Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This paper discusses web-based public health discursive practices during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. It utilises a multimodal discourse approach to explore how a combination of textual and visual resources was deployed to communicate informative and educative public health safety campaigns during the period. Essentially, this study discusses multimodal resources as a rhetorical technique for creating a public discursive engagement space designed to educate the public and mitigate the effect of the pandemic. The dataset was collected during and after the lockdown in 2020 (March–September) through media monitoring and manual downloading of relevant online COVID-19 posts, messages and public health advisories largely from WhatsApp platforms and the portals of some Nigerian national newspapers. Using insights from relevant approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. Multimodal Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis), we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse on how online posts as multimodal resources amplify the role of social media affordances in producing and promoting public safety messages helped to control the spread and mitigate the effects of the pandemic. The study also shows that discursive and multimodal resources were deliberately deployed to increase the effectiveness of the technology-driven public health campaign. To a large extent, multimodal resources were found to complement lexico-semantic properties of online communication, where social media messages are created, crafted and reconstructed within a uniquely Nigerian public discourse context. The study further illustrates the increasing importance of web-based platforms as discursive sites for enacting and negotiating meanings during event-driven social activities and public engagement in the Global South. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This study attempts to generate new insights into the wide spread online and offline conspiratorial discourse on COVID-19. Twofold analytical lens consisted of narrative interrelations framework and content analysis showed how the linguistic resources and conversational such as popular socio-religious discourses, hypothetical narratives, personal narratives, personal mental archives, and interpolated arguments are integrated in the interpretation of intertextual Bases such as Bill Gates’ TED talk 2015 (26%); Nematullah Wali’s predictions (32%); ‘End of Days’ book by Sylvia Browne (14.9%); and ‘The Eyes of Darkness’ novel by Dean Koontz (22%) by which the conspiracists in Pakistan construct an internally persuasive discourse promoting conspiracy theories on COVID-19. Several linguistic resources such as mood, modality, topicalization, insinuation, and intertextuality emerged as the main tools of making the conspiracy theories internally persuasive. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This research adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as a perspective to explore how kindness was expressed and promoted in university communities and city communities from January to March in 2020 when the Covid pandemic broke out in the UK and provide a window on British culture in which kindness was expressed and promoted through discourse. It combines a qualitative method with a corpus-based quantitative method. It is found that kindness was meant for providing support and showing compassion and inclusion to community members and that strategies in lexis, syntax and metaphor can reproduce or resist the expression and promotion of kindness in communities. During the pandemic, the intentional kindness expressed by community authorities was respect of diversity rather than inclusion of different values or ethnicity and no substantial support was provided to vulnerable members even though authorities were trying to impress the public by claiming that they were making constant efforts to support the community. Case studies revealed that we should caution against the use of passivation and the pronouns like they. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Court-related mediation is proceeded by verbal negotiation to shorten the distance of both parties involved for the final fulfillment of dispute resolution and social harmony. Based on the transcribed mediation data on a workplace injury pretrial case, and from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA for short) model, this study investigates quantitatively and qualitatively how the mediator arbitrates in terms of spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization. During court-related mediation, the mediator intends to stimulate both sides’ desires to mediate the negotiable space, proximize the mediating discourse and finally achieve persuasive functions of the mediator’s discourse; the mediator’s manipulation of the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization strategies is of decreasing frequency. Among them, the spatial proximization strategies as dominant roles while the temporal and the axiological proximization ones as auxiliary roles, jointly promote the construction of “mediating space” and establish the legitimized forces in mediation discourse. This study aims at exploring how to achieve the dispute resolution by court-related mediation, total conciliation of conflicts as well as full construction of social harmony. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper illustrates how superdiverse youth negotiate their identity in everyday interactions during Australia’s Covid-19 outbreak. The discussion is based on oral narratives collected from classroom conversations among international and local students living in Australia. The paper illustrates how participants position themselves and others in narratives, how these positionings reveal complex identity work among youth from diverse backgrounds and how identities are constructed and negotiated through stories about everyday encounters. Students’ experiences of racism and microaggressions point to interethnic interactions as sites of struggle where identities come into conflict. The paper contributes to current work on identity in narrative discourse and narratives of racism. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article is a systematic review of previous research on hate speech in discourse studies indexed in the Scopus database in the last five years, from 2015 to 2021. This review aims to map the main topics and methods used in hate speech studies and then provide critical remarks related to the methodological issues. The review focused on 70 selected articles and was analyzed using the NVivo 12 combined with the LancsBox 6.0. Based on the analysis, previous studies show a strong relationship between hate speech, political issues, and discrimination. Although many studies of hate speech have applied the CDA approach, and some of them have used sociocognitive CDA, it is surprising and unfortunate that previous researchers did not show much attention and further exploration of the cognitive aspects of the theory itself. It means that the cognitive aspects of hate speech have yet to be appropriately explored. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The article examines how the Mexicans represent in their discourse the perpetrators of everyday violence. Ethnographic data that I collected during in-depth interviews recorded in Guadalajara, Mexico, are analyzed employing Theo van Leeuwen’s tools of CDA as presented in Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Comparing extracts from recorded interviews discussing violence against women, men, and children proves that the representation of social actors differs depending on the victim and thereby normalizes violent behavior. Although the main explanation of high rates in violence is the machismo – the cult of macho, the low frequency of the terms macho, machos, machista, or machismo in the corpus demonstrates that for the informants the concept of macho is remote and does not serve to justify the violence. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Nigeria has stringent legislation against same-sex identified people and their supporters. Scholarly attention on same-sex relationships in the Nigerian context has mainly been on the legalistic and sociological perspectives, with little attention paid to how language serves as a means of illegitimising same-sex sexualities in the Nigerian media. This study, therefore, examines illegitimation strategies in the representation of same-sex sexualities in news reports of selected Nigerian newspapers. van Leeuwen’s theory of legitimation and Critical Discourse Analysis were adopted as the framework, for their contextual approaches to language. A total of 80 news reports on same-sex sexualities from four purposively selected Nigerian newspapers ( Vanguard, The Punch, Nigerian Tribune and The Sun) were randomly sampled. The newspapers were selected based on their preponderant coverage of reports on LGBT people between 2013 and 2015. Journalists used experts’ authority, role-model/personal authority, authority of tradition, conformity, moral evaluation and analogy to legitimise discrimination against non-heterosexuals in news reports. This paper argues that the media are instrumental in the continuous violence against non-heterosexuals in Nigeria. </jats:p>