The use of metaphors as models in religious discourse, with special reference to implications for syllabuses in religious education

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The role of discourse analysis for translation and translator training

It has been widely recognised that an in-depth textual analysis of a source text is relevant for translation. This book discusses the role of discourse analysis for translation and translator training. One particular model of discourse analysis is presented in detail, and its application in the context of translator training is critically examined.

Police interviews with women reporting rape: a critical discourse analysis

This study investigates the discursive patterns of interactions between police interviewers and women reporting rape in significant witness interviews. Data in the form of video recorded interviews were obtained from a UK police force for the purposes of this study. The data are analysed using a multi-method approach, incorporating tools from micro-sociology, Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology, to reveal patterns of interactional control, negotiation, and interpretation. The study adopts a critical approach, which is to say that as well as describing discursive patterns, it explains them in light of the discourse processes involved in the production and consumption of police interview talk, and comments on the relationship between these discourse processes and the social context in which they occur. A central focus of the study is how interviewers draw on particular interactional resources to shape interviewees? accounts in particular ways, and this is discussed in relation to the institutional role of the significant witness interview. The discussion is also extended to the ways in which mainstream rape ideology is both reflected in, and maintained by, the discursive choices of participants. The findings of this study indicate that there are a number of issues to be addressed in terms of the training currently offered to officers at Level 2 of the Professionalising Investigation Programme (PIP) (NPIA, 2009) who intend to conduct significant witness interviews. Furthermore, a need is identified to bring the linguistic and discursive processes of negotiation and transformation identified by the study to the attention of the justice system as a whole. This is a particularly pressing need in light of judicial reluctance to replace written witness statements, the current „end product? of significant witness interviews, with the video recorded interview in place of direct examination in cases of rape.

Political discourse, media and translation

This volume addresses the role played by translation in international political communication and news reporting and brings to light the usually invisible link between politics, media, and translation. The contributors explore the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation, with a focus on politics texts, institutional contexts, and translation policies. These topics are explored from a Translation Studies perspective, thus bringing a new disciplinary view to the investigation of political discourse and the language of the media. The first part of the volume focuses on textual analysis, investigating transformations that occur in translation processes, and the second part examines institutional contexts and institutional policies and their effects on translation production and reception.

Politics as text and talk:analytic approaches to political discourse

Human beings are political animals. They are also articulate mammals. How are these two aspects linked? This is a question that is only beginning to be explored. The present collection makes a contribution to the investigations into the use of language in those situations which, informally and intuitively, we call ‘political’. Such an approach is revealing not only for politics itself but also for the human language capacity. Each chapter outlines a particular method or analytic approach and illustrates its application to a contemporary political issue, institution or mode of political behaviour. As a whole, the collection aims to give a sample of current research in the field. It will interest those who are beginning to carry the research paradigm forward, as well as provide an introduction for newcomers, whether they come from neighbouring or remote disciplines or from none.

Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim:cultural identities in public discourse

Since 1989, Europe's eastern rim has been in constant flux. This collection focuses on how political and economic transformations have triggered redefinitions of cultural identity. Using discursive modes of identity construction (deconstruction, reconstruction, reformulation, and invention) the book focuses on the creation of opposition to old and new outsidersA" and insidersA" in Europe. The linguistic study of discourse elements in connection with an exploration of the significance of metaphors in anchoring individual and collective identity is innovative and allows for a unique analysis of public discourse in Europe.

Metaphors in Hugo Chávez's political discourse:conceptualizing nation, revolution and opposition

This dissertation examines Hugo Chávez's choice of metaphors in his efforts to construct and legitimize his Bolivarian Revolution. It focuses on metaphors drawn from three of the most frequent target domains present in his discourse: the nation, his revolution, and the opposition. The study argues that behind an official discourse of inclusion, Chávez's choice of metaphors contributes to the construction of a polarizing discourse of exclusion in which his political opponents are represented as enemies of the nation.The study shows that Chávez constructs this polarizing discourse of exclusion by combining metaphors that conceptualize: (a) the nation as a person who has been resurrected by his government, as a person ready to fight for his revolution, or as Chávez himself; (b) the revolution as war; and (c) members of the opposition as war combatants or criminals. At the same time, the study shows that by making explicit references in his discourse about the revolution as the continuation of Bolívar's wars of independence, Chávez contributes to represent opponents as enemies of the nation, given that in the Venezuelan collective imaginary Simón Bolívar is the symbol of the nation's emancipation.This research, which covers a period of nine years (from Chávez's first year in office in 1999 through 2007), is part of the discipline of Political Discourse Analysis (PDA). It is anchored both in the theoretical framework provided by the cognitive linguistic metaphor theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson described in their book Metaphors We Live By, and in Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) as defined by Jonathan Charteris-Black in his book Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis.The study provides the first comprehensive analysis of metaphors used by Chávez in his political discourse. It builds upon the findings of previous studies on political discourse analysis in Venezuela by showing that Chávez's discourse not only polarizes the country and represents opponents as detractors of national symbols such as Bolívar or his wars of independence (which have been clearly established in previous studies), but also represents political opponents as enemies of the nation.

Survival or success? A critical exploration of the use of 'double-voiced discourse' by women business leaders in the UK

This article considers whether using leadership language may be one under-explored reason why there continues to be a significant lack of women at executive level. Do women make less of a linguistic impact in the boardroom than men? By analysing linguistic data from senior management meetings and follow-up interviews in seven multinational UK companies, we suggest that senior women and men use a very similar range of linguistic strategies to lead their teams except in one key respect. Women appear to monitor and regulate their use of language more than men, adjusting what they say in the light of their colleagues’ concerns and agendas. This use of ‘double-voiced discourse’ (Bakhtin, 1994/1963) enables women to survive in a male-dominated business world, but this can sometimes make their voice ‘harder to hear’. However, double-voiced discourse is also a form of linguistic expertise and potentially might offer women leaders a strategy for success.

Follow-ups and interpreter-mediated discourse

The edited volume documents the proceedings of the ESF workshop "Follow-ups across discourse domains: a cross-cultural exploration of their forms and functions". It examines the forms and functions of the dialogue act of a follow-up, viz. accepting or challenging a prior communicative act, in political discourse across spoken and written dialogic genres. Specifically, it considers (1) the discourse domains of political interviews, editorials, op-eds and discussion forums, (2) their sequential organization as regards the status of initial (or 1st order) follow-up, a follow-up of a prior follow-up (2nd order follow-up), or nth-order follow-up, and (3) their discursive realization as regards degrees of indirectness and responsiveness which are conceptualized as a continuum along the lines of degrees of explicitness and degrees of responsiveness. The chapters come from the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, socio-pragmatics, communication, political science and psychology, examining the heterogeneous field of political discourse and its manifestation in diverse discourse genres with respect to evasiveness, indirectness and redundancy in mediated political discourse, professional discourse, discourse identity and doing politics, to name but the most prominent questions.