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20230721T101520230721T1800Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic meansHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
Tell me how you name, I'll tell you how you position yourself: Discursive analysis of nominations in the context of an electoral campaign
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
French discourse analysis has been concerned with the question of viewpoints (Rabatel 2005) since it started taking into account studies in enunciation (Benveniste) and argumentation (Ducrot). Although viewpoints may be expressed by various modalities, they also manifest by the very act of choosing a term to refer to a certain referent in the public debate. To account for the fact that selecting a noun or noun phrase may be considered a speech act, the concept of "nomination" was introduced in praxematic studies (Barbéris et al. 1984). In this paper, we aim to analyse the use of several potentially polemical nominations during the 2022 French presidential election campaign; more precisely, we will investigate the argumentative and pragmatic value of these nominations by interrogating how they contribute to the reproaches expressed towards the previous government. We will address the following questions: How do the nominations [noun] + liberticide, féminicide, écocide or violence policière mark the candidates' ideologies through an implicit or explicit enunciative positioning, and to what extent do they constitute a form of political positioning? Through the use of these nominations and the enunciative comments which accompany them, to what extent do the candidates construct their political orientation as well as their ethos as candidates opposed to the outgoing president? To this end, we propose a computer-based, enunciative, argumentative, and pragmatic analysis of two complementary corpora. Firstly, we will look into the candidates' programmes, grouped by campaign themes and segmented so as to highlight the issues identified by the candidates and their proposals in order to remedy them. Secondly, we will analyse the candidates' tweets, which feature an individual and interactive expression throughout the campaign. Based on the analysis of these two corpora, a third section will reflect on the different "regimes of meaning" (Sarfati 2008) to which programmes and tweets belong: in the electoral context, a programme corresponds a party's "canonical" discourse, even though it is the product and the result of partisan struggles (Fertikh et al., 2016); tweets may be more polemical (Djemili et al. 2014). Ultimately, we ask whether or not a candidate's ethos diverges from their online ethos.
References Barbéris, J. M., Gardès-Madray, F., Lafont, R., & Siblot, P. (1984). Terminologie praxématique. Présentation, Index, Corps de définitions théorique. Cahiers de praxématique, (3), 2-100. Fertikh, K., Hauchecorne, M., & Bué, N. (Eds.) (2016), Les programmes politiques : Genèses et usages. Presses universitaires de Rennes. Djemili, S., Longhi, J., Marinica, C., Kotzinos, D., & Sarfati, G. E. (2014, October). What does Twitter have to say about ideology?. In NLP 4 CMC: Natural Language Processing for Computer-Mediated Communication/Social Media-Pre-conference workshop at Konvens 2014 (Vol. 1). Universitätsverlag Hildesheim. Jackiewicz, A. et Pengam, M. (2020) Un modèle pour l'étude des nominations émergentes. Notion de repérage pour saisir les modalités d'ajustement sémantique et discursif, CMLF 2020. Rabatel, A. (2005). Le point de vue, une catégorie transversale. Le Français aujourd'hui, 151(4), 57-68. Sarfati, G. E. (2008). Pragmatique linguistique et normativité: remarques sur les modalités discursives du sens commun. Langages, 170(2), 92-108.
Presenters Lise Pernet PHD STUDENT, CY Cergy Paris UniversitéJulien Longhi Full Professor, CY Cergy Paris Université
Matrix constructions in German and Italian political speeches
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Matrix constructions such as "I think/mean that..." (cf. Günther/Imo 2003, Hohenstein 2004, Rehbein 2007) play an important role in oral communication, because the speaker can use them to clarify the illocutionary value of his utterances for the listener. By naming the intended speech action (assertion, justification, etc.) in a matrix sentence, the listener is made aware of how the message conveyed to him is to be processed. To this extent, matrix constructions can be a form of communicating "in your face" and accomplish positioning goals. The paper investigates forms and functions of matrix constructions in oral political discourse. Previous studies on political speeches concerning sensitive issues such as migration have highlighted that rhetoric strategies of the speakers are based on a strong polarisation of the positions in debate (Carobbio 2018). The present study focuses on how polarisation and political positioning are realised in morally-committed political communication by means of matrix constructions. Empirical base of the analysis will be a selection of public speeches of German and Italian politicians, in order to point out interlinguistic and intercultural aspects in the use of matrix constructions as instrument of political positioning. Bibliography Carobbio, Gabriella (2018) Strategien der Konsensstiftung im politischen Diskurs zur Flüchtlingskrise im Mittelmeerraum, in: Zanasi, Guisi et at. (eds.) Das Mittelmeer im deutschsprachigen Kulturraum. Grenzen und Brücken. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 461-478. Günthner, Susanne / Imo, Wolfgang (2003), Die Reanalyse von Matrixsätzen als Diskursmarker: ich-mein-Konstruktionen im gesprochenen Deutsch. In: Orosz, Magdolna / Herzog, Andreas (eds.): Jahrbuch der ungarischen Germanistik. Budapest: DAAD, 181–216. Hohenstein, Christiane (2004), A comparative analysis of Japanese and German complement constructions with matrix verbs of thinking and believing – to omou and ich glaub(e). In: House, Juliane / Rehbein, Jochen (eds.): Multilingual Communication. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 303–341. Rehbein, Jochen (2007), Matrix constructions. In: Rehbein, Jochen / Hohenstein, Christiane / Pietsch, Lukas (eds.): Connectivity in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 419–447.
Presenters Gabriella Carobbio Researcher, Università Degli Studi Di Bergamo
Performing Pro- and Anti-Abortion Political Positioning in the U.S. Congress
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
In political discourse research, the polarising issue of abortion rights in the U.S. context has received insufficient scholarly attention. This is surprising given the prominent role that the issue has played in the American political scenario since at least the early 1970s. When, on Friday 24th June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center, overturning the historical precedent made in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, abortion ceased to be a Constitutionally protected, fundamental right in the United States of America. This recent development calls for an urgent investigation of the anti- and pro-abortion discourses in the U.S. context. This paper focuses on both pro- and anti-abortion political actors and their contribution to shaping the debate around abortion rights in America. More specifically, the study is concerned with the ways in which U.S. Congress members position themselves as political actors in an attempt to create key narratives that support their work of attempting either to legalise or criminalise abortion care. The dataset analysed comprises two sub-corpora of nonlegislative one-minute speeches on the topic of abortion delivered on the House Floor during the 1st session of the 117th U.S. Congress (between January 3, 2021 to January 3, 2022) and 2nd session of the 117th Congress (between January 3, 2022 to January 3, 2023). The study examines the linguistic means the individual Congress members rely on in order not only to engage in but also create specific discourses around the topic of abortion, at the same time as they perform and reinforce their own political positioning.
Confrontation discourses and mainstreaming of populist communication style in Finnish politicians’ social media texts
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
The European political order has changed rapidly during the 21st century as Neo-liberalism has unified the political field and the new populist movements have seized much space on it. Also in Finland, the right-wing populist party Finns Party has established a firm position in the national politics during the past years. Meanwhile, social media as a communication platform enables a polarizing, and even hostile, communication style only possible in its context.
In my paper, I will analyze confrontation discourses in Finnish politicians' social media texts released during Finland's parliament election years 2015 and 2019. The writers of the texts are members of the Finnish Parliament, positioned on the opposite sides of the political field. The topics discussed in the texts contain, inter alia, the so-called refugee and solidarity crisis and the difficult economic situation in Finland and Europe at the time, as well as the alleged division of the Finnish people based on differing values and opinions. The focus of the paper lies on discursive realizations of political confrontations in the politicians' social media texts. I will examine different dimensions of political confrontations, and discursive strategies and devices they are produced with. Moreover, I will discuss effects of increased mainstreaming of populist communication style in Finnish politicians' social media discourse.
I approach confrontations as a discursive means of political positioning and populism as a political communication style and a discursive process of self-identification based on a division between 'the people' and 'the others'. The theoretical and methodological base of the study lies on Critical Discourse Studies and on its Discourse-Historical Approach. Moreover, populism serves as a theoretical and contextual starting point of the study.
Literature
Harré, R. & Langenhove, L. van (1999). Positioning theory. Moral contexts of intentional action. Oxford: Blackwell.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism. Performance, Political Style and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2018). For a Left Populism. London/New York: Verso.
Reisigl, M. & Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In: Wodak, Ruth, Meyer, Michael (eds.) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Second Edition. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear. London: Sage.
Becoming ‘critical’ citizens: language, Chinese social media, and the making of political positionings
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Politics of mainland China has been a contested topic in social sciences since the 21st century. Despite its insights, the existing body of literature is deeply implicated with a neocolonial/west-centric interpretation of the increasing tension between China and the so-called global north. More recently, the academic landscape is becoming more complicated under the surge of anti-China sentiment triggered by the China-US Trade War and the COVID19 pandemic. It is not uncommon today to see scholars taking an explicit stance on China, which unveiled the long-standing, taken-for-granted criticism on the Chinese government encouraged by well-known institutions around the world.
Due to the forged linkage between such academic production and China-targeting propaganda, and the lack of responses from Chinese academia, research on politics of China is characterized by an exclusive focus on the Chinese government. In this line of work, Chinese citizens are often viewed as passive subjects, who presumably align with either one of the two political positionings imagined by the historical anti-China narratives: as either 'brainwashed' to support the government or 'repressed' for challenging its perceived political oppression. Their voices, however, are decontextualized from local epistemologies, treated as the data evidence to justify some structural organizations pre-determined by researchers in a top-down matter (e.g., authoritarianism). Less explored is who make these voices, for what individual or collective purposes, and with what positionings enacted on the ground that could potentially transcend the dominant support-vs-repressed categorization of Chinese citizens.
In this paper, I adopt a sociolinguistic perspective to investigate the situated processes in which the political positionings of Chinese citizens are discursively constructed and circulated. Drawing on my two-year online ethnography that examines the emergence of 'new' Chinese nationalism on Chinese social media, I focus on Chinese netizens' comments on the continuous COVID lockdown that seems to have caused growing public concerns since 2022. Informed by Agha's (2006) theory of enregisterment, I trace how seemingly isolated comments on COVID-related news constitute larger interactional networks on major social media platforms. I provide a nuanced account of how such networks create a space for the complex meaning-making process of what counts as political, what as unpolitical but social, and how this distinction enables what I call a critical positioning of Chinese netizens shaped by the ambiguous status quo of China in the post-pandemic era.
With this analysis, I aim to explicate the often-backstaged heterogeneity underlying the enactment of political positionings in China. I argue that the dominant narratives – from both academic and public domains – that routinely politicize China are problematic not only for taking a colonial stance, but also for adopting a reductionist view on the real-life complexities faced by Chinese citizens on the ground. This, as I hope to show, calls for a ground-driven, sociolinguistic perspective that zooms in on the discursive formation of politics in everyday life.
Agha, A. (2006). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
"When people say migrant, we immediately have a negative image" – Positioning strategies of Viennese migrant entrepreneurs from the Balkans
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Struggling for Mobility: A Textual Analysis of Bureaucratic Processes Involved in the Migration Projects of Iranian Women
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
As a highly bureaucratic procedure, migration is mediated and organised by institutional texts that inform and organise people's mobilities. From the initial stage of making the decision to migrate to the final stage of submitting the visa application and to the receiving of a visa, or not, applicants are enmeshed in institutional processes beyond their control. In order to bring to the fore the regulatory activities in policing mobility, this paper intends to map out the textual processes involved in the student visa applications of a group of Iranian women who are planning to leave for Canada. At each and every stage of the process, applicants are required to read, understand, and produce texts as part of their applications. The whole visa application process is extra-locally organized and mediated by means of texts. Starting from the standpoint of female visa applicants and their experience of having their mobility regulated, this paper undertakes to constitute and investigate their everyday world as 'problematic', i.e. it sets out to illuminate how their everyday world is constructed and determined by social processes beyond their control (G.W. Smith, 2014). Investigating authorized texts that are integral to the visa application process makes it possible to enter the governing regime of migration and to provide an account of bordering practices. As an illustration of how an institutional text is put together and to trace the discourses, work processes, and extra-local organizations that go into the creation of the text, by drawing upon my own personal experience as a subject of discriminatory regimes of migration and inspired by the work of G. W. Smith (2014), in this paper I aim to analyze the social organization of a visa rejection letter that I received from the Australian embassy in October 2015 two weeks after submitting my student visa application. Specifically, it is my intention to show how the political and economic positioning of 'Iran' and 'Iranian' in this document is rationalized and leads to specific categorizations which have significant implications for Iranians as visa applicants.
Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, G. W. (2014). Policing The Gay Community: An Inquiry into Textually-Mediated Social Relations. In Incorporating texts into institutional ethnographies (pp. 17-40). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
“Me – You – S/he – They as a linguist!” - Positioning in the discourse on gender-fair language
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
For four decades, controversial (meta-linguistic) discussions about linguistic and socio-political aspects of the topic gender-fair language have been going on, both in the public and in Germanic linguistics. The topic has recently experienced a reactualization and polarization. This is related to social-political developments: E.g. the decision on the 'Third Option' and thus the legal recognition of the diversity of gender in Germany, followed by debates about consequent linguistic change. Also, the contested publication of the Duden on gender-fair language (Diewald/Steinhauer 2017), by which the inofficial German authority on language positioned itself. Accordingly, I see gender-fair language as both, a linguistic and a political issue.
The discussion involves different actors positioning themselves in relation to both, the object and each other – positioning that can be understood as political (Spieß 2018; Dang-Anh/Scholl 2022). Of particular interest are actors who are perceived as experts (linguists, journalists, writers) positioning themselves for or against gender-fair language, to whom the function of authority in the discourse is (self-)attributed (e.g. Bayer et al. 2019). I also investigate the negotiations between the professional identities as linguists and the attributions as opponents or representatives of gender-fair language, along with the positioning-strategies employed (Spitzmüller 2022). Furthermore, I explore how actors position themselves linguistically (e.g., by using scientific terms) as experts on gender-fair language, but also how they are positioned by others, e.g., through explicit and implicit attributions, e.g. in the address of P. Eisenberg as "the leading German linguist" (Krämer 2020: 2). I am interested in establishing how this is related to language ideologies and power. The linguistic positioning-practices investigated are found in the journals of three language maintenance associations from the past 30 years. These associations can be understood as ideology brokers: Within this specific communication context and in specific text types, they attempt to establish authority, while suggesting scientific neutrality and objectivity at the same time. From a different angle, this process can be understood as the emergence of an ideology through political positioning (Spitzmüller 2017).
References
Bayer, J. et al. (2019): Die deutsche Sprache und ihre Geschlechter: eine Dokumentation. IFB Verlag, Paderborn. Dang-Anh, M.; Scholl, S. (2022) Politisches Positionieren in der NS-Zeit: Zur sprachlichen Bearbeitung von Identitätsdilemmata in Eingaben und Zellengesprächen. In: Kämper, H., Plewnia, A. (Eds.): Sprache in Politik und Gesellschaft: Perspektiven und Zugänge. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 123-140. Diewald, G.; Steinhauer, A. (2017). Richtig Gendern. Berlin: Dudenverlag. Krämer, W. (2020): Der Vorsitzende meint. In: Sprachnachrichten 1, 2. Spieß, C. (2018): Selbst- und Fremdpositionierungsaktivitäten in Migrations- und Zuwanderungsdiskursen am Beispiel der Konzepte BURKA und VOLLVERSCHLEIERUNG. In: Wengeler, M., Ziem, A. (Eds.), Diskurs, Wissen, Sprache. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 161-192. Spitzmüller, J. (2017): Soziale Positionierung: Praxis und Praktik. Einführung in das Themenheft. WLG, 1-18. Spitzmüller, J. (2022): "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free". Positionierungsstrategie der Sprachwissenschaft im Kampf um sprachideologische Deutungshoheit. In: Kämper, H., Plewnia, A. (Eds.): Sprache in Politik und Gesellschaft: Perspektiven und Zugänge. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 17-33.
“Als Mann bin ich grundsätzlich positiv eingestellt gegenüber einer gendergerechten […] Sprache” [As a man I’m in principal in favour of gender-fair language] – Positioning oneself towards gender-inclusive language in the german discourse
Oral Presentation[SYMP22] By the way or in your face? Political positioning by linguistic means10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
The debate about gender-fair language is among the most polarised concerning the intersection and interaction of language and political ideas. Part of the debate in german-speaking contexts are different forms usable and used for gender-inclusive language, e.g. using both a feminine and a masculine form (Lehrerinnen [teacher; fem.] und Lehrer [teacher; masc.]) instead of just a masculine one with a supposedly generic reading (Lehrer [teacher; masc.]), capital I (LehrerInnen) or other typographic signs before attaching the feminine suffix (e.g. Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen, Lehrer_innen). Due to the spread of gender-inclusive language as well as potential indexicality of the speech forms (Kotthoff 2020), we assume that there is high pressure to position oneself (vgl. Dang-Anh/Scholl 2022; Schneider 2020). Based on data from discussion formats in german public broadcasting (Deutschlandfunk) and interviews we conducted, subtler and very explicit positionings and forms of stancetaking towards gender-inclusive language will be presented and analysed. The debated forms can be seen as shibboleths, eliciting not only stances on the respective usage of gender-fair language, but are furthermore read as stancetaking on issues of justice, gender and equality and language's role, due to different assumptions about who uses which forms and whether these, for example show support of a struggle for equality. The difference between more subtle and more open positionings, with the latter being more frequent due to polarisation of the debate, can be exemplified by context and the linguistic means used to position oneself: While first data shows that e.g. categorized self-references (Whitehead/Lerner 2021) are used to position oneself in a more subtle way and suggest, among others, gender as a motive for certain stances, topoi, hypertrophic language use (Felder 2018) and some cognitive metaphors, e.g. those equating gender-inclusive language with violence or rape, are very much "in your face" when it comes to evaluating the discursively constructed notion of gender-inclusive language use that the speakers are taking a stance on.
References
Dang-Anh, Mark; Scholl, Stefan (2022): Politisches Positionieren in der NS-Zeit: Zur sprachlichen Bearbeitung von Identitätsdilemmata in Eingaben und Zellengesprächen. In: Heidrun Kämper und Albrecht Plewnia (Hg.): Sprache in Politik und Gesellschaft: De Gruyter, S. 123–140.
Felder, Ekkehard (2018): Anmaßungsvokabeln: Sprachliche Strategien der Hypertrophie oder der Jargon der Anmaßung. In: Martin Wengeler und Alexander Ziem (Hg.): Diskurs, Wissen, Sprache. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter (Sprache und Wissen, 29), S. 215–240.
Kotthoff, Helga (2020): Gender-Sternchen, Binnen-I oder generisches Maskulinum, … (Akademische) Textstile der Personenreferenz als Registrierungen? In: LO 103 (3), S. 105–127.
Schneider, Jan Georg (2020): Geschlechtergerechter Sprachgebrauch im Deutschen: grammatische, pragmalinguistische und gesellschaftliche Aspekte. In: Georg Albert, Lothar Bluhm und Markus Schiefer Ferrari (Hg.): Political Correctness. Kultur- und sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte. Marburg: Tectum. S. 45–72.
Whitehead, Kevin A.; Lerner, Gene H. (2021): When simple self-reference is too simple: Managing the categorical relevance of speaker self-presentation. In: Lang. Soc., S. 1–24.
Lise Pernet
Julien Longhi
Gabriella Carobbio
Lejla Atagan