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Ecological identity involves all aspects of how individuals or collectives identify themselves with nature. This paper aims to examine the discursive construction of corporate ecological identities in corporate sustainability reports in China and evaluate how these identities are legitimated through the lens of ecolinguistic discourse analysis. Our data was drawn from a collection of English-language sustainability reports of Huawei Technologies Corporation (2016–2020). The findings suggest a mix of ecological identities across all texts, among which stewarding nature dominates and it relates to the belief that humans are obligated to steward nature for the sake of sustainability. These ecological identities are discursively legitimized in terms of defining characteristics, social roles, and community memberships. Innovativeness, leadership and ethicalness are legitimated as the corporation's dominant characteristics which serve as moral identity standards, allowing further legitimation of the social roles and community memberships that the corporation claims. In the case of social roles, green manufacturing depends on green technologies, and both of them point to the instrumentality and rightness of technology in advancing sustainability. These construals uncover the ecological sustainability in the Chinese cultural context, that is, achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. In legitimizing community memberships, hierarchical relationships between the corporation and other participants are revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using positive discourse analysis as a framework, this article examines Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s press statements on the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on how he constructed a message of hope and inspiration. The analysis demonstrates that Widodo used his language to encourage the people of Indonesia to be resilient, remain positive, and collaborate with the government to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic. The findings reveal that metaphor, lexicalisation, and rationalisation were the three main strategies that helped Widodo to construct his message of hope and inspiration and to formulate an emancipatory discourse intended to liberate the people of Indonesia from the difficulties of the pandemic and chart a way forward in the post-pandemic period. The study underscores the crucial role of language as a resource for hope and as a response strategy during a crisis as well as its significance in helping individuals, communities, nations, and societies make sense of their experiences and (re)imagine a positive future despite their present predicament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developed from scholarship in recent decades that highlights the positive potential of gossip as a kind of discursive practice, this article addresses the politics of gossip represented by Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son. It examines how gossip is used as a plot device to insinuate the deepening crisis of the Dombey world, as well as how the devoiced subordinate people employ it as a discursive strategy to survive and negotiate with the supervisory power both within the household and the office. It argues that although the subordinate gossipers do not overthrow the power structure of the Dombey world that devoices them, their whispers in the marginalised space amount to significant pressure upon Mr. Dombey that equips them with agency for active survival and covert resistance while catalysing Dombey's downfall. On the other hand, Mr. Dombey's contempt for gossip denotes a form of moral neurosis typical of the middle-class Protestant economic man who views 'idle' activities as moral corruption. With his dismissal of idle talk, Mr. Dombey deprives himself of a valuable epistemic tool and renders his agency disempowered when misfortunes beset him both in the sphere of family and of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridewealth, the long-standing practice of groom-to-bride monetary transfer, is now facing growing backlash in China. Researchers mostly approach bridewealth from the perspectives of anthropology and economics, highlighting its social impact yet leaving public opinions on it less heeded. To fill this niche, this study collected the most “liked” 5,000 posts from Sina Weibo, identified dominant themes of bridewealth supporters and detractors, and analyzed how these themes are (de)legitimatized. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis and van Leeuwen’s analytical toolkit, content analysis reveals that supporters mainly see bridewealth as a protection of women, an investment in the new families, and a worthy tradition to follow, whereas opponents associate it with the commodification of women, financial challenges to men’s natal families, and long-gone feudal shackles. These themes are enacted with strategies like rationalization, moralization, victimization, and authorization. This study stands out for situating bridewealth in media studies and illuminating the contested public discourse on it. More importantly, given that most supporters are women and they bear the brunt of the family-work balance, the study also gives voice to the much-silenced women’s marriage-related concerns in institutional media so that their welfare and self-actualization can be accommodated in future policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on how women construct resistance, project their agency and sculpt a positive identity for themselves. It employs feminist critical discourse analysis as a framework to examine how Nigerian blogs on gender issues constitute a discursive site for sociopolitical action, the interrogation and deconstruction of gendered social structures and the amplification of women's voices(s). The article analyzes discursive strategies used in the blogposts to resist gender inequality, women's exploitation and female subjugation while constructing a positive image for women and emphasizing their empowerment. The results reveal three main strategies: (1) denouncing patriarchy and gender discrimination, (2) countering toxic gender narratives and (3) calling out sexist attitudes and praising women who resist such behaviour. Together, these mechanisms contribute to a sociopolitical critique of systematic gendering of privilege aimed at social transformation and Nigerian/African women's emancipation. Implications of the study for research on marginalized, disenfranchised groups are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on the heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in three international newspapers from different geopolitical regions between 2012 and 2022. To this end, a combined method that uses the discourse-historical approach and corpus-assisted analysis was adopted. In the analysis, it identifies three salient discursive strategies (namely, nomination, perspectivisation and argumentation) that are employed to reconstruct/represent the national Dream differently in the three media. The findings suggest that the Chinese Dream is a floating discourse in media, and its portrayals strongly depend on the news institutions and their ideologies, stances and socio-political systems in which they are based and that the objective presentation of media is fragmented or an illusion, at least in the case of the mediatised Chinese Dream. The heterogeneous representations also show the features of discourse power struggle and ideological divergence in the media based in different geopolitical regions. The study contributes to the critical understanding of the Chinese Dream in the discursive world constructed by news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue expands on the ongoing dialogue on the decolonial project by bringing together thought-provoking papers that examine the communication of female political leaders in the Global South. It draws on data from West Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East to elucidate how female politicians deploy language (including multimodal forms) to position themselves in the political arena and utilize linguistic resources to navigate the discursive practices associated with their political roles and responsibilities. The issue offers a critical discursive perspective on the complex interplay of gender, culture and political leadership, and holds implications for how key issues such as voice, agency, solidarity and empowerment are conceptualized and enacted in specific sociocultural contexts. It also contributes to overcoming epistemicide by decentring knowledge production and underscoring the importance of valuing and engaging with different knowledge systems, especially non-Western epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of social media, the landscape of international news dissemination has changed significantly. This research is conducted to discover the discursive strategies of Chinese and Western news outlets in China-related news reports on Twitter, one of the most widely used social media platforms. The key objective is to examine China-related news reports on Twitter to explore the different discursive strategies employed by Chinese and Western news media in reporting China. To achieve these objectives, the research data were collected from the Twitter accounts of People’s Daily China, an official news outlet representing the Chinese media, and the New York Times, a leading American/Western news agency. Based on the data analysis, certain discursive strategies were identified in the practices of Chinese and Western media that are causing differences in constructing China’s international image. These results might assist the international audience in gaining a more objective understanding of China and help Chinese news media sources improve their reporting strategies and international communication capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online mode of medical consultation has been gaining increasing popularity. Online medical consultation (OMC) in China is largely mediated through e-healthcare websites which are featured with an online evaluation system for patients and caregivers to assess OMC doctors' service. The evaluation system facilitates an e-commercialised way for delivering healthcare services. It is of interest to study how doctors make efforts to promote themselves in the e-commercialised OMC practice, in particular how language is used to elicit positive comments and evaluations in doctors' self-promotion. However, this, to my best knowledge, has not been studied. The present study thus examines discursive strategies for eliciting feedback by doctors who contribute to OMCs on a widely used e-healthcare website in China. By the approach of mediated discourse analysis, five strategies have been identified. These discursive strategies are discussed in relation to the disruption of stereotypical roles of doctor and patient and the influence of non-stereotypical positions on power relations between doctors and patients. This study provides a new perspective on doctor-patient relationship and serves as a starting point for further studying neoliberal medical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports from a case study investigating enactment of teacher evaluation (TE) policies in two lower secondary schools in a large Norwegian municipality. The aim of the study was to explore teachers' perceptions of TE, and to unpack how new policy initiatives were shaped by translations, mediations, and negotiations in a national context characterised by relatively low-stakes accountability. The analysis was informed by municipal and local school documents, in situ observations, and semi-structured in-depth interviews with seven teachers, focusing on the interplay between material, interpretative, and discursive elements. Findings indicate that TE practices reflect traditional approaches to teachers' professional development based on classroom observations (COs) and peer counselling, marked by symmetrical relationships, reflexive collaboration, and collective knowledge-sharing. However, a non-hierarchical collective-oriented culture seems to be disrupted by result management and standards that define 'the good teacher' or 'the good lesson' combined with individual COs. Teachers raise concerns that market discourses which treat pupils as 'customers' and teachers as 'providers of results' may encourage strategic behaviours to comply with expectations and preserve one's good reputation. Implications for policy and practice are discussed with regard to how TE as a discursive strategy contributes to the 'making' of particular teacher subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to examine how male sex workers are represented in Thai newspapers. The analysis is contingent upon Reisigl and Wodak's concept of discursive strategy in conjunction with Machin and Mayr's compilation of transitivity analysis. Methodologically, this study employs corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The 45,769-word corpus consists of news articles retrieved from the websites of 11 Thai newspapers. They were published in English between the period of 2000 and 2019. Findings reveal that the media pursue the nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization together with intensification and mitigation strategies to portray male sex workers in a non-threatening fashion. Possible contributing factors behind such portrayal are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Учебник рассматривается как особая форма коммуникации между участниками образовательного процесса, в рамках которой значимость приобретает моделирование образов обучающего и обучающегося, реализующееся в текстах при помощи особых дискурсивных стратегий. Цель статьи – выявить представленное в учебниках по иностранному языку содержание образов участников образовательного дискурса, реализованных в высказываниях, обращенных к обучающимся; определить дискурсивные средства их формирования. Исследование выполнено на материале текстов 10 учебников английского и русского языков, изучаемых как иностранные. Методы исследования определяются спецификой образовательного дискурса, особенностями учебника как сложного ядерного жанра, включенного в его структуру. В качестве методологического обоснования исследования рассматривается понятие дискурсивной стратегии как способа реализации образа участника дискурса, который в свою очередь осмысляется как вариант реализации дискурсивной роли, конкретизирующий признаки социальной позиции в ситуативно-личностном аспекте. Образ участника дискурса – совокупность его признаков, проявляющихся в особом дискурсивном поведении, не выходящем за рамки типового, заданного дискурсом и направленного на реализацию дискурсивной цели. Исследование показало, что конкретно-ситуативные жанрово-дискурсивные цели учебника по иностранному языку, заданные в соответствии с типом регулируемой образовательной деятельности, определяют формирование трех типов образов участников образовательного дискурса: 1) автор – предписывающий обучающемуся необходимые учебные действия; обучающийся – их исполнитель; 2) автор – организатор, «режиссер» коммуникативной ситуации определенного типа; обучающийся – участник этой ситуации, ее «актер»; 3) автор – ведущий участник коммуникативной ситуации определенного типа; обучающийся – ведомый участник этой ситуации. Третий их тип кардинально отличается от предыдущих низкой степенью директивности. В рамках стратегической реализации рассматриваемых целей индивидуально-личностные представления составителя учебника о форме взаимодействия между участниками образовательного процесса определяют выбор речевых средств, задающий дальнейшее варьирование образа автора и образа обучающегося. Дальнейшее варьирование образов осуществляется на основании индивидуально-личностных интенций составителя учебника и проявляется в аспектах их индивидуализации.

This authors attempt to determine the relationship between positioning and discourse from the standpoint of the media communication approach (based on the theory of philology and the theory of communication). The subject of the research is positioning as a discursive strategy. The work uses a set of methods: synthesis, comparative analysis, interpretive analysis. On the one hand, the study of positioning as a discursive practice involves an analysis of discourse; on the other hand, the designation of positioning as a discursive strategy focuses on the tools of achievement (the communicative moves used during positioning). A theoretical substantiation of positioning as a discursive strategy is proposed, which is based on discourse - speech, “immersed in life” (term by N.D. Arutyunova), which, according to the author's interpretation, acts as a means of communication. It is concluded that positioning is both a communicative influence directed at the consciousness of the receiving party and a manipulative phenomenon, the realization of which occurs through the influence on the connections existing in the consciousness of the individual. In turn, the actor operating with positioning is able to achieve many goals in the course of the implementation of the communicative act.

The article presents an attempt to analyze the strategic perspective of discourse, applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) concepts and Crisis Communication analytical tools. The study aims to reveal key strategies employed by a political actor to form public perception while communicating a crisis, based on Donald Trump's discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic. Results suggest four groups of strategies: (1) legitimization (through emotions, altruism, a hypothetical future, voices of expertise, rationality, defeasibility, simple denial and bolstering), (2) delegitimization (through negative evaluations, accusations, sarcasm, nicknaming, attacking the accuser, shifting the blame), (3) mitigation (transcendence and differentiation) and (4) intensification (through the use of repetitions, metaphors, superlatives, intensifiers). The research concludes that the macro goal underlying the described strategies is to present the Trump administration's efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic as hard and effective. The study illustrates the use of language to model public perception and construct meaning in the context of a crisis. The research findings contribute to prior scientific inquiry into discursive strategies through suggesting a more comprehensive typology and extending CDA classifications by Crisis Communication categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 13th and 15th October 2021, President Putin held a conference known as the “Russian Energy Week 2021” to examine the impact of energy exportation. The news diffused through various media, aided by translation and narration aspects of journalism. The study primarily relies on qualitative research to identify foreign news articles to investigate journalistic translation. The aim is to assess how the original meaning of the source text (ST) is manipulated through translation in the media. The research examines the impact translation has on the original utterances and translated phrases. The research utilizes Critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology to facilitate contextual analyses from the text. The research verified the intertextual relation between ST and target text (TT) sentences; it found ST utterances the translational quotations from the newspaper articles are based on. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the discursive strategy of the German-language print media during the journalistic translation of top Russian officials’ speeches is investigated. The results confirm translation as a source mild to severe alterations with some words omitted whereas other implying different meanings as perceived from the original. Also, the results show that journalists use translation of original statements to construct their arguments. Moreover, the discursive strategy of the original speaker is subject to change, often significant.

There is a scarcity of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies on the representation of social actors in news media, thus this study addressed this research gap by analysing the way news represented the French President Emmanuel Macron, regarding his controversial support of Samuel Paty, a history teacher in France who was murdered because he showed a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad in his class. This research aims to see the representation of Emmanuel Macron from the perspective of the French media, The Connexion France, which published their news in English language online to reach world-wide audience. Four articles of the news were purposively selected for this CDA study, which were published from October 18 until November 1, 2020. The French President’s representation was analysed with the nomination and predication strategies. Results showed that the Connexion France uses four nomination strategies to refer Emmanuel Macron. The professional anthroponyms refer to Emmanual Macron as “the President”, proper names as “Emmanuel Macron” to be the centre of the discourse, synecdoche as “Emmanuel Macron”, and deixis as “he” to avoid repetition the subject of the text. Two predication strategies were also used, the explicit predicate of how the President “has promised” action against Islamists and presupposition from the way the news linked pictures of boycotted French supermarket products with the President. This research provides a take on fresh news with CDA and can beneficial for the students who learn English language by showing how the media uses language for political figures.

This study examines the political discursive construction of the "Chinese Dream" and its representations in global media by drawing on the methodological combination of the discourse-historical approach, corpus linguistics, and framing analysis. The data for analysis consists of Chinese President Xi Jinping's official speeches and news coverage on the Chinese Dream by the China Daily, the South China Morning Post, and The New York Times for around six years (2012–2018). The analysis identified that the Chinese Dream discourse largely aims to serve toward Chinese nationalism, the reinforcement of the ruling Party's legitimacy, and the Chinese leadership's authority. Meanwhile, it was also found that the three media adopted different dominant frames to reshape the Chinese Dream, namely China Daily's Chinese national-centric frame, South China Morning Post's multiculturalist-oriented frame, and The New York Times' US-centric "othering" frame. These news frames were tactically designed to serve their sociopolitical and ideological interests. Through corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the article aims to 1) reveal the discursive strategies and patterns of the Chinese Dream; 2) shed light on the discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in specific global media; and 3) bridge the gap between the original political discourse and its discursive reproduction in media representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing Wodak's discourse-historical approach, this paper examines how Ghana's independence leader – Kwame Nkrumah – in his creation of the Unite or Perish myth constructed 'the African people' in a manner in sync with populist performance. It argues that Nkrumah's discourse, in its focus on the formation of a Union Government of Africa as the only means of Africa's peace, progress, security and survival in the post-independence era, can be characterized as a form of populist rhetoric that presupposes an antagonistic relationship between two homogeneous social groups. To this end, the paper analyzes three discursive strategies utilized by Nkrumah in promoting anti-establishment sentiments while celebrating or valorizing 'the ordinary people': nomination and predication of social actors and actions, the construction of a man of the people image and the exploitation of familiarity and historical memory. It concludes with a discussion on the implications of the study for political discourse analysis in terms of the interrelationship between political myth and populist performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different perspectives on the compatibility between Islam and Democracy are still problematic and have been widely discussed on the international media, especially after the Arab Spring. This study aimed to reveal the changes in social beliefs about the relationship between Islam and democracy within the discourse on Room for Debate rubric, nytimes.com. The data were the written text (verbal) comprising the introductory segment from the editor, the opinion segment comprising 6 articles, and the public comment segment. The method used in this study was the qualitative method. This study employed Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (2013) to reveal the discursive strategy of the writers in negotiating the democratic and Islamic values, to investigate the production, distribution, and consumption of the text, and to identify the social context which causes the discourse of the relationship between Islam and Democracy to appear. The finding showed that there were some democratic values negotiated within the discourse that showed changes in social beliefs about the relationship between Islam and democracy in the modern view. The value negotiation showed the alignment of the writers towards the progressive Muslim actors who supported the modern democratic government system.

Through the use of language, government institutions and officials in elective democracies try to present particular instances of abuse of power and public resources as legitimate and enable similar practices in the future. This article aims to identify and reveal the strategies used within the Western Balkans' official discourses to legitimize particular cases of suspected state capture and assess their outcomes. The empirical study of six prominent cases of suspected state capture in the construction industry in the period from 2010 to 2020 indicates that a single legitimization strategy is used region-wide, and this article contributes to better understanding it. To assess the strategy outcomes, an original analytic model is proposed. The findings suggest that the deployment of the strategy to legitimize the suspected cases of state capture encourages potential captors in the region to consider engaging in similar practices in the future.

The article is devoted to the role of experiment in the process of discourse formation as a linguistic phenomenon. The object of the study is the discourse initiated by the largest Austrian writer of the twentieth century, Robert Musil. The aim of the study is a discursive analysis of the philological and literary-critical interpretations of the novel “A Man Without Qualities”, which is a central fragment of the “Musil’s Discourse”. It is noted that the Musil’s discourse unfolding during the century, is formed by numerous participants representing various groups of subjects: literary scholars, writers, cultural experts, psychologists and literary critics. Particular attention is paid to the bipolar structure of the Musil’s discourse as its main characteristic. It is shown that the leading German critic Marcel Reich- Ranicki set a new direction for the development of Musil’s discourse. The results of the analysis of Musil’s discourse at the level of its content, as well as at the levels of strategies and means of implementation are presented. The main strategies of the studied fragment of the discourse are identified - the deconstruction strategy and the conservation strategy, implemented in the tactics of invective, tactics of positive presentation and tactics of support. It is proved that the idea of the experiment laid down by Musil in the basis of the novel “A Man Without Qualities” is transposed to the Musil’s discourse as a whole and turns it into an object of experiment.

This article analyzes the political rhetoric Abiy Ahmed used to advocate integration between the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups, recasting it as “Oromara.” Its objectives are: identifying the rhetorical devices and discursive strategies used in the integration of the Oromara, examining how integration of the groups is discursively constructed, describing the message characteristics of the interview texts, and explaining how political rhetoric, power and ideology are linked to play advocacy role for further reinforcing the integration of the groups. To attain these objectives, the interview Abiy had with Amhara television journalist on 13 November, 2017 was selected using purposive sampling. The interview data was changed into written forms using line based transcription system, and analyzed thematically. Fairclough’s (1992) model of discourse analysis was used in the analysis. The findings show that rhetorical devices (simile, repetition, parallelism and analogy, metaphor and metonymy) are employed in the text. The macro-discursive strategies used in the interview include accommodative, normalization, constructive and genericizing. The interview text communicated both negative (hostility, revenge, detestation, distrust, conflict and retaliation) and positive (integration, trust, forgiveness, peace and adoration) messages. The negative descriptors portray unity of the groups as a threat for political system designed for the last 27 years, whereas the positive descriptors indicate that discourse of the Oromara is a key to bring systemic change in the country. The binary descriptors explain the divide and rule system constructed by the monopolized political power on the one hand, and the power of integration to topple the system on the other.

Ambiguity plays a central role in how narratives about violence are told, but research has rarely taken into account the ambiguity used by criminals with complex motives. Drawing on narrative criminology, this contribution explores how ambiguity is deployed in the stories of violence publicly told in a television interview by Mario Mariolini, a paraphiliac Italian killer sentenced for homicide. The analysis of the narratives, in tandem with the discursive strategies therein, demonstrates that ambiguity is strategically used for different purposes. As a result, we identify three central narratives, each displaying different ways of making instrumental use of ambiguity. In contrast to the analysis of the ambiguity produced by ordinary criminals, this contribution shows how particular and severe criminal cases are better suited for the study of narratives about violence because of the more complex interplay between the ideological and communicative dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discursive choices made by policy entrepreneurs are an important factor in the development of climate change acts (CCAs). This article examines the extent to which such choices reflect the strategic need for CCA entrepreneurs to compromise pragmatically and modulate their policy preferences in order to secure the agreement needed for CCA adoption. Drawing upon theoretical insights from discursive institutionalism (DI) and policy entrepreneurship, this article analyses discursive choices during negotiations surrounding the New Zealand Zero Carbon Act (ZCA). The analysis shows that endogenous political-ideological constraints compelled entrepreneurial actors to modify first-choice preferences for emissions reduction legislation by reframing their coordinative discursive interventions to accommodate potentially oppositional groups. Further research is required into the conditions under which such strategies become discursively operational, to provide guidance to climate policy entrepreneurs as CCAs continue to diffuse globally. Key policy insights Strategic compromise by climate advocates is crucial to the passage of enduring legislation. Climate policy entrepreneurs' decisions about how and when to compromise to ensure legislation may have significant implications for climate policy efficacy and political durability. Compromises may only defer rather than diffuse underlying political tensions but can enable CCA adoption so as to reshape political contexts in the longer-term. Future research can inform climate policy advocacy strategies that aim to balance ambition and durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper examines the function of a specific construction comme je l’ai dit and its role in a particular type of oral discourse. The phrase occurs with high frequency in an established discursive genre, namely, debates in the European Parliament (EP). It is presented as a parenthetic construction, including elements with an anaphoric function, and endowed with a specific discursive aim. In order to better understand the raison d’être of this syntactically autonomous form in the specialized corpus, a mixed semantic-discursive approach is adopted. The aim of the study is to highlight the main properties of the construction bearing a particular functionality and to specify its status in discourse from the perspective of the active interlocutor. Given its rather simple morphological paradigm, its rather stereotypical enlargements, and its easy mobility, comme je l’ai dit reveals certain specificities of the referential process. The reference of the anadeictic type causes a sort of “duplication” of the object of discourse and also its reconfiguration. The return to the already said, with the aim of re-modeling it, is in fact accompanied by a re-saying, a repetition of the locutor’s own speech. The interrupting, the going back, the reworking and advancing, involved in the use of the analysed construction, seem to have several implications. The presence of comme je l’ai dit is justified by the speaker’s intention to construct relevant discourse that takes into account intralocutive and interlocutive dialogism. The interruption followed by a relaunch is a signal that redirects the attention of the interlocutor, while the repetition, which is a reminder of the already said, preserves the continuity of the discourse. The two processes set up by comme je l’ai dit, anaphoric reference and repetition, have the function of ensuring the coherence and the continuity of ongoing discourse through the tradeoff between saying, repeating and discursive memory. The importance of adjustments between speaker and interlocutor is the basis of the chosen discursive strategy. The functional perspective brings out the interpersonal aspect of the referential procedure.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, brought a symbolic end to the Cold War. The authors examine the discourse of commemoration as a space for the production of meaning. Their subject is approached from two analytical angles: (1) the commemorative event with the original product it supplies and (2) the status of the media discourse of commemoration. The corpus comprises all the articles, a total of 101, discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall in the online editions of one or two quality newspapers from four European countries: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Romania.

The author examines the significance of Swiss investigative journalists’ involvement in shaping public understanding of the “Maudet Affair.” She combines discourse analysis with analysis of the event’s “career”, showing that investigative journalists had both a social and enunciative role in the way the affair emerged and developed. Their response to that responsibility affected the configurations they imposed on the event and leaves them open to criticism. A metanarrative thus emerges out of the journalistic search for truth, which acts as a means of legitimating the fourth estate.

The author analyzes Kazakh digital media discourse maintaining and strengthening the sacralization of the image of Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the public, media, and digital space and in the minds of Kazakhs. For over 30 years Kazakhstan has claimed to be a democracy and possesses all the elements of a democratic regime. The author goes on to examine the coherence as well as the contradictions inherent in having authoritarian and democratic processes sharing the same public and media space.

The authors present a critical reading of a new kind of object: the Allô Place Beauvau? website. Allô Place Beauvau? is a deliberate challenge to the media treatment of police violence in France based on a new form of event construction. The analysis is in three parts. The first resituates the Allô Place Beauvau? project in its journalistic and editorial context. The second is a description of its editorial mechanism. The third is a critical analysis of the approach of that project, presented as an anti-event.

While online medical consultations (OMCs) have become increasingly popular, not least in times when epidemics make access to medical facilities difficult, research exploring the interactive value of OMC is still in its infancy. This study examines patients' disalignment with speculative diagnosis and its management by doctors in OMC interactions, which to my best knowledge are not examined. From a discourse analytic perspective, this study adopts Du Bois's notion of stance-taking to approach text-based interactions collected from a widely used OMC website in China. This study finds that patients' disalignment is often based on hard evidence, which is different from the major findings of previous studies. When addressing such disalignment, doctors adopt varied discursive strategies, which are hardly mentioned in prior studies, in particular, strategies that address the affective aspect of patients' disalignment. This study thus provides a different perspective on disalignment and its management in the clinical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Through the use of language, government institutions and officials in elective democracies try to present particular instances of abuse of power and public resources as legitimate and enable similar practices in the future. This article aims to identify and reveal the strategies used within the Western Balkans' official discourses to legitimize particular cases of suspected state capture and assess their outcomes. The empirical study of six prominent cases of suspected state capture in the construction industry in the period from 2010 to 2020 indicates that a single legitimization strategy is used region-wide, and this article contributes to better understanding it. To assess the strategy outcomes, an original analytic model is proposed. The findings suggest that the deployment of the strategy to legitimize the suspected cases of state capture encourages potential captors in the region to consider engaging in similar practices in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative social and environmental consequences caused by corporate activities (e.g., workplace incidents, oil spills, and product-related accidents) can significantly affect the success and survival of a business. When there is bad news to report, how will companies handle the information disclosure? This paper examines discursive strategies UK and Chinese Fortune 500 companies used for communicating negative aspects in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Based on 50 UK and 50 Chinese CSR reports, the study shows how companies legitimize the bad news via the strategies of Denial, Deflection, Mitigation and Admission. Two major differences were observed in the legitimation efforts made by Chinese and UK companies: i) almost all legitimation strategies were more frequently found in UK reports, and ii) UK reports mobilized a wider range of linguistic and rhetorical resources for realizing the strategies. The paper discusses the results by considering cultural, social, and organizational factors that may shape CSR discourse in the two countries. Findings add to the understanding of crisis communication and image repair strategies used by large corporations and the genre of CSR reporting in different cultures. • Legitimation strategies used by UK and Chinese companies were investigated. • 50 UK and 50 Chinese corporate social responsibility reports were analysed. • Chinese companies relied mainly on strategies of Deflection and Corrective Actions. • UK companies employed a wider range of linguistic and rhetorical tactics. • Findings reveal differences in the genre of CSR reporting in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can populist competitive authoritarian regimes be defeated through elections? In this article, we focus on the 2019 municipal campaign strategy of the opposition Istanbul candidate Ekrem İmamoglu as a case study of a successful challenge to a populist competitive authoritarian regime. We argue that such regimes may be prone to defeat when their opponents use what we call an 'inverted populist' strategy. This strategy involves three key elements: adopting an indirect and gradualist approach that avoids direct confrontation with the populist leader and the popular values s/he represents, redefining the 'the people' by including previously excluded groups, and promising redistribution to disadvantaged groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand and interpret the everyday verbal interactions of Algerian speakers where several varieties of languages are used. After having collected a corpus of conversational exchanges in different places, we intend to analyze and interpret the structure and the functioning of their speeches on a daily basis in order to apprehend, from a pragmatic point of view, the mechanism implemented by the interactants who use different varieties of languages in their speeches produced in situ. Thus, we aim to dissect the real language of Algerians to contextualize training in foreign languages in order to relate the social field and the institutional field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper examines the function of a specific construction comme je l'ai dit and its role in a particular type of oral discourse. The phrase occurs with high frequency in an established discursive genre, namely, debates in the European Parliament (EP). It is presented as a parenthetic construction, including elements with an anaphoric function, and endowed with a specific discursive aim. In order to better understand the raison d'être of this syntactically autonomous form in the specialized corpus, a mixed semantic-discursive approach is adopted. The aim of the study is to highlight the main properties of the construction bearing a particular functionality and to specify its status in discourse from the perspective of the active interlocutor. Given its rather simple morphological paradigm, its rather stereotypical enlargements, and its easy mobility, comme je l'ai dit reveals certain specificities of the referential process. The reference of the anadeictic type causes a sort of "duplication" of the object of discourse and also its reconfiguration. The return to the already said, with the aim of re-modeling it, is in fact accompanied by a re-saying, a repetition of the locutor's own speech. The interrupting, the going back, the reworking and advancing, involved in the use of the analysed construction, seem to have several implications. The presence of comme je l'ai dit is justified by the speaker's intention to construct relevant discourse that takes into account intralocutive and interlocutive dialogism. The interruption followed by a relaunch is a signal that redirects the attention of the interlocutor, while the repetition, which is a reminder of the already said, preserves the continuity of the discourse. The two processes set up by comme je l'ai dit, anaphoric reference and repetition, have the function of ensuring the coherence and the continuity of ongoing discourse through the tradeoff between saying, repeating and discursive memory. The importance of adjustments between speaker and interlocutor is the basis of the chosen discursive strategy. The functional perspective brings out the interpersonal aspect of the referential procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Forma y Funcion is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is about the sociolinguistic variation of the specialized phraseological units (SPU) contained in a textual corpus in Spanish dealing with skin cancer in different communicative situations: one from specialist transmitter to specialist receiver and the other from specialist transmitter to general public receiver. It fits into the context of research conducted on this theme, the first results of which are presented. These different communicative and social contexts influence the use of the language on the part of the transmitter, which must develop discursive strategies adapted to its target receiver whose profiles are heterogeneous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Doncella Teodor is a Castilian text probably composed in the middle of the 13th century, inspired by an Arabic source, as well as other gnomic treatises from the Alphonsine period. Opposed to various wise men of the court, in charge of measuring the extent of her knowledge, the doncella Teodor convince them, in turn, by the sentences she asserts without any justification, but which her opponents recognize as truths. However, in the printed versions of the early 16th century, the last of his opponents accuses her of using false arguments to defeat the first sages. How can we describe as arguments what seem to be only preconceived ideas shared between questioners and questioned? What are Teodor's strategies, both gestural and discursive, to convince hers judges?

The paper on the material of two leading British editorials – the Daily Mail and the Guardian in the context of critical discourse analysis analyzes immigration discourse which is the consequence of the political changes that swept Europe during the events of 2011 called the “Arab Spring”. The author reveals and analyzes the discursive strategies that form the discourse immigration, the linguistic mechanisms for their implementation, illustrating their use on specific examples. Within the framework of critical discourse analysis discourse is considered as a form of social interaction, which, in our opinion, allows us to clarify how ideology sets the formatting rules of discourse and determines its content. The relevance of such an investigation is due to the growing scientific interest in the phenomenology of political discourse and its various aspects. As a result of the analysis of publications, the discursive strategy of humane treatment of immigrants has been identified as one of the most common discursive strategies used by publications for the representation of immigrants. The paper substantiates the need for further study of immigration discourse and the development of discourse analysis for the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of speech interaction in the political sphere. The replacement of the lexeme “illegal” with “irregular” or simply “migrants”, the use of the term “irregular migration” in relation to immigrants in the context of their basic rights, smuggling and trafficking in their totality are those constitutive components of immigration discourse that realize the strategy of representing immigrants as helpless, desperate and powerless victims.

The Ming dynasty saw a surge of "the revival of the ancient" in both theory and practice of leisure essays. The revival of the ancient was both value judgment at the level of literature and cross-reference between personality traits and social changes. Essay writers who promoted the revival of the ancient fell into two groups, one comprising members of the learned societies and academies, the one including officials from ministries in the central government. The former advocated a plain style as exemplified by the Song-Dynasty prose, while the latterfavored the archaic style of the Qin and Han dynasties. The different approaches chosen to revive the ancient responded to both internal requirements and external conditions. On the one hand, they took into considerations how the theme, author's situation and attitude, as well as the social status of the author and the reader, were conditioned by the chosen style. On the other hand, the approach to reviving the ancient needed to fulfill the requirements from different socio-political strata to gain control of literary standards, maintain power structure, and seek political reformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze a seven-page speech delivered by Sukarno, first president of Indonesia, at the opening of the First Asia-Africa Conference where he advocated Afro-Asian unity/ solidarity as the panacea for colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Our aim, by focusing on a single text, is to demonstrate the role of an intensive analysis of 'outstanding' singular texts within the broad field of discourse analysis. The analysis is rooted within a positive discourse analysis (PDA) framework, with special focus on lexical choices and variation, modality, intertextuality/interdiscursivity, metaphorical representations, ideological use of pronouns, indexical meaning, and strategies of argumentation. Through these rhetorical techniques, we illustrate how an independence leader constructs an emancipatory discourse aimed at reconciling the ideas and beliefs of the leaders of two continents that have a common history of colonialism. The study sheds light on the role of key speeches and political leaders in promoting an emancipatory discourse, and exemplifies how (presidential) rhetoric can be construed as offering a message of hope, strength, and inspiration while playing the role of a unifier, thereby highlighting the major underlying assumption of PDA: a commitment to a discourse of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]