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This paper examines critical comments hidden behind the humorous topic of self-mockery. Based on a discourse analysis of 51 critical comments identified by GooSeeker of a self-mockery event from Weibo, this paper aims to unpack how the commenters actively exploit the relevancy of a topic to fulfill socio-political functions. Three strategies are found to be key in enabling them to accomplish socio-political functions: immoralizing the peripheral party, deauthorizing privilege and irrationalizing competitiveness, the meanings of which are discursively constructed across the critical comments. In this process, the self-mockery event serves as a weapon of social power to formulate critique and articulate discontent without breaking a consistent performance. The creative (re)appropriation in use is believed to be triggered by the policy of the platform and user's self-motivated interactional practice. These findings are expected to have implications for understanding comments as a social behavior at the nexus of language and social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newer forms of racism in the context of right-wing extremism are characterised by an apparent distancing from overt racist devaluations. In addition or even beyond biological features, it is now cultural characteristics attributed to social groups which serve as grounds for practices of othering and social exclusion. This paper analyses racist discourse in the comment sections of the influential far-right blog pi-news.com where these practices can be observed in detail. With reference to discourse analytical approaches to racism and using corpus-linguistic, data-driven methods, especially word embeddings and collocations, it is shown how racism is linguistically and discursively expressed. Next to both overt and more implicit racist nominations and predications, the notion of Heimat ('homeland') is analysed; it is used to draw racist demarcations without relying on overtly racialising terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting internet hate speech automatically is an important but difficult task that is recognised as ethically problematic. In comparison to typical computer science approaches, the current study focuses on psychologically meaningful aspects of language, and not on terms pre-defined as hateful. Data consists of the naturally occurring discourse of a gender critical feminist group banned from the Reddit discussion platform for promoting hate based on identity; this is compared with discourse of a feminist group from Reddit, that has not been banned. Notable psychologically meaningful terms of the gender critical group include third-person plural pronouns, and metonymic acronyms that reference the gender critical outgroup, which may represent outgroup derogation, and outgroup homogeneity. It is noted that the banned forum, which is shown to be an online community, may be responding to threats to identity in recognised ways. It is concluded that a socio-cognitive discourse approach to hate speech detection may help address related ethical concerns, including potential social injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been renewed interest in the intersection of identity and epistemics in social interaction, yet epistemics has still rarely been analyzed in political identity construction. This paper combines research on identity from a sociocultural linguistic perspective with epistemics using Conversation Analysis. The focus here is on understanding how a small group of student activists construct their shared political identities through epistemic stances towards their academic majors and career goals. Through a discourse analytic study of conversational data among these activists, I demonstrate the validity of the relationality principle of identity in accounting for how identities are constructed as related to one another. Furthermore, I examine the relational process of authentication in epistemic stances to legitimate claims to knowledge regarding political and academic identities, as well as alignment of stances in building group solidarity and shared political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American states began passing legislation that would ban transgender girls from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity in 2020. During legislative debate, supporters of transgender athlete bans adopted rhetoric that framed their arguments in terms of commonly held values. 'Value frames' establish connections between people and spoken values and have a powerful effect on the way that opinions about public policy are formed. We conduct a discourse analysis of video and audio footage from committee testimony and chamber debate from 18 US states to identify the major discursive themes used by the bans' supporters. Themes include gender simplicity, male advantage, protecting women and preventing change. Our discussion and analysis connects these themes to long-standing value frames used by political elites, namely tradition, fairness and equal opportunity. The conclusion addresses the implications of this discourse for shaping the public's understanding of sex and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison violence has been considered a threat to not only the safety of inmates, staff, and visitors but the day-to-day functioning of the prisons, and therefore is strictly forbidden and immediately punished. However, some inmates still turn to violence, which raises doubts about whether these inmates are naturally violent and impossible to change. This paper, based on in-depth interviews with 27 inmates who have committed violence and remained in solitary confinement in prisons in Zhejiang Province, China, examines how the inmates make sense of and describe their violent experiences. It is found that these inmates make efforts to construct their victims as deserving, acts as controlled, and punishment as acceptable through employing discursive strategies such as resorting to traditional values, conditional sentences, and repetition. In so doing, these inmates seek to redefine who they are not, how they should not be treated and what prison life should not be like. This paper could open up ways of better understanding why violence could be reduced but impossible to be eliminated completely in the prison context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global environmental change has provoked changes in how humans experience and perceive their relationship to nature. Such conceptual changes can be observed through language use, and specifically lexical change. This paper investigates how such changes manifest through an analysis of how the terms 'greenhouse gas', 'climate gas', 'carbon', and 'CO2' are used in the Norwegian parliament in the time period 1999–2019. We observe a discursive specialization where different discursive dimensions are linked to the different expressions, corresponding to different framings of climate change, including technological, economic, and moral perspectives. Importantly, there is a shift over time where the discursive division of labor between the expressions is consolidated and new framings emerge. We show that a more refined language of GHG expressions is a discursive resource that contributes to making sense of the multiple ways that climate change impacts society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout its history, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has elicited strong opposition that risks stifling anti-racist progress. This paper examines how support for BLM is argued about and challenged in online settings, focussing on the use of alternative 'Lives Matter' hashtags and slogans. BLM and anti-BLM material from 2020 was identified across six online platforms, which generated 1242 data items. Data were subjected to discourse analysis informed by critical discursive psychology. Arguments over the context of racism were a recurrent feature of responses to BLM-supporting posts. The analysis demonstrates the varying ways that alternative 'Lives Matter' formulations can be used to display opposition to and undermine BLM. Of these, 'All Lives Matter' was used most prominently but also 'White Lives Matter' and others. All alternatives to BLM function to obscure or deny the discrimination that Black people face, and so work to maintain the racist status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Taiwanese same-sex marriage debates from a particular analytical perspective: (1) how the identity as a mother is employed as stancetaking moves in both the supporting and opposing discourses, and (2) how stances are taken through intertextual links among the same-sex marriage-related discourses and the larger discourses concerning motherhood. It examines the online posts of two mother bloggers, focusing on how evaluative stances and parodic frames are achieved and how intertextual links help both bloggers to align or misalign themselves with particular value positions. The analysis reveals how the mother identity, traditionally situated in the private sphere, can be mobilized to advance arguments in political debates. It also exemplifies the ideological contestation about motherhood and family in Taiwan, where traditional Chinese cultural ideologies and Western influences co-exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has become a mental health pandemic. The impact on vulnerable demographic groups has been particularly severe. This paper focuses on women in employment in Hong Kong who have had to balance remote work and online schooling for over 2 years. Using semi-ethnography and theme-oriented discourse analysis, we examine 200 threads that concern members' mental health on a popular Facebook support group for mothers. We demonstrate that mental health messages are typically framed as 'troubles talk'. Other support group members actively align with a trouble-teller through 'caring responses', namely expressions of empathy and sympathy. These are realized through assessments of the trouble-teller's experience, reports of similar experiences; expressions of compassion and advice-giving. Mental health talk online is heavily mitigated, nevertheless the medium provides a space for expressing mental health troubles and providing informal psychosocial support. We advocate the importance of microanalytic discourse studies for mental health research to get insights into people's lived experiences during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study intends to contribute to the analysis of digital discursive practices of hate speech expressed throughout the so-called 'Manosphere', a group of online communities in which men express their considerations about masculinity. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, it investigates how one of the main Manosphere groups, the Incels, creates its in-group/out-group discourse through its representations of women and of themselves. Driven by Critical Discourse Studies and studies on the ideological function of metaphors, the first part of the analysis reveals a conflation of apparently sarcastic metaphors, dark humour, and misogyny used to talk about women, while the second section of the study focuses on the peculiar self-representations of the men who participate in the forum, which breach Van Dijk's 'us vs them' identity square pattern: rather than emphasising the positive traits of the in-group, incels describe themselves through self-derogative nominations and predications that give way to a spiral of self-pitying and self-contempt, which might be used to create fraternal bonds within the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a perspective on normalisation that turns on public pedagogies; that is, on ambient, ever-present systems of mediated experience that consciously teach ways of seeing, evaluating, acting, and reacting. Our perspective is further focused by theories of literacy and utopianism. It takes the view that we are in, or at least fast moving towards, post-literate cultures for which instructions to achieve political utopias are grounded in the devices of narrative mnemonics. We demonstrate our perspective using negative discourse analysis and show how narrative elements from extremist manifestos get normalised through the mediations and remediations of mainstream politicians, and through print and broadcast journalism, greatly aided at every stage by the volatile environments of digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the analysis of synthetic personalization as a new approach in studying and understanding the legitimization of the Crimean annexation. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough, synthetic personalization is a discursive strategy that identifies how aspects of language, which are regarded as commonsensical and normal, have ideological power, as they can become manipulative and controlling. The application of synthetic personalization to the March 2014 address of Russian President Vladimir Putin draws the audience's attention to traits that unify the masses and thus stimulate their individual features, in particular by relying on presuppositions. The article argues that the address legitimized the annexation of Crimea by framing the annexation as a result of a religious, military, and heterogeneous unity, which unified Crimea and Russia. The findings also question the impact of the one-sided production process and who is the actual producer of the address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers' crisis response communication about COVID-19. We examine how gender performativity and contextual factors contribute to each leader's discursive 'style' at the lexical level, and explore micro-diachronic changes as the pandemic unfolded. Informed by corpus linguistics approaches, we analysed written texts published on each leader's website between January and December 2020, using Scattertext to visualise lexical differences between each leader's corpus, and mapping frequencies against coronavirus case numbers in each country. Guided by these results, closer qualitative analysis reveals that whereas Jacinda Ardern quickly established and maintained a consistent and highly personalised style in guiding New Zealanders through the pandemic, Scott Morrison's messaging was both less personal and more reactive to the epidemic curve. However, despite some traces of stereotypically gendered language, neither leader made gender salient in their COVID-19 crisis response communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, although there have been steady increases in the number of women in politics, widespread gender inequalities persist. This is particularly pervasive in patriarchal societies where gender norms and practices are deeply entrenched, with socio-cultural barriers often cited as some of the key impediments to women's search for political power. There have, therefore, been calls to remove such barriers for effective participation. Unfortunately, some events that occurred before Ghana's 2020 election discourage, rather than encourage, women's participation in governance. With data from articles, headlines and comments from various online media outlets, this paper examines three events that reinforce what may be called 'a bloody widow discourse' in Ghana's politics. Using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper shows how traditional norms and expectations associated with widowhood can be perceived as barriers to women's (and not men's) quest for political power, thereby sustaining the unequal gender and power relations in politics. The use of allusion, rhetorical questions and presuppositions further perpetuate a 'blame-the-widow' discourse which makes the women appear unworthy of the power they seek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of COVID-19 in Macedonia in March 2020 overlapped with a period in which the country was run by a technical Government tasked to organize premature elections. In circumstances of highlighted inter-party conflict predating the health crisis, the newly emerged health emergency has only added to the political confrontation and the existing political crisis. COVID-19 and the resulting discourses on health crisis in this respect, I argue, have been used strategically by the political actors to make a populist advancement in the struggle over state power. Moreover, the strategic use of the COVID-19 by the two major political parties in a discourse marked by blame casting and (inter)dependence on past political misconduct indexes, and at the same time perpetuates, a larger ongoing political crisis in the country. To demonstrate the strategic use of the COVID-19 health discourse within the interparty conflict and its diagnostic potential to witness a prolonged political crisis, I will use internet data collected from the websites of the two largest Macedonian political parties in order to analyze the discursive strategies of predication and argumentation employed by the political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective, historical memory becomes increasingly important in public debates on cultural heritage across many countries. Their key elements are contested cultural objects – such as statues or memorials – which construct nations' memory that governs societal processes such as decolonisation or de-Stalinization. This paper analyses arguments about five such objects in UK, US, South Africa, Poland and Spain in order to identify discursive strategies used to argue whether to remove or to keep them. Large-scale comparative discourse analysis reveals that the ethos of historical figures – such as the Confederates or Joseph Stalin – commemorated by these cultural objects plays an essential and primary role in these debates. We argue that values associated with the character of these figures determine the dynamics of discourse and its close analysis allows us to uncover what societies are struggling with when handling artefacts of the past in the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is to analyse 180 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader (SL), Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, from 2005 to 2013 which are concentrated upon characterising the threats of doshman [enemy] and depicting the future space of Iran. Adopting the Proximisation Theory, the investigation of the Iranian Supreme Leader's speeches reveals that doshman poses futuristic spatial-axiological threats to the central values, programmes and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Furthermore, the future space of Iran is figured in multifarious policies to preempt the construed spatial-axiological threats of doshman. In this regard, I indicated that the Supreme Leader resorts to the characterisation of the pre-revolutionary states of affairs (the past) to analogously characterise the opposite futures space of the IRI. Therefore, the SL programmes to mould the futures based on the present time values and programmes in order to abort the re-birth of the past. It was also indicated that the future space in this discourse serves to preempt the reification of the construed threats in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ecolinguistics studies interactions between language and the natural world, the theme of genetic modification highlights challenges in developing frameworks for the analysis of ecological discourses. Given the ability of humans to alter life at the molecular level, one could argue that frameworks of anti-essentialism and discursive constructivism have expanded from the cultural and social realms (the traditional focus of discourse analysis) to encompass the natural world. This paper uses multilevel analysis to draw out various dimensions of debates related to genetically modified (GM) seed. Analysis is applied to a web-based corpus using both computational, quantitative methods as well as qualitative critical and interpretive approaches. Keyword analysis, concordance lines, and collocation are used to explore whether sides of the debate are reflected in the semantic structure of the text. Implicature and conceptual blending point to differences at the cognitive level. The analyses give data-based evidence for differing epistemologies, worldviews, and situated contexts that may underlie misunderstandings. Results suggest the multilevel methodology can be an effective way to integrate ecological context into discourse analyses. Findings also lead to a discussion of conceptual frameworks for ecolinguistic discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality in society is legitimised through the 'meritocracy myth' and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terrestrial UK televised broadcasts that used the term, 'super-rich' was analysed. This explored how wealthy individuals are presented as having superior psychological qualities compared to the general public in relation to their greater drive and resilience. However, wealthy individuals also talk about the development of superior traits as a response to adversity. Entertainment documentaries draw upon individualistic ideology to present wealth inequality as a natural consequence of individual differences and as a result, the current distribution of wealth is 'just' despite its negative consequences for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, access to high-quality migration advice can often be crucial to obtaining a visa, and migration advisors have attracted ongoing scrutiny from policymakers, leading to successive inquiries and reviews. Such inquiries and the recommendations they produce are used to justify policy design and reform that can have significant impacts on a range of stakeholders, including of course, migration advisors and their clients. This article explores one such recent inquiry, completed in 2018. It adopts a critical discourse analysis to examine the way the inquiry's official report presents migration advisors, and how it frames the inquiry process itself. Finding that the report presents its recommendations as being based on evidence created by external stakeholder submissions, the examination goes on to explore to what extent this is actually the case. Through an examination of the 'textual travels' submissions undergo when incorporated in the report, the article finds that these texts are either transformed to support dominant discourses, or simply excluded. The article concludes that decision-making is inaccurately presented as a participatory, evidence-based process, thus legitimising particular policy decisions, and unfairly continuing to present migration advisors as problems requiring fixing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of human rights has faced challenges in recent years in the United States and elsewhere. In this study, human rights discourses are examined in the context of strategic foreign policy rhetoric by the United States. The routine of foreign policy statements is meant to create audiences receptive to U.S. foreign policy aims, but also reveals underlying ideologies and assumptions. The analysis examines U.S. State Department Human Rights Country Reports between 2000 and 2019. The results show that the assumed ideal model of human rights is heavily based on U.S. political tradition. The performance of other countries is evaluated against the 'exceptionalist' U.S. model without consideration of different cultural or societal contexts. Linguistic choices are made to highlight the agency of authorities and events, which can be seen as a strategy of diplomatic face-saving. In some cases, countries are evaluated on an unequal basis based on political expediency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary politics, the category of victimhood confers rights and recognition. An inclusive discussion about the construction and conferral of victimhood, which includes individuals from different social backgrounds, need be informed by the possible uses of victimhood in political discourse. The present study investigates how individuals and groups are positioned as victims by mainstream Swedish politicians. A constructionist discourse analysis inspired by positioning theory was performed of eight longer political speeches and fifty-six addresses to the Swedish parliament, held over the course of a year. The results suggest that individuals in the 'normal' majority, comprising the most numerous and normatively dominant group of society, were positioned as victims. Heterodox minorities, which had fundamentally different morals and political ambitions compared to the 'normal' majority, were positioned as offenders. The study argues that a more inclusive construction of victimhood could be accomplished by engaging with heterodox minorities through dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter campaigns attacking those who make racist or xenophobic statements are valuable, raising the public profile of opinions that will not tolerate racism in any form. They also indicate how our major institutions are failing to address important matters of social justice. But there is concern that social media, such as Twitter, tends to extremes, moral outrages, lack of nuance and incivility, which shape how issues become represented. In this paper, using Critical Discourse Analysis, we look at three Twitter hashtags calling-out racist behaviour. We ask how racism and anti-racism is represented on these hashtags? We show how these misrepresent fundamental aspects of racism in society, distracting from, what race theorists would argue, is the most important thing these incidents tell us about racism at this present time. The findings have consequences for all such Twitter social justice campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the linguistic practices of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities have become more widely documented, little is known about how AAPIs discursively create shared political identities, let alone political identities online. In this study, I examine an online messaging community dedicated to AAPI political organizing. Focusing on the discourse of four highly active members of the community, I analyze stance-taking, their uses of what have been called "referring terms" or "referring expressions", and the intertextual references they make. I show how users establish group values through stance-taking and in-group membership through using specific referring expressions, co-constructing the community's identity as a marginalized political group. Through intertextual references, users index shared knowledge of cultural texts regarding AAPI activism and political organizing, such as references to recent and past hate crimes, current news, and AAPI non-profit organizations. I demonstrate how these intertextual references reinforce Becker's notion that social groups' identities lie in a shared collection of "prior texts." Furthermore, I contend that the use of intertextual references aligns the community with the political implications and connotations of the references themselves. Through mutual recognition and understanding of shared texts, members create an online community that transcends ethnic and regional boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connection between ethnic identity, the articulation of these identities through discourse and the ideologies indexed by these identities in the interaction of Malaysian speakers. Based on selected episodes of radio discussions, the study focuses on how speakers identify or self-categorise themselves, in such a way that makes ethnic identity relevant to the discussion. The study draws upon existing literature on types of identities in interactions and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) in investigating how speakers make ethnic identity relevant to the discussion on Malaysian issues through the act of self-categorisation. In the context of these discussions, the membership categorisation device (MCD) 'Malaysian' and ethnic identities acquire very specific meanings through the practice of self-categorisation. While some speakers focused on the ethnic culture and traditions, others are more interested in sharing their experiences based on their own ethnic identities and interactions amongst the society. Social issues like dealing with rights and obligations of certain ethnic or social groups and developing one's sense of ethnic identity, among others, motivate speakers to offer their stance on these issues. In this way, their views and expressions of ethnic identity come to position themselves in terms of these interactional specific roles and identities as Malaysians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent pro-Biafra protest across Nigeria has become an important topic in the news media where it has been constructed in different ways. Existing studies on media construction of protest have examined framing, speech acts and rhetorical strategies. However, adequate attention has not been given to the discursive representation of the 2015 and 2016 pro-Biafra protest. This study therefore examined the discourse strategies and the ideological inclinations of news reports on the 2015 and 2016 Biafra protest. Van Leeuwen's representation of social actors and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL) serve as the theoretical underpinning of the study. Data were purposively drawn from four widely read and circulated Nigerian newspapers, The Punch, The Sun, The Vanguard and The Nation which allocate sufficient space to the coverage of the protests. The period covered was between 2015 and 2016, a period where the protest was most intense in the country. Three representational strategies which include 'protesters as freedom fighters', 'protesters as economic saboteurs' and 'protesters as law-abiding citizens' were discovered in the study. Ten strategies in van Leeuwen's representation of social actors – passivisation, nomination, association, disassociation, exclusion, aggregation, functionalisation, differentiation, indetermination, collectivisation – were indexed in the representational strategies. These representations were also explicated by four processes which include material, verbal, relational and behavioural. The pro-Biafra protesters were equally represented as violent and unruly whereas the protesters construe themselves as law-abiding citizens and freedom fighters as against being treated as terrorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a considerable body of research on the pragmatics of apology across the globe, the Indian apology discourse has received hardly any attention from scholars. Political apologies particularly, have been neglected as an important area of research in India. The act of tendering public political apologies, which was almost absent from the Indian repertoire, is an emerging trend in India. This article aims to identify the salient characteristics of Indian political apologies by contextual analysis of the apology texts and is a first of its kind as far as known to the authors. Indian political leaders use evasion and manipulation in apology utterances to avoid an explicit apology. The graver the transgression, the greater the hesitation to offer an explicit apology. We suggest that the categorization of political apologies should take into consideration the stature of the political apologizer also and not just the magnitude of the offence, as this can have a significant impact on the apology behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing competition and metrics focusing on teaching quality (e.g. the teaching excellence framework or TEF), there is a spotlight on learning and teaching (L&T) in policies and practices within universities. Bodies at national and institutional levels focus on disseminating policy ideas on L&T which are oriented to government priorities. This article focuses on how policy itself is discursively constructed in selected L&T policy documents and explores the means of the recontextualisation of policy discourses. I discuss the following three findings: (1) the construction of policy as 'embedded within processes and practices', (2) shifts in genre and discursive strategies as policy ideas become short guidelines and (3) the role of 'discursive mechanisms' in forcing engagement with policy ideas. Through an analysis of discursive strategies and recontextualisation, I demonstrate the seeming insecurity around policy compliance and show how constructions of L&T are never value-free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adopts critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the recontextualisation of Beijing's voice in Hong Kong's governance. Using Beijing's interpretation of Article 104 of the Basic Law in 2016, which triggered a by-election in 2018, as the case, this article analyses two texts produced by two social actors: the press conference in response to Beijing's interpretation by the Hong Kong government and an election flyer by a pro-democracy candidate, complemented by a corpus analysis of pro-Beijing newspapers reporting the incident. The findings show that the local government drew upon Beijing's voice to help create a dominant representation of the Beijing–Hong Kong relations and thus hegemonised Hong Kong political discourse which influenced other social domains, such as newspapers and elections. The pro-democracy camp, as the resistance to the hegemony, drew upon Beijing's voice to create an alternative representation to secure votes during the by-election. This article then proposes a model which could comprehend Beijing's role in Hong Kong's political events, of creating and perpetuating the tension between the hegemony and resistance in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been abundant empirical studies identifying risk factors associated with inmate suicide. However, little attention has been turned to the voices of inmates who have experienced suicide. This article, based on semi-structured interviews with 14 incarcerated adults who have committed suicide and survived in prisons in Zhejiang Province, China, tries to explore how suicide is presented, constructed and oriented to in interaction. Implications for future research and suicide intervention are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but little attention has been paid to what the concept of political discourse itself encompasses. With this in mind, this article aims to understand what types of discourse are categorized as 'political' in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (form, type of actors, policy domains, geographical coverage). To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of 164 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Overall, the findings show that political discourse is generally limited to the discourses of (institutionalized) political elites and most specifically to oral monological speeches. The review also highlights discrepancies regarding the geographical scope and the policy domains covered by the empirical analyses, more specifically a bias toward the Western world and issues related to external defense policies, justice and home affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that metalinguistic documents in historical archives are a useful source for political discourse analysts to explore. With reference to the archives of the British Ministry of Information in World War II, it shows that such documents are revealing of the orders of discourse and the language ideologies that contribute to the production of political discourse. Archival documents can help us to understand the ways in which political actors conceive of the linguistic strategies that are typically the focus of our discourse analytic work. In a field which places great theoretical emphasis on the contextual significance of political language, archival documents thus represent a crucial, but hitherto overlooked, source of evidence. More specifically, the article demonstrates that the Ministry of Information's civil servants paid a great deal of attention to language, working in highly reflexive ways to produce their discourse, and that one of the linguistic strategies that was particularly intensely discussed was the use of informal and personalised language. Those civil servants were working on a 'synthetically personalised' language half a century before discourse analysts began paying sustained attention to such a strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practices like hashtags can enable identity construction and affiliation with a wider community of users. Practices such as mentioning and retweeting have also been discussed in the literature but the practice of following as a discourse practice is underexplored. This article presents a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach to the study of collective identity on Twitter that focuses on the relationships between following and language use and details a study conducted on the language used by followers of the Football Lads Alliance – a protest group who say they are 'against all extremism'. This approach was fruitful in identifying correlations between salient discourses in follower profile descriptions and their tweets and suggests that a portion of the followership constructs identity in relation to radical right-wing and populist discourse specifically concerning Islam/Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates a distinctive linguistic device – slogans – in the discursive ecology of the history, culture and politics of China. We are interested in how a given language device, one that might seem trivial, can carry out different distinctive and important functions in particular cases. Slogans in China are an important way to carry out a function that all states must engage with: to encourage and teach people to see themselves as 'co-citizens' in the state. At the same, this function also and always links to important ideological goals and intersects with the state as a source of coercive power. This article is a first step in a larger project to study the discursive tools used, in different ways in different societies, to accomplish the civic and ideological goals of states. So, China here is a case study, an important one to start with, given the significance of modern China in the global world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political discourse is a major site where ideological construction of both Self and Others is carried out. Based on a corpus of 98 political texts issued by Chinese governing bodies from 2000 to 2018, this study adopts Appraisal System to analyse the lexical items that indicate attitudes towards China and other countries with a view to revealing the ways in which China and other countries are appraised in Chinese political discourse. It is found that (1) Chinese political discourse does represent the ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation, but more frequently it negatively evaluates China's things (appreciation) rather than its behaviours (judgement) while more negative appraisals are used to describe Others' behaviours rather than Their things, (2) interestingly, while China upturns Others' negative profiles, it also upscales negative presentation of Self; likewise, China mitigates negative presentation of both Self and Others, (3) Chinese political discourse allows more external voices when expressing its attitudes towards Self. The analysis shows that the producers of Chinese political discourse skilfully use appraisal resources, sometimes implicitly, to construct a subtle but dynamic 'Self versus Other' ideological structure in Chinese political discourse, which enhances the understanding of China's moderate view on itself and others in its pursuit of national interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes an integrated framework to elucidate the process of socially constructing reality by examining how Facebook commenters argue over two same-sex marriage (SSM) bills in Taiwan. Through stance-taking, which involves evaluating, positioning and aligning with others, some commenters contest while others defend SSM by referencing the referendums and the laws. The analysis shows that (dis)alignments facilitate multiple 'team performances', that is, cooperative interactions that project competing definitions of the situation, or 'frames', within which events are interpreted differently: one bill is criticized as undemocratic while the other contradictory. This bottom-up approach emphasizes participants' agentive role in shaping the public discourse. The discourse analysis of online comments illustrates reality as constituted by negotiation over taken-for-granted concepts in the digital age, while highlighting the intersubjectivity in large-scale platforms like Facebook and how online commenting is used to (re)frame issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances a synthetic framework for examining the relationship between affect and power. Combining critical discursive psychology with analyses of stance and emotion thematization, the framework enables a dialogic analysis of the macro and micro levels on which affect weaves into social life. The approach is applied in an analysis of women's talk about their hair, which they construct as 'black' or 'African'. Guided by the notion of 'affective-discursive practice', the article investigates the relationship between affect and meaning-making revealed in talk, as well as relations of power that arise from it. In the analysis, individuals are found to articulate their affective experiences in unlike ways and to hence position themselves differently in relation to the hegemonic discourses of beauty and race. The article discusses how the dialogic research on affect and discourse enriches our understanding of the role of feelings in the micropolitics of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discriminatory discursive strategies adopted in the online interactions between different power groups from Mainland China and Hong Kong in their response to two YouTube videos about the Hong Kong Umbrella, or Occupy Central, Movement. A corpus of 4329 comments made by 2157 posters from Mainland China and Hong Kong was coded regarding commenters' place of residence and their perceptions of the Umbrella Movement and then tagged based on Flowerdew et al.'s previous taxonomy of discriminatory discursive strategies. The results show that a wide range of discriminatory discursive strategies, used by two power groups from Hong Kong and one from the Mainland, were found in the majority of the comments, including four sub-strategies not identified by Flowerdew et al. While studies to date on the Umbrella Movement have mainly focused on Hong Kong data, our study contributes to the literature by adding the perspective from Mainland China. The findings of this study provide insights into the increasing social and political tensions between Hong Kong and its mother country as well as the current situation in the divided city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing cultural and academic attention is being paid to fathers who assume the primary caregiving role, stemming from interest into whether contemporary masculinity is evolving away from traditional, hegemonic ideals. This study utilises a Discourse Analysis informed by Membership Categorisation Analysis to explore how this relatively new category – primary caregiving father – is discursively constructed in 193 Australian newsprint media articles. The analysis identified that the category of 'primary caregiving father' was defended and discursively managed so as to remain consistent with the activities and predicates typically associated with the category 'normative man'. This was routinely achieved in two ways. First, descriptions of traditional uninvolved fathers were contrasted unfavourably against the 'new' primary caregiving father, working to position primary caregiving fathers as the new norm. Second, accounts of men's decision to take on the primary caregiving role routinely relied on the category-tied predicates of rationality and stoicism, thereby working to position primary caregiving fathers as normatively masculine. Overall, this article concludes that, despite fathers taking on roles inconsistent with normative gendered categorisation, constructions of fatherhood in news media routinely work to align (or re-align) primary caregiving fathers within hegemonic ideals. Therefore, while masculinity is evolving and shifting, it remains within the bounds of what is considered hegemonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I use a critical discourse analytic approach to investigate how President Trump's campaign goal to build a wall along the US/Mexico border has been discussed in United States political discourse. The data analyzed are 30 videotaped speeches and other public events which occurred between October 2016 and March 2018. These data are publicly available from the cable news channel C-SPAN's online video archive. The analysis focuses on the communicative techniques and strategies used to persuade others and justify one's position in the interactions and events studied. In this article, I show how the border wall proposal is reformulated into a debate about border security, and how diverse ways of referring to persons without approved documentation are used to support arguments on both sides of the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an exploratory study investigating the production of the meaning of 'freedom' in US history textbooks used in high schools across America. Responding to current ideological division, this article investigates the production of American patriotism and identity. This study uses methods from critical discourse analysis to dissect how the language used in the textbooks produces a meaning of 'freedom'. It then explores the production of patriotic citizens through history/civic education and questions the meaning of 'freedom' as a value that sits at the heart of American identity and rhetoric. The quantitative and qualitative results show that the story of 'freedom' in the textbooks aims to pacify the violent ruptures of history while instilling in students a sense of duty to 'freedom' as a cause and value worth furthering – even if its meaning is not fully explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the legal action taken for defamation in the case of the 'human zoo', an alleged defamatory portrayal of the Paiwan people, a Taiwanese indigenous group, by Japan's public broadcaster, NHK. The analysis of this case is presented in two stages, the first of which employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the covert racist discourse regarding the Paiwan people in a four-episode NHK documentary series on the history of the modernization of Japan. Second, the study evaluates the discursive patterns of the legal documents resulting from the subsequent lawsuits. The analysis incorporates the findings of interviews with key stakeholders in the human zoo case in its investigation of the presence of insidious racial prejudice against the Paiwan people, combined with a lack of sensitivity towards indigenous peoples in general, both in the documentary and in the responses from NHK in the subsequent lawsuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a collaborative interdisciplinary multimethod research project on psychosocial risks and communication in the workplace that involved the Union of Metro Workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The objective of this article is twofold: on one hand, to understand an apparent contradiction in the results of the quantitative survey, which showed very high levels of stress and, at the same time, very high levels of satisfaction. To do this, we conducted a discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with subway workers. On the other hand, the results of this analysis allowed us to coin the concept of 'double stance discourse' as a way of describing a specific type of response that differentiates both personal and collective perspectives toward the issue of job satisfaction. We conclude that these 'to me' and 'to others' responses are a resource for individuals to reconcile, in discourse, conflictive individual and social experiences of working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on discourses of 'smart' in order to invite more inclusive communications among policymakers, scientists and practitioners, designers and developers. The selected data consist of the European Commission policy discourse on innovation for the digital future and related developments currently in force with legally binding financial and monitoring instruments. We identify assumptions about who and what 'drives' this domain of innovation and who is at the 'receiving end'. Namely, the two conspicuous notions in these texts concern 'smart' Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-driven progress and Europeans as beneficiaries. We discourse-analyse these assumptions, the resources they draw upon, rhetorical strategies and the implications of the ideological underpinnings for those who are spoken of. By interrogating taken-for-granted notions and ways of talking about (the role of) technology and Europeans, we aim to raise awareness about how discourses of smart can be deconstructed in order to unravel and 'see' the built-in assumptions, trace their trajectories, consider their functions as they appear, and begin to address open and direct questions about them to their proponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism has an important role in making political participation visible to the public. In representing the voices of the public, journalism produces discourses on democratic engagement that tell us a great deal about the norms of how these discourses conceive of practices of political engagement. The aim of this article is to study the ways in which speaker identities are given to and taken by migrant activists participating in Swedish radio interviews. Employing Goffman's concept of footing, this article shows that there are conflicting speaker identities that the activists are adopting and are given by the framework of the radio interviews. The main conflict in how the speaker identities are made up is based on the negotiations around how the activists are talking about themselves or about others. The article further shows how talking about others in a public discourse such as journalism requires speakers to make difficult choices in how to represent oneself as a speaker, and that such choices might stand in conflict with a news discourse's preferred authentic and experiential identity of its sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biafra secessionist agitations in Nigeria continue to generate varied conversations online and offline. This study applies critical discourse analysis and the appraisal framework in examining social actor representations in the ongoing Biafra agitations in Nigeria. It analyses posts produced by interlocutors, as they express variegated stances towards the agitations and its actors, within two vibrant Nigerian digital communities, Nairaland and Nigeria Village Square. This study identifies binary social actor positioning, revealing both negative valence and positive self-representation strategies towards the agitations and principal social actors in the agitations. Expressed within the appraisal resources of attitude, engagement and graduation, these valuations result in the distribution of socially and emotionally constructed identities for the principal social actors in the agitations. Such distribution is socio-cognitive, as there is the likelihood that the representations might evolve into the creation of new ideological orientations or the reinforcement of existing ideological leanings, whose consequences are potentially double-edged for tranquillity in the Nigerian polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research follows the tradition of Ethnography of Communication to discuss hitlahamut, an Israeli term for a distinctive type of public talk. After presenting the denotive meaning, I define the act and style hitlahamut encodes, using analysis of the type of talk it describes. The data are taken from phone-in interactions and online op-eds and news. Hitlahamut defines a self-centered emotive, exaggerated style of the confrontational and divisive message, and it encodes hostile relations between the participants. I then connect this term with other Israeli terms for talk and with terms for public talk elsewhere, suggesting that hitlahamut describes unreasonable criticism, enabling participants not to engage with the content of the criticism due to its (perceived) style. In addition, hitlahamut describes populist discourse (from both left and right) due to its combination of aggression and emotive style with divisive language and problematic argumentative content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]