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This article explores discursive constructions of women trafficked for sexual exploitation in newspaper articles in the United Kingdom and the United States. I draw on the results of a multimodal discourse analysis of 25 articles published in 2018 across seven newspapers. The framework of politics of pity is used to analyze the politics of representation of trafficked women. The analysis yields six categories that fall into two themes: Agency is depicted through trafficked women as deceased, controlled, and injured subjects, and visibility through the categories of strangers, victims, and survivors. These ways of appearance suggest that, in newspaper content, trafficked women are placed on a hierarchy of victimhood. Appeals to compassionate care are reserved for "ideal victims," while those lower on the hierarchy are construed as ambivalent subjects lacking a political voice. The study shows that dominant constructions of public suffering reflect a neo-abolitionist politics of representation, while marginalized identities and subjectivities are framed through ambivalence. To expand the remit of care, ambivalence could be productively used to contextualize social oppression in media accounts of human trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducts an exploratory corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the representation of the Rohingya minority group across online news media in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the study is to identify and interpret the discursive patterns employed in popular online news media when depicting the Rohingya minority and associated crises affecting the group in Myanmar and worldwide. Through the use of a combination of frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis, a synchronic study was undertaken using data collected from fifteen major online news media producers in the United Kingdom. The data was collected over a period from January 2017 - August 2020 through freely accessible digital archives. The research study found that particular discourses of security, internationalization, and power are commonly employed when reporting on the Rohingya, while equally a sympathetic viewpoint is often adopted which focuses specifically on global responsibility and failures of international society. The findings offer insight into socio-political processes of representation and discourse in the 'new social location' (Scholz, 2019) of online news media, while offering relevant insight into the discourses of urgent and pressing humanitarian issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study seeks to identify the main tendencies in the use of politically correct language from the linguocultural and pragma-linguistic perspectives. The paper offers an overview of the ways in which political correctness is expressed in the British and American political discourse. The study is corpus-based; the contexts illustrating theoretical hypotheses are borrowed from three large-scale corpora of the corresponding variants of English (British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, and Hong Kong Baptist University Corpus of Political Speeches). The study relies on the linguo-cultural and pragma-linguistic paradigm supplemented by discourse analysis. Research results indicate that British and American political discourse has both general and culture-specific features. Speakers from both the USA and the UK tend to refer to milestone events their audience is well-acquainted with. They use a wide array of general notions, as well as specific terms and set expressions depending on the impression they wish to make on their listeners. American politicians appear to be inclined towards using less formal lexis such as 'opposing the nation's enemies' and 'political rivals', whereas their British counterparts tend to choose more formal terms and expressions. Modern political discourse is characterised by continuity: it is inextricably connected with the previous stages in its development, while at the same time acquiring new peculiarities and taking new forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing relevance of social networking platforms is accompanied by a growing number of studies using digital trace data. However, most studies still lack further understanding of the data-generating process. This analytical gap can be directly attributed to the prevalence of quantitative approaches, as only qualitative work is able to generate these insights. The broad methodological toolset of discourse network analysis addresses this shortcoming as it combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The present study therefore employs discourse network analysis in order to (1) determine different user groups' varying role as senders and recipients of targeted online conversations, (2) identify and compare Twitter users' (simultaneous) reference to different forms of conversational Twitter content, and to (3) asses the motivation of @message authors to direct particular Tweets at particular user groups. To this end, this study analyzes @messages during the BBC program 'Question Time' on 2nd of June 2017--the final media encounter of Prime Minister Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the context of the 2017 UK election campaign. We draw on the theoretical background of Maarten Hajer's discourse coalitions approach in order to investigate the preconditions for the formation of discourse coalitions in new and emerging virtual discourse arenas. Thus, our work not only mirrors the focus in existing literature on Twitter usage during high-profile political media events, but also emphasizes Twitter's unique features for interactive exchange. This article identifies different forms of meta-talk and policy issues, which vary in both their general popularity with Twitter users as well as their interconnectedness. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers the motivation behind the decisions of @message authors to send particular @messages to certain groups of Twitter users. Finally, we could establish that media events only temporarily affect the topical foci of @message authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 2011 UK Census, Muslims form the second largest religious community in Britain. The relationship of this community to British society more generally has come under much scrutiny. The current study focused on British Muslim's constructions of belonging and conflict towards Britain. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using discourse analysis. Findings suggested that for these participants second generation Muslims were more likely to construct themselves as belonging to Britain than first-generation Muslims, who show more attachments to their own culture and religion. Both generations produced rationalizations in order to negotiate their sense of belonging to British society and/or other culture. Moreover, their discourse was constructed in such a way that it fulfilled the function of protecting both generations from issues of accountability in social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]