Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was the result of a coup of the economically dominant conservative oligarchy against the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, the Worker’s Party), in power since 2003. The right wing Brazilian media played a crucial role in this coup by manipulating public opinion as well as the politicians who voted against Dilma. In particular, the media of the powerful Globo Corporation, such as O Globo newspaper, and especially Globo’s Jornal Nacional, the pervasive TV news program, systematically demonized and delegitimized Dilma, as well as ex-President Lula and the PT, in their news reports and editorials by selectively associating them with pervasive corruption and attributing the serious economic recession to them. After a summary of this sociopolitical context, and a brief theoretical definition of manipulation, this article examines some of the manipulative strategies of O Globo’s editorials during March and April 2016. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Sensorial access to products in shop encounters constitutes a crucial aspect of the appeal to customers. This paper examines sensorial engagements with products in a specific ecology (outdoor markets) with a focus on the possible (pre)opening of a shop encounter. When passers-by stroll from one stand to another, open to local findings, unplanned discoveries, and emergent opportunities to buy, they orient to the sensory appeal of the products, becoming possible customers, stopping in front of a counter and engaging in a social interaction with sellers and other customers. The analysis focuses on multisensoriality in action, studying how customers and sellers treat the sensorial qualities of the products, the relevance of the sensory engagement of the customer with their materiality, and their involvement in the social encounter with the seller, including normative expectations related to sensing and buying. It includes a discussion of how under Covid-19 sensorial access to products was restricted and the sensorial, interactional, normative, and economic consequences of these restrictions. Based on video recordings of market encounters, and on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of multimodality and multisensoriality, the paper reflects on how appealing to the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste is methodically orchestrated, and its consequences for the interaction with the seller, the sensorial experience, and the economic transaction. </jats:p>

<jats:p> When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to (1) personal authority of policymakers, (2) impersonal authority of rules or documents and (3) goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government (42,618 words) which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with (im)migrant subjects and (im)migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities (im)migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the (im)migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of (im)migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as (im)migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Recent years have witnessed an increasing academic interest in Chinese homosexuality; however, linguistic-oriented research on this topic is scant and multimodal inquiry on it is even rarer. To address the gap, this article conducts a discourse analysis of how tongzhi in mainland China are represented by news media. Specifically, we examine both linguistic and visual representations of tongzhi by utilizing two influential English-language newspapers in mainland China published between 2009 and 2019. Our data consist of 221 news articles totaling 117,407 words; 44 of the articles are accompanied with pictures. Methodologically, we draw on Halliday’s transitivity structure coupled with van Leeuwen’s classification of social actors. Our findings reveal that Chinese tongzhi are mainly represented in a negative fashion, and that there is little positive news representation of this invisible community. In addition, socio-cultural factors contributing to media representations of Chinese tongzhi are considered. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper examines how German media discourses reflect debates around integration, based on a newspaper corpus spanning the period 2008–2018. Considering these discourses, our research interest is focussed on how integration is constructed as a responsibility of those who are expected to integrate into society. To analyze how media might play a role in reproducing essentialist constructions of difference, we present a case study that combines methodologies of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, and that examines discursive practices and strategies linked to dominant discourses about integration in Germany. Our findings show that in the German context, certain ethnicities (here: people of Turkish background) are framed as “other” and these groups are constantly being assessed in terms of integration in ways that others are not. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The research identifies the amount of headline/article discrepancies in the corpora of western (the USA, the UK) and Russian online articles on sensitive political topics. A quarter of the western headlines and nearly half of the Russian headlines distort the publications they introduce. Language means and manipulative strategies employed by different sides vary considerably. Extensive use of expressive language and style variation are seen as leading causes of distortions in the western corpus. The rich imagery used by the authors (metaphors and metonymy in particular) forms emotional implicatures that affect the reader’s perception of the issue. In contrast, information substitution, subjective modality and selective citations are identified as major causes of distortions in the Russian corpus. Contributors to Russian news outlets rely on general rather than language manipulation strategies, including frequent use of logical fallacies and wrong generalizations. These techniques establish false logical sequences and wrong causative implicatures that compromise objective reporting. The underlying motives of the journalists’ creating false emotional and causative implicatures in the headlines lies beyond the scope of the study; however, it is assumed that intentional change of the information introduced by the headline could be viewed as a covert misinformation attempt. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This study compares the coverage of coping strategies and emotions portrayed in news regarding COVID-19 by The New York Times in the U.S. and People’s Daily of China via social media. By employing corpus assisted discourse analysis to scrutinize the text corpora, our study uncovered prominent keywords and themes. Findings indicate that a comprehensive range of themes relating to coping strategies was more common in People’s Daily while a relatively smaller number of themes was apparent in The New York Times. In terms of emotions exhibited in the news coverage, positive emotions such as cheer, gratitude, and good wishes predominated in People’s Daily whereas in The New York Times, negative emotions in the form of fears and anxiety were salient. The differences are explained with reference to the political context intertwined with the news environment and prior experiences in handling epidemics, with practical implications. </jats:p>