Search

This article explores the under-researched area of discursive tactics employed in terrorist threat texts that exploit moral values to constantly justify violence, fostering a 'discourse of justification', disaffiliation and conflict. Employing a discursive pragmatic analysis, it delves into the tactics of violent extremists associated with jihadism and far-right ideologies. Utilising the Appraisal framework and the 'moral disaffiliation' strategy, the study uncovers verbal practices shaping a dynamic of justification. Findings reveal threateners' involvement in regulatory discursive functions – manipulation, deontic-retaliation, and boulomaic effect – and practices of ideologically positioning functions – discrediting, blaming, denying and (de)legitimating. The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment. This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis. [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]

The article examines the use of the modal auxiliaries MUST and HAVE (GOT) TO in politically charged online communication. Comments from D. Trump's official Facebook page were categorized according to the ideological position of the commenters and further divided into employing deontic or epistemic senses of the modals. The analysis was based on the assumption that the proportion of epistemic and deontic modals in the supportive and critical comments reflects the stances of equality or superiority assumed by the commenters. The hypothesis that pro- and anti-Trump camps assume different stances while debating immigration was confirmed as the proportion of deontic and epistemic senses of the modals differed significantly between the two groups. There were also differences in the use of passive voice referring to in- and out- groups. The results are used to make inferences about the underlying ideology of Trump supporters and the prevalent attitudes in the population under study. [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 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]

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]

Intent is a psychological quality that threat assessors view as a required step on a threatener's pathway to action. Recognizing the presence of intent in threatening language is therefore crucial to determining whether a threat is credible. Nevertheless, a 'lack of empirical guidance' (p. 326) is available concerning how violent intent is expressed linguistically. Using the subsystem of judgment in Appraisal analysis, this study compares realized with non-realized 'pledges to harm', revealing occasionally counterintuitive patterns of stancetaking by both author types – for example, that the non-realized texts are both prosodically more violent and more threatening, while the realized pledges are more ethically nuanced – which may begin to shed light on which attitudinal markers reliably correlate with an author's intention to do future harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the representations of the Syrian refugee crisis in commentary articles published in two British newspapers with different political orientations, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The study draws on the appraisal model as a linguistic tool to analyse the attitudinal language of the articles indicative of the stances adopted by the newspapers. Such stances have the potential to position the readers to positively view the refugees and accept them into their homeland labelled as the welcoming stance, or otherwise reject them labelled as unwelcoming. The selected 20 articles belong to September 2015 and March 2016, the beginning and end of a 6-month period during which important policy changes were made by the leading countries in the wake of 2015 terrorist attacks. The findings indicate that the left-leaning The Guardian adopts a dominantly welcoming stance towards the Syrian refugees and consistently maintains this welcoming stance after 6 months of chaos across Europe. The right-leaning The Telegraph, however, shows a more unwelcoming stance and becomes even more unwelcoming after 6 months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a scenario-based experiment designed to test the effects of trust-building strategies, realised in stance-taking acts, which a previous corpus-based study found to be salient features of stakeholder-facing corporate communication. The experiment relies on a between-subjects design in which a target group of subjects are exposed to trust-building strategies while another control group of subjects are not. We apply this paradigm to corporate discourse in the form of an About Us webpage produced by a fictitious multinational pharmaceutical company that has been accused by a whistle-blower of corporate misconduct. The results of the study show that these strategies are indeed effective in fostering trust in the company and have an indirect positive effect on the perceived credibility of the company’s denial in response to the allegations made by the whistle-blower. The strategies are therefore able to mitigate the potential damage caused by public accusations of wrongdoing and help companies insure against future threats to their legitimacy and freedom to operate, as when their behaviour violates, or is said to violate, societal norms and values. Theoretically, the results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms of trust-building and reader response. Methodologically, the study contributes to the growing body of work using experimental methods in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by further demonstrating that experimentation can usefully complement more traditional discourse-analytical methods as a form of triangulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many other areas of life, the notion of risk has recently become central to discourses related to politics. This research article shows how political and media representatives use the notion of risk in their rhetoric, making it an important part of and a powerful resource for manipulation. It is demonstrated how stances taken by speakers on different political issues reflect their social, political and moral views, showing that risk has become a common construct around which a political situation in the modern world is described, organized and practiced. In most general terms, stance is understood here as the way of expressing one’s viewpoint concerning the object of interaction, which in this study is risk. The theoretical background of the research is situated within socially constructivist approaches to discourse analysis. We argue that risk has become one of the defining social and cultural characteristics of modern society. The research focuses on the ways stances on risks are constructed at the linguistic level by means of certain structural and formal qualities, and on how these linguistic features are related to social interaction under the conditions of political, moral, economic and social crisis in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines stories of personal experience of World War II in guided tours at a Japanese American museum and analyzes the positioning practices deployed in constructing identity within the story world and storytelling. In particular, it shows how older Japanese American docents tell we-focused stories in positioning themselves as part of a group of Japanese Americans and family who were relocated and incarcerated during the war, and I-focused stories in positioning themselves as individuals who acted in response to unexpected events linked to relationships and institutions. The analysis points out ways docents display stances toward past events and ways visitors participate in the telling such as by posing questions. It suggests that stories of personal experience are a vehicle for constructing identities that draw upon historical events, autobiographies, story structure, and interactional contingencies. The findings are related to stories as a tool of teaching and engaging museum visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the way that audiences respond to particular representations of poverty. Using clips from the Channel 4 television programme Benefits Street we conducted focus groups in four locations across the United Kingdom, working with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who had different experiences with the benefits system. Benefits Street (2014) is an example of reality television where members of the public are followed by film crews as they perform everyday tasks and routines. Our choice to focus on this particular programme was prompted by the huge media response that it received when it was broadcast; Benefits Street generated 950 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom and was referred to as ‘poverty porn’. We focus on the way that viewers of this programme produce assessments of those on benefits, analysing the discursive strategies used by our participants when evaluating representations of those on benefits. Specifically, we consider how the participants in our study construct their own stance and attribute stance to others through naming and agency practices, the negotiation of opinion and stake inoculation. We invited our participants to judge the people they saw on screen, but they went beyond this. They used clips of the programme as stimuli to collaboratively construct an overarchingly negative stereotype of those on benefits. We conclude that Benefits Street is not just an entertainment programme, but is rather a site for ideological construction and the perpetuation of existing stereotypes about benefit claimants. The programme (and others like it) invites negative evaluations of those on benefits and is thus a worthy site for critical linguistic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook was not only a global campaign for the release of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, but also a campaign for the rights of female children and girls to formal education. This article applies the appraisal framework and (critical) discourse analysis to examine the discursive features of this campaign and the role of affective stance in the evaluation of social actors in the campaign discourse. Findings reveal that #BringBackOurGirls (https://twitter.com/hashtag/BringBackOurGirls?src=hash) campaign exhibits a great deal of affect at the level of vocabulary reflecting moods, feelings and emotional language in the representations of persons, groups and governments. Most of the evaluations reflect negative valence, which is often typical of public reactions to (social) media reports of crisis, or national disasters. The article argues that social media campaigns and activisms can be fruitful if they are followed up by practical offline actions; otherwise, they will end up as mere skacktivism. Some of the campaigners themselves argued that the campaign could not have been successful if the girls were not rescued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A penchant for luxury goods, insistence on a boyfriend who pays, and any opportunity to be the center of attention have all been described as characteristic of a ‘Kong Girl’ since the mid-2000s. In this article, we explore the social relevance of the popular stereotype by examining the role of stancetaking in online forum discussions. Focusing on a 2005 incident involving ‘Jenny’, who was later described as the ‘Kong Girl’ prototype, we show how forum participants try to come to terms with the sociohistorical changes in a late modern Hong Kong society by positioning Jenny and themselves within a shifting heterosexual marketplace. The heated controversy reflects changing gender ideologies that are exerting pressure on both men and women and provides the backdrop for the rise of the Kong Girl stereotype, which has its media prime in the years following 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Underpinned by the assumption that social categorizations emerge from discursive practices performed within the interactional context, this study examines the discursive process in which an expert witness constructs and negotiates persuasive courtroom accounts. Using insights from the concept of ‘footing’ and the framework of stance and engagement, this study reveals the ways in which an expert witness calls upon a range of interactional devices to appropriate the desired footing and labeling category. The findings suggest that instead of asserting their dominance and expertise over the interlocutors, experts construct and negotiate their identity by aligning with other participants and establishing a relationship with them. All this is done within the broad constraints of courtroom discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aims to offer a fresh look at the relationship between identity, stance-taking and code choice. The study provides three examples of different forms of Egyptian public discourse related directly to identity that took place during the 2011 revolution of Egypt, a time when state TV media stations cast doubt on the identity of the protestors by utilizing linguistic resources. This article argues that during the process of stance-taking speakers employ linguistic resources, discourse resources and structural resources. These linguistic resources include the associations and indexes of different languages and varieties, in this case Standard Arabic (SA), Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) and English. This stance-taking process depends on code-switching as a mechanism that lays claims to different indexes and thus appeals to different ideologies and different facets of identity. Second, this study also shows how speakers use public discourse in order to construe language as a classification category and an identity builder. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The organization of embodied participation frameworks, stance and affect is investigated using as data a sequence in which a father is helping his daughter do homework. Through the way in which they position their bodies toward both each other and the homework sheet that is the focus of their work the two contest the interactive and cognitive organization of the activity they are pursuing together. The father insisted that their work be organized in a way that would allow him to demonstrate the practices required to solve her problems. However the daughter refused to rearrange her body to organize the participation framework that would make this possible, and demanded instead that Father tell her the answers. When the daughter consistently refused to cooperate Father eventually walked out, but returned later, and they constructed a very different affective and cognitive alignment. Such phenomena shed light on range of different kinds of epistemic, moral and affective stances that are central to both the organization of cognition and action, and to how participants constitute themselves as particular kinds of social and moral actors in the midst of the mundane activities that constitute daily family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]