This study examines discursive representations of poverty and social exclusion by the leaders of the two main political parties in the UK (Labour and Conservative) across time.The political context selected for analysis is that of the parties' annual conferences, specifically all the speeches delivered by their leaders between 1900 and 2014 (c. 1 million words). Using a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies methodology, we identify two recurring discourses of poverty and social exclusion in these speeches: we call these a finance discourse, which represents PSE in terms of economic and business needs, and a hardship discourse, where PSE are represented as various sources of struggle. The Labour Party favours the hardship discourse over the finance discourse; the Conservative Party displays the opposite trend. Notwithstanding this difference, our study primarily reveals commonalities across political party, time and discourse type. These include a tendency to describe poverty and social exclusion in terms of scale and to represent them as inert entities that need to be acted upon. In the party conference speeches we examine, political leaders tend to use third person deixis to distance themselves personally from the responsibility of intervening to alleviate poverty and social exclusion. A partial exception to this trend is observed post-2001. This may reflect the process of securitization that poverty is known to have undergone as a result, in particular, of terrorist attacks on the West in the twenty-first century.
This study aims to investigate the linguistic mechanism of disseminating knowledge about terrorism by professionals to laypersons in TED Talks. The study examines the interface between knowledge, meaning and social practices in terms of text and context when speakers cognitively reconceptualize terrorism discourse as a professional practice and maintain their stance over social issues. Drawing on a multidisciplinary approach of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the study sets out to analyse the discursive representation of terrorism in TED talks delivered between 2002 and 2019, focusing on explanation strategies of definition, description, denomination and metaphor. The results revealed that TED talks’ discourse was a less popularised genre regarding terrorism, marked by specialised terms of traditional right discourse of military actions, and impersonal reference for private intentions of building up expert identity.
This study sets out to examine the British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speeches delivered through her premiership. It aims to unveil the ideological discursive formation of Brexit after the referendum, and to investigate the way May squares the rhetoric to persuade the general public and the British/European political Elites to deliver the Brexit deal, though she campaigned pro-European Britain. I conduct a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, using discourse analysis methods and corpus linguistics tools for a case study of a purpose-built corpus of the Prime Minister speeches (2016-2019). The analysis revealed that the Brexit representation eschewed any identifi cation with ‘Europe’ and boosted Eurosceptic sentiments by (1) rationalizing the decision to leave the European Union; (2) proposing a better future after Brexit; (3) appealing to the British people’s emotion to support the Brexit deal.
discourse analysis. Indeed, Kelsey's focus on the complexities that are suppressed by the workings of myth ultimately implies relinquishing politicized engagement with social issues due to the acknowledgement of the impossibility of operating outside 'the ideological structures and orders of society' (p. 31), contrary to more classical modes of critical discourse analysis.
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