Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Sexism and gender controversies often occur on the internet in contemporary China. The prevalence of male effeminacy is a part of the growing diversity of gender representations. This article investigates the dominant discourses surrounding the debate on male feminization, and netizens’ stance in Chinese social media discourse. By employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, the study identifies four dominant discourses: resistance discourse, anti-discrimination discourse, patriarchal discourse, and nationalistic discourse. These discourses are constructed using various strategies, such as abstraction, authorization, categorization, and morality strategies, and are inextricably intertwined with China’s sociocultural background and broader social contexts. This study offers insights into the clash between conventional and liberal views on ‘soft masculinity’ and exemplifies how Chinese netizens actively leverage social media platforms to express views on gender issues. </jats:p>

<jats:p> American news media outlets have a storied past of delegitimizing protest movements, particularly through violence. However, recent literature has suggested news media outlets in America are slowly beginning to pull away from this trend. Moreover, recent protest history has several memorable examples of this attempted course correction, such as CNN’s viral ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ headline during the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Along with this series of protest demonstrations, one of the most historically significant demonstrations of protest in the 2020s was the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. This study utilized a discourse analysis methodology to explore textual and visual framing incongruencies of participant violence in The New York Times’s coverage of these historic demonstrations. Findings point to a consistent visual and textual framing of violence within the NYT’s coverage of George Floyd Demonstrations, but not within its coverage of the Capitol riot. Possible discrepancies in participant labeling were also observed. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The article reports a study of corporate testimonial videos from a Danish tech SME. The aim of the study is to show how combining Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) may provide new insight into the persuasive appeal of corporate testimonial videos. The study uses EMCA to demonstrate how participants interactionally construct a position of credibility and authenticity from which to deliver the recommendation. It uses MCDA to show how the interaction is integrated into a larger set of multimodally constructed meanings with a specific strategic communicative purpose, specifically how visual and editorial choices contribute to the credibility of the videos by creating a sense that viewers are watching a spontaneous (online) conversation rather than a staged corporate video. The article concludes that the videos construct credibility by providing access to a curated backstage region which viewers are invited to understand as ‘authentic’ and ‘unedited’. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This case study demonstrates identification, explicitation, and validation of the implicatures found in the Kommersant (Russia) Telegram channel posts. It explores the primary reasons for Kommersant’s implicature use and the language means employed for the creation of the implicature. The contributors to the Kommersant Telegram channel use irony/sarcasm, creative neologisms, wordplay, metaphors, and legally imposed euphemisms for the expression of the implicit meaning. The use of implicatures is mainly motivated by the authors’ desire for self-protection and cooperation. Kommersant’s implicit language also contributes towards the creation of a circle of loyal readers who may enjoy explicitating the implicatures so as to feel they belong to a specific socio-political group. The multi-stage perceptual analysis substantiates the assumption that readers with prior knowledge of Kommersant’s style are more sensitive to its implicatures. The report also concludes that at times of rigid war-time media regulation in Russia, Kommersant’s reporters use a code of implicit expressions as a means to preserve a certain objectivity in their reporting and to maintain their loyal readership. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article offers a qualitative analysis of two instances of troubles-telling threads on a diabetes forum, with a specific focus on how these instances contribute to constructing a way to manage others’ expectations concerning how persons diagnosed with diabetes control their condition. From the perspective of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article shows some recurrent features of both troubles-telling (namely announcement, stake inoculation and self-deprecation) and of troubles-receiving (namely appreciation, second stories, escalation). Our analysis furthermore shows how inadequate expectations from family members are judged differently from those of health professionals. The latter are judged more harshly for what seems a lack of professional competence, whereas the former are more easily pardoned but pose a particular challenge in that patients do not wish to remove these persons from their lives. Through this analysis, we contribute to showing a particularly important function of patient fora, namely allowing patients to tell troubles about others’ expectations and to receive support and advice for these circumstances that put a heavy emotional burden. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The movement for reparations for those enslaved on the North American continent from 1450 to 1866 has a long history fraught with debate, criticized by individuals on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Specific points of contention include how much money should be allocated, who the recipients and potential liable parties should be, and what specific form reparations should take. Accounting for this historical opposition, this paper employs a corpus-based discourse analysis to examine the communicative barriers to implementing reparations. The corpora consisted of YouTube comments posted to news reports of six cities’ reparations proposals. I utilized Sketch Engine to examine frequency of keywords, collocations, and concordance, followed by a close-reading discourse analysis of lexical, grammatical, and tonal elements. The analysis revealed myriad constructions of reparations resulting in inertia, the institutional tendency to preserve the status quo. This discursive formation is consequential not only for its implications for reparations, but for broader structural reform efforts. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In May 2020, in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we set up the transmedia space PanMeMic, and involved our social networks, in a snowball fashion, to exchange observations and reflections on the changes in communication and social interactions ensuing from the restrictions imposed. We adopted a citizen approach towards co-constructing knowledge about semiotic practices, by integrating tenets of social semiotics, ethnography and citizen sociolinguistics. The article reports on the activities and discusses the potentials and limitations of the approach through analysis of the posts and discussions that took place in the PanMeMic Facebook group. It shows results quantitatively and then zooms in to offer a qualitative analysis of one discussion thread, with the aim of illustrating the potential and limitations of PanMeMic as a platform for citizen semiotic research and providing indications for future socially engaged and engaging research. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores how universities construe organizational identities and engage digital audiences through images on web homepages. Combining visual content analysis and a discourse-analytic approach informed by social semiotics, I interpret the discourses of identity in 400 images from organizational homepages of four top-tier public universities in Sydney, Australia – University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney, and Macquarie University. Based on the social semiotic interpretation of images, I identify eight identity icons, each deploying a combination of semiotic resources to represent a specific organizational identity. The analysis suggests that universities prioritize featuring people, which results in an augmented sense of social presence on the homepage. Lastly, four identified strategies for digital audience engagement in images – proximation, alignment, equalization, and subjectivation – point to how these are instrumental in representing university life as both individual and shared experiences. </jats:p>

<jats:p> There have been extensive public and academic debates on the role platform algorithms play in shaping social media (sub)cultures. Little attention, however, has been paid to how platform (sub)cultures are discursively constructed by the design of the platform interface. This study examines Bilibili, a leading Chinese video platform, and investigates how it discursively frames video-sharing culture through platform menu design. We developed a three-level analytical framework that includes: 1) a multimodal social semiotic analysis of Bilibili’s menu design; 2) a contrastive analysis of YouTube’s video menu, and 3) a focused analysis of guichu or kichiku videos (as a linguistic phenomenon, a transcultural practice and a multimodal semiotic artefact). Our findings reveal that Bilibili discursively frames and legitimizes video-sharing practices by establishing a folk taxonomy of video genres and integrating subculture into its menu design. Furthermore, Bilibili controls access to cultural knowledge through explicit (gatekeeping) and implicit (semiotic) measures, in contrast to YouTube’s visual and superficial taxonomy. This study unveils different discursive strategies platforms use to shape unique online video cultures. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This study explores the incorporation of experts’ and authorities’ voices in COVID-19 news articles with respect to their distribution and discursive functions. Based on a corpus 90 articles from 2020 to 2022 in The Korea Herald, the analysis reveals that reporters rely heavily and, at times, uncritically, on biomedical voices, representing them as a homogeneous group that provides a superior form of knowledge. The discursive functions range from providing substance to the coverage, to adding negative emotional coloring, to disowning, and to deauthorizing, which appear to vary according to the dynamics of the pandemic. These intertextual practices do not simply transmit biomedical knowledge to the reader but also mediate public perceptions of the virus by defining what counts as (il)legitimate knowledge and framing it as an alarming threat and an (in)security issue. In effect, multidimensional perspectives are precluded that may also be helpful for a complex issue like the pandemic. </jats:p>