Political Discourse in Transition in Europe, 1989-1991

Political Discourse in Transition in Europe, 1989-1991
Author: Paul Anthony Chilton
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 1998
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027250480

The year 1989 brought political upheavals in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the effects of which have not yet ended. The political discourse of the Cold War period disintegrated and gave way to competing alternatives. The contributors to this book are linguists, discourse analysts and social scientists, from all corners of the continent, whose tools of analysis shed light on the crucial two years of transition during which political concepts and political interaction changed in dramatic and sometimes violent ways.

Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse

Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse
Author: Michele Durocher Dunne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2003-09-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027294763

When politicians and pundits in the Middle East discuss democracy, do they mean it? Looking at public discourse about democracy in contemporary Egypt, Dunne proposes a fresh way of reading Arabic political discourse. She charts a method combining ethnographic research into communities of people producing political discourse with investigation of the texts themselves, using tools from anthropology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics — a method with broad applicability to political discourse generally. Taking off from the premise that all discourse is based in social interaction, this book demonstrates that looking at the ways individuals and groups use public discourse to perform critical social and political functions yields entirely new perspectives on the significance of the discourse. Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse is a valuable resource for students of linguistics, political science, democracy studies, Arabic language, and Middle East area studies.

Metaphor and Political Discourse

Metaphor and Political Discourse
Author: A. Musolff
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2004-08-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230504515

Far from being rhetorical ornaments, metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the structure of political categorisation and argumentation. Drawing on a very large bilingual corpus, this book, now in paperback, analyses the distribution of 'metaphor scenarios' in more than a decade of public discourse on European integration, elucidating differences in UK and German attitudes and argumentation. The corpus analysis leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory by systematically relating conceptual, semantic and argumentation levels and incorporating the historical dimension of metaphor evolution. Finally, drawing on examples of metaphor negotiation and on a reassessment of Hobbes' concept of metaphor in Leviathan, the book highlights the ethical dimension of metaphor in politics.

The Politics of Diversity in Europe

The Politics of Diversity in Europe
Author: Gavan Titley
Publisher: Council of Europe
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789287161710

Diversity has become a key term in contemporary social politics, and is often used as both a description of complex social realities and a normative prescription for how those realities should be valued, influenced by the politics of multiculturalism and by social movements asserting "the right to be different" diversity has emerged as an open, fluid discourse that challenges reductive visions of legitimate identities and human possibilities.It is this apparent acceptance of diversity as a fact and value that this book looks at in several ways, it offers a countervailing assessment of diversity, seeing it less as a unifying social imaginary and more as a cost-free form of politics attuned to the needs of late capitalist, consumer societies.The essays collected here are developed from a research seminar entitled "Diversity, Human Rights and Participation" organised by the Partnership on Youth between the Council of Europe and the European Commission. The studies gathered here are embedded in 10 different national contexts. They track dimensions of 'diversity' in education, social services, jurisprudence, parliamentary proceedings and employment initiatives, and assess their significances for the social actors who must negotiate these frameworks in their daily experience.

Political Discourse in the Media

Political Discourse in the Media
Author: Anita Fetzer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2007-06-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292272

This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse, as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab, Dutch, British, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Israeli, Swedish, US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics, the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics, particularly multimodality, cognition, context, genre and recipient design.

Legitimisation in Political Discourse

Legitimisation in Political Discourse
Author: Piotr Cap
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2013-01-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443845531

How did the G. W. Bush administration manage to persuade Americans to go to war in Iraq in March 2003? How was this intervention, and the global campaign named as “war-on-terror,” legitimised linguistically? This book shows that the best legitimisation effects in political discourse are accomplished through the use of “proximization”—a cognitive-rhetorical strategy that draws on the speaker’s ability to present events as directly and increasingly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or threatening way. There are three aspects of proximization: spatial, temporal and axiological. The spatial aspect involves the construal of events in the discourse as physically endangering the addressee. The temporal aspect involves presenting the events as increasingly momentous and historic and hence of central significance to both the addressee and the speaker. The axiological aspect consists in a growing clash between the system of values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee, and the values characterizing a third party whose actions, ideologically negative, are made “proximate” and thus threatening. Although the tripartite model of proximization proposed in the book is complex at the level of its linguistic realisation, the working assumption is intriguingly basic: addressees of political discourse are more likely to legitimise pre-emptive actions aimed at neutralizing the proximate “threat” if they construe the threat as personally consequential. The book shows how language of the war-on-terror, and especially the rhetoric of the Iraq war, respond to this precondition. This second revised edition features an extended preface and a new closing chapter.

The Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation

The Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation
Author: Wolfgang Merkel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1162
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192565478

Political, social, and economic transformation is a complex historical phenomenon. It can adequately be analysed only by a multidisciplinary approach. The Handbook brings together an international team of scholars who are specialists in their respective research fields. It introduces the most important areas, theories, and methods in transformation research, with particular attention placed on the historical and comparative dimension. Although focussing on post-communist and other democratic transformations in our epoch, the Handbook therefore presents and discusses not only their problems, paths, and developments, but also deals with the antecedent 'waves', beginning with the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868 and its aftermath. The book is structured into six parts. Starting with basic concepts as systems, actors, and institutions (Section I), it gives an overview over major theoretical approaches and research methods (Sections II and III). The connection of theory and method with their application is essential, allowing special insights into the past and opens analytical avenues for transformation research in the future. Section (IV) provides a historically oriented description or interpretation of particular 'waves' or types of societal transformation. With a clear focus on present transformations, the contributions to Section V provide a description and discussion of the problems, structures, actors, and courses of the transformations within different spheres of (civil) society, politics, law, and economics. Finally, brief lexicographic entries in Section VI delineate research perspectives and facts about relevant issues of societal transformation. Each of the 79 contributions contains a concise list of the most important research literature.

European Parliaments Under Scrutiny

European Parliaments Under Scrutiny
Author: Cornelia Ilie
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027206295

In the European tradition, parliaments are central political institutions that play a crucial role in the development of democratic societies. No other institution regularly offers a public arena for open deliberation and dissent, for discussing opposite points of view and for reaching compromise solutions between political adversaries. However, in spite of the growing visibility of modern parliaments, the study of parliamentary language use, interaction practices and discourse strategies has long been under-researched. Based on extensive parliamentary data, this book integrates a rich variety of innovative analytical approaches that explore the far-reaching impacts of parliamentary practices and linguistic strategies on current political action and interaction. Individual chapters problematise and re-evaluate the discourse-shaped identities and roles of Members of Parliament, the structure and functions of parliamentary discourse genres, interpersonal behaviour and intertextual meaning co-construction in post-Communist parliaments. They offer broad cross-cultural perspectives on parliamentary discursive psychology and argumentation. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of language and linguistics, rhetoric, political and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in language and politics.

Translating the European House

Translating the European House
Author: Stefan Baumgarten
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-08-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1443899135

This anthology of papers, written by Christina Schäffner, brings together a selection of articles on the theme of translation and politics. Written from the perspective of translation studies and critical discourse analysis, it provides an overview of the textual and ideological factors that determine processes of translation within the arena of international politics. The selected articles afford a fascinating insight into the dynamics of intercultural exchange against the backdrop of European politics from the fall of the Berlin Wall to debates on EU enlargement. By taking a context-sensitive approach to linguistic description, this book will be of interest to scholars in various adjacent fields of research, such as (applied) linguistics, (intercultural) communication studies, media studies, political science and the sociology of globalisation, as well as to relevant higher education programmes around the world. The discipline of translation studies has made its mark by conceptualising translation as a form of cross-cultural communication that transcends asymmetrical relations of power, foregrounding issues such as (colonial) domination, (cultural) hegemony, and ideology. To date, however, there has been no compelling evidence of the linguistic implications of transnational political communication, and little research has been done to help us to understand how political discourse at the international level presupposes translation. Featuring a wealth of examples from political text and talk, each article here links contextual features to the linguistic choices of political actors. By moving beyond national and cultural boundaries, these analyses help the reader to get to grips with the discursive implications of power politics, and to open up a new debate for a novel area of studies that might be termed cross-cultural political discourse analysis.