in a name? Crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in multilingual Indonesia

ABSTRACT This paper explores crisis communication during the pandemic in multilingual Indonesia. Crisis communication during the pandemic is a discursive act of sense-making in responding to the pandemic. As Asia’s pandemic epicentre, Indonesia provides a fascinating setting to enhance the discussion between crisis communication and multilingualism because of its pandemic response and indigenous linguistic diversity and its tension with the national and international language. We employ critical discourse analysis in identifying the linguistic and discursive practices of crisis communication found in speeches and public statements made by relevant political leaders and policy documents. By using Fairclough’s concepts of ‘word meaning’, ‘wording’, ‘re-wording’, ‘over-wording’, and ‘metaphor’, we examine the changing mobility constraint terms and keywords in pandemic policies and speeches. Our findings on the inconsistent mobility constraint terms, confusing pandemic keywords and unempathetic metaphors used in public speeches have provided linguistic evidence of the ineffective pandemic response and crisis communication. The analysis draws attention to the importance of consistent and empathetic communication in crisis management.

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

Gender Discourses in Positioning Indonesian Female Migrant Workers

Indonesian female migrant workers are a group that has over time experienced physical, psychological, and verbal violence in their jobs in foreign countries. The story presented of the struggles of this subordinated group of women remains one-sided and incomplete. The untold part of the story are the experiences they have encountered domestically from within their own country, Indonesia. This article argues that the subordinated position of Indonesian female migrant workers is initially created and strongly reinforced through the discrimination they face within specific social settings in the Indonesian context. One such social setting is at Indonesian international airports. Indonesian international airports are where the female migrant workers are positioned as “others”; rules put in place and their enforcement by airport officials and other passengers show the exclusion of female migrant workers from Indonesian society. Such positioning is an act of discrimination, exploitation, and exercise of power. This study examines what discourses are used in positioning these Indonesian female migrant workers in Soekarno Hatta International Airport, Jakarta. The authors argue, using research data and gender theories, that the positioning of Indonesian female migrant workers is a discursive act. It is committed by various individuals, particularly those (in the power system) that have the position of “we” and “us”, to preserve the social classes, which have become normalized throughout Indonesian history. The research found that the discrimination against female migrant workers is strongly connected to their social class. Although they have financial capital, their position is considered lower than other people in the airport, which creates multiple forms of discrimination, from material to symbolic discrimination and stereotypes.

DISCOURSE AND DISQUALIFICATION

Abstract A commonly expressed sentiment in contemporary political discourse is that bigotry should be disqualifying. In this paper, I consider how this sentiment might be formulated into a more precise moral principle. After identifying problems with several candidate formulations, I suggest the version of the principle that best captures the expression’s intended meaning. I then consider the principle’s justifiability, its value as a decision-procedure, and its power as a discursive act.

Othering within the Islamist Spectrum: Ennahda and the Political Salafists in Tunisia

Abstract While research on Islamist moderation has paid considerable attention to cross-ideological cooperation, it has barely explored whether and how the moderation of Islamist parties is related to interactions inside the Islamist spectrum. We attempt to bridge this gap by using othering as a theoretical-analytical lens with which to analyze the interplay between Ennahda’s moderation and the party’s relations to the political Salafists in Tunisia. We argue that the discursive act of othering the political Salafists has helped Ennahda construct itself both as a moderate, democratic actor representing the ‘true’ version of Tunisian Islam and as an effective and reliable political force. Moreover, while the concept of othering has barely been systematically applied to intra-Islamist relations, we show that it constitutes a fine-grained tool with which to study Islamist moderation in the context of intra-Islamist competition.

Location, Location, Locution: Why it Matters Where We Say What We Say

This paper addresses educators’ responsibility for the discourse (including their own and others’) that circulates in educational settings. This issue tends to arise especially with hurtful language and other discursive acts that have negative effects, and that require an apology, correction, or some other kind of remedial discourse. The paper frames this “discursive responsibility” as particularly contingent on location, arguing that when educators address their own or others’ discourse, the response needs to be at a level of publicity that is the same as, or as similar as possible to, the discursive act it responds to.

Interiorization and Internalization as Repressive Practices of the Subject Formation

The article examines the problem of the subject power formation through the prism of structuralist methodology. The subjection concept is used to denote the process of subjectness repressive articulation. Subjection is defined as the discursive act of implanting power into a person and the transformation of this external power into internal subjectness and individual subjective features. Two forms of subjection are distinguished: interiorization and internalization. We made a theoretical analysis to identify the essential differences of these forms in this article. It has been established that interiorization is a rational process of subject formation through awareness, assimilation and reproduction of the external influence of social structures, and internalization is an unconscious process of subject formation through unconditional acceptance, assimilation and reproduction of the external influence of social structures. It is noted that, being independent mental processes, interiorization and internalization may not be repressive forms of subjection, but only represent the most general mechanism for the formation of internal structures of the psyche. We can talk about them as subjective processes only when the result of the subject’s activity is already in the language or social practice. Thus, the article confirms the paradox of reference in the issue of subjectness formation: the subject does not exist before the fact of its subjection, but is the result of power formation.

Representations of Students in Composition Scholarship

Using methods from corpus linguistics, the author argues that the practice of making knowledge in composition studies is bound with the discursive act of representing students. Students are represented both in ways that align with disciplinary knowledge about writing and in ways that align with major intellectual shifts in composition studies.

Visualization, participation and rhetoric: The discursive power of landscape design representations in participatory processes

Visual landscape design representations facilitate communication and knowledge exchange during participatory planning and design processes. The production of representations is considered to be a discursive act: actors and institutions construct knowledge with a certain authority and credibility through the use of visual expression. We aim to study the context in which the production of representations is embedded and how this context manifests itself in the communicative qualities of design representations. We present a visual discourse analysis of landscape design representations, employing empirical examples from the transdisciplinary design competition Rebuild by Design. The analysis uncovers interdependencies among three components of the visual discourse: the arrangement of participatory processes, media interactivity and the visual rhetoric embedded in the composition and style of the image. A conscious use of these discursive components could help prevent miscommunication, manage participant expectations and increase the validity of participatory design process outcomes.

Violência discursiva, argumentação e memória no cenário político brasileiro: a (des)virtuosidade do discurso público

Além dos tão corriqueiros insultos, calúnias e difamações, comuns no período eleitoral, temos acompanhado o aumento de casos de violência explícita, pelo/do discurso, que tendem a fomentar ações e reações reais de violência física pela população. Pode-se dizer que um dos motivos para esse crescimento é o poder persuasivo do discurso e a falta de comprometimento ético por parte dos sujeitos em geral, mas em especial dos agentes políticos, em ajustar seus discursos pelo parâmetro ético da democracia. Nesse sentido, este artigo pretende problematizar os limites éticos do discurso público, lançando luzes sobre a importância de analisar não só o ato discursivo em si, isolado, mas também o agente do ato (PERELMAN; OLBRECHTS-TYTECA, 2005), em busca de uma mais bem adequada atividade hermenêutica. Para tanto, analiso o enunciado “vamos fuzilar a petralhada…” por meio da noção de virtude discursiva, proposta por Marie-Anne Paveau (2015) e, ao final, aponto para a necessidade de compreensão da responsabilidade (BAKHTIN, 1993) de cada agente como condição para o exercício ético e democrático da palavra pública no Brasil.

‘The right hybrid for every acre’: Assembling the social worlds of corn and soy seed‐selling in conventional agricultural techniques

AbstractThis article looks to better understand seed‐selling assemblages between top‐10 agricultural companies and conventional farmers in the US Midwest by looking to the often ignored participants connecting these groups. Data for this research are drawn from 12 qualitative, on‐site interviews with participants identifying as seed dealers or agronomists who live and work in Northeast Kansas and Northwest Missouri, an agricultural region dominated by the soybean and corn agriculture that has also become ubiquitous in European and global contexts over the last half‐century. This project arises out of assemblage‐thinking approaches to re‐see the social relations between agronomists and agricultural seed. This research suggests that the convergence between genetically engineering hybrid seed stock and the discursive act of marketing that seed stock together coproduces a flexible materiality which is far from discreet or static. Because of this, transitional actors, the seed dealers and agronomists who buy and sell such seeds have unexpectedly outsized clout when considering the agentic capacity of members in conventional agriculture assemblages. By engaging with community members and farmer‐clients, seed dealers co‐produce the worlds and meanings of hybrid seeds and conventional agriculture. This paper explores these relations and considers their implications for imagining more environmentally sustainable futures.