Discursive Approach Research Articles

Exploring NGOs-government collaboration strategies in institutionalising child-centred disaster resilience and climate change adaptation

Child-centred disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation have gained traction through projects and programs implemented by various actors worldwide. However, there remains a lack of understanding of their longer-term impact and influence on policy and practice at different levels of governance. This longitudinal research examines the processes of mainstreaming child-centred disaster risk reduction (DRR) and school safety programs at various levels. The data collection methods included participatory workshops, focus group discussions, and participant observations collected in 2008 and 2019. The findings suggest that the existence of local disaster regulation and mainstream institutions does not serve as a legitimate predictor for how likely governments adopt child-centred DRR and sustain school safety policy implementation. By adopting hybrid and combining approaches to DRR institutionalisation, NGOs and governments have collaboratively combined various strategies, including local regulatory change, incentives, nudging, and coercive and discursive approaches.

Critical language awareness through advocacy: Disrupting deficit discourse through simulation in L2 writing teacher education

Second language specialists are often called on to advocate for multilingual learners (MLs), particularly in response to deficit views of MLs’ writing. Such advocacy necessitates critical language awareness (CLA) in regard to issues of equity, power, and ideology that intersect with the lives of MLs on a daily basis. However, little is known about how advocacy interactions actually occur in real time. To document advocacy-related discourse, our study explores an innovative virtual simulation approach in which participants discuss ML writing samples with a teacher-colleague (in the form of an avatar) who is extremely focused on “errors” and employs deficit-oriented discourses about ML student work. Focusing on discursive approaches and footings, we documented how 42 English as a Second Language endorsement candidates engaged with this simulation and leveraged (or not) critical language awareness in their advocacy efforts. We identified three main approaches participants took up in these interactions: (1) conceptual, (2) strategic, and (3) developmental. We illustrate these approaches through case studies of three focal participants, documenting how CLA can be operationalized across different approaches to ML writing advocacy.

‘How the other half lives’?: Taking a critical approach to the social psychology of economic inequality and extreme wealth

AbstractThe negative impact of economic inequality on social issues and wellbeing is of importance to social psychology that historically has an interest in social justice. Social Identity Theory is explored as an approach that acknowledges the wider context of social issues. The use of experiments encounters challenges in categorizing wealth and how individuals account for extreme wealth. Mainstream research agendas in psychology are not neutral and draw upon current ideology (such as neoliberalism) that can often maintain inequality. These difficulties are addressed by Critical Social Psychology driven by a social justice agenda that challenges the acceptance of neoliberal values. The application of Critical Social Psychology to wealth inequality is demonstrated with research using UK media data. Critical feminist psychology is discussed to explore the role of class and how to challenge the stigmatization of working‐class people. Finally, this paper outlines how Discursive Psychology addresses how extreme wealth and the practices of the super‐rich are warranted. A discursive approach questions the acceptance of wealth inequality as an everyday assumption and demonstrates how dominant discourse draws upon individualism. Furthermore, Discursive Psychology has examined how accountability for problematic practices, such as tax avoidance that maintain inequality, are managed in media broadcasts.

Historical changes in politeness norms

Abstract Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders’ own understandings – that is, French people living in Finland and Finns who live or have lived in France – my study lies within the framework of a discursive approach, and draws upon data from five focus-group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis. My study shows that the different forms of government, levels of urbanisation and branches of Christianity reportedly influenced differences in Finnish and French politeness. Yet, during participants’ stays in these respective countries, an affinity towards politeness was described as stemming from globalisation. Future research should examine if the frames of expectations of politeness in Europe are generally moving closer towards one another.

ANALYSIS DISCURSIVA ABOUT DYSLEXIA: ITS NUANCES AND THE DAMAGE CAUSED IN THE LEARNING PROCESS

This study aims to make a discursive approach about dyslexia, its nuances and the damage caused in the learning process, as well as to show that teachers need to be aware that patients with this disorder have specific difficulties in cognitive processing and take a longer time and differentiated pace to learn. It was also seen with this research that the brain is not only able to produce new neurons, but also to respond to stimuli of the environment, with a learning that has to do with modifications linked to experience and modifications that are the expression of intentional plasticity. It can also be seen that the difficulty of learning is not an isolated situation and that, often, an evaluation and diagnosis of specialists are necessary for the treatment of disorders of this nature. Thus, family and school must walk together and the teacher be the mediator of the entire educational process for the success of dyslexic student learning.

Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach, edited by Pierre Ostiguy, Francisco Panizza, and Benjamin Moffitt

Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach, edited by Pierre Ostiguy, Francisco Panizza, and Benjamin Moffitt

Populist Discourse beyond the Borders

Abstract Following the 2016 US elections, populism as a political discourse tactic surged worldwide and became critically examined by scholars as result of the anti-establishment rhetoric used throughout the Trump campaign. Yet despite the considerable amount of scholarly attention dedicated to this topic, its international dimension and ability to transcend beyond national borders has been rarely studied. To fill the lacuna in the literature on populism, in this article we examine how populist discourse is construed by leaders in an effort to appeal to an audience beyond their national borders. In doing so we examine the speeches and political rhetoric of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Venezuela’s former president Hugo Chavez’s, both of which demonstrate obvious examples of populist narratives. We adopt a qualitative discursive approach to identify salient populist rhetoric in the speeches of both leaders, which ultimately create divisions over identity and politics among citizenry and in many instances create such divides within the international arena.

Linguistic and Communicative Practices in the US Military’s Response to the COVID-19 Emergency

There has been debate on the language used by the media and the government in communicating about the pandemic emergency (Kranert et al. 2020; Cardinale 2021; Kalkman 2021). One of the main criticisms lies in their extensive use of “military metaphors”, a common trend in healthcare discourse (Nie et al. 2016; Parsi 2016). In truth, the US military avoids such aggressive language in favor of a more positive professional discursive approach (Parcell and Webb 2015), with greater focus on the support and implementation of clear, structured pandemic emergency plans. As a result, the military has managed to maintain its activity and a relatively low fatality rate while becoming a model of containment in certain areas (Nevitt 2020). The study will adopt the CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis) methodology to analyze a corpus of military press articles and Department of Defense resources. It will draw qualitative insights on productive discourse patterns of military and governmental authorities, while empirically confirming or questioning such insights. In doing so, the study aims at highlighting alternative linguistic strategies that may be productively used in civilian emergency communication.

Occupational Health and Safety during COVID-19: A Cross-National Comparison of Discursive and Communication Practices in Italy and the US

This paper examines legal communication in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) discourse and investigates the rhetorical strategies implemented at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper focuses on a dataset of legal provisions introduced as emergency legislation – measures adopted to tackle unprecedented circumstances – in Italy and the US, in order to identify commonalities and differences when informing the general public of the measures laid down particularly to protect workers in the workplace. This paper is intended to contribute to research in discourse analysis in OHS, an area of expertise which has been given fresh momentum since the onset of the pandemic. The decision to examine Italian and US emergency legislation was made in consideration of the cultural and legal differences between the two countries, which give rise to a number of discursive approaches to emergency management.

Nǐ kànzhe bàn ba: negotiating complaint solutions in e-shopping service encounters

Abstract In Mandarin Chinese, the expression nǐ kànzhe bàn ba can be employed in either ‘you-decide use’ (you assess and decide by yourself), whereby the speaker disclaims his/her deontic authority to the recipient in decision-making, or ‘I-claim use’ (you have to assess and decide cautiously), whereby he/she claims a higher degree of deontic authority than the recipient when determining a proposed action. Focusing on the ‘I-claim use’ of nǐ kànzhe bàn ba, this study examines how this expression is manipulated by customers to negotiate solutions for their complaints with customer service representatives in Chinese e-shopping platforms. Utilising naturally occurring data from Taobao service encounters spanning about one year, this study employs a discursive approach and finds that this expression fulfills one of a number of pragmatic functions: (1) when there is no mutual agreement on the complaint proposals, the customers deploy it to upgrade their deontic authority to orient to their own unilateral solution and refrain from further negotiations; (2) when expressing a negative evaluation, the customers use it to pre-empt potential complainables that reflect their strong deontic authority; or (3) following non-substantive rectification on the part of the agent, the customers use it to express diluted deontic authority in order to display disaffiliation and solicit more substantive proposals. By analyzing the use of this expression in e-shopping service encounters, our study contributes to understanding how deontic authority is exercised in negotiating solutions to complaints.

Normativity and Variation in the Address Terms System Practiced among the Jordanian Youth Community

This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were analysed, based on Watts’ discursive approach to politeness and Agha’s approach of indexicality. The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage. The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of address term usage and potentially normative incertitude.

Alterity as a term and a communication category: linguocognitive and discursive approach

The article is devoted to alterity as a communication category in terms of linguocognitive and discursive approaches. The article gives an in-depth insight into alterity as a communication category in the cognitive and discursive aspects. Being an indispensable part of communication and cognition, the category has its own meaning presenting the communicative interaction within the frame "I – the Other". The category of alterity has its own set of category properties, which are specified uniquely in different languages. The article includes a description of the linguistic means and communicative strategies and tactics, with the help of which the category of alterity is realized in fiction. The category content is variable in the discourse, and it serves ground for the ecological and non-ecological modes of communication. The results of the research are verified with the help of the following methods employed in the research: the analysis of key concepts, comparative analysis, contextual analysis, discursive analysis. The study of special linguoallological (from allology – a science about the Other) competence forms the perspective of the research.

«Я вдали вижу город, которого нет…» (довоенный Новгород в романе К. Г. Паустовского «Дым отчества»)

The article is devoted to a special urban space – pre-war Novgorod, recreated by K. G. Paustovsky after a trip to the Russian North in the late 1930s. On the pages of the novel, the writer pays attention to the Pushkin Mountains, Odessa, and Leningrad but the chapters about Novgorod can be read as an independent text. The material of the study was the epistolary and literary heritage of the writer, in which there are references to Novgorod, the novel The Smoke of the Fatherland, which has a difficult publicist’s history. The aim of the study is to recreate the image of pre-war Novgorod, described by Paustovsky, not as a museum city but a city with a unique appearance, where the past and present, nature, art and culture, traditions coexist. The article is based on socio-critical, hermeneutical, semiotic, and discursive approaches. The main conclusions of the article are related to the fact that the novel, which bears the stamp of its time, the lyrical and romantic attitude of the writer of the 1930s and 1940s, maybe, if it is returned to the urban Novgorod text, relevant, and Paustovsky, pushed to the periphery, should remain in the space of Russian literature, Russian culture. The choice of material is due not only to academic interest in Paustovsky’s work, but also to concern about the fate and pressing problems of the city. Firstly, the visual range of the novel allows us to reconstruct the pre-war image of the city, which does not exist, since it was almost completely destroyed during the Great Patriotic War. Secondly, the proposed plans for the restoration of the city (in particular, Academician Shchusev) were often corrected, changed by local authorities, were not fully implemented, and shortterm pragmatic solutions often won. Novgorod is still going through transformations today, and one can only hope and believe that the time will come to return the lost face, the historical appearance to the city. Paustovsky’s novel will allow the reader to compare pre-war Novgorod with today’s appearance of the city, devoid of integrity and structure, and to think about its preservation.

Scientific text on the Internet: Communication-typological characteristics

The key communication and typological characteristics of a scientific text on the Internet are considered as a special form of representation of scientific knowledge. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the use of a multimodal approach to the study of the specifics of academic texts in the Internet environment, which involves the study of a scientific text in a combination of linguo-stylistic, semiotic and discursive approaches. This approach makes it possible to study scientific Internet texts as certain communicative situations in terms of combining various forms and formats of transmitting and receiving information, taking into account the verbal and visual components, text architectonics, affordances, etc. As a result, the most important features of the academic Internet text, such as hypertextuality, interactivity, multimodality, openness and accessibility, are identified and characterized. The digital online environment has fundamentally changed scientific communication — it has made it cheaper, more accessible, more mobile, at the same time, it has also created new communication problems. One of them is the “extinction” of links in scientific publications: a significant number of hyperlinks either do not correspond to the original content or do not work completely. The number of “dead” links is linear, but constantly growing, which creates obvious threats to the development of modern scientific communication in the Internet environment. Based on the analysis of modern scientific texts, their typology was performed, based on the following parameters: the nature of the creation of texts (PDF versions of texts, web texts and mixed types of texts), the updating of the material in the publication (static and dynamic (“live”) scientific texts), semiotic organization of the text (verbal texts, verbal texts with a static or dynamic visual component), the ability to rate the material and comment on it (texts with excluded and enabled readers’ evaluation), conditions for the reader to access the publication (publications with free and paid full-text access), the prevailing way of perception of information by the consumer (linear, microergodic, non-mutable and mutable ergodic texts).

The Medical Healing of Souls: a strategy for welcoming post-pandemic mental health.

to reflect on the applicability of the Medical Healing of Souls (MHS) by health professionals as a welcoming strategy in post-pandemic mental health. a theoretical and reflective study, based on Viktor Frankl's philosophy, based on the book "The Doctor and the Soul, From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy" and scientific literature. the study was structured in two discursive approaches: MHS in the field of health; The applicability of MHS in post-pandemic mental health care. MHS can be used in mental health care, in health emergencies, promoting a more humane performance of health professionals, facilitating the integration of inevitable suffering into a meaningful life.

Dignitatis Humanae and Human Rights in Philosophical and Legal Existence and in Contemporary Constitutionalism: Division and Reunification

The article analyzes the concept of “human dignity” in the context of philosophical and legal existence; scientific and philosophical identification of dignity as a polysemantic concept allows us to state its universal value and consider it as a universal legal and ethical category. The research work reveals the views of modern philosophers and lawyers on the nature and role of dignity in relation to human rights. The aim is to study the philosophical foundations and legal aspects of human dignity, to highlight the conceptual foundations of dialogue and the co-existence of human dignity and human rights in modern philosophical and legal discussions. The polysemy and polymorphism of human dignity is combined with a wealth of concepts of dignity, especially in modern constitutional jurisprudence and the practice of constitutionalism, and a unified theoretical basis for the relationship between individual dignity and human rights. The author used general and specific research methods, including methods of dialectics, inductive-deductive analysis, legal hermeneutics and legal engineering and a discursive approach, critical rationalism, and legal realism. Conclusions: dignity as a philosophical and legal category in modern discussions has several of the most important hypostases, reflecting the fundamental categorical meaning: a) the category of ethics and humanistic understanding of man; b) a legal category with a significant variety of legal forms of consolidation at the international, supranational and domestic levels, in the branches of legal regulation; c) a historically changeable category, affecting both the evolution of ethics and law, the legal status of individuals. The article proposes four approaches to the relationship between human rights and human dignity, which are based on four concepts of human dignity: 1) dignity as a gift and heritage; 2) dignity as a social achievement and social honor; 3) dignity as human capacity; 4) dignity as human potential.

"Die Deutsche Märchenstraße" als erlebbare und diskursive Landeskunde im DaF-Unterricht

This article deals with the use of a 600 km long route through Germany, the "German Fairy Tale Route" in foreign language German lessons. In the context of the discursive approach, an attempt is made to create a didactic proposal on the topic of the "German Fairy Tale Route". In order to increase the interest and motivation of those learning German, an attempt is made to create didactic suggestions on the topic of "German Fairy Tale Route" with discursive regional studies using authentic and versatile materials.

Challenging ‘Leftist Big Tech’ through Right-wing Alternative Social Media: Parler and Albicla in Polish Conservative Media Discourse

Numerous “free speech” platforms have been launched in recent years as a form of protest against content moderation practices on mainstream social media. This paper asks the question of how the issue of these emerging right-wing alternative social media is discursively constructed, taking as an example the Polish conservative media debate over the American service Parler and its Polish equivalent Albicla. Taking a critically discursive approach, the article provides an analysis of the discursive strategies applied, and critically embeds the findings in the broader socio-political context, as well as in the alternative media theory. The results show that, drawing on the wartime rhetoric and numerous references to Poland’s non-democratic past, the discourse creates a populist narrative of identity conflict between two opposing groups: “them” – hostile “leftists” seeking to impose a radical, progressive social order and “us” – oppressed protectors of freedom and common-sense values. The study additionally indicates that the issue is also utilised for the purposes of rivalry between domestic right-wing factions. Furthermore, the data contains frequent reference to issues of political economy and thus, intriguingly, overlaps to some extent with left-wing media critique, in that both agree on the necessity of contesting a monopolised media market and developing alternative means of communication.

Landeskunde in Lehrwerken - über ein Land erzählen oder ein Land erzählen?

Classical cultural studies, or 'Landeskunde', as it has been known since the first textbooks on teaching German as a foreign language, tells its readers a lot about a country, initially in a cognitive manner, and later also through an intercultural and communicative approach. Alongside historical events like the fall of the Berlin wall, aspects of everyday life and culture have come into focus, as is evidenced by the existence of many texts about food in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (commonly known as DACH). These classical approaches to 'Landeskunde' are challenged in this essay by arguing that 'Landeskunde' is often transmitted implicitly, through the protagonists of the textbooks and the stories they tell – therefore, 'Landeskunde' is also people's studies. It is in these stories that a country is told. Are German textbooks still dominated by "young, dynamic, cheerful people of different origins" (Funk 2004: 41, translated by the author) that "principally belong to a prosperous bourgeois middle class" (Altmayer 2017: 17, translated by the author)? What are the stories about German-speaking countries that they tell? How is the discursive approach to 'Landeskunde' being implemented? These questions are discussed in this essay with reference to current German-language textbooks, with a focus on three new books on the A1/A2 levels.

Критерии различия пресуппозиций и конвенциональных импликатур

This article explores conventional implicatures and presuppusitions as the main parts of utterance’s content expressing its implied meaning. The article considers a discussion around taxonomy of meaning types, which is an important problem for the philosophy of language. The main shared properties of these semantic components are examined on various examples: projection, conventionality, and non-cancellability. The article provides a criteria for differentiation of these parts od meaning: implicatures are speaker-oriented. This unique semantic property is explained within the epistemic approach using the concepts of common knowledge and agent’s beliefs. At the end, the logical explanation of the differences between conventional implicatures and presuppositions is compared with the theory of impositions and formal discursive approach.