The form and functions of political discourse have considerably taken a new orientation with the evolving ways of communication. Twitter is a platform that is increasingly preferred by the political elites for the purpose of gaining public acclaim and propagating political ideologies. The political discourse on Twitter requires a critical attention toward linguistic structures and strategies to uncover the relationship between language and social practices. For this purpose, tweets of two eminent Pakistani political figures are chosen for unmasking a variety of discourse strategies at work from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA) through the socio-cognitive model of ideological square. The analysis uncovers the hidden ideological structures and strategies realized through a number of rhetorical moves in the selected tweets. The cognitive binary of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation help achieving political domination and legitimization of political actions by controlling the public opinion. The underlying motives vary and are context bound such as the aims to topple a government or to restore public faith in the governance. This research is significant for political discourse analysts as well as the general public, as a means for analytical activism propagated by any CDA inquiry, and paves way for further research in the use of social media platforms for political purposes.
Colonialism has been such a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon that it often juxtaposed the culture of the colonized in simultaneous assimilation of, and resistance to, the culture of the colonizers. Embedded in the theory of Post colonialism, this research aims at carrying out a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies used in Saadat Hassan Manto's literary work Letters to Uncle Sam from a neo-colonial perspective. It seeks to highlight the issues of globalization and the effects that it engendered upon the then newly-established independent state of Pakistan. The research findings conclude that globalization has resulted in putting an end to the so-called purity of culture. Manto, therefore, explicitly satirizes the super power (read the United States of America) for its hidden agendas of manipulating and exploiting the economic system as well as the cultural beliefs of Pakistan under the mask of prospering nations by building a global market to create a new means of dominance that works through consent.
Promotional strategies have become discursive practices in corporate companies’ mission and vision statements. However, less focus was given to the role of grammar in shaping this text type as part of promotional discourse. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is arguably the most definite and certain linguistic analysis as a meaning-making resource. Hence, the purpose of this study was to use transitivity grammar theory in SFL to analyse the use of experiential processes in enacting promotional rhetorical moves. Following purposive sampling, mission and vision statements of hundred international companies, which were ranked by current market capitalization, were selected. Using textual analysis, we applied transitivity grammar theory to manually analyse promotional rhetorical moves. The results were quantified and presented in tabulation form. The findings revealed that mental and relational processes are favoured grammatical patterns used by corporate firms to write mission statements that focus on building public image and establish self-concept. The findings of this research can prove helpful for other corporate companies to use similar grammatical patterns to develop mission and vision statements.
Mission statements provide educational institutions with the legitimacy to market and promote services through positive statements. This study applied genre analysis to examine the function of promotional rhetoric in top 100 international universities' mission statements. Bhatia's rhetorical moves of promotional genre was triangulated with Pearce and David's components for mission-writing. It was
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