Discursive Techniques Research Articles

Unmasking Media Narratives through Comparative Corpus Linguistic Analysis: A Study of Russia-Ukraine Conflict

In a world inundated with diverse media narratives, the Russia-Ukraine conflict emerges as a focal point of contention, revealing a complex interplay of linguistic strategies and discursive tactics. This study aims to unravel the intricacies of lexical choices, and discursive techniques employed by Sputnik, BBC, and Fox News in their coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict through corpus-assisted discourse studies techniques. Three corpora were created comprising 5,347 articles with 5,829,747 tokens, sampled from February 2022 to February 2023. Moreover, Sputnik’s diction strategically employs the phrase “military operation” while eschewing “war”, portraying the conflict as a defensive, legitimate endeavour, thus reinforcing a Russian geopolitical narrative that recasts Ukraine not as a victim but as an active participant with extremist factions. BBC, in contrast, adopts a pro-Western stance, framing Ukraine as a victim and Russia as an aggressor. Fox News calls Russia’s action as an invasion, and highlights the individual roles of political leaders in shaping the conflict. However, to address the limitations of this study, future studies can expand the scope, sources, languages, and genres for analysis. Furthermore, media consumers need to practice media literacy, cross-checking, and critical analysis in the era of overloaded information in order to form well-rounded opinions on complex geopolitical events.

Atrocity in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Critical Discourse Approach

This paper examines the discursive tactics employed in The Handmaid's Tale to (re)produce social reality. Using critical discourse analysis, the study reveals the ideological polarization between a favorable self-presentation and a negative portrayal of the other. Through the analysis of excerpts and the application of Van Dijk's framework, the pervasive use of discursive techniques is uncovered, emphasizing the ideological division between a positive self-portrayal and a negative depiction of the other. Pronouns and adjectives play a crucial role in conveying optimistic self-representations and pessimistic other representations, highlighting the characters' struggle against the inherent sexism and patriarchy within legal systems. The findings demonstrate the significance of polarization, lexicalization, positive and negative representation tactics, and the proximity of contrasting stages, illustrating the tension between the individual and society. Considering these results, the paper recommends fostering awareness and critical analysis of discursive tactics, promoting diverse narratives to cultivate empathy and understanding, encouraging dialogue and critical engagement, and actively addressing and challenging gender inequality. These recommendations aim to deepen our understanding of how discursive tactics shape social reality and promote a more equitable and inclusive society. By recognizing and interrogating these discursive strategies, individuals can navigate and challenge the manipulation of language and narrative. The study's insights contribute to a broader understanding of the underlying gender inequality and societal tensions portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, shedding light on the power dynamics and systemic oppression present in society.

Notion of Beauty in the Selected Pakistani Advertisements: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Beauty advertisement is one of the most potent and successful tools for significantly influencing consumer purchasing behavior as it modifies individuals’ views of beauty, social conventions, and gender roles. From a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis standpoint, this study looks at the beauty advertisements in a few chosen social media (Instagram) posts. The study’s goal is to concentrate on how the idea of beauty is used in these Pakistani advertisements to control and influence consumers through both language as well as images. For this particular reason, four ads from different Instagram pages have been chosen via purposive sampling and they have undergone both linguistic and visual analysis. Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model (1995) serves as the foundation for the linguistic examination while Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (2006) is applied for the visual analysis of these ads. The nature of this study is qualitative. The findings reveal that advertisers have employed a variety of discursive techniques like surreal representation, scientific evidence, celebrity endorsement, & self-representation etc., and linguistic devices, such as pronouns, catchy phrases, adjectives, repetitions, etc. in addition to visual tactics, e.g., modality, gaze, social distance, salience, and camera angles etc. to influence women by portraying an idealized version of beauty in the chosen advertisements. Additionally, it shows how advertisers—who are essentially powerful people with vested interests—marginalize and restrict the status of women in society to propagate the ideology of beauty just for boosting the sales of their products. Thus, the companies and creators of these commercials employ images and language as a means of controlling Pakistan’s female consumer base by luring them to get on their items. It is anticipated that this study will increase awareness of the usefulness of multimodal critical discourse analysis and open the door for future researchers to investigate the language and pictures used in advertisements for a variety of other products.

Judicial Practice as Islamic Law: The ʿAmal of Fez in Post-Classical Mālikī Legal Tradition

Abstract ʿAmal (judicial practice) is a critical feature of post-classical Mālikī law in the Maghrib. The scholars who have examined ʿamal contend that it presents a paradigm of Mālikī law’s flexibility and judicial responsiveness to custom (ʿurf). However, ʿamal also constitute a significant part of the regional Islamic juristic literature produced from approximately the 17th to nineteenth centuries. In this article, I examine how ʿamal of Fez became not only widely practiced but part of the mainstream Mālikī jurisprudential discourse in Morocco. I argue that understanding Islamic law’s mechanisms for discursive stability is critical for its well-established capacity to change through principles like ʿamal. I do so by analyzing three practices that contravened the prevailing Mālikī rule yet were widely practiced as ʿamal of Fez: female witnesses for spousal defects, the ṣafqa unilateral shared property sale, and the lafīfiyya twelve-person testimony (plus a fourth “counter-example,” the abandonment of the mutual spousal cursing oath (liʿān), that reinforces the argument). I pay special attention to jurists’ discursive techniques for entrenching ʿamal in Mālikī history and precedence in classical substantive Mālikī rules. In the end, I call to acknowledge ʿamal’s inextricable status as Islamic law in Morocco and beyond.

In Custody: From written text to audio-visual discourse through a postcolonial lens

Comparing the novel In Custody, written by , and the film adaptation In Custody (1993), directed by Ismail Merchant, provides an interesting opportunity to examine how literary texts are transformed into audio-visual works, through different discursive techniques. A written text is taken from the page to live on a screen, and thus focusing on the main content the literary author created becomes a challenge for screenwriters, filmmakers and translators. In the case of In Custody, the inclusion of English subtitles in the film allows for its internationalization while respecting the language of the novel. This approach enables audiences to appreciate the sounds of Hindi and Urdu poetry, and in doing so, they become custodians of these rich literary traditions.

Challenging color-evasion in democratic dialogue: using critical race discourse analysis to generate practical theory for facilitators*

ABSTRACT Guided by Critical Race Discourse Analysis and Grounded Practical Theory this paper analyzes interaction during classroom dialogs to examine how democratic inclusion is undermined by color-evasion. Too often color-evasion as a discursive technique perpetuates exclusion, inhibits democratic values under the guise of inclusion, and consequently, protects whiteness and puts undue burden on non-white participants. Thus, we argue that democratic facilitators who are concerned with inclusion should listen for and disrupt color-evasiveness. We offer a practical theory to guide facilitators recognizing and challenging color-evasion through questions that encourage the group to contend with why evading talk about race undermines democratic dialogue.

Aspects innovants des métonymies dans le discours quotidien de Brazzavillois

Innovative Aspects of Metonymies in Brazzavillois' Everyday Discourse
 This article examines the innovative aspects of metonymies in the everyday speech of Brazzavillois residents, who live in an environment influenced by both the French language and local languages. The primary goal of the study is to discern the network of metonymies in oral communication and to identify the stylistic reasons for their expressive use in Brazzaville French.The chosen methodology involves compiling a corpus sourced from recordings, posters, and various daily uses related to the professional and linguistic habits of the Brazzaville community. Data selection criteria prioritize relevance and qualitative value. Utilizing this corpus, we applied the linguistic components criteria and the implicit approach developed by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1998), along with the ellipsis approach proposed by Michel Le Guern (1973). This application aims to elucidate the discursive implications of metonymy in everyday conversation, seeking to verify how metonymic expressions illuminate the subjectivity, culture, and language proficiency of the speaker. Furthermore, metonymies in oral communication hold implicit value as they allow for the examination of undisclosed informational content omitted by the speaker through ellipses. The ellipsis approach aids in analyzing metonymy as a process that accentuates the container, with the content being elliptically placed by the speaker based on communication needs, intending to magnify a salient element of metonymic adjacency. Our anticipated results are expected to confirm that metonymy actively contributes to the semantic innovation of French in the Brazzaville context. This is attributed to its discursive techniques, particularly the containing/content relationship, which remains a decisive factor in semantic evolution and polysemy. Additionally, metonymy, being a figure of everyday life, permeates various domains such as family, professional settings, religious language, and even in journalism. It is commonly employed in familiar discourse, the realm of transportation, educational institutions, and commercial communication. This usage often arises from the application of verbs like 'pay' and 'buy,' where the content is replaced by the container (e.g., the bottle replaces the gas, and the invoice replaces the company). In conclusion, our findings indicate that metonymy in oral communication is not merely a tool for aesthetic language creation; rather, it emerges as a phenomenon driving linguistic innovation. It adds new layers of meaning to verbs like 'buy' and 'pay' within the specific context of Brazzaville, contributing to a diatopic variation of French in Africa.

“WOULD YOU DATE A MAID?”

The refers to a common video trend we encountered as we set out to analyze how FDWs use TikTok to express personal and sexual sovereignty amid constraining structural surveillance at the level of policy, employer-employee dynamics, and social restrictions. Academic scholars from various disciplines have critiqued the nature of migration regimes in which foreign domestic workers (FDW) are hired, drawing from the fields of social, health, and economic justice. We focus on FDWs in Singapore, where these conditions are enforced and rationalized through laws and government-owned-media that entrench socially constructed divisions. These conditions are rationalized and perpetuated through rhetoric that stigmatizes, stereotypes, and enforces segregation. Intersecting layers of marginalization are created by a labor system that maximally extracts and exploits low-wage migrant workers. Discursive techniques used by state-owned media and legislation also portray FDW as ungovernable and promiscuous employer property that supersedes and eclipses their civil rights (Kaur-Gill, Pandi & Dutta, 2021).

No murder without a clue: An intersemiotic translation of murders in And Then There Were None

The aim of this study is to analyze the detective novel titled And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie to find out the implicit or explicit clues in the conflict part of the plot to allow the readers to be able to draw inferences or anticipations on the resolution. Following the identification of the relevant contexts in the source text, the TV mini series adaptation of the novel is also analyzed in comparison to the source contexts to find out the extent of preservation or omission of the meaning in intersemiotic translation. The contexts with implicit or explicit clues are discussed in relation to discursive techniques in a narration, particularly anticipation and amorce techniques. The relevant contexts in the source text are mostly found to be preserved in the target text. However, this preservation does not come directly copying or transferring the content to the target text, rather the dynamics different between a literary text and audiovisual text could impel the intersemiotic translator to employ the compensation technique in the adaptation process. A text of visual and cognitive nature is translated to another semiotic system incorporating the auditory aspect to TV adaptations, resulting in translation decisions different from interlingual translations. As a result of the analysis, it is recommended that compensation technique could allow the target viewers to gather anticipations as regards the resolution as is the case with source readers in intersemiotic translation. Therefore, what counts in novel-to-TV adaptations turns out to be the extent of similarity rather than a quest for sameness.

Public speech as a tool for nation-building: An analysis of Thabo Mbeki’s speeches

This study investigated the discursive strategies used in major speeches in South Africa with distinct socio-political systems, which put nation-building in a central place, making the nation both the context and an analytical unit for the study of nation-building. The research question that needed to be answered was: to what extent does a presidential speech, as a tool, reflect South Africa’s nation-building objectives? This study specifically examined various discursive techniques used in the political language of former President Thabo Mbeki. Two speeches by former President Thabo Mbeki were collected from the GCIS website. A general textual description of the speeches is made in terms of lexis and syntax to uncover the underlying ideology in the speeches. Thematic content analysis was adopted. The analysis was predominantly qualitative, supported by some statistical data, on the assumption that a purely qualitative analysis would not necessarily yield reliable results. The occurrence of linguistic features was presented; each text was transcribed and marked for relevant linguistic features. The critical discourse analysis revealed that, on a macro-level, the text of the speeches can be viewed as a manifestation of larger socio-political processes within the country. The texts illustrate a type of political speech positioned in a society in transition, as there are references to building a cohesive society, policy implementation, new programs of government, job creation, and poverty alleviation. The speeches did serve as a nation-building tool, as they conveyed the steps undertaken by the South African government to strive towards an inclusive and all-encompassing approach in an effort to achieve nation-building.

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.

From (in)securitisation to conviviality: the reconciliatory potential of participatory ethnography

Abstract Racialised bilinguals experience marginalisation all over the world. In South-East Europe, millions of bilingual Roma share this experience alongside emerging aspirations of conviviality, which remain rare. This paper considers marginalisation as a consequence of (in)securitisation. The concept of (in)securitisation addresses discursive techniques of power which advocate the protection of some at the price of excluding others. These discursive techniques are exerted on different levels of social interaction, creating and maintaining uncertainty. The paper discusses individual aspirations to conviviality, or peaceful cohabitation, in (in)securitised local realities in a town in Hungary, where 20 % of the population are bilingual Roma. Furthermore, it explores whether the leveraging of translingual practices can be an effective tool for conviviality. The argument is based on long-term field research, and the data used comes from a series of participatory workshops, attended by academic non-local and local participants. Using the method of Moment Analysis to understand workshop discussions, the article focuses on the ways in which participants negotiate the dependencies of (in)securitisation while trying to forge convivial capabilities. Experience shows that acts of (in)securitisation and racialised social roles define relations even within the research group, and only certain types of capabilities considered convivial are suitable to override them.

Machine visions: A corporate imaginary of artificial sight

Machine vision is one the most consequential applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in contemporary society. This article analyzes how companies that produce machine vision technology articulate what it means for machines to “see.” Through a thematic analysis of more than 200 corporately produced documents, we examine the companies’ product offerings and identify three discursive techniques that entwine basic explanations of emerging technology with the ideologies of AI producers: dismantling sight into technical action, expanding the parameters of sight, and seeing through data. These recurring corporate narratives organize perceptions of automation, educating outsiders how to value computational outcomes and support them through rearranging the real-world conditions of labor. We argue that the social power of machine vision is not only in how it detects objects, but also in how it arbitrates what work is visible in visions of the industry’s future.

Discursive Strategies Contributing to Stigma towards Involuntary Childless Women in the Gikùyù Community

Positioning women in a situation where motherhood is associated with womanhood has led to stigma towards those who do not have children. They are perceived as outsiders in their communities, and language is used to advance the ideologies that support their discrimination. The use of discursive techniques has been essential in stigmatising and categorising childlessness. Linguistic stigma has been created by language and other ideas. Degrading discourse strategies that are language-based have a significant impact on how childless women are viewed. The paper’s discursive approaches were centred on the stigma that involuntarily childless women in the Gikùyù community experience. The study was informed by Fairclough and Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Different elements like vocabulary, grammatical structure, and semantics ought not to be examined individually, according to CDA and their functions should not be disregarded. The purpose of the study was to assess the discursive techniques stigmatising involuntarily childless women. The study used purposive sampling to choose the villages in the Tetu sub-county, Nyeri County. They were Kǐandu, Ndǔgamano and Kǐgogoinǐ. The researcher used focus group discussions (FGDs) in order to collect data. Twelve involuntarily childless women participated in the FGD as respondents, four in each FGD. The data was then audio recorded, analysed, and categorised into themes. The study will benefit linguists since it will educate them on the extent to which language may be used to stigmatise social groups and prepare them to advocate for language change when needed. This discussion will highlight the connection between language and gender and motivate curriculum designers to include discussions on linguistic stigma, which will benefit researchers who focus on gender issues. Involuntary childless women are stigmatised linguistically according to the study, and these women should rebrand themselves by accepting their situation and reclaiming their identity

Discursive strategies in the branding of Fortune Global 500 Chinese manufacturing companies

Company profiles are increasingly used to construct the corporate brand of Fortune Global 500 Chinese Manufacturing Companies (FG500CMCs). However, the communication of the corporate brand through the company profile is not sufficiently explored. This article explored the discursive strategies that were exploited to construct the desired brand identities of the FG500CMCs. Through the approach of critical genre analysis, it is found that the branding of the FG500CMCs is realized by the strategic organization of rhetorical moves, the purposeful employment of rhetorical devices, and tactical wording. All the obligatory moves identified primarily highlight a set of attributes indicating the strengths, competitiveness, and superiority of the FG500CMCs. This projects the distinctiveness of the brand identities of the companies. The strengths, competitiveness, and superiority are constructed by deploying graduation resources, appropriating numerical resources, adopting high-end and high-tech-related terms, and exploiting endorsement, authentication, and altruism. Besides analyzing the lexico-grammatical features and discursive techniques, this article also investigates how the FG500CMCs’ particular attributes and strengths are covertly conveyed through the strategic organization and distribution of the moves. This provides a more comprehensive explication and thus gives new insights into the body of knowledge on the discursive construction of corporate branding. With grounded elaboration on the tactful use of language and covert arrangement of the moves, this article also sheds light on the content design of the ‘company profile’ for shaping stakeholders’ and the public’s perception of the corporate brand.

First and last and always: Politics of the ‘energy efficiency first’ principle in EU energy and climate policy

The EU legislators have agreed that the ‘energy efficiency first’ (EE1) principle is made legally binding for Member States, to apply in policy, planning and major investment decisions. Through the EE1 principle, energy efficiency is to be made a priority in European Union (EU) energy and climate policy, providing what has been a missing link in fully implementing two other guiding principles of EU energy and climate policy: cost-effectiveness and consumer protection. In this article, I conduct an argumentative discourse analysis to better understand the politics of the EE1 principle in EU energy and climate policy. Two different discourses with a set of storylines were identified in the negotiations on the EE1 principle. The first focuses on multiple benefits of energy efficiency and a stronger role for the EE1 principle. The other focuses on climate change mitigation and a weaker role for the EE1 principle. The Council Presidency and the European Commission used discursive techniques such as frame polarisation, frame disconnection and frame incorporation to overcome these dualities. The description of storylines, discourse coalitions and discursive interaction strategies can help policymakers and other stakeholders become more aware of their own and others' argumentation on energy efficiency and how these could be changed, thus help policymakers and stakeholders better shape their strategies in future advocacy and policymaking.

Beyond “insider” and “outsider” in the Field: Reflections on the Roles of Human Geographers in Shifting Contexts

Previous scholarship in qualitative methodologies commonly classifies researchers’ status in the field into insiders or outsiders. However, the prevalence of participatory observation in numerous social science disciplines has blurred the insider/outsider dichotomy and highlighted that the levels of researchers’ involvement in the field are becoming context-specific and far more complex than just insider or outsider. Inspired by this tendency in fieldwork methodology, this paper seeks insights from a theory in communication studies, role theory, to understand researchers’ status regarding the roles they adopt in their interactions with research participants. Through reference to relevant sociological and psychological schools of thought, this paper highlights discourse as a crucial instrument for researchers’ role-making in fieldwork. This study draws on the author’s experience conducting fieldwork in a Central China city to demonstrate how a researcher engages in shifting field contexts by intentionally assuming numerous roles. To explore state-firm relations in local development, the author recruited two groups of research participants: government officials and business managers. The author actively learned and employed comparable discursive techniques in interactions with each group of participants, thereby assuming various roles in different contexts. These findings underscore the purposeful self-presentation and intentional role-playing/change as effective means for human geographers and researchers in extensive disciplines to be involved in participant groups for gathering data more efficiently. Meanwhile, the author’s self-reflection also illuminates the consequent impacts on research outcomes and ethical issues due to the involvement of researchers in their participants, therefore highlighting the necessity for detachment.

Content Analysis of Tourism Section of Davao Oriental Official Websites

This study identified the extent of language use in the tourism pages of the official websites of the province. The text and images of six tourism pages were subjected to qualitative content analysis, and data were coded to identify the linguistic features and discursive techniques employed by the tourism officers in promoting and motivating potential clients to visit tourism destinations in the province. The common lexical features were positive adjectives and use of proper nouns for descriptions while the syntactic features were declaratives in active voice, imperatives in the form of commands and requests, and interrogatives in the form of wh-questions. In addition, modality includes brightness, color contrast, and perspective; while the salience composes of perspective, relative size, and sharpness of objects in focus. The use of collage features three to six photos with descriptive texts and participants such as people captured in photos. On the discursive techniques, the tourism administrators employed the techniques to inform such practical necessities for decision-making like cognitive necessities, to persuade through manipulation, and to direct in the form of directives.

Constructing Race and Gender in Modern Rape Law: The Abandoned Category of Black Female Victims

Despite the successes of the 1960s Anti-Rape Movement, modern state rape statutes continue to prioritize white male perspectives and perceptions of race, ultimately ignoring the intersectional identity of Black women and leaving these victims without legal protection. This Note examines rape law’s history of allocating agency along gendered and racialized lines through statutory construction and other discursive techniques. Such legal constructions both uphold and cultivate the white victim/Black assailant rape dyad primarily by making the Black male the “ultimate” and most feared assailant. Rape law’s adherence to a white baseline sustains stereotypes of Black men as criminals and predators, which ultimately relegates Black women to a category of lesser and undeserving victims. Re-focusing rape reform and feminist movements on Black female experiences, as well as a rhetorical restructuring of rape laws, can improve rape law uniformity and remove white normativity standards. A departure from the current rhetorical and realized white baseline can eliminate rape law’s delineations of femininity that silence women of color.

The Art of Smearing: How Is Feminist Decolonizing Artivism Received by Italian Newspapers? The Case of Montanelli’s Statue

On March 8, 2019, during a demonstration organised on occasion of the International Women's Day in Milan, members of the feminist collective Non Una Di Meno (not one woman less) Milano threw washable pink paint on the statue that commemorates the Italian journalist Indro Montanelli (1909–2001). The aim of exposing at a visual level the acclaimed writer’s controversial past was crucial to the group’s symbolic action. In fact, despite being a reference figure for many Italian intellectuals, Montanelli participated in the Abyssinian war in 1935 and, as a member of the fascist army, he engaged in a relationship with a 12-year-old local girl who acted as his wife and sexual object. The collective’s action, which can be labelled as a feminist decolonizing performance, has already been read as a form of artivism that manipulated the Italian’s artistic heritage with the objective of criticising the existing narrative on Italy’s colonial past. In this sense, an analysis of the resonance that journalistic coverage assigned to the event proves crucial for understanding the impact that such an action has had on Italian public opinion and the progress towards the country's mental decolonization. This article presents the findings of a qualitative analysis conducted on a corpus of 10 online newspaper articles published in the aftermath of the artivist performance on Montanelli’s statue. The study employs Foucauldian critical discourse analysis in order to identify the rhetorical strategies used by journalists to criticise or legitimate the feminist collective’s action. Among these strategies, particular attention is paid to those discursive techniques adopted to portray the act as a form of vandalism or, on the contrary, as a form of art. The aim is to show how the discourse on art versus non-art/vandalism is used to confirm (or overcome) the discursive limits imposed by the still dominant narratives on the nation’s colonial history as well as on the disposability of “othered” women’s bodies.