Newspaper Discourse Research Articles

Cow, union buster! Identitarianism and organizing in Bombay’s mills, 1850s-1990s

ABSTRACT This essay examines the role of cow protection in resisting labour struggles in Bombay’s cotton mills from the birth of industrialization in the 1850s to its eventual decline in the 1990s. Relying on public discourse in newspapers, government reports, and union documents, it shows that cows, sacred to Hindus, became a symbol of identity and a basis for elective affinity between mill owners, political/religious leaders, and a pro-capital city government. Mill owners funded cow protection societies, political/religious leaders supported cow protection and mediated directly with mill owners, and the state offered legitimacy, further resisting the negotiating power and innovations of labour unions to demand better living and working conditions. By implicating cow protection (identitarianism/communalism more broadly) in the political economy of industrial capitalism, this essay shifts attention from its primarily nationalist, majoritarian, and often agrarian discourse.

Ruminant livestock and climate change: critical discourse moments in mainstream and farming sector news media

AbstractThere is ongoing contestation around greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant livestock and how society should respond. Media discourses play a key role in agenda setting for the general public and policymakers, and may contribute to polarisation. This paper examines how UK news media portrayed ruminant livestock’s impact on climate change between 2016 and 2021. The analysis addresses a gap in the literature by comparing discourses in national and farming sector newspapers using a qualitative approach. Four national and two farming sector news outlets were searched for articles published between 2016 and 2021. A corpus of 996 relevant articles was assembled, from which 154 were selected for in-depth examination using Critical Discourse Analysis. Four ‘Critical Discourse Moments’ (CDMs), each signifying a discursive shift in the debate, were identified over the 6-year studied period: 1) Low salience, diverging discourses, 2) We must eat far less meat, 3) Fighting the anti-meat agenda, and 4) Policy (in)action at COP26. There was a large increase in the number of published articles from January 2019 onward, partly associated with publication of the EAT/Lancet Commission report. CDM 2 (We must eat far less meat) occurred mainly in the national media, while CDM 3 (Fighting the anti-meat agenda) occurred mainly in the farming media. Our findings reveal both opinion polarisation and intergroup polarisation between national and farming sector media, and low engagement with food system power imbalances. Addressing polarisation will be important to enhance capacity for collective decision-making regarding methane emissions from ruminant livestock.

Suicide in the Austrian Littoral at the turn of the 20th century

The paper seeks to examine the social image of suicide at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the case of Trieste as a major Austrian urban centre, where the suicide rates were more visibly increasing at least from the 1870s onwards. The perception of the growing presence of suicide in society made it possible to observe what the reflections on suicide from the last quarter of the 19th century brought from different parts of Europe (Morselli, Masaryk, Durkheim) and at the same time how the discourses around suicide shed light on a somewhat broader picture of society, including its fears (of social problems and change, not least the potential threat of the imitative effect that the daily press was believed to create by reporting on suicides). The newspaper discourse usually followed the scientific publications of the time, and the contemporaneous observations on the mass of suicides were confirmed through statistical analyses and medical, sociological, philosophical and other debates, while also raising many other social issues with which suicide in urban areas could be linked (alcoholism, the growth of the proletariat, poverty, changing values, etc.). All of this shaped the public debate on suicide as a problem of modern society, with an emphasis on (big) cities, where the problem of suicide was much more pronounced than in smaller non-industrial towns or in the countryside of the Austrian Littoral.

Breach of pacta sunt servanda: A corpus-assisted analysis of newspaper discourse on the AUKUS agreement

The AUKUS agreement,11The abbreviation AUKUS stands for ‘Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States’. a strategic pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, primarily aimed to facilitate Australia's acquisition of eight nuclear-powered submarines from the US and Britain. This agreement led to the abrupt termination of a previous contract with France's state-owned Naval Group. This article examines the language used in media coverage of the AUKUS agreement in newspapers from various Anglophone and Asian countries. Employing a combination of Sentiment Analysis (Crossley et al., 2017) and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington, 2013; Gillings et al., 2023), we focus on identifying key linguistic patterns, themes, and the sentiment embedded in the discourse. Our findings indicate a general positive assessment of AUKUS in the Anglophone media, contrasted with negative portrayals in Chinese publications. Moreover, the analysis of linguistic components such as adjectives, nouns, and verbs reveals underlying complexities and conflicting viewpoints within the Anglophone discourse itself. By applying Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, we uncover the contextual and linguistic factors that shape these diverse perspectives.

Pathos for Gatekeeping and Moderating in Newspaper Discourse - A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis on China’s Human Rights Issues during the Pandemic -

Pathos for Gatekeeping and Moderating in Newspaper Discourse - A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis on China’s Human Rights Issues during the Pandemic -

Evolving Representations of Childhood: A Diachronic Analysis of the Lexeme Child in British Newspapers from the 18th To 21st Centuries

This article investigates the semantic evolution of the lexeme CHILD in British newspaper discourse from the 18th to the 21st centuries, employing a diachronic approach and cognitive semantics framework. The study utilizes lexical analysis and frame modelling methodologies to trace changes in the lexical meaning of the lexeme CHILD during the mentioned period, drawing on dictionaries and newspaper archives. Findings reveal a dynamic semantic structure characterized by the emergence of new meanings and the persistence of core components like 'person' and 'juvenile'. The analysis identifies shifts influenced by societal, cultural, and ideological factors, reflecting changes in societal perceptions and linguistic representations over time. This research contributes to understanding how a language mirrors and shapes societal attitudes towards childhood across centuries, emphasizing the role of newspaper discourse in framing cultural norms and perceptions.

Pragmatic conditionality of linguistic means of expressing evaluation in French newspaper discourse

Pragmatic conditionality of linguistic means of expressing evaluation in French newspaper discourse

Effective Stance in Conservative Newspaper Opinion Articles on Irregular Immigration and Refugee Humanitarian Crises

This paper presents a quantitative and contrastive analysis of expressions of effective stance in conservative newspaper opinion articles related to irregular immigration and humanitarian crises involving refugees in both English and Spanish contexts. Drawing upon the seminal works of Langacker (2013) and Marín-Arrese (2021a, 2021b, 2023), the study examines six fundamental categories of effective stance expressions established according to factors such as orientation towards self or others, degree of control about the realisation of the event, and agreement with social norms. The dataset under examination comprises a 120,000-word corpus of opinion articles obtained from two conservative newspapers, The Telegraph from the United Kingdom and El Mundo from Spain. The words are evenly distributed, with each newspaper contributing 30,000 words in articles pertaining to three humanitarian crises involving refugees: Syria (2015), Afghanistan (2021), and Ukraine (2022-2023), and 30,000 words relating to articles on irregular immigration coinciding in time with each of the three refugee crises. The primary objective of the paper is to discern notable differences between the two newspapers and across the different refugee and irregular immigration crises under investigation. The analysis of the results, which uncover a larger number of effective stance expressions in the English subcorpus as well as distributional differences of subcategories across the subcorpora in both languages, provides a valuable understanding of the intricate patterns of usage and distribution of effective stance expressions within the realm of newspaper discourse, thereby enriching our comprehension of journalistic portrayals concerning the complexity of refugee crises and migratory movements.

The tontine and the public sphere: Ireland and Scotland compared, 1772–1850

AbstractRecently, there has been a surge of interest in tontines, including their history and potential modern applications. While scholarly work has focussed on how tontines were organised, nominee selection, and the use of raised funds, little attention has been paid to their cultural impact. This article starts to address this gap by comparing tontine development in Ireland and Scotland, where the scheme was more than a revenue-raising tool. In these countries, it contributed to the public sphere through broad public discourse in newspapers and pamphlets and by raising funds for spaces including meeting rooms, coffeehouses, theatres, and hotels. The tontine’s influence in these regions therefore extended beyond the financial.

Role of Newspaper Discourse in Legitimizing Discrimination against Veiled Female Students in Turkey

The paper analyses the Kemalist dailies’ presentation of veiled female students who protested the discrimination they faced when the hijab was banned at Turkish universities. Although such discrimination has since been quashed, the ideology that produced and legitimised it is still alive. The media, an important means of reproducing the Kemalist hegemony, relativised or legitimised discrimination against these students by discursively constructing them as a destructive force that threatened the secular order. This construct is based on the Kemalist conception of modernisation, equated with secularisation, where “the limit of the expression of religion in Turkey is the skin of a citizen”. The analysed examples reinforce the construct by integrating multimodal elements, including the text itself, typographical elements, page layouts, and accompanying images and caricatures. The paper confirms the importance of analysing linguistic and other semiotic elements of discourse in the research of complex social phenomena like discrimination, hegemony, and ideology.

‘Flanders Conquered the World’s Fair!’ Flemish newspaper discourses and nation-building during the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition

This article examines the meaning of the ‘Flemish Day’ at the Brussels World Exhibition of 1958 for the formation of the Flemish nation. With this one-day festival pro-Flemish organisations contested the francophone character of the Expo, and francophone dominance in Belgian society. Its success announced the steep advance of the Flemish movement in the second half of the twentieth century. But how can we best interpret its impact on Flemish nation-building? The article analyses reactions on the Flemish Day in the Flemish press. Using six newspapers of diverse ideological strands it assesses support for Flemish emancipation. It thereby reveals a broad acceptance of the legitimacy of the Flemish Day, despite remarkable ideological differences. The discourse analysis supports the hypothesis that broadly shared interpretations of, and an almost unanimous identification with Flanders, provided the foundation for the mass spreading of Flemish consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Contributing empirical evidence to the study of nation-building in post-war Flanders, this article demonstrates the importance of media as mirrors and sources of national discourses.

Ubuntu Precepts and the Coverage of Xenophobic Discourses in South African Community Newspapers: An Afrocentric Systematic Critique

Ubuntu Precepts and the Coverage of Xenophobic Discourses in South African Community Newspapers: An Afrocentric Systematic Critique

Examining Malaysian Chinese Lexical Variations in Newspaper Discourse: A Standard Chinese in China Perspective

Examining Malaysian Chinese Lexical Variations in Newspaper Discourse: A Standard Chinese in China Perspective

A corpus-assisted semantic profile of the noun representation in CAD and CADS studies on newspaper discourse

A corpus-assisted semantic profile of the noun representation in CAD and CADS studies on newspaper discourse

Personal responsibility for the common good: The MMR vaccination discourse in contemporary Serbian daily newspapers

Personal responsibility for the common good: The MMR vaccination discourse in contemporary Serbian daily newspapers

Conceptualizing parenthood: American newspaper discourse analysis

This study aims to elucidate the metaphorical representations of the concept PARENT within American media discourse. By analyzing the conceptual metaphors employed in newspaper discourse, we seek to reconstruct the metaphorically derived understanding of parenthood within English-speaking community. These conceptual metaphors, crafted by media presenters, exert a profound influence on the societal comprehension of this concept, both directly and indirectly. The study draws upon the Conceptual Metaphor theory, Conceptual Integration theory, and Discourse analysis. Within the scope of our investigation, the target domain PARENT encompasses four primary source domains: DUTIES, DIFFICULTIES, OWNER, and BURDEN. Our emphasis lies in scrutinizing the cross-domain mappings, which delineate systematic correspondences between the target and source domains. We investigate novel conceptualizations that emerge from conventional metaphoric patterns, employing cognitive mechanisms such as extension, elaboration, questioning, and combination. We also explore the conceptual blends and emergent structures that introduce additional layers of interpretation of being a parent. They are elucidated using Conceptual Integration Networks, specifically double- and multiple-scope models. Our analysis has unveiled the existence of four metaphorical clusters, each providing unique perspectives on how parenthood is conceptualized within the newspaper discourse.

The Ideological Representation of Iraqi Human Rights Violations in American Online Newspaper Discourse

Language used in newspapers can influence the readers' view on the issues published in them. Language is no longer a mere means of communicating information; but it also generates and shapes the social interaction with such issues. This could be achieved through the effective representation of these issues using linguistic expressions. Therefore, this study investigates the ideological representation of human rights violations in newspaper discourse. The data of this study is collected from news articles published in American online newspapers, namely, the Washington Post and New York Times, on the issue of the human rights violations, particularly the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in Iraq. Accordingly, Van Dijk’s (1998) theory of ideology is also employed to examine group ideology and portrayal of "Self" and "Others" in these newspapers. It is found that in both newspapers, group ideology was manifested through presenting positive in-group actions, such as peaceful demonstrations, supporting protesters, resisting and warning against out-group violent procedures. Moreover, the newspapers focused on the victims of protesters (as in-group), while generalizing the negative reactions of government, political parties, and security forces (as out-group) toward protests and protesters.

The Portrayal of Environmental Concerns: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Media Discourse

The global focus on environmental/climatic concerns and sustainability has intensified in recent years due to the growing recognition of the urgent need for action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. As one of the key goals of Saudi Vision 2030, the Saudi Green Initiative strives to mitigate the effects of climate change and improve biodiversity through multiple measures including promulgating awareness and responsibility in the general public. With this respect, undoubtedly media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing policy decisions. Therefore, it is essential to investigate how environmental issues and sustainability are portrayed in media discourse in the Saudi context. This research intends to analyze media representations of environmental concerns specifically in English newspaper discourse using an eco-linguistic framework. For the said purpose, the corpus developed was based on content published in Arab News an English newspaper, and analyzed through Sketch Engine and LancsBox6.0 software. The key frames that emerged were evaluated and interpreted both statistically and qualitatively to ascertain the role of media in imparting and creating collective consciousness regarding the need for sustainable environmental actions. The study demonstrated that the newspaper discourse portrayed the climate concerns effectively by framing the climate as a change, crisis, fight, and collective social responsibility through discursive strategies such as frequent repetition of concepts, specific lexical choices like negative, strong expressive words as well as techniques of naming and making concrete references. Additionally, the writers suggested practical solutions and measures people and nations must need to take collectively to address the ever-growing climate challenges.

From Prejudice to Print: American Newspapers and the Reporting of Black Murders

The present study explores the inherent ideologies of newspaper discourse and the subjugation of the readers to the said ideologies. 30 articles reporting Black murders by White policemen published in The New York Times, USA Today and Washington Post between 2014-2021 are used for creating three corpora of 25,561 words in total. AntCon 3.5.9 is used to generate the wordlist, N-Grams and concords; and LancsBox 6.0 is used to annotate the corpora.The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis and the Ideological Square Model of Van Dijk as its framework. The findings reveal that the use of certain lexical items plays a significant role in the construction of a discourse that abets the manipulation of the news. The deliberate omission of the ethnic identity of the victims and linguistically naturalizing the murders in the Washington Post makes it a racist and partial reporter of crimes. The New York Times and USA Today lean towards pro-black discourse.

Digital Shifts and Ethno-Political Dynamics: Examining Event and Actor Designation in the Cameroon Boko Haram Terrorism Conflict through Print and Online Platforms

This study examines how the issue of ethnic identity is approached in Cameroon within the context of combating Boko Haram terrorism, considering the influence of the rise of social media on journalistic practices. The advent of these platforms has fundamentally altered the landscape of media coverage, challenging the traditional monopoly of journalists in shaping the narrative of news. How does this technological shift affect the discourse, especially in the designation of events and actors in the reporting of Boko Haram terrorism in Cameroon, whether in traditional print media or on online platforms like Facebook? Do these designations in print media and Facebook discussion forums indicate shifts in the dynamics of the Cameroonian media sphere (censorship, government repression, etc.), resulting from the emergence of new voices in digital discursive spaces? This study employs a dual analysis, integrating a critical examination of media discourse with a sociological study of journalistic production. The scrutiny of media discourse is based on the investigation of 497 articles published between 1st January and 30 June 2015, sourced from seven Cameroonian newspapers. The online corpus encompasses 450 written publications from three Facebook forums. We aim to establish a dialectical relationship between newspaper discourse, online content, and the sociological foundations shaping their production. The observed quality of designations in the studied forums unveils a surge in hate speech within the ethno-political landscape of Cameroon. While this phenomenon remained manageable through the intervention of state regulatory bodies in traditional media, the unrestrained nature of online content, coupled with the absence of state control, has facilitated the rise of inter-ethnic discursive hatred in politics. In conclusion, this study underscores the challenges stemming from the evolution of journalistic practices in a technological landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for regulatory frameworks to counteract the upswing in hate speech and inter-ethnic tensions within political discourse.