Newspaper Discourse

U radu se razmatra odnos između kognitivne lingvistike i kritičke analize diskursa, kao i mogućnosti kombinacije ova dva teorijska okvira u empirijskim istraživanjima. Rad počinje pregledom osnovnih teorijskih postulata dveju disciplina, sa posebnim osvrtom na ona polja proučavanja u kojima kognitivna lingvistika i kritička analiza diskursa interaguju. S obzirom da u literaturi već postoje konkretni primeri ovakvih interdisciplinarnih istraživanja, najznačajnije u radu Kristofera Harta (Hart 2010, 2011; Hart & Lukeš 2010), autor u daljem tekstu ukazuje i na dosadašnje pokušaje uparivanja kognitivne lingvistike i kritičke analize diskursa. Nakon toga, u radu će biti prikazan i sam način primene ovako integrisanog pristupa na primeru kritičke analize verbalnih manifestacija pojmovne metonimije u političkom novinskom diskursu. Analiza će biti praćena odgovarajućim ilustracijama. Rad se završava zaključnim razmatranjima i predlozima za dalja istraživanja i produbljivanje međusobnog odnosa između datih teorijskih okvira. [The paper deals with the relationship between cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis, as well as the possibilities of integrating these two theoretical frameworks in empirical research. The paper begins with an overview of the basic theoretical tenets of the two disciplines, with a particular emphasis on the interface between cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Bearing in mind that there already exist concrete examples of such interdisciplinary research in the literature, most significantly in the work of Christopher Hart (e.g. Hart, 2010, 2011; Hart & Lukeš, 2010), the author further points to the previous attempts at combining cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Next, the paper presents an application of this integrated approach in the example of the critical analysis of verbal manifestations of conceptual metonymy in political newspaper discourse. The analysis is complemented by appropriate examples taken from the two British daily newspapers, The Telegraph and The Guardian. The paper ends with concluding remarks and several suggestions for further research and deeper elaboration of the relationship between the discussed theoretical frameworks.]

This thesis explores how Canadian artist Fred Herzog’s (b. 1930) empathetic photographs of unattached, white, working-class men living on Vancouver’s Skid Road in the 1950s and 1960s contest dominant newspaper representations. Herzog’s art practice is framed as a sociologically-oriented form of flânerie yielding original, nuanced, and critical images that transcend the stereotypes of the drunk, the criminal, the old-age pensioner, and the sexual deviant on Skid Road. I apply Critical Discourse Analysis to newspaper articles published in the Vancouver Sun and the Province between 1950 and 1970 to uncover how newspaper discourse produced and reproduced the socioeconomic marginalization of men on Skid Road. Through a comparative analysis, this thesis shows how Herzog’s photographs challenge dominant newspaper discourse in the following ways: by expanding the Skid Road discourse to allow the possibility of positive subject-positions; by demonstrating a dialectical rather than causal relationship between masculinity and space; and by exposing the ways in which the supposedly deviant sexual practices of men on Skid Road in fact stemmed from the hegemonic capitalist and patriarchal structures of Western society. Drawing on feminist, social, and Neo-Marxian class theories, this study not only deconstructs dominant perspectives but also gives visibility to alternative ones, thereby underscoring working-class subjectivities and uncovering the ways in which working-class masculinity on Skid Road both defied and conformed to hegemonic masculinity in the postwar period.

This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocate with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) are calculated and this information is subsequently used to identify any ‘mismatch’ between the amount of attention that migrants from a given country receive in the media and the official population estimates. In the second, and most extensive stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities are analysed through the moral panic framework. Results show an extensive negative representation of some groups, but there is no evidence of a fully iterated moral panic relating to any of the nationalities investigated.

"From chronological to axiological meaning in Spanish adjectives: any past time was worse".
This paper aims to show how the Spanish adjectives antediluviano, decimonónico, medieval and prehistórico, whose original meaning as relational adjectives was linked to the designation of certain chronological spaces, have acquired an axiological meaning, namely negative and disparaging. This evaluative nature makes them particularly suited instruments for argumentative discourse.

Resumen:
El presente artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar cómo los adjetivos españoles antediluviano, decimonónico, medieval y prehistórico, cuyo significado originario como adjetivos relacionales estaba vinculado a la designación de determinados espacios cronológicos, han adquirido un significado calificativo axiológico, en concreto de carácter negativo y descalificador de lo designado. Este carácter valorativo los convierte en instrumentos léxicos particularmente aptos para el discurso argumentativo.

A primeira página do jornal (e seu design) oferece um
modo de leitura global que coloca lado a lado, de forma ordenada e
hierarquizada, diversas dimensões da vida social como produção
discursiva, enquanto constrói a realidade. Este trabalho problematiza
a primeira página e o jornal na sua relação com a noção de
dispositivo (Foucault). E defende que ela encarna um discurso sobre
a organização social em sua dimensão visual, participando, assim,
do seu processo de construção e ordenação.
Palavras-Chave: Design. Jornal. Discurso. Dispositivo.

The present paper explores the structure, function, and the potential of conceptual metaphors in the political discourse of daily newspapers to provoke an emotional reaction with the electorate, i.e. readers. The two groups of metaphors that are investigated include CONFLICT and SPORT metaphors. Consequently, the corpus consists of metaphorical expressions corresponding to the two previously mentioned conceptual keys, extracted from the on-line editions of The New York Times during December 2011. The paper resides on an integrated theoretical framework that encompasses the basic tenets of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the fully developed model of the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), and the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion. Additionally, basic tenets of the Circumplex Model of Affect and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) are also utilized. The present research is conducted in two stages: 1) metaphorical expressions from the corpus are analyzed in terms of their structure and function through the concomitant use of the CMT and CBT models; 2) building on the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion, Russell’s circumplex, and the PANAS model, the second stage of the research uses appropriate questionnaires to test whether the metaphorical expressions extracted from the corpus can provoke an actual tangible emotional reaction with the experimental subjects. The reaction is measured in terms of affect, and in terms of specific emotion concepts. Such research design is meant to reveal both the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the construction of metaphorical conceptual integration networks, and the mechanisms that facilitate the development of an emotional response. Furthermore, the results obtained from the two parts of the present research are compared and investigated for potential points of intersection. Additionally, the results of the present study are also compared against the results obtained from the previous research in the field, predominantly conducted within the CMT framework. Finally, the paper also presents additional evidence in favor of the joint use of the CMT and the CBT frameworks. Based on the analyses, it can be concluded that all metaphorical conceptual integration networks from the present corpus appeared as single-scope networks. Additionally, a high degree of systematicity of emergent structures was also recorded, which was accounted for by the highly entrenched nature of the two conceptual keys, and links were established with the systematic nature of compression. The two main cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the creation of an emotional reaction are backward projections and coupled elaboration, which in turn enable metaphors to function as powerful persuasive tools. The second part of the research revealed that metaphorical expressions from the corpus can provoke a certain degree of an emotional response with the readers, i.e. experimental subjects. In addition, the recorded reactions also showed a certain degree of consistency. In conclusion, metaphor poses as a powerful rhetorical tool that can influence individuals’ reasoning and behavior by influencing their emotional and affective states. Future research should attempt to further reveal the nature of interaction between the processes of meaning and emotion construction.

November 2005 saw a significant flashpoint in the long-running history of tensions between minority groups and those in power in France. Two teenagers, allegedly while hiding from the police, were accidently electrocuted in a Parisian sub-station. This incident was the catalyst for the spread of violent riots in communities across banlieues or urban French districts lasting for a number of weeks. Mindful of the printed news media as important sites of ideology production, this study contributes to a growing body of work on newspaper representations of the banlieues, with focus on the particularly traumatic events of November 2005.

Recognising the active role of the media in constituting and shaping reality, my interest lies not merely in identifying instances of prejudicial discourse in French newspaper texts, but also in highlighting how largely covert ideological structures of power and dominance can be disguised in ostensibly neutral discourse. This study examines French newspaper representations of urban violence in 2005, combining a qualitative Critical Discourse Analytical methodology with a quantitative Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies examination of a corpus of texts specifically created for the study. The project questions the discursive construction of the events of November 2005 and the associated individuals and groups. It shows how the scenes of violent rioting prompted media discussions pertaining to French national identity, and thus examines interpretations of French national identity that are implicit in news reporting on the riots. This research suggests that in its reaction to the challenging events of November 2005, the printed news media adopt strategies which ‘other’ immigrant minorities and those living in the banlieues. Residents of the banlieues are depicted as being outside the borders of the homogenously constructed French society. It is thus argued that newspaper discourse on incidents of urban violence in France in 2005 provides further evidence of how language can be used as a means of enacting and upholding social relations of dominance and discrimination.

В статье французский газетно-политический текст рассматривается в качестве особой зоны прагматического использования коннотативных топонимов. Уста-навливаются основные характеристики газетно-политических текстов в целом и в особенности французских текстов СМИ, которым присуща яркая социальная направленность и наличие компрессированных элементов смысла. В результате функционально-прагматического и историко-этимологического анализов ме-дийных текстов выявлено, что употребление журналистами коннотативных то-понимов во французских газетно-политических текстах обусловлено их импли-цитной оценочно-характеризующей и акцентологической функциями, а также их способностью участвовать в перспективе повествования. The paper describes the political press as a special zone of connotative toponym's pragmatical use. It has been found the main characteristics of the political press in general and the peculiarities of French media texts, among which there are a vivid social orientation and the compressed sense elements presence. In the issue of the functional-pragmatic and historical-etymological analysis, realized on the vast corpus of media texts, it has been discovered that the use of connotative toponyms by journalists in French political press is conditioned by its implicit evaluative-characterized and accentuated functions, as well by its capacity to take part in the narrative perspective.

The contrastive analysis of two sets of newspaper articles has been carried out in order to observe how the reports of the same events are constructed in two different languages and cultures as represented by El País and The Guardian newspapers. The first set of texts consists of two science popularization articles dealing with the same scientific finding (Bee Texts), whereas the second set consists of all the articles covering the opening day of a world summit held in Rome (Summit Texts) which were published in the online versions of El País and The Guardian respectively. Newsworthiness (Bell, 1991), attribution and lexicogrammatical strategies have been studied in order to show how ideological construction has been developed in these two different kinds of report, one dealing with a non-controversial event (as represented in the Bee Texts) and the other with a controversial event (as represented in the Summit Texts).

November 2005 saw a significant flashpoint in the long-running history of tensions between minority groups and those in power in France: two teenagers, allegedly while hiding from the police, were electrocuted in a Parisian electrical sub-station, which was the catalyst for the unprecedented spread of violent riots across banlieues, or urban districts, in French cities lasting for a number of weeks. Mindful of the printed news media as important sites of ideology production, this study contributes to a growing body of work on newspaper representation of the banlieues, with a focus on the particularly traumatic events of November 2005. This
article examines French newspaper representations of urban violence in 2005 using a critical discourse analytical approach, focusing on how the scenes of violent rioting prompted media  discussions pertaining to French national identity. It argues that national identity and expressions of nationalism are defined in an exclusionary way, and that a discourse of sameness constructs
symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The research suggests that in its reaction to the challenging events of November 2005, the printed news media adopts strategies which ‘other’ immigrant minorities and those living in the banlieues. Inhabitants of the banlieues are depicted as being outside the borders of the homogenously constructed French society in order to explain the violent scenes and ultimately uphold relations of discrimination and social dominance.

The aim of this article is to argue that negation plays a crucial role in the creation of discourse coherence understood as a process which involves the creation of a textual world. Negation modifies information present in discourse or evoked from propositions in discourse, thus performing different discourse functions in which frame knowledge plays a crucial role. A proposal is put forward for a classification of the cognitive-discourse functions of negative propositions in argumentative discourse with illustrations from extracts from opinion articles, headlines and advertisements in Spanish and British newspapers.

When an incident or event in a certain region will be reported by the mass media in a different language, the choice of expressions, the perspective and aim of their message will differ. This study analyzes the news coverage of events related to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in German, American and Japanese newspapers. It will aim to uncover expressional differences in the coverage on a similar topic reported in different languages. This research especially focuses on the use of religious language in the coverage, which in this paper refers to religious metaphors and symbols originating from a Christian context. Previous research shows that the use of religious language in the media, affects consumers mentally and emotionally. Based on that theory, this study compares how religious language is used in the coverage and tries to clarify the functions of religious expressions through a critical discourse analysis. The results show that religious language appears continuously in German and American news reports related to the disaster. Religious language is mostly used symbolically as well as metaphorically in order to illustrate the destruction caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, while at the same time conveying emotions such as the fear of the victims. It is also used to describe the difficulties, suffering and hope of the people in the disaster-hit area. Moreover religious language provokes emotions in the readers and makes it easier for them to understand the situation in Japan as well as the feelings of the disaster refugees. A difference between the German and American news coverage was seen in the description of the situation at the nuclear power plant and the state of the victims in Fukushima and the Tohoku region. In Germany, religious language can change the viewpoint of and provoke emotions in the readers. It is also employed to emphasize domestic social and political problems related to German energy policy.

This chapter investigates the discourse of Brexit in the UK newspaper The Guardian, based on a corpus containing every article published on The Guardian website since 2000. Adopting a corpus linguistic approach, we explore the diachronic development of the word Brexit, starting with its first attestation in an article appearing in the Business section on 9 August 2012. We study the use of this word and related terms, such as Brexiteers and Brexiters, in The Guardian as a whole as well as in individual sections of the newspaper, focusing in particular on the Business domain and the blog-style Comment is Free section. Our findings show that the uncertainty surrounding Brexit has led to the construction of different discourses in these newspaper sections that focus, on the one hand, on the negative impact of the referendum vote and, on the other hand, involve attempts at defining the phenomenon of Brexit.

According to recent sociolinguistic research, language represents a set of resources, the intentional choice of which serves as a way of expressing social meaning and transmitting attitudes, values, and bias. News discourse today is one of the most dynamic discursive practices that reflect the peculiarities of language as a means of ideological influence. The current study is aimed at identifying the specific features of language use adopted for representation of contemporary events in the English language newspaper and magazine news reports covering the US – Russia relations. The study is based on the understanding of discourse as a form of social action and the approach to language as a means of the social construction of reality. The linguistic analysis based on the methods of linguistic interpretation demonstrates the change of the formal content structure of informational reports. Hypothetical modality, lack of clarifying devices and abundance of unspecified phrases are characteristic features of modern “news stories”. The intentional structure of news reports manifests itself in the choice of syntactic, morphological and stylistic features which can either highlight specific information or make it obscure. The use of explicit and implicit attitudes, the passive voice and various modal constructions helps send an emotional message, create persuasive discourse and express the ideological stance of the author.

This paper analyses the ways in which maternity leave has been reported, within the broader context of economic inequality, in the periods from 1971 to 1977 and from 1997 to 2001, in the right-of-centre British national press. The aim is to answer the following research question: Has the representation of maternity leave changed in the right-of-centre UK press with the adoption of new policies, particularly in relation to economic matters, and if so, in what ways? Discussions of maternity leave in newspapers are identified by uses of the phrase maternity leave. Selected findings are presented from a corpus compiled for this study of news stories (641,996 words) in the Times and the Daily Mail, in the years in which maternity leave policies were changed in the UK (1973, 1975, 1999) plus two years before and after each of those years. Combining qualitative with quantitative methods, the analysis shows that maternity leave becomes monetized in the later period, from 1997 to 2001. The economic term that undergoes the most noticeable shift in frequency of use is afford, which is used five-times more frequently in the 1997 to 2001 period. A close reading of all those stories containing the term afford reveals considerable opposition in these newspapers to the introduction of new entitlements for women with new-borns, a hostility that was not apparent when improvements to maternity leave provisions were first introduced in the 1970s. This paper addresses the representation of maternity leave in the belief that this system benefit (like any other state-backed benefit in the UK system) helps in mitigating wealth inequality, and it is part of a larger study exploring changes in the way in which British newspapers have represented wealth inequality in the UK from 1971 to the present.

This article deals with external voicing in early news discourse, focusing on how the function of announcing future events was realised in letters to the editor and classified adverts, using data from the British daily newspaper The Times in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The external voicing of texts announcing future newsworthy events – upcoming cricket and football matches – is interpreted in terms of a participation framework in which the newspaper plays the role of the animator, mediating messages originating elsewhere. It is argued that this arrangement of the communicative situation is related to pre-modern journalistic practices that tended to rely on the aggregation of content rather than editorial processing of information.

The term underclass is widely used in sociology, but definitions of what it consists of differ. In this presentation we examine how underclass(es) and the way they supposedly behave are represented in a number of English-language press outlets, of differing political persuasions and in various countries, including the USA, UK, India, Hong Kong and China.
The  term itself has highly negative evaluative connotations. It is a class - or classes - which should not exist. But if whoever uses the term believes that it - or they - do exist, who is considered to be responsible? Are the same social actors blamed in different societies and by political voices from different political standpoints? There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that, in western newspapers at least, the term is ‘weaponised’,  one political side accuses the other of having created an underclass by its negative or negligent policies. In another example, the Chinese authorities are criticized for having created the hukou, an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers (South China Morning Post).
A  number of statements in recent sociology literature assert that the underclass is very frequently negatively represented “as a moral category” defined by its “deviant behavioural norms” (Hamilton, 2012: 86), however our findings suggest that the term is not in fact used to demonise, nor are the connotations of underclass always negative. We also found that certain themes connected with the underclass are universally relevant. In/visibility, for example, is a common feature, and im/migrants, either external or internal, seem to form an underclass within a society in all our sources. Women too often feature as an underclass within the underclass. The theme of how to prevent a single-generation underclass turning into a permanent one is also discussed across the newspapers, with possible solutions offered.  Finally there is some evidence, with the emergence of “creative underclasses”, that the word is increasingly being used metaphorically and in the positive sense, while another surprising finding was a higher frequency in the use of a romanticised underclass in fictional settings.
A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach is used (Partington et al, 2013) in the study (Johnson and Partington, forthcoming). The corpora employed includes the SiBol suite of English language newspaper corpora (covering the period 1993-2013) alongside corpora of newspaper comment pieces and of political interviews from 2015-2016 which treat the topic of underclasses, downloaded using Lexis Nexis.
References

Johnson, J.H. & Partington, A. (forthcoming) ‘A corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of representations of the ‘underclass’ in the English-language press: Who are they, how do they behave, and who is to blame for them?’ In Friginal, E. (ed.). (forthcoming) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics (Chapter 13), Oxford: Routledge.
Hamilton, K. (2012). Low-income Families and Coping through Brands: Inclusion or Stigma? Sociology 46(1), 74–90.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse. Theory and practice in corpus assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

The expression of “writer stance” involves appeal to evidence (evidentiality), assessment of the degree of likelihood concerning the described situation (epistemic modality), as well as arguments regarding the necessity or desirability of the situation obtaining (deontic modality). The aim of this paper is to explore differences and similarities in the expression of these categories in newspaper discourse in English and Spanish. The study was carried out using two comparable corpora consisting of leading articles and opinion columns from newspapers of both liberal and conservative orientations. The use of epistemic modal markers was found to be significantly higher in the English press, whereas the Spanish press favours the use of deontic markers.

This paper reports work on an ongoing project on the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. In recent years, the issue of refugees and asylum seekers entering the UK has has attracted intense media and political discussion. As the representation of these groups in the press can influence the way in which readers perceive them, the discourses surrounding these, and related, groups have been the focus of linguistic studies (eg Greenslade, 2005; ter Wal, 2002).