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The paper analyzes the discursive strategies of apparent empathy and ideological polarization that were used to legitimize discrimination against covered female students in the Republic of Turkey. We approached this complex social problem from the point of view of critical discourse analysis, which represents an interdisciplinary research area centered on the interest in researching the manipulative use of language. The ban on wearing headscarves in universities in Turkey was the fruit of the Kemalist conception of modernism and hegemony established by the Kemalist elites. An important role in preserving that hegemony was also played by the media, whose primary goal was to legitimize social injustice and protect the social order based on an asymmetric distribution of power. They performed this role of the media through the manipulative use of language within clearly recognizable discursive strategies, which was shown by the analysis of the newspaper text that is the subject of this paper.

In recent years, political discourse, in particular diplomatic discourse, has increasingly fueled research in language sciences. From this perspective, Algerian-French relations, through their common past and the development of their exchanges in the aftermath of independence, is proving to be fertile ground in the field of discursive analysis. This article addresses the notion of ethos in political discourse of a diplomatic nature via a political address delivered during an official visit by Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to France in 2000. It is very important in this study to consider the context of this speech. To this end, recourse to the prior image of Algerian-French relations as well as that of the political speaker is essential given that the primary ambition of a Head of State, setting out a political speech, is to build a selfimage that meets the expectations of the audience. This analysis involves going through the different discursive strategies implemented by the political speaker in anticipation of building a discursive ethos that would guarantee the credibility and effectiveness of his speech.

This study explores the discourse of Trump as a businessman and as a president regarding the topic of immigration. Data for this research were gathered from four speeches and four interviews delivered by Trump in the eighties-nineties and four speeches and four interviews after being elected president. The analysis focuses on the way Trump represents US (ingroup) versus THEM (outgroup) at the local semantic level through the use of pronouns and implicatures and, at the local form through the use of syntax, that is, the formal relationship between clauses and sentences. In particular, I want to shed light on the following research questions: (1) How does Donald Trump represent the topic of immigration as a businessman? (2) How does Donald Trump represent the topic of immigration as a president? On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that the period in which the discourse was uttered seems to have a strong bearing on the discursive strategies employed by Trump. It should be also pointed out that nowadays, the linguistic analysis of Trump’s discourses area touchstone issue in political and social affairs. This paper contributes to this volume offering insights regarding the analysis of political discourse. More specifically, research on political discourse is considered as a branch within social science.

This paper presents the oral testimonies of two survivors of the dramatic events in the last months of the second World War, who have experienced diametrically opposed traumatic experiences, albeit from the same family background. The stories, reconstructed on the basis of autobiographical narrative interviews selected in the most salient parts, occur at a distance of seventy years from the events narrated and relate to the episodes that have struck the protagonists since January 1945 in East Prussia. The testimonies will be analyzed from a linguistic point of view with the aid of concrete examples, to reconstruct the space and escape routes of one of the protagionists.

Book review

The essay focuses on recent developments in the field of history of socialist/ communist regime in Bulgaria. The author considers this form of disciplinary knowledge as a set of discourses and draws his research material from a number of interviews with researchers (mostly historians, but also anthropologists and sociologists) in the field. The attempt is made to elucidate the “moral base” and potential political implications of the existing demarcation and differentiation between different approaches to this still burning subject. The accent is put on the individual (and collective) choice of labeling the epoch – socialism, communism, or totalitarianism. Those three labels are used in order to construct three ideal types of historical-sociological research and to indicate the methodological specificities of every type of research as well as itsparticular objects of study. Finally a point is made on the danger which a close relationship between a study and politics represents to the relative research autonomy.

In everyday conversation the questioners and answerers are in an approximately symmetrical relationship that questioners do not have the information that they are requesting and the answerers are not obliged to answer. On the contrary, in the rule and role governed courtroom question/answer dyad, lawyers usually have particular version of events to control the language of the respondents where witnesses are compelled to respond, and do not have the right to question. So, it may hold back the production and interpretation of the evidence, and consequently hinder the execution of the tasks of the court trial. Such types of courtroom language-related problems are unexplored by academic research in Oromia Regional State. In this regard, no or little is known about these courtroom language-related problems in the criminal courts of the region. In an attempt to fill-in the existing gap, this study investigates how widespread such courtroom linguistic problems are and contribute to the limited conceptual and methodological values of linguistic analysis of courtroom oral discourse in legal institutions of the region. The analysis of this study is based on the authentic, naturally occurring courtroom defense lawyers-witnesses dyad of some Oromia Regional State Criminal Courtrooms. The aim of the study is, therefore, to present the discursive strategies of defense lawyers questioning forms and functions in their attempts to deconstruct persuasive testimony. In so doing, based on the way in which lawyers exploit the specialized speech-exchange linguistic system of the courtroom, the study focuses on the analysis of defense lawyers question forms and functions from the pragma-dialectical discourse perspectives. The findings of the study suggest that the use of declarative question, tag question, and projection question forms are the defense lawyers’ discursive strategies to control and dominate the language of the witnesses. Such questioning forms function by potentially damaging witnesses’ admission and limiting their response boundaries and are found the influential defense lawyers’ discursive strategies through which the existing narratives of the witnesses are attacked and deconstructed.