In this accessible new textbook, Isabela and Norman Fairclough present their innovative approach to analysing political discourse. Political Discourse Analysis integrates analysis of arguments into critical discourse analysis and political discourse analysis. The book is grounded in a view of politics in which deliberation, decision and action are crucial concepts: politics is about arriving cooperatively at decisions about what to do in the context of disagreement, conflict of interests and values, power inequalities, uncertainty and risk. The first half of the book introduces the authors’ new approach to the analysis and evaluation of practical arguments, while the second half explores how it can be applied by looking at examples such as government reports, parliamentary debates, political speeches and online discussion forums on political issues. Through the analysis of current events, including a particular focus on the economic crisis and political responses to it, the authors provide a systematic and rigorous analytical framework that can be adopted and used for students’ own research. This exciting new text, co-written by bestselling author Norman Fairclough, is essential reading for researchers, upper undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis, within English language, linguistics, communication studies, politics and other social sciences.

Political Discourse Analysis addresses the challenges facing political actors at all levels of society and across a range of regimes. It shows how discursive legitimisation strategies can vary on a continuum ranging from the stabilising effects of institutional discourse and the management of destabilising factors inherent in new types of media to the destabilising potential of rhetorical devices and deliberate de-legitimisation strategies used to attack opponents. The diverse approaches show how political actors strive to maintain control in the context of democratic deficit and crisis in developed societies while addressing growing global threats to stability in all regimes. While many actors seek legitimisation through the institutional structure, media or rhetoric, others may seek to weaken any opposition to them through de-legitimisation. In this collection Butler provides the reader with replicable methods that can be adapted to political contexts.

Systemic Functional Political Discourse Analysis: A Text-based Study is the first book which takes a comprehensive systemic functional perspective on political discourse to provide a complete, integrated, exhaustive, systemic and functional description and analysis. Based on the political discourses of the Umbrella Movement – the largest public protest in the history of Hong Kong, which occupies a unique political situation in the world: a post-colonial society like many other Asian societies and yet unlike the others, it is a Special Administrative Region of China. Though it enjoys a high degree of autonomy under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, it is still confined to being part of the ‘One Country’. The book demonstrates how a systemic functional approach can provide a comprehensive, thorough, and insightful analysis of the political discourse from four co-related and complementary approaches: contextual, discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and historical. Apart from a thorough discussion of various systemic functional conceptions, it provides examples of various analyses from a SF perspective, including contextual parameters, registerial analysis, semantic discourse analysis, appraisal analysis, and discusses important issues in political discourse, including negotiation of self-identity, association of language, power and institutional role, and expression of ‘evidentiality’ and ‘subjectivity’. It is written not only for those who are interested in Hong Kong politics in general and political discourse in Hong Kong in particular, but also for those who work on political discourse analysis, and those who apply SFL to various other discourses such as mass media discourse, medical discourse, teaching discourse, etc. Last but not least, this book is also intended to provide a theoretical framework in discourse analysis from the systemic functional perspective for those who work in Cantonese and in other languages.

How can recent developments in post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and psychoanalytical theory actually inform ongoing empirical research? What are the appropriate methods and research strategies for conducting research in discourse theory and analysis? How can concepts such as hegemony, identity, the imaginary, dislocation, and empty signifiers illuminate key aspects of contemporary society and politics? This pathbreaking and multi-focal book contains a clear introductory statement of the theoretical approach used, and concludes with an assessment of the future directions of discourse theory in the social sciences.

Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse extends.

The second edition of the highly successful Handbook of Discourse Analysis has been expanded and thoroughly updated to reflect the very latest research to have developed since the original publication, including new theoretical paradigms and discourse-analytic models, in an authoritative two-volume set. Twenty new chapters highlight emerging trends and the latest areas of research Contributions reflect the range, depth, and richness of current research in the field Chapters are written by internationally-recognized leaders in their respective fields, constituting a Who’s Who of Discourse Analysis A vital resource for scholars and students in discourse studies as well as for researchers in related fields who seek authoritative overviews of discourse analytic issues, theories, and methods

This book offers new insights into the close relationship between political discourses and conflict resolution through critical analysis of the role of discursive change in a peace process. Just as a peace process has many dimensions and stakeholders, so the discourses considered here come from a wide range of sources and actors. The book contains in-depth analyses of official discourses used to present the peace process, the discourses of political party leaders engaging (or otherwise) with it, the discourses of community-level activists responding to it, and the discourses of the media and the academy commenting on it. These discourses reflect varying levels of support for the peace process – from obstruction to promotion – and the role of language in moving across this spectrum according to issue and occasion. Common to all these analyses is the conviction that the language used by political protagonists and cultural stakeholders has a profound effect on progression towards peace. Bringing together leading experts on Northern Ireland’s peace process from a range of academic disciplines, including political science, sociology, linguistics, history, geography, law, and peace studies, this book offers new insights into the discursive dynamics of violent political conflict and its resolution.

This book adopts a multi-method multimodal approach to the study of online political communication, applying it to case studies from the UK, France, and Italy toward offering a portrait of the rapid ideological shifts in contemporary Western democracies. The volume introduces an integrated framework combining Sentiment and Emotion Analysis, rooted in lexical semantics, and the qualitative dimensions of Appraisal Theory, applying it to large corpora of online political communication from the UK, France, and Italy. Combei and Reggi highlight their combined potential in analyzing the multimodal resources in such discourses and in turn, revealing fresh insights into layers of subtext and the ways in which parties and movements frame their political programmes and values. The authors also take into account culture- and language-specific variables across the three countries in shaping such discourses. The volume makes the case for an integrated methodological framework that can be uniquely applied to better understand the multimodal communicative landscape of divisiveness in today’s rapidly shifting political climate and other forms of online communication more broadly. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, multimodality, and qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, especially those interested in corpus-assisted approaches.

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use - 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.