Discourse & Society

Wang J (2017) Representations of the Chinese Communist Party’s political ideologies in President Xi Jinping’s discourse. Discourse and Society 28(4): 413–435. DOI 10.1177/0957926516687418.

The above paper, initially titled as “Party legitimation through representations of the Chinese Communist Party’s (post-) communist ideologies in Xi Jinping’s political discourse” has lightly been edited between Online First publication and final issue publication in order to clarify some remarks which were open to misinterpretation. These edits have not changed the meaning of the article.

The subsequent version of this article has been corrected.

Using data from the Egyptian public discourse on the United States, this article lays out the foundation for building a general theory of pictorial framing. In this theory, at the most general level, the concept of pictorial framing refers to subtle alterations in the visual presentation of judgment and choice problems. Specifically, pictures are viewed as constructions, and pictorial meaning is seen as an intricate web of connected frames. The article thus adopts the view that a visual grammar is part of cognitive science and is fundamentally concerned with the relation between what goes on in the human mind and manifestations of this activity. The article draws on insights from blending model (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002), Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and frame semantics (Fillmore, 1985), discussing a large corpus of 90 multimodal cartoons on the United States.

In this article I evaluate competing discourses about the meaning of street remarks – the remarks men make to unacquainted women passing on the street – in 1000 comments posted to a YouTube video of street remarks recorded in New York City in 2014. One discourse prominent in the comments posted to the video defends the remarks as civil talk, highlighting the literal meanings of remarks such as ‘Have a nice evening’. A second, less frequent, discourse characterizes these encounters and utterances as sexual harassment, citing men’s ostensible sexual intentions and personal experience. I find that (a) difficulties in articulating the ways in which street remarks are injurious may veil their harm, thus contributing to the perpetuation of male domination of women in public spaces, and (b) the close juxtaposition of explicitly misogynistic comments with interpretations of the street remarks as civil casts doubt on the sincerity of such interpretations.

This article explores how we take responsibility for our past actions in language, using an ideational perspective. It focuses on the way we construe actions in transitive and ergative language patterns and from this develop a cline of responsibility, which has maximum responsibility at the one end and minimum responsibility at the other. The article examines a number of instances of language use from different genres and registers with this cline to determine the extent to which language users take responsibility (or not) for their actions through language.

This article analyses the two national parliamentary debates on the new Islam law of 2015 using a Viennese School of Critical Discourse Analysis. It asks how the new Islam law was framed from the perspectives of the political parties in power and of those in opposition. It also shows in detail which arguments were raised to defend, alter or support the proposed law by identifying the list of topoi used. It asks especially how racist arguments were debated between on one side a comparably tolerant Austrian system of laws on religion, and on the other, the dominant right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria, which aimed to foster Islamophobia.