More than Words? An Analysis on the Language and Structure of General Election Manifestos of the British Labour Party 1983-2005

The topic of this study is the language of the educational policies of the British Labour party in the General Election manifestos between the years 1983-2005. The twenty-year period studied has been a period of significant changes in world politics, and in British politics, especially for the Labour party. The emergence educational policy as a vote-winner of the manifestos of the nineties has been noteworthy. The aim of the thesis is two-fold: to look at the structure of the political manifesto as an example of genre writing and to analyze the content utilizing the approach of critical discourse analysis. Furthermore, the aim of this study is not to pinpoint policy positions but to look at what is the image that the Labour Party creates of itself through these manifestos. The analysis of the content is done by a method of close-reading. Based on the findings, the methodology for the analysis of the content was created. This study utilized methodological triangulation which means that the material is analyzed from several methodological aspects. The aspects used in this study are ones of lexical features (collocation, coordination, euphemisms, metaphors and naming), grammatical features (thematic roles, tense, aspect, voice and modal auxiliaries) and rhetoric (Burke, Toulmin and Perelman). From the analysis of the content a generic description is built. By looking at the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features a clear change in language of the Labour Party can be detected. This change is foreshadowed already in the 1992 manifesto but culminates in the 1997 manifesto which would lead Labour to a landslide victory in the General Election. During this twenty-year period Labour has moved away from the old commitments and into the new sphere of “something for everybody”. The pervasiveness of promotional language and market inspired vocabulary into the sphere of manifesto writing is clear. The use of the metaphors seemed to be the tool for the creation of the image of the party represented through the manifestos. A limited generic description can be constructed from the findings based on the content and structure of the manifestos: especially more generic findings such as the use of the exclusive we, the lack of certain anatomical parts of argument structure, the use of the future tense and the present progressive aspect can shed light to the description of the genre of manifesto writing. While this study is only the beginning, it proves that the combination of looking at the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features in the study of manifestos is a promising one.

The many faces of strikes : attitudes towards industrial action by labour, management and human resources

Strikes provide a current, fresh but also a seldom-addressed issue to study from economic sciences perspective. This study provides to filling this research gap by trying to identify attitudes towards strikes that can be found inside organizations. The research problem this study then sets out to answer is: “What kinds of attitudes exist inside organizations towards industrial actions and how attitudes vary between labour, management and human resources?” This study has been planned with a view to test how qualitative attitudinal research, as a method, is suited to studying a phenomenon such as strike. At the heart of this research approach lies an assumption linked to rhetoric social psychology, that attitude is a phenomenon that can be identified in argumentation. For this research 10 semi-structured interviews in 4 organizations were conducted utilizing statements and pictures as stimulants for discussion. The material was transcribed and analysed following the two levels, categorical and interpretive, demanded by the chosen method. Altogether five attitudes were discovered; three of them negative, one indifferent and one positive by nature. The negative attitudes of unfairness, failure and personification towards strikes represented the side of strikes that was perhaps the most anticipated, portraying the contradictions between employees and employer. The attitude of ordinariness, which portrayed indifference, and the positive attitude of change however, were more unanticipated findings. They reflect shared understanding and trust between conflict parties. The utilization of qualitative attitudinal approach to study strikes was deemed successful. The results of this study support prior literature on workplace conflicts for example in regards of the definition of conflict and typologies conflicts. In addition the multifaceted nature of strikes can be perceived as one statement supported by this study. It arises in the nature of the attitudes, the diversity of discussion themes during the interviews as well as in the extent of possible theories to apply.

“I haven’t had that much fun since labour.” Subtitling sarco-ironic remarks in Gilmore Girls

The purpose of this study is to explore how the potential cues of spoken sarcasm and irony are transferred into written Finnish subtitles in the American television series Gilmore Girls. The aim is to discover how the use of cuing differs between the English source text and the Finnish target text. The research is conducted through qualitative and quantitative analysis and comparison between the two languages. Three (3) episodes from Gilmore Girls are analysed using the Finnish DVD subtitles and the episodes’ English unofficial transcripts. The sarco-ironic remarks and their translations are identified, and their individual sarco-ironic cues are categorised. The number of cues, the number of cues in each category and the number of cue shifts are compared quantitatively in order to find whether the translator uses less or different cues than the writer of the original source text. The qualitative analysis focuses on the cue types used in both texts. The results confirmed the hypothesis of sarcasm and irony being relatively straightforward linguistic phenomena to translate, and the hypothesis of the category of words of reinforcement/trivialising being the most used in conveying sarcasm and irony. However, the study also showed that even though some cues were cut in the translation process, the sarco-ironic meaning was rarely omitted entirely from the translation. The findings also showed that the number of cue shifts was surprisingly low. From these results we can deduce that at least in the context of DVD subtitles, sarcasm and irony can be conveyed also in writing, and even though some cues were omitted or shifted, sarcasm and irony were still detectable in the Finnish subtitles. The language used in DVD translations uses less cues of sarcasm and irony and it could thus be considered less versatile than the original source language.