Mental illness is an increasing concern of government health services across the globe. It is timely, therefore, that community education about mental illness is subject to discourse analysis. Shaping Minds explores how the psychoeducational message is presented to Chinese-speaking audiences in China, Taiwan and Australia. The book uniquely examines community education materials in a language rarely examined by discourse analysts, but which is nevertheless spoken by around a fifth of the world's population and constitutes an important 'minority' language throughout the Western world....

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a...

The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various...

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains - political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. - it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions...

The Arab-Israeli struggle is not only a struggle over land, but a struggle over language representations. Arab reporters as well as politicians believe that their political discourses about the Middle East conflict are objective, accurate, and credible. Arab News and Conflict critically examines the role of language in the representations of events and ideologies found in news media.
Drawing on socio-political-linguistic approaches combined with real-case studies, the author offers a unique discourse analysis model for analysing politically sensitive language in the media. The...

This monograph examines the rhetorical nature and function of representations of the future in political discourse, focusing on political actors' use of hegemonic images of future -reality- to achieve their political goals. It argues that a key ideological dimension of political rhetoric lies in politicians' use of projections of the future to legitimate policies and actions. This argument is grounded in systemic-functional and critical discourse analyses of the -Bush Doctrine, - the U.S. policy response to the September 11 terrorist attacks which sanctioned a -preemptive- military posture....

Discourse since September 11, 2001 has constrained and shaped public discussion and debate surrounding terrorism worldwide. Social actors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere employ the language of the "war on terror" to explain, react to, justify and understand a broad range of political, economic and social phenomena. Discourse, War and Terrorism explores the discursive production of identities, the shaping of ideologies, and the formation of collective understandings in response to 9/11 in the United States and around the world. At issue are how enemies are...

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude, investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an...

Silencing is not only a physically coercive act. It is also an act of language involving forms of selection, representation and compliance. Discourse and Silencing weaves together theories and examples of discourse from different disciplines in order to put forward a theory of silencing in language: that discursive systems filter, represent and displace types of knowledge into other forms of expression.
Each chapter of the book analyses examples of silencing through discourse in various social and political fields. The examples cover courtroom trials, government censorship,...

When politicians and pundits in the Middle East discuss democracy, do they mean it? Looking at public discourse about democracy in contemporary Egypt, Dunne proposes a fresh way of reading Arabic political discourse. She charts a method combining ethnographic research into communities of people producing political discourse with investigation of the texts themselves, using tools from anthropology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics -- a method with broad applicability to political discourse generally. Taking off from the premise that all discourse is based in social interaction, this book...