Languaging Diversity : Identities, Genres, Discourses [1 ed.] 9781443876889, 9781443871228

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Languaging Diversity

Languaging Diversity Identities, Genres, Discourses Edited by

Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Cristina Nisco

Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Cristina Nisco This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Giuseppe Balirano, Maria Cristina Nisco and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7122-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7122-8

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................. viii Prologue..................................................................................................... xv Jocelyne Vincent IN THE NEWS A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers........................ 2 Cesare Zanca Languaging the Riots: A Corpus-based Investigation of the Rioters’ Identity in the British Press ....................................................................... 16 Maria Cristina Nisco and Marco Venuti IN POLITICS At the Intersection of Class and Race: Languaging and Picturing Diversity in Post-apartheid South Africa ................................................... 34 Claudia Ortu Building Ethnic Inclusiveness in a Plural Society: Kamla PersadBissessar’s 2010 Election Campaign in Trinidad and Tobago .................. 47 Eleonora Esposito “Black Man Runnin’ and It Ain’t from the Police”: Rap Music, Political Endorsement and Black Identity ................................................. 61 Paola Attolino CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES Languaging Diversity in EU Institutional Discourse ................................. 76 Vanda Polese and Germana D’Acquisto

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The Counter-Hegemonic Discourse of Biodiversity: CDA of Vandana Shiva’s Honorary Doctorate Acceptance Speech ...................................... 99 Anna Franca Plastina “How are you feeling?”, “What’s happening?”: Identity Construction via FB Status Messages ........................................................................... 116 Nicola Borrelli Identity, Discourse and Translation ......................................................... 130 Urszula Zaliwska-Okrutna ACROSS GENERATIONS AND GENDERS Old and Young: Changing Evaluations of Intergenerational Diversity ... 144 Alison Duguid The Construction of Age Identity in an Online Discourse Community: The Case of Boomer Women Speak ........................................................ 163 Laura Tommaso Discursive Shifts and ‘Mis-premising’ in the Representation of Male Homosexuality in AVT ........................................................................... 176 Bronwen Hughes And What about Same Sex Marriages? A Corpus-based Analysis of Lexical Choices and Social Attitudes .................................................. 197 Francesca Vigo ETHNICITIES Representation of Ethnic Identity of Tatars through the Ethnonym ‘Tatar’ ...................................................................................................... 212 Nailya Bashirova and Marina Solnyshkina A Course of Life or a Curse for Life? Discussing the Name of an Ethnic Minority in Romania ............................................................................... 226 Raluca Levonian Using Difference as a Weapon: Phenomena of Verbal Impoliteness in Maghrebi Arabic Dialects.................................................................... 249 Luca D’Anna

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POPULARISING IDEAS TED Culture and Ideas Worth Spreading ................................................ 262 Margaret Rasulo Speaker Identity vs. Speaker Diversity: The Case of TED Talks Corpus ..................................................................................................... 279 Stefania D’Avanzo Metadiscourse Diversification in English and Italian Scientific Magazines ................................................................................................ 297 Silvia Masi Diversifying Language according to the Context: Popularizing Legal Language in TV Series ............................................................................ 312 Adriano Laudisio Language, Identity and Diversity: An Epilogue? .................................... 325 Giuseppe Balirano

FOREWORD

This volume intends to explore the thorny issue of Language and Diversity, focusing on the discourses that emerge as bearers of the values of alterity. Language enables the deployment of multiple identities that offer a specific representation of the self through explicit linguistic means, lexical and stylistic choices, and grammatical structures. It is in language that diversity is articulated with discursive practices that conceptualise what they name (Halliday 1994). Therefore, language can be seen as a space fostering the articulation and differentiation of identity values. Discourse identity has become an increasingly popular research area in recent years (Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Llamas and Watt 2010), with its crucial assumption that speakers’ identities are dynamically negotiated as discourse unfolds. Therefore, language acquires a pivotal role, when the expression of individual and/or group diversity occurs within the social and discursive practices that represent identity as a process of negotiation, a performance (De Fina, Schiffrin, Bamberg 2006). Indeed, the speakers’ linguistic choices can be interpreted as a means to signal and highlight the way they construe their own and/or others’ identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller refer to ‘acts of identity’, 1985). The essays included in this volume, which are based on papers presented at the Languaging Diversity International Conference (held in 2013 at the University of Naples L’Orientale), seek to respond to such a critical landscape. The fruitful and thought-provoking observations that emerged from the Conference were further developed to explore the topics surrounding the modes in which diversity is linguistically articulated by and in discourse, from a series of different linguistic and critical perspectives. The various studies deal with how individuals draw on linguistic resources to achieve, maintain or challenge the representations pertaining to their cultural, social, ethnic, sexual, gender, professional, and institutional identities. The contributions presented here reveal the need to devote a wider critical attention to the ways identities can be linguistically and multimodally articulated and represented in the various discourses produced by different societies. The volume comprises six sections, which group the essays according to their specific focus, although a number of methodologies is employed for analyses and a variety of theoretical frameworks is referred to.

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The first section, IN THE PRESS, opens with Cesare Zanca’s analysis of the wide range of interpretations and evaluations linked to the concepts of ‘diversity’ and ‘alterity’, and triggered by different contexts of use and discourses. With his emphasis on the socio-cultural relevance of the keyword ‘diversity’, Zanca carries out a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) investigation of British newspapers to examine the ways in which the press ‘languages’ diversity. Maria Cristina Nisco and Marco Venuti’s essay tackles the ways in which the British press linguistically represented the protagonists involved in the 2011 UK riots, by offering a series of construals that almost invariably locate them within the framework of law and order, crime and anarchy. By drawing a comparison between the reporting of the most recent events and that of the riots in the 1980s and 1990s (as emerging from the existing literature), the authors show that the way newspapers manage diversity is pivotal in conveying racial, social or age connotations. In the second section, IN POLITICS, Claudia Ortu examines how diversity is ‘languaged’ and pictured in post-apartheid South Africa. Widely known as the ‘Rainbow Nation’, South Africa is one of the most diverse countries in the world, and can therefore extensively contribute to the study of the articulations of the concept of diversity, as the author highlights. By taking into account a political text employed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – which was meant to confront neoliberal policies while defending the interests of the workers affected by such policies – the essay offers an entry point into issues of race and class diversity as emerging from the cartoon strips construing the political narrative. Shifting the focus to another plural and heterogeneous area, the Caribbean, Eleonora Esposito examines the linguistic and multimodal strategies that enabled the Indo-Trinidadian political leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar to cross the ethnic and political divide in Trinidad and Tobago by proposing a new politics of multiculturalism in the country. Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s political speeches, which constitute the corpus under scrutiny in Esposito’s analysis, are based on the celebration of diversity and multiethnicity, a strategy that is used to avoid exclusivism and promote power sharing. The third essay included in the section, by Paola Attolino, concentrates on a remarkable political event: the 2008 elections of the 44th and current President of the United States, Barack Obama. As the first politician to get support from the Hip Hop community, Obama’s candidacy was endorsed by African American rappers, who gave rise to an interesting new genre: Obama Rap. By analysing a corpus of rap songs, the author investigates to what extent

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linguistic choices and pragmatic strategies in the lyrics reveal a reconciliation between rap music and politics, while advocating a new and upcoming idea of Black American identity. The third section, CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES, opens up with Vanda Polese and Germana D’Acquisto’s investigation of the ways in which diversity is ‘languaged’ in institutional discourse on immigration and integration. By carrying out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus of legal texts – EU Directives – the authors identify the emerging and dominant notions related to immigration (assimilation, inclusion, intercultural or social integration, and so forth). The second essay, by Anna Franca Plastina, starts from the debated concept of globalisation (against which several commentators and activists urge alternative solutions for a more sustainable world), and analyses Vandana Shiva’s honorary doctorate acceptance speech. The author shows that the keyword ‘diversity’ unlocks a discursive space in which biodiversity is articulated as a response to the legitimacy of capitalist globalisation and its hegemonic discourse. Moving to a different context, Nicola Borrelli’s essay examines how Facebook users codify their identity, offering a specific set of semiotic representations to the online community. FB status update messages, collected from British and Italian users and included in the corpus analysed by the author, constitute a digital extension of real-life discursive practices; indeed, the users’ ‘online persona’ and multimodal identities are communicated via a digital medium. The last essay in this section, by Urszula Zaliwska-Okrutna, examines discourse diversity as emerging from J.K. Rowling’s novel The Casual Vacancy (2012) which seems to pose a real challenge to the translator. More specifically, by taking into account the Polish translation of the text, the author focuses on the glottic identity of the translator and on how it influences the translation itself – glottic identity being not about group roles or identities but rather about the added individual flavours. In the fourth section, ACROSS GENERATIONS AND GENDERS, Alison Duguid investigates how diversity is treated discursively in the language of the press as far as age is concerned. As a socio-cultural construct, age has always been employed to construct collective or individual identities; however, such identities are negotiated and renegotiated, with varying evaluations attached to them. By diachronically analysing a corpus of newspaper articles, using a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, Duguid tracks changes in language usage which reflect extra-linguistic (social, political, historical, cultural, etc.) changes, revealing the several

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ways of ‘languaging’ age diversity and its changing evaluations. The construction of age identity is also the focus of Laura Tommaso’s essay, which concentrates on text-based online interaction in elderly online communities (an area that has received little empirical attention in linguistic research). After selecting the Boomer Women Speak discussions forums (a corpus that was analysed by adopting a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach), the author examines the discursive strategies that boomer women employ to present and negotiate their age identities, online communities providing a rich communication arena. The focus of the second part of the section shifts to gender-related topics and more specifically gay discourse. Starting from the assumption that gay discourses are often steeped in ideology and stereotypes that vary from nation to nation, Bronwen Hughes highlights the centrality of translation, and in particular audiovisual translation (AVT), in the representations of the ‘other’ from the source to the target culture and language. By concentrating on the dubbing of the TV series Queer as Folk UK into Italian – adopting the framework of descriptive Translation Studies – the author seeks to ascertain whether the dubbed target version is ‘adequate’ (namely, it respects the norms of the original source text) or ‘acceptable’ (that is complying with the norms of the target culture). While considering the potential crisis points in translation, caused by the extra-linguistic culture-bound references present in the source text, Hughes also reflects on the ‘mis-premising’ of social roles deriving from the crossing-over from English to Italian. Still on gay discourse, Francesca Vigo’s essay takes into account issues relating to same-sex marriages by analysing a diachronic corpus of British and Italian newspaper articles with the aim of tracing and describing how the two cultures deal with certain social phenomena and sexual preferences. Since the newspapers’ lexical choices may be seen as good indicators of cultural attitudes, after carrying out a corpus-based analysis, the author shows the extent to which both British and Italian cultures have changed their behaviour – on the lexical and sociological level – over time. In the fifth section, ETHNICITIES, Nailya Bashirova and Marina Solnyshkina present a corpus and discourse analysis of the linguistic means of self-presentation of Kazan Tatar young generation in online social communities. The authors focus their analysis on the semantic evolution of the ethnonym ‘Tatar’ in the Tatar and Russian languages spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan. The word ‘Tatar’ is firstly analysed in the corpus of Written Tatar and Russian National Corpus in order to reveal its fixed connotations in the two languages creating a stereotypical image

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of the Tatar. Secondly, the discourse analysis of the ethnonym in young Tatars’ Internet social community names epitomises an altered selfawareness of Tartars’ ethnicity. In the second paper, Raluca Levonian investigates the case of a campaign conducted by a Romanian daily newspaper, aiming to replace the term ‘rrom/rom’, the official Romanian name of the Roma minority, with the term ‘Ġigan’ (‘Gypsy’). The arguments provided contribute to the discursive construction of the national identity although, according to the author, the campaign pretended to be centered on the non-discriminative representation of ethnic diversity. The search for a marked linguistic differentiation of the minority from the majority does not show an attempt to be ‘politically correct’ as the newspaper claimed, but rather a strong desire for segregation. The study illustrates how language use plays a key role in the process of asserting and re-dimensioning identities and how ‘languaging’ diversity is, ultimately, a matter of conceiving and expressing one’s own identity. The third paper in this section, by Luca D’Anna, explores issues of linguistic diversity which can be concealed, stressed or even claimed in language usage when employed as effective weapons in order to find a prominent place in several manifestations of verbal impoliteness. The author focuses on similar linguistic phenomena which have occurred in the Arab-Islamic culture throughout its history and still occur in contemporary Arabic dialects. In Western cultures, the concept of race was presumably used to define alterity, at least in the modern age. Islamic societies, on the contrary, always leaned towards the definition of affiliations and differences on a religious basis. D’Anna discusses this issue taking into consideration the usage of religion, race and sexual orientation in the creation of slurs and dysphemisms in contemporary Maghrebi Arabic dialects, describing their underlining patterns by means of a wide exemplification. In the sixth section, POPULARISING IDEAS, Silvia Masi proposes a comparative exploration of the use of some meta-discursive resources in a small corpus of texts from popular scientific magazines in English and Italian, namely Scientific American and Le Scienze. Scientific popularization is a meeting point of different discourse communities with their own needs, intentions and modes of communication. Metadiscourse can be modulated and can modulate communication in different ways, as it covers a variety of linguistic elements which are aimed at organising the text for its readers – the interactive dimension – and at engaging them in exposition and argumentation – the interactional dimension. Masi’s analysis shows indices of the dominant role played by scientific actors vis-

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à-vis other social identities, thus providing insights for a clearer positioning of the text sample under analysis within the manifold modes of expression of scientific popularisation. Margaret Rasulo present study on TED talks, “TED culture and ideas worth spreading”, represents the first step in determining whether TED affords organisations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue and genuine knowledge sharing and whether it provides space-for-growth within its distinct culture. TED has stirred up everyone’s thirst for knowledge and it makes ideas freely available on the Internet taking the TED talks from the privileged and elitist scenario of the main conference venues to the online reality, and in doing so, they created an innovative platform that can propel ideas forward. According to the author, through the popularisation process TED has helped bring complex thoughts and theories to massive audiences of non-experts in a wide range of topics and fields. This paper convincingly suggests that ideas are also made to be challenged and tested before convincing people that they might be worth spreading. The third paper on popularisation by Stefania D’Avanzo focuses on speaker identity and speaker diversity in the TED talks corpus. The paper focuses on language differentiation deriving from different rhetorical choices made by speakers belonging to different professional categories. TED talks are delivered by experts – specialists in a great number of different fields – and are aimed at a non-specialist audience. The talks are made available online by a nonprofit organisation devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”. In the present study, the author’s attention is mainly devoted to ‘how’ speakers belonging to a number of different professional categories build up their own identity through the employment of specific rhetorical choices. Thus, 1,131 talks have been investigated, subdivided into eight professional categories depending on the speaker: academics, entrepreneurs, employees in companies and consultants, politicians, artists, literary writers and lay people (both VIPs and ordinary people). Particular importance is also given to the distinction between expert and lay, in order to understand to what extent rhetorical choices aimed at achieving proximity with the reader are influenced by the degree of expertise of the speakers themselves. In the last article of this section, Adriano Laudisio draws a comparison of two corpora with the aim of investigating the genre of legal drama. The first corpus includes the scripts of all the episodes of the first four series of the American legal drama The Good Wife, and is a subcorpus of a larger one, made up of the ten legal dramas collected to investigate the genre. The reference corpus is the Supreme Court Dialogue Corpus, which features the transcriptions of the Supreme Court. The aim of this paper is to investigate the genre of legal drama from a linguistic and

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contrastive point of view in a preliminary attempt to define it as a genre, as well as to find out whether legal dramas can ease the popularisation of specialized – legal – contents. Along with the investigation of the ‘legal drama’ genre, Laudisio’s study aims at discovering the language choices made by the fictional speakers of the legal drama The Good Wife and the differences between the specialised language used by experts of law and popularised legal language when an expert addresses a non-expert interlocutor. As power relationships and aspects related to belonging to a discourse community are involved, this research appeals to Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the relationships between speakers. We do hope this volume may further contribute to the analysis of linguistic and cultural diversity in different fields of investigation by bringing an array of multifaceted complexities to the difficult analysis of language and identity. This introduction has given us the opportunity to present the single papers, inevitably only briefly exploring the important issues arising from the contributions, then leaving other non less marginal points to be made by the authors’ own voices. May this volume be considered a modest step in the direction of diversity studies in any field or sub-field of linguistic research. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes to the scholars, and good friends, who read and commented on previous versions of this volume: Julia Bamford, Jocelyne Vincent and Mark Weir. It is impossible to determine their exact contribution to the volume, but the editors firmly believe that without their support, the book would not merely be different, it would be less interesting. The Editors

PROLOGUE JOCELYNE VINCENT

Languaging Diversity: what were we thinking of? Languaging diversity is an evocative, and rather busy title, not to mention a buzzy one, but what does it actually mean? What were we thinking of when we gave it? We were, indeed, struck, if not surprised, by the diversity of interpretations of the terms of our title and of the issues involved in the responses to our call for papers. Diversity, for a start, is one of those terms we do often use without realizing perhaps that we are using it with diverse meanings, that it is polysemous, that it itself displays diversity. Its diverse meanings intertwine to cover a conceptual field (held together by etymological, logical and metaphorical connections) co-articulated by synonyms and partial synonyms. Even without going to the dictionaries, thesauri and/or looking at its roots, or etymology, nor doing proper concordancing, a little reflection reveals its diverse (though related) meanings. We can see them reflected in its neighbours such as different, various, alternate, alternative, variant, other, distinct, multiple, and so on. It would be opportune, conceptually, at this point, to try to explore and unravel the meanings and connections, even if necessarily only informally in these remarks, so as to prime us, or simply remind us, of the diverse issues, rather than blur them (as I have just done deliberately). So, bear with me, if you will, while I try, a little more in detail than I did in our conference’s opening session. I felt it useful to do this, not just for a little intellectual satisfaction but also to try to glimpse a path through the trees and avoid tripping up in the undergrowth, in other words, of confusing the diverse issues.

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1. Three diverse meanings of diversity It seems to me that three diverse meanings can indeed be distinguished conceptually in the semantic field covered by uses of the term diversity, diverse and its derivatives and neighbours – cognate and otherwise – in English and in Italian, to take a Romance language conveniently to hand where most of the relevant terms share cognates, having come from Latin into both, via Medieval French into English.

1.1 Diversity/diverse as ‘difference/different’ I have just used diverse above with the first of the three diverse meanings: diverse/diversity with the sense of different in type from something else, dissimilar, unlike; in other words, it is a Quality notion, one of relative difference, when two (or more) items are not identical to each other; there is a non-isomorphism of category features; they are not the same in quality or in essence, as the OED puts it. Here, diversity/diverse is related to the notion of divergence and to being distinct or distinguished from something else. The di- prefix (cognate with Latin bi- and English tw- as in two), is common to these terms. Other terms that share and co-articulate this part of the woods are, for instance, Other/ness, hetero-, alter- as opposed to ego/nos, homo- and auto- and self- (e.g. as in heterosexual/ homosexual, to describe a sexual preference for a partner from different/same sexual category). Although informal English seems to be specializing away from this use of diverse/diversity to prefer difference to it, yet it is still very much alive in Italian, for example (where it is preferred, on the contrary, to differente: ‘lei è diversa da me’, is certainly the more normal or colloquial way of saying ‘she is different from me’, for example). This native intuition ‘data’ would certainly need to be backed up by concordances before being taken as fact. However, you don’t need me (or a concordancer) to tell you, moreover, that in some academic circles at least, alterity/alterità is the preferred specialized buzzword with this - or a similar - Quality meaning, as is the Other, without delving further into that thorny and intricate part of the woods. Diverse and diversity used to have a strongly negative meaning, as in perverse, deviant, wicked, alien, queer, but that is surely a thing of the past. Right?

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1.2 Diversity/diverse as ‘variety’ of types or categories A second meaning of diverse, diversity and especially diversify, captures, instead, a plural or Quantity concept, synonymous indeed with variety, and various (at least in one of their meanings), in other words, more than one – that is, to be more precise, more than one type or category is copresent (in fact, to be pragmatically sensitive to scalar values, more than two). It thus involves both Quantity and Quality, a plurality of qualitatively different category types. To diversify is to quantitatively distribute qualitative distinctions within a group or category. Prefixes with this meaning would be, for example, multi- and poly-, as opposed to mono-, but also again hetero- as opposed to homo-, at least in the heterogeneity/homogeneity pair, since they are used to describe internal qualities of sets or groups. A heterogeneous group or set or category is one whose members are dissimilar in some respects. We can take the opportunity at this point to remember to distinguish between inter- and intra-categorical diversity. Here we see intra-variation (heterogeneity of an entity, within an entity, with otherwise unifying/ categorical characteristics - e.g. a nation, a language with its various and different ‘varieties’), while inter-variation involves differences between different sets – that which qualifies them as different sets or groups or categories (or identities) or languages in the first place. To be clearer, in meaning 2 here, there is an intra-categorical variability of features within a set, rather than inter-categorical difference between two or more sets, as in meaning 1. At any rate, hetero- like diverse, seems to be able to cover both of these two meanings. Heterogeneous, we might also notice, however, can take on negative connotations in some collocations or contexts, e.g. in “It’s a very heterogeneous class of students”, while diversity would be, in this context, the positive side of heterogeneity, the optimistic view of possible confusion and disorder, its celebration. To trace the connection between meanings 1 and 2 we could simply say that if there exist non-identical objects/sets, then there necessarily exists a plurality (at least more than one), a diversity of sets. Needless to add here, perhaps, there are further complications and nuances to consider if we look at collocates of the various word class forms, such as of the adjectives diverse, various, different, or as abstract, mass or countable noun, diversity/ difference/ differences/variety/ varieties, variation or the verb forms, divert/ diversify/ defer, differ, vary, (we would note, among other things, also their asymmetry of distribution of transitive and intransitive uses) but we cannot explore these further here.

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1.3 Diversity as ‘numerical distinctiveness’ of tokens The third meaning, as given with earlier English diverse and still very much alive at least in Italian diverso, would be that of merely Quantitative plurality of tokens (i.e. instances of a type), as in a Kantian ‘numerical distinctiveness’, as found in sundry, several of the same type (and as before, more than two). This meaning is interestingly still found especially in the neighbourly ‘various’ (though not in varied or varying), in several and most certainly in Italian vari, as well as in diverso/i. Since this meaning is hardly if at all still present in English ‘diversity’ or ‘diverse’ it will thus concern us less here. The following examples for each of the three meanings might help to clarify or summarise: 1. ho amici diversi (da me)/I miei amici sono diversi/differenti (da me) (my friends are different from me – not the same type as me); 2. ho amici diversi tra loro / ho amici molto vari (my friends are very diverse/are different from each other/I’ve got friends of various types); 3. ho diversi amici /ho vari amici (I have several/ various friends).

2. Tracing and chasing meaning connections and shifts Investigating etymology is fun, and useful for seeing how metaphorical extensions chase each other and coalesce into new meanings; even more so is investigating usage, synchronically and diachronically, through concordances, as is necessary for accurate current and historical usage insights. For example, it would be useful, and fun, to trace how distinctive/distinction/distinguished/distinto became positive, as did, eventually, diversity, when different/diverse started out as negative (once meaning wicked, as in perverse, or indeed, deviant) retained to some degree in diversion. The common Latin/Romance root element of differ, diverse, deviant and divergence (and also of defer, just to remind us of the basis for Derrida’s punning distinction between différence and différance) bears their shared essential common core meaning of ‘moving /carrying/ turning aside/ moving on/ in another direction’’ as in deviating, diverting, dividing, differentiating, deferring. Or again, one could look to see how alternative/alternativo (as in John leads an alternative life-style/ Gianni è un alternativo) and distinguished/distinto (he’s a rather distinguished gentleman /è una persona molto distinta) – both sets starting out simply as meaning ‘different’ - have taken on specific new (positive) meanings, sometimes also slightly differently in different languages. Another side-

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thought flickers out to how‘diverting’ can also mean ‘fun, funny, entertaining’ as it still centrally does in It. divertente and Fr. divertissement. At any rate, for diversity (meaning 1, different, non-identical quality) to move to diversity 2 (variety, qualitative plurality), can be seen as a natural metaphorical and logical step, that hardly needs spelling out again. If there exist non-identical objects, then there exists at least a plurality (more than one) of them.

3. Identity and diversity/alterity two sides of the coin Can you have identity without alterity? Alterity without identity? Can you have meaning without difference? In structuralist terms, no, of course. Our focus here is nominally diversity (whether in meaning 1 or 2), but many presentations and papers speak of identity without necessarily even explicitly mentioning diversity, or difference or, even more, alterity. I have no trouble affirming that one of the reasons is because ‘diversity’ in this meaning is somewhat old-fashioned a term, but also because difference/diversity/alterity and identity are on either sides of the coin to each other. They implicate each other logically. My alterity (if it is different from yours) is not-your identity. Difference/alterity/otherness is relative to another entity, the paragon identity, to which it is compared. You define yourself, your identity, in counter-position to something else, or other. This is in the first meaning of diversity, as otherness, difference. Although the term diversity is little used in English now with this meaning, being supplanted by difference, or more technically with its baggage of specialist meanings by alterity, its flip side identity is certainly ubiquitous. I don’t know which precedes which logically (perhaps it is alterity which precedes identity as Deleuze would have it) but I would tend to say ‘difference’, otherness, comes into being simultaneously with what it is different or other from, the base-line paragon. X is different means, it logically entails, that x is different from y, z or whatever. X and y are both essential to the concept of otherness, and also of identity, if my identity needs to define itself in comparison to that of others. At any rate, you can’t have one without the other. Just as you can’t have meaning or value without difference, a simple structuralist tenet that as far as I can see has yet to be refuted. It is difference which allows us to conceptualize – to categorize – to understand our selves as well as any other category; categorization is based on difference, concepts cannot exist as absolutes in a vacuum but as relative to others. Even with categories seen as fuzzy sets

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of properties, with focal or prototypical members and grades of peripheral membership – should we be beguiled to think differently because of the fuzziness connotation – everything still holds relatively, perhaps even more so, both within and without. So, diversity is defined from both sides, it is reciprocal. I am diverse from you, you are diverse from me. At the risk of confusing things, we could say that it is a difference which ‘makes a difference’. In the buzzword and politically correct current climate (to which we adhere) indeed it makes all the difference (but that is playing with words, Bateson’s words). In this volume, and in our overall project, this is a basic tenet, however. Diversity is implicitly and explicitly celebrated and its ‘languaging’ of others with negative connotations is deplored, or rather, denounced, critiqued, deconstructed. This doesn’t mean that we think that all ‘othering’ is negative or unnatural, and, as should be obvious, othering is also an act of identity, the flip side of the creation of one’s own identity created together with and in contraposition to that of the other.

4. Whats, whos, hows, wheres and whys 4.1 Whats: Types of identities/categories Needless to say, otherness is also various, diverse. There are many types of otherness. It depends on what category of otherness (what categorical or definitional features or characteristics of identity) is being focussed on or used as definitional for the type or category, by anyone at any one time, in any one culture, be it to do with regional, class, age group, ethnicity, gender, professional characteristics. Indeed, anything on the so-called diastratic, diaphasic and diatopic or other dimensions of variation could be the ‘whats’ of the identity definition.

4.2 Who languages whom It is also important to consider ‘who’ is involved; who is the agent of the category’s defining features; and also who is the object of the act of definition or ascription of belongingness or not in the category, or of the various degrees of belongingness of the self and of others. Who decides for whom? Who languages whom? We can, or should, thus talk of Auto- or Self-languaging: where x languages x, or identifies x as diverse/different from x’s surrounding context, or from y, or z, and then of Hetero- or Other-languaging: where x

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languages y as different from x (or z) directly (in y’s face) or to z, for example, in the Press. Let’s not forget that one must consider not only a distinction between the agent and the affected objects but also with the recipients or addressees of the languaging. Talking of agents and objects we have needed to think of the action, the process, the ‘how’, so we turn now explicitly to the verb we have chosen to use to capture the how, languaging.

4.3 How: Languaging As one might have expected by now, this term too may have diverse meanings, despite its apparent novelty and creativity, perhaps because of its apparent novelty. To cut to the point straightaway, we intended by it simply to especially focus on the process of constructing through language, or expressing or performing through language, in this case, the otherness, the difference or the variation or the variety/ies and - to bring in the whos again - of constructing another’s or one’s own otherness/ identity. We were also, but not only, using it to refer to representing or reflecting perceived differences or attitudes to others as embodied by other agents in the language one has inherited. We see ‘languaging’ thus as “the making of meaning through language” in our case, of social meanings or categories, rather than as, for example, “mediating cognition”, a cognitive tool to clarify ideas, to “talk something through”, as simply using language (i.e. use as opposed to metalinguistic mention), or as in any of the other diverse meanings which each of the authors discussed by Merrill Swain (2006), for example, thought they had coined it to mean. We saw it thus simply as category or meaning construction, and category membership assignment, through language, for the language community, without, moreover, necessarily going as far as hypothesizing strong linguistic determinism, nor, even less, any static permanence or immobility of the categories so created. We also assume it is possible to glimpse, and deconstruct, others’ categories and their attitudes to their members, at any one time, and across time, through their use of language (their languaging), for example, through their choices of collocations, and of substantives, adjectives, verbs, variously loaded. This is too well known and well-studied by Critical Discourse Analysis to need further comment here.

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4.4 Where and when It is also important to remember to consider as significant the different wheres or loci of languaging. It merges with considering the whos and whoms, admittedly, and to some extent the when; it pertains to the relationships among those concerned (the x, y and z), and the affective loading possible. What is especially important would be the difference between private and public places or contexts, between mass and nonmass communication, whether or not and to what extent there is an audience, and what its extent is, beyond the direct object of the languaging and/or the addressee (e.g. at a dinner party, at a football match, in a newspaper article, on television, whether fiction or documentary, email, texts, facebook posts, tweets, etc). Indeed, the medium, whether oral, written, traditional or digital, one-to-one or social, synchronous or asynchronous may also be significant. Perhaps it is the audience design aspect, if I can call it that, however, which is of most significance here in the shaping of othering. As said above, For one thing, the object of languaging can be the self (x), or it can be another person different from x (not-x). Not-x can be the person or persons x is addressing (y), or another third party or parties (z) who may or may not be present (in co-presence if oral, as potential readers if written). In other words, x can be languaging x, y or z in public or in private, i.e. in the presence of other y’s and/or z’s. Furthermore, of course, y’s and z’s may belong or be attributed to the same or a different ‘what’ category group to x). Some of the combinations may be expressed as follows: X languages x (self-languaging) X languages y as same group as x (x languages yx) x languages y as different from x (x languages y-x) x languages z as same as x (to y) etc. We might also remember the enlightening metaphor of ‘emotive conjugation’ given by Bertrand Russell Where negative loading increases with distance from ego, the first person (I, we), as you go from the second person (you) to the third person (he/she/they), as in, for example: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed. Talking to others and calling them names to their face, or talking about others to an audience are quite different.

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4.5 Why Let’s not forget too that the function and purposes or genre of text may also be significant in how and whether others are languaged. Whether jokingly, or in an academic article for scientific purposes, as an insult or dysphemism, as a euphemism, in an attempt at ‘politically correct’ reference - to name just a few possible diverse modes - these are all revealing of ‘other’ categories, and often of the existence of a locus of taboo or, at least, of otherness.

5. Varieties and variation within language, identities, multiplicity and hybridity 5.1 Variety, Multiplicity Variety and variation are key words in sociolinguistics where the focus is, among other things, on different language varieties within a category (meaning 2), a language in this case, and the way any member of a category/set, or speaker of a language, displays variation in their behaviour in that language for different or various purposes in different contexts, for example, to assert, construct, their own or others’ different and various group identities, which are variously professional, generational, ethnic or cultural, glottic, social, gender-based or sexual, and so on. We all know that an individual person or group can have and use a variety of languages (as well as varieties) too. A single individual or a single nation, for example, can be diglossic, or have a multiple, qualitatively plural range, repertoire or diversity of languages. I want to also mention and even issue a caveat to remind us all, just in case, not to confuse multiple varieties, multilingualism or multiculturality with hybridity, another currently salient buzzword, which our group also engages with, with conviction, as a relevant and germane concern. In multilingualism there is a repertoire of two, or more than two types, languages, identities, cultures, side by side, between which one may or may not switch, sequentially, or consecutively, alternately, whenever appropriate. Hybridity is also intuitively related to diversity and its types but the concept and the relationship are perhaps more tricky to pin down.

5.2 Types of Hybridity- blend or collage? As far as its relationship with multiplicity/plurality is concerned it may be useful to put it this way: while multiplicity, as in multilingual,

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multicultural etc., could be said to concern or focus on external diversity, a collection, range or repertoire of different types or sets, hybridity, instead, could be seen to characterize or refer to internally diverse or varied sets. At any rate, hybrid/ity too may be referentially unstable or even polysemous in general use (though not in animal husbandry or biology whence it derives). On reflection we seem to use the term hybrid/ity too for different types of things and we use other terms to describe or label other realizations of the different phenomena. It might be useful to point to some of this terminological mix. As far as I see it, hybridity does have a common feature in that it can be said to focus on a mixing of differences, in contrast to the multi-polytype plurality concepts which we might see as involving a focus on the juxtaposition of differences. This internal mixing captured by hybridity, is of (at least) two types, however. The first kind of hybridity (hybridity proper, perhaps) might be said to be a simultaneous (and homogeneous) mix or fusion of characteristics originally from separate sets, producing a third new, distinct, different, entity, a hybrid one (which may or may not stabilize, for example, into a creole language). This new entity, moreover, may or may not even display ‘pure’ elements recognizable as such from its ‘parents’ (you can’t distinguish horse and donkey bits separately in a mule, blue or yellow bits in green, beer and lemonade parts in shandy). I think we should, in language studies anyway, be careful to distinguish it from that other use of hybrid, as in hybrid vehicle, where you can distinguish and separate the various diverse contributing characteristics (able to use electricity, gas or petrol at any one time). Differently from creolization (an example of hybridity ‘one’), code-mixing (which is really code-switching within an utterance, rather than at a higher level - between/among languages, registers, styles - or for different purposes or interlocutors) could be seen as exemplifying this second type of hybridity. The first type mentioned, results instead in a novel entity, like a creole, indeed. The second type of hybridity is the one that can therefore confuse the issues, since it overlaps in some way with multi- and diverse (indeed in Italian it is also a synonym of vario, and eterogeneo). Hybridity ‘two’ is an a or b thing (alternating, a union set where two (or more) separate things are present, as in a repertoire), while the first type, Hybridity ‘one’ is an a and b thing (one mingled together). But, lest we jump to the easy conclusion: it is not the intersection either, which would be composed only of what the contributing sets have in common. A hybrid set (let’s call

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it c) might, tentatively, be described as the result of a mapping relation with its two contributors a and b. Furthermore this relation is one of a type of possible ‘correspondence’ relations1; in other words, it is not easy to distinguish the specific elements of the original sets. You would need very sophisticated ‘reverse engineering’ to reconstruct the contributors. Analogies or metaphors from more concrete fields may help clarify more appropriately perhaps what I intend by hybridity ‘one’, where donating components are not easily distinguishable and where there is the creation of a new entity. Hydrogen and oxygen molecules can combine and through a chemical reaction create a new molecule, that of water, for example, which has different properties from either of its parents (it is liquid, it is polar, etc). From metallurgy, we know of new entities, alloys (e.g. bronze) produced by the combination of different metals (copper, zinc) whose new properties are different from either parent again. A barman will have a range of brand blended whiskies (as well as single malts), whose components are not distinguishable to the general public; he will create cocktails, perhaps with a blend of secret ingredients; a coffee house will prepare and patent its own special and novel blend. These blends and cocktails are, arguably, not just the sum of their components but new entities. These can be said to be homogeneous mixtures or blends (except for some cocktails not involving all water soluble ingredients). On the other hand, technically at least, the mayonnaise in the canapés at the cocktail party is an emulsion, a non-homogeneous hybrid mixture, of oil, egg and vinegar or lemon juice, whose separate components though well amalgamated for a while will nevertheless still be mainly distinguishable (though in minute droplets; the mixture will separate out again (at least into oil and vinegar) if left to stand, for example in a warm room. Chefs’ sauces are mainly also emulsions, amalgamated ingredients of non-homogeneous ingredients (e.g. flour, cream, meat juices, vegetables, herbs, etc.) as well as homogeneous blends. Certainly neither blends nor sauces, however ‘rich’ or creative, would ever be called ‘hybrids’, but that is, surely, essentially what they are: mixtures of separate ingredients simultaneously forming a new amalgamated entity (sub-types of hybridity type ‘one’)2. Though technically their separate ingredients can be distinguished by experts, (the chemical engineer, the whiskey expert, the geneticist, the chef or gourmet) there is no felt distinction between the two types of blend, the homogenous and the heterogeneous (at the micro-level). Note that we tend to use hybrid only technically in the linguistic and in the biological fields. Otherwise blend or mixture or fusion or alloy serve to indicate this. An overlap in terminology does occur in derivational

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morphology, when lexicologists speak of portmanteau terms or blends (e.g. netiquette), and speak of hybrid etymology (e.g. in polyfunctional Grk + Latin roots). And this is where some confusion can creep in. The last, ‘hybrid’ example is also, rather than a blend, actually what is called in lexical morphology a compound. The two subtypes of hybridity ‘one’ need to be distinguished, indeed, from hybridity ‘two’, where alternation of separately distinguishable components or modules is involved, and which for simplicity’s sake we could also liken to compounding, and even more clearly appeal to the collage, montage or assemblaggio type of combination of diverse elements, and even perhaps to modularity. It may boil down to a question of scale and whether separate donor units are distinguishable. There seems to be a gradual passage from one to the other? Or is it not also qualitative? It is difficult for the non-expert to speculate on what type of hybridity is represented, for example, by so called Mediterranean, World or Ethnic fusion3, or World fusion jazz4 or to be found in folk rock, or Neapolitan blues, Algerian Rai, or East End Bangla, etc. As Lev Manovich reminds us, we live in a ‘remix culture’. Today, many cultural and life-style arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups (Manovich 2006: 368).

These are all terms capturing different types of hybridity and mixing, their differences which I have attempted with difficulty to at least glimpse. What, indeed, is happening in “remix”, or in software mash-ups where separate elements are identifiable - that may be part of the fun or purpose, indeed - but which do fuse in some parts and anyway most certainly involve the creation of new entities, whatever their inner micro-structure (blend or collage)? In his cultural historical discussion of remixing and the other terms and practices (in addition to those mentioned above, also sampling, quoting, montage) inherited from various artistic arenas, Manovich makes a distinction, partly relevant here, between types of mix at least in electronic music: In my view, these terms that come to us from literary and visual modernism of the earlier twentieth century […] do not always adequately describe new electronic music. […] Firstly, musical samples are often arranged in loops. Secondly, the nature of sound allows musicians to mix pre-existent sounds in a variety of ways, from clearly differentiating and

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contrasting individual samples (thus following the traditional modernist aesthetics of montage/collage), to mixing them into an organic and coherent whole. To use the terms of Roland Barthes, we can say that of modernist collage always involved a ‘clash’ of elements, electronic and software collage also allows for ‘blend’ […] (Manovich 2006: 371-372).

The distinctions between the blending, fusing, mingling and collage (if not clashing) types of mix/hybridity, may even fade into each other to some degree, but at some point there is a qualitative difference between blend and collage on the one hand, and then between both of these and repertoire to-hand (e.g. repertoire or multi-lingualism or multiculturalism, plurality, i.e. the possibility of alternating between elements) on the other. All three categories are different ways or types of possessing diversity: internal or structural diversity vs external or functional diversity. Incidentally, and to briefly contemplate etymologies again, it’s no accident that alternate and alter- have the same root (Latin for other, different), while that of mingle is cognate with mongrel (mixed). Not incidentally, and to anticipate issues for my next section, we might remember that of course the negative loading of terms like mongrel, mulato5, métisse, mixed-blood, half-caste a few of the terms for mixed race around the world, seem to overwhelmingly have very heavy negative loading (even criolo by association when it originally merely meant native born and raised). Hybridity, the new old word for this miscegenation, is only now becoming a good thing. In Latin, hybrƱda was originally specifically (see Pliny and Isodorus cited in Warren 1884: 501-502) a cross between a tame sow and a wild boar, and later extended to mean ‘mongrel’ (‘bastardo’ (sic) in Italian), generically. It may have been cognate with Greek (hubris/hybris) meaning something like an outrage, a presumption offending the gods (which would be significant, but this is disputed. At any rate, to speculate further, hybridity (of both types), and perhaps also individual (rather than societal) multilingualism, multiculturalism and multiple identities, could perhaps credibly be seen as denying alterity, or otherness (in that specialised meaning of separateness and incommensurability), if not diversity, by making it one’s own, by incorporating it into one’s new hybrid self or even one’s repertoire/range/ diversity of elements, albeit originally ‘other’. I say this with more conviction only for hybridity admittedly. The espousing of multiculturalism and its joys, could best be seen perhaps, rather than as denying alterity, instead, as welcoming it, as advocating it, as rejoicing in diversity6.

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In any case, to return to less speculative ground to end this section, rather than being able to identify or not separate elements in the mix, i.e. whether it’s homogeneous or heterogeneous, the important difference between multiplicity and hybridity might more simply be the externalouter / internal-inner focus.

6. Loading Diversity, as we all know, is today’s positively loaded, politically correct cultural buzz word, rejoiced in and celebrated in at least two of its various senses. There is probably no need to remind us, but I will, anyway. Difference and alterity rather than being seen as, at best, ‘exotic’, ‘odd’, or worse, ‘queer’ or ‘alien’, and at worst, as perverse, frightening and threatening thus to be avoided or suppressed, and more often than not as basically ‘inferior’, are now (to be) seen as positive, as ‘good’, and their celebration as right and fair, humane, empathetic. Diversity, difference, is now also seen as useful, in that thanks to it one can entertain other horizons or worlds, other possible life and mind-styles. This can go further than tolerance, and even than solidarity. It goes as far as rejoicing in difference, and even perhaps as making the other into one’s own, as becoming the other, or perhaps, as no longer noticing difference. At any rate, intra-personal or intra-societal diversity - having more than one identity- can be useful. Plurality, diversity, multiplicity, nonhomogeneity, that is, possessing a variety of, a mixed repertoire of skills, approaches, points of view, competences, knowledge bases in a society, a company, an individual is now considered desirable. Successful intercultural interaction, collaboration, is considered a given for the benefit of mutual seeding and enrichment for novel, creative and more successful outcomes. Being able to assume or having more than one identity is adaptive and, as sociolinguists have always known, normal, in that we do it all the time, at least on different levels, within our so-called single languages, when we assume our diverse range of professional, personal, social identities. This is the essence of adaptability, of flexibility, being able to do and be different things according to needs, to the context. Companies now go out of their way to diversify and to promote diversity, to engage indeed in ‘diversity training’7. Preserving bio-diversity is a byword these days, along the same lines as - since Joshua Fishman8 at least we (ethno-pragma-socio-) linguists have always believed that humanity must preserve and make the most of the treasure house of different survival strategies held in different and diverse cultures and world-views.

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Diversity is now up there as a positively loaded term/concept with flexibility, adaptability. And, being ‘constant’ is no longer best. ‘Inconstant’ still sounds negative but surely it is just the uptight way of defining flexible, adaptable, something you can only do if you have a repertoire of diverse traits and skills, if you are or have ‘more than one’, if you have multiple skills. Incidentally, that duplicity and ambiguity (unlike multiplicity or flexibility or diversity) should retain negative meanings and an aura of suspicion and of threat in the encounter, is significant. They are perhaps referring to the entertainment of two incompatible or incommensurable identities or worlds (they can’t both be true at the same time, one is a lie, and they are therefore deceptive). The entertainment of mutually compatible, non-exclusive identities would be easily acknowledged and accepted as positive. One can simultaneously and inter-compatibly have a gender identity, a professional one, even a cultural multiplicity (a diversity of type two). What still provokes suspicion (in some mono-cultural individuals) is the co-existence of different, apparently mutually exclusive categories (how can you be both English and Italian, or Scots and English, say? - plurality of type one). The possibilities again depend on what you mean. Both - but simultaneously or consecutively? And that they should be of the same category or categorical level – e.g. you can’t be both young and old, a homosexual and a heterosexual (though you can be bi-sexual), black and white? It depends on how you define your labels and/or your category. It depends also on what type of set logic you are envisaging. Classical formal logic or fuzzy set logic? And this brings us back to hybridity again. Just to pick up again on my tentative distinction. The bi-/multi-cultural/-lingual individual can alternate between/among different cultural identities and languages. While the culturally hybrid individual is a new mixture, a fusion, with perhaps just this one cultural identity (historically new, albeit also often doublebarrelled at least for a while, like Afro-American, italo-inglese, but see Trinidadian where the result has now coalesced, at least lexically). At any rate, hybridity, as recalled earlier, also raises suspicion traditionally, witness the practically universal negative loading of the terms (at some point) referring to it (mongrel, mixed-blood, half-caste, half-breed, etc.), as if being a mix, logically of different/various things, were naturally suspect or inferior9. Untrustworthiness is often associated with miscegenation, indeed, especially of the racial mix. In SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs’ Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects collection of essays (2013) also discussing this, it is also worth noting en passant the use of multiracial in the title to mean mixing i.e. as synonymous with

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hybrid (with hybrid ‘one’, hybrid ‘proper’). Perhaps we cannot but have hybridity proper when mixing involves biology or genetic traits, but surely we must distinguish (as I attempted in the section above) the two types of outcome (of inter-‘cultural’ contact) - blending/fusion/mixing as opposed to plurality - if one is thinking of behavioural patterns, or cultures/languages, i.e. in linguistic terms, creolization vs. multi-lingualism. But back to loading again. We have, furthermore, ‘languaged’ our suspicion especially of the being of two things at the same time not only in such terms as duplicity, ambiguity, but also double-agent, a spy with divided loyalties, a double-personality means that the two are not reconcilable, double-talk or double-speak means you’re not talking straight, truthfully. Anyone who can be different things at the same time, must be hypocritical, two-faced, a trickster, like Janus, and Iago: I am not what I am (Vincent 2004: 247-288). Yes, just what is it with ‘double-’ (and with half-, for that matter)? This would be interesting to go into further, but some other time, perhaps. Certainly, negative loading of all types of diversity, of any combination of differences, whether multi- (or double-) or mixed or mingled, i.e. hybrid, does seem to bedevil us. There is one further distinction I wish to remind us of before closing. Beneath the calls for diversity training, for multicultural, intercultural, cross-cultural awareness and education, there is often an implicit loading of asymmetry. As if the different cultures involved were not on the same level. Sometimes this is explicitly acknowledged and addressed, as when ‘inclusion’, ‘equal opportunities’ for ‘minorities’ is invoked. We must stay alert also when it is not explicit, in popular usage or even in our own, the different = inferior, not just different = bad/suspect/untrustworthy equation, has been a constant companion since the dawn of time and may well be lurking beneath the surface as well as loaded onto it; but this is naturally what critical discourse analysis is all about, so there was perhaps little need to remind us here of this. Whether or not my notes on the pitfalls of terminological confusion and my attempted outline of categorical distinctions are convincing, I trust that there will be agreement at least that our methodological attention to multiple, hybrid, peripheral/focal or prototypical belongingness must stay alert, as should our vigilance concerning the terminology used, not only by the agents of languaging diversity, the subjects of our analyses, but also by our own selves.

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7. By way of conclusion By choosing to speak of ‘languaging’ diversity, and not just of difference, otherness, varieties, multiplicity, hybridity or alterity, we intended the range of meanings in the entire field, as I have attempted to describe. We wanted it all. We neither wished to limit ourselves by using such specific and even more buzzy words with increasingly specialized connotations, as Alterity or the Other, but to also allow a wide-angled and eclectic range of perspectives and issues. So we opted, a little more demurely, for the multifaceted term diversity also to give ourselves and our contributors space at the conference, and in this volume, for the full range of connected issues. Since they were, we felt, all legitimate and also inevitably entwined, in the end we could not distinguish our sections so neatly along these lines, neither for our conference nor for this particular issue, the editors have come to the best solution to differentiate their sections, that of focusing mostly on the whats of identity/diversity/otherness and grouping them accordingly. It will be obvious that we ourselves value diversity in all its facets (the value of different and multiple horizons and world views, the naturalness of growth of new hybrid ‘worlds’ through contact – not surprisingly, with a few hybrids and/or multi-culturals among us –, and that we also realise the dangers and pervasiveness of negative languaging or othering, as is clear from many of the critical analyses describing and deconstructing othering practices. To present these studies is to help towards the necessary education for valuing and promoting diversity, whether a mix or a plurality, to unveil and denounce negative practices and to participate in the task of creating at least some empathetic understanding of others, thereby reducing fear and distrust of different others, working for fairness, for equality within diversity, without homogeny, and then for, eventually, allowing crossseeding or co-operation for each other’s benefit. We should never forget that we are all ‘the other’ to someone else. My role and intention here, however, have been more modest. While I have also taken the liberty to speculate freely on the nature of some concepts, it has been, as hinted above, merely with the aim of keeping us vigilant and aware of the complexity and density of the connections between different issues behind apparently clear or univocal terms and to help us remember to not take our own categories for granted.

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References Bennett, Milton J. “A developmental approach to training intercultural sensitivity.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10(2) (1986): 179-196. Byrnes, Heidi (ed.). Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Fishman, Joshua. “Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset.” Language in Society, 11(1) (1982): 114. Kwan, SanSan and Kenneth Speirs (eds). Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects. Austin: University of Texas, 2013. Manovich, Lev. “What comes after Remix?” Anglistica New Series (special issue English and Technology, edited by Jocelyne Vincent), 10(1-2) (2006) http://anglistica.unior.it/node/89/cover. Swain, Michael. “Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency.” In Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, edited by Heidi Byrnes, 95108. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Vincent Marrelli, Jocelyne. Words in the Way of Truth: truthfulness, deception lying across cultures and disciplines. Naples: E.S.I., 2004.

Notes 1 I cannot say what type of correspondence relation, however, would be best to capture fusion or mingling where there is a qualitative change, not just a quantity one of summation, for example. A new molecule is created not just a compound. 2 We tend to speak of hybridity for food, if at all, only when it involves some sort of fusion of ethnically or culturally diverse cuisines, not just when ‘ordinary’ ingredients are mixed. 3 You often hear talk in the Italian media of contaminazioni (TG3 Regione Campania, concerning Tullio De Piscopo’s music at the Ischia jazz festival this August 2014, for example) a negative word for mixing appropriated positively, however, by Italian world fusion music fans. 4 Eastern Mediterranean World Fusion Music, by the band Animus, where the separate donors of identity to the mix are listed, but “the result is an organic and coherent whole”. 5 Not incidentally derived figuratively, of course, from ‘mulo’ (the archetypal hybrid animal mentioned earlier). 6 See also Bennett’s developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (in steps from denial to defence to minimization to acceptance to adaptation to integration) (1986).

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See, for example, the Candia Elliott Diversity Training Associates’ Multicultural Toolkit (at http://www.awesomelibrary.org/multiculturaltoolkit.html, or, also indeed, www.dtui.com. 8 To mention only one of my favourite takes on this: Fishman 1982. 9 As if any ‘pure’ entity existed anywhere anyway – let alone the well-known evolutionary superiority of hybrids and their progeny because of their wider gene pool and therefore better adaptability – but we have come to realize this only very recently in human history.

IN THE NEWS

A MD-CADS ANALYSIS OF ‘DIVERSITY’ IN BRITISH NEWSPAPERS CESARE ZANCA

The suggestive idea of languaging diversity inevitably triggers different interpretations and is likely to suggest a range of diverse approaches. This paper uses the MD-CADS methodology defined by the SiBol group and used by Partington and others (Partington 2010: 88-105) to study linguistic corpora and how they can be exploited to investigate our choice of words, on the assumption that these choices may reveal something about our discourses, society, and culture: to summarise and by way of definition, MD-CADS is the study of changes in linguistic habits or in social, political and cultural perspectives over a brief period of contemporary time, as illustrated in a particular discourse type or set of discourse types (Partington 2010: 104).

The next pages will mainly (but not only) focus on the analysis of the SiBol-Port corpus, a diachronic corpus of British newspapers collected in different years of our recent history 1 and explore both quantitative and qualitative variations in the use of words and expressions that can be associated with, and hopefully be revealing of, the way we 'language' diversity.

1. Diversity If languaging diversity may take several shapes, the same applies to the word diversity itself. A first look at the definition of diversity in the Oxford English Dictionary2 results in the following (shortened) entry: diversity, n. Forms: Also ME–15 diversite/e, ME dyverste. Etymology: Old French diverseté, diversité (12th cent. in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter) difference, oddness, wickedness, perversity Latin dƯversitƗtem contrariety, disagreement, difference, dƯversus diverse adj.

Cesare Zanca

3

1. a. The condition or quality of being diverse, different, or varied; difference, unlikeness. b. with a and pl. An instance of this condition or quality; a point of unlikeness; a difference, distinction; a different kind, a variety. c. Divers manners or sorts: a variety. Obs. 2. Law (See quot. 1848.) 3. Contrariety to what is agreeable, good, or right; perversity, evil, mischief. Obs.

where the main meaning is 'varied' or ‘different in kind’ while the third entry – though labelled as obs for obsolete – signals a possible very negative interpretation and evaluation of the word. If we search one of the latest, and corpus based, quality dictionaries, The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, we get the following definition: diversity noun 1. a range of people or things that are very different from each other Synonym – Variety x the biological diversity of the rainforests x great/wide/rich diversity of opinion 2. the quality or fact of including a range of many people or things x There is a need for greater diversity and choice in education

Where the ‘obsolete’ negative evaluation is completely absent and the idea of ‘varied’ and ‘different in kind’ is largely associated with positive contexts of use: a ‘rich diversity of opinion’, ‘biological diversity’, ‘inclusion of a range of many people or things’. The word inclusion, here, offers a new and different shade to the concept of diversity which we will find to be relevant to much of our discussion3. The possibility of a negative evaluation associated with the word reappears in the OALD section dedicated to its usage which lists a number of contextual collocations of diversity grouped under three different headings. These examples underline the sociocultural relevance of our key word, and also some of the discourses we tend to associate to it or, as Hoey (2005)4 would say, we are primed to expect when we find it or use it5: Prejudice and racism • experience/encounter racism/discrimination/prejudice/anti-semitism • face/suffer persecution/discrimination • fear/escape from/flee racial/political/religious persecution

A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers

4 • • •

constitute/be a form of racial/race discrimination reflect/reveal/show/have a racial/cultural bias be biased/be prejudiced against (especially British English) black people/(both especially North American English) people of color/African Americans/Asians/Africans/Indians, etc. • discriminate against minority groups/minorities • perpetuate/conform to/fit/defy a common/popular/traditional/negative stereotype • overcome/be blinded by deep-seated/racial/(especially North American English) race prejudice • entrench/perpetuate racist attitudes • hurl/shout (especially British English) racist abuse; (especially North American English) a racist/racial/ethnic slur • challenge/confront racism/discrimination/prejudice • combat/fight (against)/tackle latant/overt/covert/subtle/institutional/ systemic racism Race, Society • damage/improve (especially British English) race relations • practise/(especially US) practice (racial/religious) tolerance/segregation • bridge/break down/transcend cultural/racial barriers • encourage/promote social integration • outlaw/end discrimination/slavery/segregation • promote/embrace/celebrate cultural diversity • conform to/challenge/violate (accepted/established/prevailing/dominant) social/cultural norms • live in a multicultural society • attack/criticize multiculturalism • fight for/struggle for/promote racial equality • perpetuate/reinforce economic and social inequality • introduce/be for/be against (British English) positive discrimination (especially North American English) affirmative action • support/be active in/play a leading role in the civil rights movement Immigration • control/restrict/limit/encourage immigration • attract/draw a wave of immigrants • assist/welcome refugees • house/shelter refugees and asylum seekers • smuggle illegal immigrants into the UK • deport/repatriate illegal immigrants/failed asylum seekers • assimilate/integrate new immigrants • employ/hire migrant workers • exploit/rely on (cheap/illegal) immigrant labour/(especially US) labor • apply for/gain/obtain/be granted/be denied (full) citizenship • have/hold dual citizenship



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Each of the three group headings: prejudice and racism, race/society and immigration, encapsulates features of a discourse about cultural, religious, national and racial diversity which entails some degree of conflict – a conflict, we might generalize, about diversity but also about inclusion6. This large and faceted sociocultural use of diversity is even more apparent if compared to the word suggested as a near synonym in the call for papers for this conference: alterity. In the OED 7 it produces the following shortened result: alterity, n. The fact or state of being other or different; diversity, difference, otherness; an instance of this. Common after the mid 20th cent., esp. in critical and cultural theory.

Again, expressing the idea of ‘different in kind’ but this time also stressing the idea of ‘otherness’, ‘not included’. The OALD result is: Sorry, no search result for alterity. Did you mean: x austerity x altering x alacrity x ….

Not only is alterity not associated to the same sociocultural patterns as diversity, but it appears to be one of a number of English words that are not frequent or relevant enough to be considered for a learner’s dictionary. But, as Scott (2008) writes in one of his messages to the users of his software, “much can be inferred from what is absent”: in this case, probably, the inclusive discursive dimension of diversity has made it much more popular than the exclusive dimension of alterity. A much less orthodox, limited, but sometimes effective, way of eliciting contexts of use and discourses attached to words or expressions is through google images 8 . It is quick, straightforward and of almost no systematic significance, but sometimes it can be intriguing and I like to use it with my students. The word alterity is, as almost anything, present in Google and the search in Google images results in Figure 1 (see colour centerfold). Confirming, in my opinion, an idea of ‘different in kind’ but also ‘separated from’ and even ‘segregated’. The presence and quality of several book covers and dated illustrations could signal an academic use of the word. The fact that the word usage is very sporadic is confirmed by the

6

A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers

more academic fact that it occurs only 15 times in the online BYU version of the British National Corpus9 and just twice in the whole SiBol-Port10 corpus, a frequency that doesn’t allow for any further substantial discussion about connected discourses11. Much more suggestive is the picture we get searching for diversity – see Figure 2 (colour centerfold). The sense of social conflict and the possible negative connotations we found in the dictionaries are completely absent from these images. Here, the ‘different in kind’ meaning is largely coloured by the positive connotation of ‘rich variety’ and ‘inclusion’. The word diversity is visually associated with people and to the fact that the aggregation of human diversities is clearly positive. Is this just one of the ways of languaging diversity? Or is it the predominant way in our times? Is it just coincidental and a product of Google algorithms? Maybe our corpus can provide us with us some more detailed and reliable evidence.

2. Diverse diversities in the SiBol-Port corpus In order to find information about different ways of languaging diversity I searched the three years of newspaper articles and the more than 500 million words included in the SiBol-Port corpus using the concordancing and indexing software Wordsmith 5.0 and Xaira12. The results, figures and tables included in this article are just a selection of the many investigations conducted on the basis of the buzz words listed in the conference call for papers but also of intuition and curiosity induced by reading the first wordlists and concordances obtained in the process. The word diversity appears 5,452 times in the SiBol-Port corpus with the following distribution and frequency: 980 2649 1823

in SiBol93 in SiBol05 in Port10

7732nd word 5281st word 6326th word

The overall frequency is in line with the normalized frequency of the BNC (0,001389% against 0,001383%) but a significant increase in use is evident in the 2005 corpus while in 1993 we obtained fewer instances. These figures alone are not particularly interesting: in order to find out more about the discourses associated to diversity we need to compare the elements that might signal contextual and sociocultural differences in the three corpora.



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I decided to adopt the concordance-keywords procedure described by Taylor (2010: 226-227). This method allows for the comparison of restricted sections of the corpora, hopefully more closely related to the searched linguistic item and, crucial to this work, encompassing its discoursal context through the generation of keyness lists – lists of words that are significantly more frequently used in one (target) corpus as compared to another (reference) corpus. A further important advantage when dealing with large corpora is that the data we obtain is much more manageable. The calculation of concordance-keywords is particularly relevant when dealing with very large corpora since it allows us to make the amount of data for analysis more manageable and to target the comparison more closely by focussing on the key topics; it also assists in providing an overview of the semantic fields or aboutness (Scott 1999) connected with each sub-corpus (Taylor 2010: 227).

Following Taylor’s procedure, I used WordSmith Tools to obtain the concordances of diversity and diversities in each of the three corpora SiBol 93, 05 and Port10. A span of 600 characters of co-text was specified and these extended concordances were saved in text format making up three separate new ‘concordance-corpora’. I then used the WordSmith Wordlist tool to compile frequency lists of the words contained in each concordance-corpus. Finally, I used the WordSmith Keyword tool to contrasts any two wordlists and get a list of those significantly more frequent (or “key”) in the first as compared to the second: I obtained 6 Keyword lists in all: 1. Keyness 93_05 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 93 vs 05); 2. Keyness 93_10 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 93 vs 10); 3. Keyness 05_93 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 05 vs 93); 4. Keyness 05_10 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 05 vs 10); 5. Keyness 10_93 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 10 vs 93); 6. Keyness 10_05 (Diversity concordance corpus wordlist 10 vs 05).

Where the first date in each pair is the publication year of the target corpus, the second of the comparison corpus. For the purpose of this paper, the following table lists the first 40 results of the 93_05, 93_10, 05_93 and 10_93 comparisons.





A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers

8 Keyness 93_05



Keyness 93_10

Keyness 05_93

Keyness 10_93

clinton

pounds

police

equality

curriculum

clinton

www

she

ec

of

equality

services

which

the

blair

officers

patten

choice

you

minority

clinton's

cultural

employers

it's

music

mr

minority

officer

dinosaurs

patten

it's

group

orchestras

ec

services

i

itv

curriculum

people

final

bio

maastricht

ethnic

lgbt

television

his

workplace

police

maastricht

bio

officers

judges

church

which

i

judiciary

maintained

clinton's

nhs

judicial

his

privatisation

recruitment

board

profile

radio

discrimination

boardroom

privatisation

present

communities

com

dance

television

public

targets

system

treaty

says

said

dr

education

minorities

discrimination

patten's

church

race

nhs

agreement

he

disability

jac

would

independent

diverse

cameron

hurd

dinosaurs

service

tim

feminism

ecological

com

people

arkansas

constitutional

sector

you

gatt

breeds

workforce

talent

sokoke

broadcasting

equal

mps

sarajevo

japanese

eu

women

Cesare Zanca

9

nature

commercial

leadership

www

earth

interest

staff

obama

mr

grant

org

executive

preserve

rain

organisations

ethnic

by

lotus

letters

employers

biological

franchise

training

ftse

reno

justify

she

offshore

ira

nationalist

targets

don't

moth

patten's

multiculturalism

funds

unitary

washington

do

black

Table 1. Diversity concordance keyness

In her article, Taylor (2010: 227) also warns against the risks of overgeneralizations deriving from the interpretation of concordancekeywords: On the other hand, we should be wary of over-interpreting findings from concordance-keywords, because some items will be the result of changes throughout the two original corpora, not necessarily the newly created corpora of concordance lines; for instance, among the concordancekeywords for scien* in SiBol 93 there are various address forms, such as Mr and Dr, which are the result of changes in the use of honorifics throughout the newspapers (they tend to be used much less frequently in the more recent data) and are not connected with the specific context of reporting science. Therefore, the concordance-keywords need to be analysed in combination with the original keywords, and with reference to the wider co-text.

The changes in the use of honorifics (Mr and Dr) emerges also in our data 13 , but other concordance-keywords seem to reveal significant differences in associated discourses which are likely to be connected with the ‘aboutness’ (Scott 1999) of diversity in different years. Several of these words can be grouped in distinct, though subjective, semantic sets or, as Duguid (2010: 114) says, “well-trodden paths”: In terms of lexical choice, the high frequency lexical items used over a wide variety of texts, such as in a corpus of one entire year of newspaper output, represent well-worn paths as opposed to the new. In examining the

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A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers keywords lists we can see how, over time, some little-frequented paths have become well-trodden while the grass has grown over others.

3. The ‘aboutness’ of diversity: abstract and bureaucratic vs. concrete and social inclusion For example, the ‘93 keywords POUNDS, AGREEMENT, COMMERCIAL, CONSTITUTIONAL, EDUCATION, CURRICULUM, INSTITUTIONS, PRIVATISATION, TREATY, CHOICE can be associated to an institutionalized, bureaucratic and ‘abstract’ use of the word while the ‘05 and ‘10 keywords EMPLOYERS, WORKERS, WORKFORCE, SERVICES, SKILLS, ORG, PUBLIC, MINORITY/IES, MULTICULTURALISM. EQUAL, DISCRIMINATION, COMMUNITIES, PEOPLE, in my view, indicate social issues involving concrete and everyday life concerns. The keywords indicating to the actors on the scene also differ in a significant way: in 1993 we mainly find institutions, politicians from other countries and references to television and music: CLINTON, PATTEN, ORCHESTRAS, CHURCH, INSTITUTIONS, MAASTRICHT, STATIONS, TELEVISION etc. while in 2005 and 2010 we get mainly actors involved in UK everyday social and economic life, with a relevant role in the process of integrating diversities: POLICE, OFFICERS, EMPLOYERS, SERVICES, COMMUNITIES, NHS, LGBT, MINORITY, JUDGES, BOARD, MANAGER, ADVISER, WORKERS, TEAM, STAFF. Following the MD-CADS methodology mentioned above, I also carried out a qualitative reading of the concordances which confirmed the considerations above: in 1993, for example, the potentially societal background to the issue of educational diversity is maintained on an institutional level. The discussion in the news is mainly on the new national curriculum introduced by the Education Secretary John Patton: not sociocultural or ethnic diversity then, but diversity of subjects in the curriculum. Here are some concordance lines of EDUCATION as a collocate of DIVERSITY in 1993: – –

to allow parental choice and diversity in education. The decision by Baroness Blatch, the education a government committed to choice and diversity in education will have created an instrument of dread uniformity

On the other hand, in the 2005 and 2010 concordance-corpora even the references to more institutional bodies like the police, officers, judges or



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managers are almost exclusively associated to ongoing debates about sociocultural diversity: – – – –

their experience in working with senior policing colleagues, the diversity of police authorities in enabling independent members of the community to have a it in March 2006. He said: “I had just given several diversity talks to Kent police officers and had spoken about how some of them were dealing with black Law Society. The JAC said it was concerned with the underrepresentation of LGBT judges, but that its diversity strategy focused on encouraging solicitors, turning out in “beach wear or very short skirts in the office”. It adds that “managers should take into account diversity when challenging a person's dress”.

4. There vs. here and biological, historical and scientific diversity A second clear contrast in our keyness lists is between the presence of so many words referring to foreign countries in 1993 (CLINTON, IRELAND, SPANISH, SOKOKE, RENO, ARKANSAS etc.) and the UK national elements prevailing in 2005 and 2010 (LONDON, BLAIR, CAMERON, MPS, NHS etc.). A third one is the fact that all the 1993 references to a scientific and historical diversity discourse (BIO, BIOLOGICAL, HISTORICAL, ECOLOGICAL, ANCIENT) are totally absent from the 2005 and 2010 keyness lists. It is worth underlying that, of course, the different semantic areas associated with diversity do not disappear from our corpora, but are more or less used, more or less ‘key’ in the normalized comparison with the other years. BIOLOGICAL, for example, is mentioned in a similar way in 1993 (53 normalized 14 instances) and 2010 (75) but is much less frequent in 2005. In 1993 we also find a keyness for the word BIO, which is almost absent in 2005 and 2010. In other instances the context reveals that the presence in the keyness list is linked to specific events: CHOICE, for example, is listed in the first set and not in the last, because it refers to a white paper published by the British Government called ‘Choice and Diversity’. Similarly, CLINTON is often mentioned in relation to a political project called 'unity in diversity' which might have been one of the seminal uses of the word diversity that produced similar discourses in Britain in the following years. Other examples of contextual information we can infer by reading our

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A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers

concordance lines are the fact that the reference to SPAIN refers mainly to food, ingredients and plants while DINOSAURS metaphorically refers to the semantic set of music (‘orchestral dinosaurs’).

5. Inclusion: equality and diversity The most significant keyword emerging in the 2005 and 2010 vs. 1993 comparison is probably EQUALITY (3rd and 1st respectively) which makes it a good candidate for a closer investigation in context. The word appears only 8 times in the 1993 corpus, and it only collocates with the lexical word OPPORTUNITY which appears 3 times, always in the string: ‘equality of opportunity’. – – – – – – – –

all into eight carefully balanced forms. Here, equality of opportunity does not mean denying a national lobbying organisation working for legal equality and social justice for lesbians and gay brilliantly for me as an expert witness during my equality tribunal and I was impressed then with initiated by those judgments and the principle of equality of treat the success rates in 15 years. aim of our social strategy should be to promote equality and diversity. For instance, the crisis as raised the issue with the Commission for Racial Equality, which now acknowledges the Irish as a in English, for common values of tolerance, equality of opportunity, justice and law, so we of his support came, diversity is of a piece with equality of opportunity, affirmative action, non-

In the 2005 corpus we find 187 occurrences, the first 25 lexical collocates are: DIVERSITY, RACIAL, COMMISSION, RACE, OPPORTUNITY, HEAD, PROMOTE, COUNCIL, GENDER, ISSUES, VALUES, COMMITTEE, TOWARDS, POLICIES, RESPECT, CORE, EQUALITIES, EMBEDDED, DRIVING, SECTOR, ACTION, RIGHTS, REPORT, PROMOTING, PLANS. In the 2010 one we register 147 occurrences and very similar results in terms of lexical collocates: DIVERSITY, EQUALITIES, PROMOTE, RIGHTS, HUMAN, COMMISSION, RESPECT, FORUM, HEAD, ISSUES, SAID, WHICH, NHS, ABOUT, HOME, MORE, ACCEPTANCE, ORGANISATION, OFFICE, SECTOR, LAW, WERE,



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UNIT, SECTION, OFFICER. The difference both in terms of quantity and quality is evident: the association of DIVERSITY with EQUALITY is very frequent and emphasises its inclusive and sociocultural ‘aboutness’.

6. Concluding remarks and further research These results (and the analysis of the concordances, clusters and of the collocates in the whole corpora not included in this publication) indicate that the languaging of diversity in British newspapers largely reflects the impression evoked by the Google images search. They are revelatory of a tendency to a greater and more varied use of the word diversity; a tendency to use it to construe linguistic discourses primed to be set in sociocultural contexts and to deal with a variety of topics, policies and actors that in the years have become part of the daily life of UK citizens. Finally, the diachronic analysis and the overall picture emerging from the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the SiBol/Port corpus indicate that the word has become more popular in absolute terms and has shifted with time from discourses about America or other countries to Britain, from there and then to here and now, from abstract, moral and institutional or bureaucratic discussions, to everyday life, civil, sociocultural, occupational and value-oriented issues, from opportunities to acceptance and inclusion. The exploration of the SiBol-Port corpus included a second area of research into the ‘languaging’ of diversity which started from the ‘buzz words’ listed in the conference call for papers: ‘colored’, ‘negro’, ‘black’, ‘Afro-American’, ‘African American’, ‘fag’, ‘queen’, ‘queer’, ‘dyke’, ‘butch’. I conducted several searches in the newspaper corpora: some of the terms (e.g. black, fag, queen) are problematic because either polysemic and difficult to disambiguate or almost completely absent from the corpus (e.g. queer and dyke). After several exploratory searches, I focused my analysis on the words ‘African’, ‘Afro-American’, ‘African American’ and ‘Negro’ and on the basis of the collocates I obtained I added an analysis of the interesting and unforeseen non-white. The discussion of these discourses would exceed the limits of the present paper and will hopefully provide the basis for further research.

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A MD-Cads Analysis of ‘Diversity’ in British Newspapers

References Duguid, Alison. “Newspaper discourse informalisation: a diachronic comparison from keywords.” Corpora 5(2) (2002): 109-138. Hoey, Michael. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge, 2005. Hoey, Michael. “Language awareness: lexical priming.” MED (January 2009), 12-13. URL:http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/MEDMagazine//January2009/52-LA-LexicalPriming.htm . Partington, Alan. “Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project.” Corpora 5 (2) (2010): 83-108. Scott, Mike. WordSmith Tools version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis, 2008. Taylor, Charlotte. Science in the news: a diachronic perspective. Corpora 5(2) (2010), 221-250. Zanca, Cesare. “Developing translation strategies and cultural awareness using corpora and the web.” Tralogy [En ligne], 3 (2011) - Training translators / La formation du traducteur. Paris. URL: http://lodel.irevues.inist.fr/tralogy/index.php?id=116 . Zanca, Cesare. “Online Learning and Data Driven Learning in translation training and language teaching.” In Creativity and Innovation in Language Education, edited by Carmen Argondizzo. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013.

Notes 1 The SiBol-Port corpus is described by Duguid in her article published on this book and in: http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/blog/clb/?page_id=8. 2 See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56064. 3 As we will see, all these examples of use seem to correspond and almost be taken from some of the concordance lines from our oldest 1993 corpus. 4 See also Hoey 2009. 5 See: http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/diversity. 6 The first section, about prejudice and racism, inevitably shows discourses with predominantly negative collocations (discrimination, prejudice, suffer, persecution etc.). The second seems to refer more to social inclusion and has positive collocations (improve, encourage, promote, end discrimination etc.). The third again seems to show different conflicting ideas about immigrants and immigration (control, restrict, limit immigration, but also assist, welcome refugees). Of course collocations are to be analysed in context and any apparently ‘negative’ word could in fact be used in a positive context (e.g. in fight against discrimination), but



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the examples in the OALD were probably chosen and filtered to represent what the lexicographers thought to be the main both positive and negative discourses associated to the word. 7 See www.oed.com/view/Entry/5788 . 8 Google can be used as a corpus for some rough and ready investigation about language use (see Zanca 2011, 2013). 9 URL: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ . 10 Diversity, on the contrary, is much more frequent and appears 1383 times in the BNC and 5624 times in SiBol-Port corpus. 11 The different frequency of the two words in time is attested clearly also through Google Books Ngram Viewer: URL https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alterity%2Cdiversity&year_start =1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B% 2Calterity%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdiversity%3B%2Cc0 . 12 http://lexically.net/wordsmith/version5/ and http://xaira.sourceforge.net/ . The reasons and advantages of using different software are reported very effectively in Taylor 2010: 224-225. 13 And a similar change throughout the newspapers probably explains why in 1993 the 3rd person pronouns (HE, HIS) are more frequent and we find the acronym EC while the 2005/10 keyness list includes the 1st person pronoun I and EU. 14 All these figures have been normalized to compensate for the different size of the concordance-corpora. The real frequency for 1993, 2005 and 2010 is BIOLOGICAL (28, 79, 53), BIO (24, 9, 4), BIODIVERSITY (12, 22, 34).

LANGUAGING THE RIOTS: A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION OF THE RIOTERS’ IDENTITY AS REPORTED BY THE BRITISH PRESS MARIA CRISTINA NISCO AND MARCO VENUTI

Introduction The present paper will focus on the linguistic representations of the 2011 UK riots and some of the participants involved, as this emerges from the British press. A corpus of newspaper articles was collected over a period of time ranging from August 1st to December 31st, 2011, from six British newspapers, i.e. The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun. Previous studies on riots in the UK in 1981 and 1985 were invariably characterised by a series of recurring features in the portrayal of the rioters, among them the identification of the rioters and offenders with ethnic minorities. The only existing literature on the subject highlighted the fact that press discourse tended to construe the rioters’ identity in ethnic and racial terms by locating them within binary oppositions contrasting Britons and immigrants, whites and coloured, us and them, hence the prevailing and generalised reference to ‘race riots’. Starting from such investigation, our corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Morley and Bailey 2009) will focus on the way in which the main actors of the events, the rioters, are referred to in the corpus, showing both common trends in the reporting of the 2011 events and differences among the six newspapers as far as naming strategies and collocational choices are concerned. Findings will then be interpreted taking into account the general analysis of what happened according to sociological studies and in comparison/contrast with the traditional notion of race riots.

Maria Cristina Nisco and Marco Venuti

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1. UK Riots In 2011, Great Britain was shaken by what the media promptly defined as the worst disturbances in decades, with violent protests starting in London, soon spreading to the rest of the country. Thousands of people took to the streets causing four days of mayhem, rampaging through London and other major cities across the UK, as a reaction to the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man, during a traffic stop in Tottenham, London, on 4th August 2011. The shooting took place during a Metropolitan Police Service (MET) investigation into drug trafficking. Since the circumstances of his killing were uncertain and controversial, Duggan’s relatives and friends marched peacefully from Broadwater Farm to Tottenham Police Station, expecting to receive some information about his death; when their request to see a high-rank officer was dismissed, tension rose until some members of the crowd attacked two nearby police cars, setting them on fire. Violence immediately spread from Aug. 7th to 10th, with rioting, arson, and looting. As a matter of fact, riots seem to be a relatively frequent event in British history. Over the last four decades, the UK has experienced a significant number of extremely violent protests. More specifically, in 1981, the effects of the general recession on the country were particularly devastating on areas that had been already hit by serious social and economic problems. In south London, the African-Caribbean community – suffering from particularly high rates of unemployment, poor housing, and a higher than average crime rate – erupted in a harsh confrontation with the MET. Up to 5,000 people were involved in the events that were then known as the Brixton riots. Within four years, there was a second major riot in the same area, which was sparked by the police shooting of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, a Jamaican woman who had migrated to the UK in her youth. Officers were looking for her son in relation to a suspected firearms offence, believing he was hiding in his mother’s home. Apparently without giving the required warning (that is meant to alert residents that a raid is about to proceed), they raided the house and accidentally shot Mrs Groce, who remained paralysed from the waist down. The ‘incident’ was immediately perceived by many local residents as further evidence of what was widely regarded as a form of institutional racism in the MET. Hostility between a largely black crowd and a largely white police force quickly escalated into two days of fierce street battles, with several shops looted and buildings and cars destroyed.

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Languaging the Riots

Ten years later, in 1995, Brixton was again the scene of violent protests following the death in police custody of Wayne Douglas, a black 26-year-old man who was said to have robbed a couple in bed at knifepoint. As, at the time, the disproportionate number of black or ethnic minority deaths in police custody was a very debated issue, a peaceful protest march outside Brixton Police Station turned into a (5-hour) riot resulting in damage to property and vehicles in the area, some police officers hurt and about 20 people arrested and charged with public order offences, theft, and criminal damage. Since these riots have been the focus of a number of linguistic studies aiming at understanding how the British press reported the events – especially as far as issues of agency and representation were concerned – such studies were deemed relevant for a comprehensive investigation of the reporting of the 2011 UK riots too. Although they are exclusively based on Critical Discourse Analysis, they only take into account a limited number of texts, and they do not feature statistical and replicable results. Indeed, even if the present paper examines a different corpus and adopts a different theoretical and methodological framework, previous analyses can still be said to give relevant insights into the ways in which the British press (or a specific part of it) reported the news concerning the riots and the rioters in the recent past; thus their findings and data constitute the starting point for this article. British reporting has typically depicted riots and rioters drawing on a limited range of images from contexts relating to conflict, deviance, threat and anti-social behaviour. According to the existing literature on the news reports of the 1981 and 1985 riots in the UK (van Dijk 1989, 1991), the British quality press adopted some recurring elements in the description of the events: - crime and crime-related topics were very common in the riot portrayal as an orgy of murder, arson, looting, petrol bombs, barricades, and fights with police; - the criminal nature of the disturbances was enhanced by emphasizing evidence of ‘vicious’ or ‘malicious’ premeditation; - the events were often termed as a ‘collapse of civil order’, a ‘direct challenge to the rule of law’. So the riots were primarily depicted within the framework of law and order, crime, anarchy and terror spreading in the British society. More interestingly, the events were also strongly connoted in terms of their racial aspects, and therefore explicitly and habitually defined as ‘race’ riots.



Maria Cristina Nisco and Marco Venuti

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Indeed, as these studies demonstrate, the media, in general, and the press, in particular, can be said to have often associated minorities with specific forms of ‘ethnic’ crimes such as aggression, mugging, prostitution, drugs and rioting. Minorities, especially young, male, Black or AfroCaribbean people, were perceived as problematic, deviant, criminal and blamed for the riots; in fact, they were usually characterized as troublemakers and perpetrators of crimes by terms such as ‘hooligans’, ‘thugs’ and ‘mobs’. This depiction also contributed to the production of very marked group representations opposing ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’, namely ‘us’ – British, white, law-abiding people – to ‘them’ – immigrants, black, alien and criminals – with an evaluative ‘charge’ opposing good to bad.

2. Media reporting and diversity The media can be said to play a pivotal role in the reproduction of racial stereotypes and racism by controlling and regulating access to important resources like the flow of information. In other words, when they paint a negative portrayal of specific subjects within society, it cannot be regarded merely as a passive reflection of the population’s widespread prejudices, but rather the result of explicit discursive practices that (media, political, social) elites enact by drawing on some precise discursive strategies, such as biased topic choice, stylistic negativization of minorities, dramatization of ethnic events, and so forth (van Dijk 1991). Hence the need to study news text and talk and their cognitive and socio-political contexts in a more systematic way, especially when otherness is involved. Indeed, since discourses featuring forms of otherness entail issues of visibility and representation, media reports on topics linked to diversity (especially ethnicity, gender, religion, disability) can be particularly challenging for a critical reflection. When tackling the question of diversity in the media, special attention should be paid to the general management of diversity and to the development and evaluation of policies for diversity inclusiveness, in the light of the fact that media reporting can affect discrimination and social tensions1. According to van Dijk (1999), CDA can be one of the means of monitoring the media on ‘hot’ and tricky issues, with a specific focus on the production process as well as on content design, which jointly contribute to inform and shape public opinion. Such a focus, for instance, could shed light on the fact that some subjects remain completely invisible or are not very visible – and when they do appear in the media, they are often confined to specific roles and representations.

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Within the British context, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was also recently created to monitor the editorial content of newspapers, magazines and their websites to prevent media harassment. As an independent organization, it enforces a code of practice that was ratified by the newspaper industry, to set the benchmark for ethical standards in journalism. On the particular issue of discrimination, the PCC states that the press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability. Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story2.

Given this general framework according to which the past UK riots were described in terms of ‘race’ riots (with evident derogatory intentions when portraying ethnic minorities), considering that in the last thirty years the British society has evolved substantially driven by increasing ‘multicultural pressures’, and the press has tried to avoid discriminatory discourses by adopting an ethical code, it would be interesting to examine whether the 2011 UK riots were linguistically construed as ‘race’ riots by the British Press3 and whether the participants involved were identified in terms of their ethnic, cultural, identitarian diversity or according to other connotative features.

3. The 2011 riots: corpus design and collection In order to investigate the most recent events in the UK, a corpus of articles – including reports, features, editorials, and op-eds (Franklin 2008) – was collected over a time span ranging from August 1st to December 31st 2011, thus covering the first five months after the riots which were considered as the most salient period for press coverage. Six British daily newspapers, and their Sunday edition, were selected, three representing the so-called quality press, namely The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times, and three papers representing the so-called popular press, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and The Sun. In terms of political affiliation, two papers can be said to be ‘left-leaning’ (The Guardian and Daily Mirror), while all the others can be defined as ‘right-leaning’ 4 . Despite the prevalence of right-leaning newspapers, the corpus still appears balanced because it reflects the dominant trends in the British press, which does not feature an equal distribution of papers along a left/right distinction. The web-archive LexisNexis5 was employed to download the articles containing the keyword ‘riots’, either in the headline or lead paragraph, in



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the aforementioned newspapers and over the time span chosen for investigation (results were then refined to eliminate double articles and to make sure that only articles referring to the 2011 UK riots were included). The corpus thus collected comprises 1,753 articles with a total number of 1,112,471 running words; a breakdown of the corpus for the six newspapers can be found in Table 1 (newspapers are ordered by number of tokens). Textual data were then analyzed by using Wordsmith Tools 5.0 (Scott 2008), adopting what is widely known as a corpus-based discourse analysis approach. Newspaper Guardian Telegraph Times Daily Mail Sun Daily Mirror Total

Articles 469 417 217 121 364 165 1753

Tokens 398,189 232,944 203,821 103,865 103,270 70,382 1,112,471

Table 1. Corpus size in terms of articles and tokens

Corpus-based Discourse Analysis was mostly developed by the Lancaster group of scholars, who have implemented and systematized a methodology based on a combination of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and CDA (Baker et al. 2008; Gabrielatos and Baker 2008)6. On the one hand, CL is meant to uncover significant linguistic patterns by employing computational tools to analyze large amounts of texts and, on the other hand, CDA allows a close analysis of texts taking into account the wider social context. While admitting that all methods of research feature a number of problems and can therefore be criticised, Baker (2006: 6-7) supports the use of corpora in discourse analysis as a worthwhile technique to make sense of the ways in which language is used in the construction of discourses and in the construal of reality. The blending of these approaches is said to offer a series of advantages, mainly pertaining to reliability (the researcher’s agency, position and involvement are clearly acknowledged) and the incremental effect of discourse (underlying discourses can be revealed and uncovered by becoming aware of how language is used and how hegemonic or counter-hegemonic discourses are constructed and emerge in large samples of naturally-occurring language). In this view, neither CL nor CDA need to be subservient to the other, since each contributes equally to the analysis of the corpus and actually helps triangulate the findings and results, by creating what Baker et al. call

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a “virtuous research circle” (Baker et al. 2008: 295; see also Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 7). Their search for cross-pollination is thought to potentially and manifoldly benefit both CL and CDA. Indeed, if CL does not usually take into account the social, political, historical, and cultural context in which data are embedded, a multidimensional CDA analysis going beyond the linguistic elements of the texts can be instrumental to reveal processes of text production and reception of news data, politics and attitudes toward the subjects under investigation, together with macro-textual and text-inherent structures (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 33).

4. Corpus analysis: defining the rioters Moving to a more detailed corpus-based analysis of the language used by the British newspapers in their reporting of the 2011 UK riots, a search for all the terms employed to identify the rioters was carried out. This revealed that the lexical items in Table 2 were used by the British press to refer to the variously defined participants to the events. Such items were then classified according to some general criteria associating them with particular features and/or roles in media representation, some shared ‘qualities’, i.e. whether they indicated the real actors, emphasized the legal aspects connected to their actions, referred to undistinguished groups, or carried an overt negative evaluation of the participants, and finally shared references to the age of the social actors. Obviously some terms might be seen as ‘overlapping’ since they belong to more than one category. LEXICAL ITEMS rioter*, looter* criminal*, offender* crowd*, gang*, mob* thug*, yob* boy*, children, kid*, teenager*, youngster*, youth*

SEMANTIC DOMAINS ACTORS LAW GROUP CRIMINAL AGE

Table 2. Terms used to refer to the rioters7

After a close reading of all the concordances in which such lexical items occurred, the instances in which the terms did not refer to the rioters (in the context of the 2011 UK riots) were deleted, and for the remaining instances frequencies were normalised per hundred thousand words, as shown in Tables 4 to 8 in the Appendix.



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All the newspapers in the corpus use the search terms to identify the rioters, despite giving a different emphasis to different aspects. Looking at the distribution of the terms from the different domains, the popular press can be said to use all the lexical items describing the rioters more frequently compared to the quality press, judging from the total number featured by each newspaper. Within the popular press, the so-called red tops, the Daily Mirror and The Sun, feature considerably higher numbers than the black top, the Daily Mail, regardless of their political orientation. Within the quality press, on the other hand, the two right-leaning newspapers, The Telegraph and The Times, feature a higher frequency than The Guardian, which seems to avoid using some of the words that are present in the other papers’ reporting (for example ‘crowd’ and ‘yobs’) while using other items less often (‘looters’, ‘mob’, ‘rioters’). This view is also exemplified by considering one lexical item in particular, ‘rioters’, which has the highest number of occurrences in almost all the newspapers, but has an uneven distribution across them (with The Sun and the Daily Mirror displaying a high rate of repetition of the word signalling a strong emphasis). If the specific categories in which the lexical items were classified (Figure 1 and Table 3) are examined, it becomes evident that the derogatory terms belonging to the category ‘CRIMINAL’, namely ‘thug*’ and ‘yob*’, are almost absent in the quality press unlike the popular press, which on the contrary makes extensive use of them, especially The Sun. As a matter of fact, The Sun features the highest percentages of presence and use of items, relating to nearly all categories, to designate the rioters. Whereas the categories ‘LAW’, ‘GROUP’ and ‘ACTORS’ seem slightly more balanced in the distribution of the terms, with the usual differences found in the distinction quality-popular press. Interestingly, the category ‘AGE’ appears to have very high numbers, marking the fact that the participants in the events are strongly characterized by connotations linked to their age. Indeed, the category comprises more items than the others, all emphasizing the very young age of the rioters. We therefore decided to focus our attention on the distribution and analysis of the lexical items included in this category. With respect to the terms included in the category ‘AGE’ (Figure 2), it is worth noting that, among those with the lowest percentages, ‘youngster’ is almost completely absent from the quality press, while the only item whose occurrence is similar in both the quality and popular press is ‘teenagers’, the term being invariably and homogeneously employed by the newspapers. Overall, a close reading of the concordances of these words reveals that the terms ‘boy*’, ‘children’, ‘kids’, together with

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‘youth’ andd ‘teenager’ are a more typiccal in the repporting of thee popular papers, wheere they are often o used in n connection w with the perssonal and individual sttories told by families givin ng their view oon the riots8.

Fig. 1. Distribbution of norm malised frequenccies of the lexi cal items referrring to the rioters in the six newspaperss according to th he five domainss

Fig. 2. Distrribution of thee items includeed in the cateegory ‘AGE’ in i the six newspapers



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Mail Mirror Sun Guardian Telegraph Times 227 359 364 154 119 226 123 82 96 42 70 56 160 238 270 156 137 216 246 246 340 88 204 190 62 110 259 3 19 9

Table 3. Total counts of normalised frequencies of the retrieved lexical items

5. Corpus analysis: the rioters’ main connotative features Apart from the category they belonged to, all the terms employed to identify the rioters were then searched as keywords, and their collocates – over an L5-R5 span (with MI value > 3 and LL value 6,63 – Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 11) were retrieved10. The main element emerging from corpus findings concerns a significant presence of the pre-modifying adjective ‘young’ in phrases like ‘young people/groups of’. As a matter of fact, almost all the keywords feature ‘young’ among their collocates, excluding the terms belonging to the ‘AGE’ group that already give an age indication in themselves11. Therefore, the interesting finding concerning the participants in the 2011 riots is that there seems to be a strong connotation of the rioters in terms of age: even when lexical items not belonging to the ‘AGE’ group are used, the young age is a constant and characterizing trait of the way in which the rioters are linguistically portrayed by the British press. If we take into consideration the analysis of the previous riots in the UK and the strong racial connotation of the rioters, an additional striking feature emerging from our analysis is the relatively scarce presence of the adjective ‘black’ among the collocates of the keywords. More specifically, ‘black’ co-occurred with ‘youth’ (in the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, The Guardian and The Times), ‘gang’, ‘boy’ and ‘kid’ (in The Times), ‘rioter’ (in the Daily Mirror). However, the few occurrences of ‘black’ do not appear to be particularly significant in the light of the fact that ‘white’ also collocates with a significant number of the keywords, so the former cannot be regarded as marked more than the latter. Moreover, out of the 500 occurrences of ‘black’ that were race-related, only half of them actually referred to the rioters, while the other half referred to the wider social context (for instance, ‘legitimacy in black areas’, ‘future for the black community’) 12 . Similarly, out of the 1,555 occurrences of ‘young’, half were referred to the rioters and half to social issues involving younger generations (such as unemployment, parenting

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issues, deprived areas, social workers and services): so numbers still remain higher in the case of age as opposed to racial connotations.

6. Concluding remarks Despite the fact that the terms employed by the British press to report the 2011 UK riots were not significantly linked to ethnicity, there are indisputable factors relating to ethnicity and social disadvantage among the reasons why the riots were sparked – partly due to the fact that a black man was shot by police, partly due to the fact that the riots took place in areas where most of the population were from ethnic minorities with a history of harassment by the police. The events, and their newspaper representation, remain controversial in terms of racial connotations, as the claims by royalist and conservative historian David Starkey show. In a TV appearance on Newsnight, he stresses that the 2011 riots were the result of white youths becoming black. In his view, “a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together”. By ‘this language’ he refers to the “Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of a foreign country”13. While linking the riots to the way some young people may choose to speak, tackling the whole question in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, he further highlights the fact that it is not about skin colour, it is about culture: white people have adopted a black culture that he overtly relates to criminality and gangs. Despite the fact that a large number of people reckoned that these were offensive generalizations based on no evidence, several observers have warned that issues of race and cultural alienation are an uncomfortable question that the UK has to face. A report by the Runnymede Trust – the UK’s leading independent race equality think-tank – suggests that the 2011 disturbances feature some common elements with the 1980s ‘race’ riots, namely anger against the police and their discriminatory practices, high levels of unemployment, poverty, and social exclusion. However, according to the report, the 2011 unrest had a completely different development in terms of the scale of events, the number of participants involved, and the multiple locations affected by the riots. Notably, in the Trust’s view, the media were too quick in dismissing and/or marginalising racial injustice as a factor of the events: since the rioters were from a range of ethnic backgrounds, the riots were not racialised. […] [I]t was further suggested that there were no clear



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reasons for the riots beyond ‘criminality, pure and simple’” (Nwabuzo 2012).

The claim is that, as the riots spread, the media coverage moved away from issues concerning race and discrimination to concentrate on the most violent and criminal aspects of the events. This process is said to have made politicians and the media complicit in fuelling a kind of moral panic. Above all, they underline that, even accepting looting as the main reason to riot, very little space was given to further thoughts on it: Bauman, for example, contextualised the looting by explaining that it was the result of ‘hyper-consumerism’, a product of the growth of social inequality where groups of young people feel left out of ‘consumer culture’ (Bauman 2011). While acknowledging the different viewpoints emerging on such an intricate and sensitive topic, it seems relevant to also refer to the official data provided by the UK Home Office, according to which, in terms of ethnicity, the numbers of white and black rioters who have had a first hearing, been found guilty and sentenced are not so dissimilar14, although with higher figures for white rioters. The same statistics also show that, in terms of age, the most numerous group of rioters were aged between 10 and 24. In the attempt to reach some concluding remarks that take into account the wider political, social and cultural background in which the riots occurred, and also triangulating our corpus findings concerning the newspapers’ portrayals of the events, some basic points can be recognized. If the past UK riots were strongly connoted by the British press in terms of ethnicity (with great emphasis on the rioters’ ethnic background), the reporting of the most recent events to emerge from the articles collected for this investigation was more varied, with references to the social class of the rioters (disadvantaged children as much as middle-class ones), to ethnicity (black rioters as well as white rioters), but certainly and above all to age. As a result, the 2011 UK riots were mostly characterized as ‘youth’ riots.

References Baker, Paul. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Baker, Paul et al. “A Useful Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 19(3) (2008): 273-306.

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Bauman, Žižek. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen R. and Malcolm Coulthard (eds). Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Franklin, Bob (ed.). Pulling Newspapers Apart. Analysing Print Journalism. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008. Gabrielatos, Costas and Paul Baker. “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005.” Journal of English Linguistics 36(1) (2008): 5-38. Home Office. An Overview of Recorded Crimes and Arrests Resulting from Disorder Events in August 2011. 2011. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-overview-ofrecorded-crimes-and-arrests-resulting-from-disorder-events-in-august2011 (last accessed July 2014). Krishnamurthy, Ramesh. “ETHNIC, RACIAL AND TRIBAL. The language of racism?” In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Carmen. R. Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 129–149. London: Routledge, 1996. Morley, John and Jo Bailey (eds). Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict. London: Routledge, 2009. Nordenstreng, Kaarle and Michael S. Griffin (eds). International Media Monitoring. Cresskill (NJ): Hampton Press, 1999. Nwabuzo, Ojeaku. Runnymede Report. The Riot Roundtables: Race and the Riots of August 2011. London: Runnymede, 2012. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/RiotRoundta bles-2012.pdf (last accessed July 2014). Scott, Mike. Wordsmith Tools 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software, 2008. Van Dijk, Teun A. “Race, Riots and the Press: An Analysis of Editorials in the British Press About the 1985 Disorders”, Gazette 43 (1989): 229-253. —. Racism and the Press. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991. —. “Media, Racism, and Monitoring”, in International Media Monitoring, edited by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Michael S. Griffin, 307-316. Cresskill (NJ): Hampton Press, 1999.





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Appendix Tokens boy boys children kids teenager teenagers youngster youngsters youth youths Total

Mail 33 9 28 11 23 14 7 11 30 62 227

Mirror 69 26 61 38 26 13 11 21 48 46 359

Sun 66 29 35 86 28 21 0 0 57 42 364

Guardian 13 13 17 25 9 20 0 6 17 33 154

Telegraph 25 0 21 4 7 16 0 0 14 31 119

Times 24 26 34 32 9 19 0 18 18 46 226

Total 230 104 196 196 102 104 18 57 183 260 1449

Table 4. Normalised frequencies of ‘AGE’ lexical items in each newspaper Tokens criminal criminals offender offenders Total

Mail 0 55 11 57 123

Mirror 31 20 15 16 82

Sun 46 17 0 32 96

Guardian 2 13 4 23 42

Telegraph 1 28 6 36 70

Times 2 16 11 27 56

Total 83 148 47 192 470

Table 5. Normalised frequencies of ‘LAW’ lexical items in each newspaper Tokens crowd crowds gang gangs mob mobs Total

Mail 11 6 43 56 34 10 160

Mirror 18 5 75 84 46 10 238

Sun 25 0 110 77 49 10 270

Guardian 0 9 73 61 10 3 156

Telegraph 11 7 43 50 21 6 137

Times 18 7 99 67 19 6 216

Total 82 34 444 395 179 43 1177

Table 6. Normalised frequencies of ‘GROUP’ lexical items in each newspaper





Languaging the Riots

30 Tokens looter looters rioter rioters Total

Mail 17 76 11 142 246

Mirror 23 57 8 157 246

Sun Guardian 33 9 105 27 22 6 180 47 340 88

Telegraph 8 62 7 128 204

Times 10 60 7 113 190

Total 100 387 61 768 1315

Table 7. Normalised frequencies of ‘ACTOS’ lexical items in each newspaper

Tokens Mail thug 3 thugs 41 yob 0 yobs 18 62 Total

Mirror 8 71 0 31 110

Sun 36 121 27 76 259

Guardian 0 3 0 0 3

Telegraph 1 15 0 2 19

Times 0 7 0 2 9

Total 49 258 27 128 462

Table 8. Normalised frequencies of ‘CRIMINAL’ lexical items in each newspaper

Notes

Although the authors discussed and conceived the article together, Maria Cristina Nisco is responsible for Sections 1, 2, 3 and 5, while Marco Venuti is responsible for the Introduction and sections 4 and 6. 1 According to many views, a good practice is required in media reporting to counter the spread of intolerance and hatred leading to discrimination and tensions within society. In recent times, a series of programmes and activities have been launched to support and strengthen quality in the media, with a specific concern for print media, especially after the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) highlighted the importance of building an ethical environment for journalism. Different forms of cooperation with the Council of Europe have been also encouraged in order to promote diversity and inclusiveness in the media (for example, with initiatives that were co-funded by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme). See http://ethicaljournalisminitiative.org/en/contents/editorial. 2 http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html. 3 It is important to bear in mind that, although a diachronic study of the British press reporting on the riots would be extremely interesting, the only partial terms of reference for a comparison with the most recent events are provided by the findings of the previously mentioned (CDA) analysis. 4 Baker et al. (2013: 8) suggest the terms ‘left/right-leaning’ rather than left/rightwing to stress the fact that political stances have become more complex and multifaceted, and newspapers do not necessarily occupy extreme or neatly defined political positions.



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LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) provides access to billions of documents and records drawing on more than 45,000 legal, news and business sources. Users can download all the articles stored by selecting a specific criterion for the search (date, source, key word, etc.). 6 It is worth noting, however, that the association of quantitative and qualitative techniques is not a new practice (Stubbs 1994; Biber et al. 1998). 7 The asterisks indicate that both singular and plural forms were retrieved. The singular ‘child’ was not taken into account because its frequency was not statistically significant. 8 The terms ‘kid’ and ‘child’ were not included in the category because they were too low in frequency and were therefore regarded as not significant for the purposes of this analysis. 10 As Baker and Gabrielatos suggest, using both MI (Mutual Information) and LL (log likelihood) to retrieve collocational candidates allows the selection of the only lexical items having a very high probability and a strong link respectively with the keyword with which they collocate. 11 ‘Young’ is not a collocate of ‘GROUP’ nouns (‘crowd’ and ‘mob’), with the exception of ‘gang’. 12 The concordances in which ‘black’ was not race-related (as in ‘a navy T-shirt and black trousers’, ‘it was just black smoke’) were deleted. 13 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517. 14 First hearing: 1088 white rioters vs. 1025 black rioters; found guilty: 773 white rioters vs. 614 black rioters, sentenced: 761 white rioters vs. 605 black rioters (Home Office 2011).

IN POLITICS

AT THE INTERSECTION OF CLASS AND RACE: LANGUAGING AND PICTURING DIVERSITY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA CLAUDIA ORTU

Introduction South Africa is one of the most diverse countries in the world. With its eleven official languages and many more historical and cultural traditions, the Rainbow Nation – as its first democratically elected president Nelson Mandela liked to call it – has much to contribute to the study of the many articulations of the concept of diversity. But South Africa is also one of the more unequal countries in the world, with a Gini coefficient that oscillates between 60 and 70 (with 100 indicating maximum inequality). This form of structural diversity and its intersection with racial diversity are the main of this contribution. After the centuries of colonial domination and decades of racial segregation experienced by the South African population, 1994 was the year in which all legal discrimination between people with different racial backgrounds was dropped. The black majority, nearly 80 per cent of the total population, voted for the first time and the movement that had been the protagonist of the anti-apartheid struggle, the African National Congress (ANC), formed a government that promised to tackle the structural differences that still remained. The most recent accounts of the socio-economic condition of the black majority, though, highlight the fact that the ANC has not been able to keep that promise (Marais 2000; 2011), mostly because the new government had to come to terms with white capital (Bond 1998; Bond and Zapiro 2004), and to implement the infamous neoliberal policies promoted by international organisations such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the context of the global hegemony of neoliberal discourse and policies (see Harvey 2005 for a history of the concept and its practical implementations) South Africa is not an exception. What is peculiar about South Africa, instead, is the reaction of the most important union confederation in the country, the Congress of South African Trade Unions

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(COSATU), to the implementation of such neoliberal policies. Indeed, despite being in an alliance with the ANC since its creation in 1985 and throughout the anti-apartheid struggle, as well as its ally in government, COSATU has been the most vocal opponent of the dictatorship of the free market espoused by ANC leaders. Contrary to what other trade unions in the developed world had done vis-à-vis the rise of neoliberalism – i.e. adapting their discourses to the new “planetary vulgate” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001) – COSATU confronted the ANC’s neoliberal discourse (Ortu, forthcoming) with its traditional class-based, anti-capitalist discourse while managing, at the same time, to avoid being labelled as out-dated. The text presented and analysed in this article is an example of the strategy used by COSATU unions to confront neoliberal policies and defend the interests of the workers, both employed and unemployed, who are destined to shoulder the weight of such policies. The explicit author of the text is the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), but the text has been adopted as the official position of COSATU regarding the latest economic policy document issued by the ANC in 2011: the National Development Plan (NDP)1. In the text, titled “Numsa Explains the National Development Plan”, the author uses an imagined event as a narrative tool that allows her/him to describe in simple terms the contents of the NDP and to highlight its effects on the life of the working class. The imagined event takes place at an airport, where two representatives of the ruling class, Trevor Manuel – the Minister responsible for the NDP – and Helen Zille – the leader of the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA) – are waiting for their flights. The general secretary of Numsa, Irving Jim is also at the airport and hears their conversation on the contents of the NDP. As the conversation goes on, Jim explains what the two politicians really mean and what the single aspects of the NDP discussed by the two imply for the working class. The narrative ends when Zille and Manuel realise that Jim has been listening to them. It is through this narrative that the text provides an entry point on the issue of race and class diversity, which is the focus of my analysis. Indeed, the characters are described both in their characteristics and through their actions as belonging to very different worlds: through this description we are able to see how race and class differences are perceived from a working class perspective.

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1. Characteristics of the text and Multimodal Discourse Analysis The text responds to the functional characteristics normally attached to political pamphlets – I will refer to it as a pamphlet from now on – as it is “a short piece of polemical writing printed in the form of a booklet and aimed at a large public”( Orwell and Reynolds 1948: 7), except for the fact that it is not simply “writing” but a multimodal text in which the verbal (written) and the visual mode contribute to the meaning-making effort. Indeed, the narrative is realised through cartoon strips that show the three characters interacting and describes them by attaching “raced” and “classed” aspects to each of them. Consequently the focus of the analysis will be on the cartoons and on how they contribute to define race and class identity. The main methodological point of reference for the analysis will thus be Kress and van Leeuwen’s seminal work on “the grammar of visual design” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006), coupled with the highly compatible theory of verbal grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), developed by M.A.K. Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), which will complete the multimodal approach to the pamphlet. The first part of the analysis will look at the compositional choices made by the author. First of all we will look at the information value (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 176) attached to the different parts of the composition. Secondly their salience (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 202), i.e. the relative importance of each element in the composition, and finally we will look at how the different elements are framed (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 203) and how through framing the author guides the reader by differentiating elements that are to be “read” as connected or disconnected. The analysis will continue with a study of the narrative representations (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 45) by looking at the way in which the represented participants are described (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 47), what processes (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 59) they take part in, and finally what their relationship with the interactive participants are (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 48). The categories sketched above will become clearer in their application in the following paragraph.

2. Analysis The pamphlet is printed on 3 A4 sheets of paper bound at the centre, thus resulting in 12 A5 pages. The front cover is organised according to a



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vertical triptych composition (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 198). According to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s description of this organising principle, the information value attached to the top position is that of the “Ideal”, i.e. “the idealized or generalized essence of the information” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 187). Accordingly, that is the space reserved for the title of the pamphlet “Numsa explains the National Development Plan”. The title is written in small capital letters in a font reminiscent of protest placards written with a black marker. The central space, which is normally devoted to the mediating element in the triptych, bears the symbol of NUMSA, while the bottom space, the space of the “Real”, i.e. more specific, down-to-earth or practical information (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 187), introduces the three caricatured characters of the story. As Kress and Van Leeuwen point out, “the opposition between Ideal and Real can also structure text-image relations” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 187). Thus, in a multimodal text, if the verbal part is in the Ideal position it might be interpreted as the most important mode. Nonetheless, an analysis of the other two systems of instantiation of composition, salience and framing, renders a more balanced assessment. First of all the three parts are not heavily framed; the three elements are placed against one common background with a very subtle transition from the pale yellow of the top part to salmon/orange at the bottom. Thus the space is a unified one, even though the reader can definitely spot three components in it. As far as salience is concerned, the most salient part in the cover is the bottom part, the Real, followed by the Ideal. The NUMSA symbol, in the middle, is the least salient element. This central part can also be interpreted as a repetition, a link between the actor in the sentence of the title and its visual representation. This choice seems to point towards a balance between the two modes, verbal and visual, which is strengthened by the choice of giving more salience to the bottom visual part, in an attempt to counter the top position given to the verbal part. The reader might consequently expect a text in which the two modes are closely connected and neither prevails. As anticipated before, the author introduces the represented participants in the cover. The first is Trevor Manuel (see Figure 1, colour centerfold), the Head of the National Planning Commission and author of the NDP. He was born during apartheid and he is a long-standing member of the ANC. When he was born the apartheid system qualified him as “cape coloured”. This means that, being neither black nor white, he did not enjoy the same rights as white people, but he had the possibility to aspire to more clerical jobs with better pay, and he also had a larger freedom of movement across

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the country, as opposed to the harsh restrictions imposed on the black majority. On his right the reader finds Helen Zille (see colour centerfold, Figure 2), the leader of the main opposition party in SA, the Democratic Alliance (DA). This is a mainly white party, with very explicit pro-market neoliberal views in political economy. She is from the Cape Town area, which is the whitest area in SA, and she is classified as white. Zille is also known as “the madam”. This is the way in which black house workers called and still call their white female bosses. A madam in contemporary SA is a rich white woman who is bossy and covertly racist. Zille was never a member of the ANC, but she was nonetheless against the apartheid system. Further right and slightly backgrounded, the reader meets Irvin Jim (see colour centerfold, Figure 3), the general secretary of NUMSA. Jim comes from the Eastern Cape. His father, a farm worker, was often abused by white farmers and the family could never put down roots for long. They moved from one farm to another, living in mud houses. His father did not receive a proper salary but was paid with bags of maize and pails of milk. This is the life that most black people, as Irvin Jim, led during apartheid. The representatives of the ruling class both have their eyes closed. This might be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand the narrative required this in order to justify the fact that the two do not notice Jim’s presence, on the other hand, the closed eyes might represent them as being selfabsorbed, as most politicians are reputed to be. The main difference between the characters is quite evidently their skin colour, Zille and Manuel are pink while Jim is brown. Despite the objective difference in the complexions of the two politicians – indeed, as underlined before, Helen Zille is white while Trevor Manuel is “cape coloured” which in his case means he has a light olive complexion – the author has decided not to give Manuel and Zille a different colour. This choice is, arguably, a symbolic one. The racially segregated regime that existed legally in South Africa was designed to keep the black majority in a condition of semi-slavery, confining them to non or semi skilled jobs both on farms and in mines owned by the white minority, with coloureds and Indians mostly employed in the service sector. This segregation created the overlap of race and class identity in South Africa which is only partially – and painfully slowly – changing now. During informal interactions with colleagues in South Africa I noticed that the racial label is frequently used as a proxy for class identity; white often means rich and privileged while black means working class or poor and discriminated against, regardless of skin colour. Unfortunately I have



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not been able to gather scientifically valid data on the issue so far, but the use of pink and brown in the cartoon seems to point exactly in this direction, with privilege and upper class position signalled by whiteness and working class subaltern position signalled by blackness. Apart from the overlapping of race and class, the cartoon makes use of clear class signals when it introduces its characters. As mentioned above, the two representatives of the ruling class are depicted with their eyes closed, oblivious to what happens around them. The idea of carelessness is reinforced by the fact that the two are speaking on their cell phones. Both Manuel and Zille are dressed very formally as for a business meeting and they are only carrying a small handbag. Irving Jim, on the contrary, is not on the phone, he is pushing a trolley with two suitcases and he is dressed informally, with blue jeans and a jacket. The dress code is a clear and explicit signal of class position that is high in the consideration of most South Africans. Manuel and Zille’s formal dressing is thus used by the author to place them in a position of privilege, while Irving Jim is represented not as poor but as a clearly working class person. This construal of the represented participants is reinforced by the processes in which they are involved as actors on the cover. While Manuel and Zille are represented as undertaking a nontransactional action (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 63) accompanied by a circumstantial element of means (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 72), i.e. “talk on the phone”, Jim is an actor in a unidirectional transactional action, i.e. “pushing a trolley”. If we look at the verbal translation of the two actions we can get to a finer analysis that will strengthen the point made above. Indeed, according to Halliday’s classification of processes (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), Manuel and Zille are actors in a verbal process, while Jim is undertaking a material process. The general idea that the image on the cover conveys is that while the ruling class is busy talking, trade unionists are working, doing something, just as normal working class people do. The trolley is also important for a different articulation of class structure and identity, that of the culture of travel in South Africa. Flying is not a common experience in the country. Working class people travel by bus even for long journeys so there is a connotation of privilege attached to flying. When working class/black South Africans fly they do it with lots of luggage, first of all because they are not used to it (true for inexperienced travellers of any nationality), and secondly because it is customary for black South Africans who have migrated from villages to the city in search for a better position to bring presents to the whole extended family whenever they pay a visit to their relatives in the rural

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areas. The fact that Manuel and Zille do not have any luggage with them except their handbags means that they are frequent flyers, maybe coming and going on the same day, while Jim’s representation with the trolley and suitcases mirrors the situation of a working class traveller. Through the use of the signals described above, the author manages to create reader identification with Jim who is also the reacter in a transactional reaction, i.e. a process in which “an eyeline vector connects two participants, a Reacter and a Phenomenon” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 74). Indeed Jim is obliquely gazing at the left side of the page, where Manuel and Zille are grouped as a Phenomenon. Thus, the space of the real indicates what is actually going to happen, i.e. the working class, represented by Jim, is going to look at what the ruling class does when it is unaware – remember their eyes are closed – of the presence of normal people.

3. Represented participants in action The 11 pages that follow the cover are also organized along the vertical axis with the cartoons at the top and a text box at the bottom. This time the balance is reversed and the Ideal part is filled with visual elements as well as speech and thought bubbles, while in the space of the Real the verbal mode prevails. The organisation of the pages is schematised in figure 4 below. The comic strip has thus a quite mandatory reading path (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 205): the internal pages are divided into highly visible frames, the most visible ones dividing each A5 page from the next, suggesting that each page has to be read separately. Such a reading path is strengthened by the text in the boxes at the bottom. There are always three boxes with a different coloured filling; the first one in pale blue presents the position of the DA, the second one is grey and it presents the content of the NDP and the third one, in light green states the answer of NUMSA to both. Each A5 page has the complete set of three text boxes in which a part of the NDP is presented as coherent with DA ideology and criticised by the NUMSA in the last box. This convention is only abandoned once, on pages 4 and 5 where the only text box present is the one highlighting NUMSA’s position.



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Fig. 1. Organnisation of the page

The cartoonn part of the pamphlet p is allso highly fram med, indeed whenever w Zille and M Manuel speak they t are fram med in black bboxes (I will call them “sub-framess” from now on), o sometimes together som metimes singu ularly. On the contraryy Jim is nearlyy never framed d. The trade uunionist alway ys appears after one orr two sub-fram mes in which h Zille and M Manuel are rep presented, providing ann interpretatioon of what th he two say oor a rebuttal (Toulmin what I mean. 1958) to theeir arguments. An example might m clarify w Figure 5 shows the seecond interactiion between Z Zille and Man nuel, after they greet eeach other. Gooing from leftt to right, we have a first sub-frame s with the twoo politicians, a second sub-fframe with onnly Trevor Maanuel and, finally, Irvinn Jim in the main m space of the t cartoon. B Before entering g into the analysis off the content it is imporrtant to interrpret the meeaning of compositionn in this casse. This struccture of fram ming that is repeated throughout tthe pamphlet puts p Irving Jim m constantly iin a Reacter role r while Zille and M Manuel and theeir interaction n are the Phennomenon. Thee framing seems thus tto work as quuotation markss do in the wrritten verbal mode. m Jim is seen as rreporting in direct d speech the actual w words of the two, t thus giving the im mpression to the reader that their voicees are represen nted, in a complex vissual realisatioon of intertex xtuality (Faircclough 2003: 47). The content of thhe speech bubbbles is the following:

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At the Intersection of o Class and Raace hemselves at the expense of o the Zille: Orrganised workkers protect th unemployyed. Exactly. Manuel: They make thee price of labou ur too high so bbusiness doesn’t want to employy. Jim: So, according to booth of them uneemployment is oour fault.

Fig. 2. Sub-frraming and diallogue

In the firstt sub-frame Zille Z is readiing the NDP P, which look ks like a pamphlet deespite being 444 pages lo ong, so the ssentence she utters is represented in the cartoonn as if it was written on thhe document. The only original parrt in the utteraance is the ad dverb “exactlly” which is a sign of approval foor what she has just read d. In his ansswer Manuell gives a justification for what is written w in thee NDP which is a common n tenet of neoliberal iddeology: thatt of labour seeen as a com mmodity for which w the price determ mines its posssibility of bein ng sold (see O Ortu 2008; 20 012 for a more in-deppth discussion)). There arre 25 sub-fram mes in the pam mphlet and eacch of them haas Manuel and/or Zille as representeed participantss. We have seeen their descrription on the cover aand analysed the race and d class attribuutes attached to them through rellational proceesses, but raace and classs identities are also construed inn narratives thhrough the deescription of tthe processes in which the represennted participannts are involveed. Helen Ziille is a sayerr 17 times, i.ee. 17 speech bballoons eman nate from her in the ccartoon. She is also a senseer of a mentaal phenomeno on, with a thought bubbble emanatingg from her. The T thought buubble represen nts her as an actor in the materiall process of eating a pie,, while other material processes shhe undertakess are shaking Manuel’s haand, reading the t NDP, four times, aand drinking wine, w only oncce.



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Trevor Manuel is a sayer 15 times and a senser twice. One of the thought bubbles emanating from him also depicts him as eating something, but this time it is a cake. Manuel is also an actor in other material processes, like shaking Zille’s hand at the beginning of the narrative, showing her the NDP two times and drinking wine three times. Overall, the two powerful represented participants are involved in processes that are quite similar. Wine drinking is not a casual choice as it is a particular sign of class position. Indeed, wine drinking is supposed to be an activity that belongs to the sophisticated, while working class people mostly drink beer. Needless to say, the same division is present along racial lines: wine drinking is a white activity while beer drinking is a “black thing”. The different cultural value attached to the two drinks originates in the segregated history of the country. Black farm workers would work as near-slaves in the vineyards of the Western Cape, which were implanted by the colonisers in the 17th century, and produce a wine that would mostly get exported, while the only alcoholic drink black people could have access to, both in the country and in the urban townships, would be their home-brewed beer. The fact that both Manuel and Zille drink wine in the cartoon, and that even when they are not drinking the two glasses of red wine are always present in the sub-frames, has thus to be read as another signal of them belonging to the same class despite their different personal stories. The verbal processes in which Manuel and Zille are involved are mostly transactional actions of the sequential bi-directional type (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 66), with the speech bubbles working as bidirectional vectors realising a dialogue in which both characters take part. Nonetheless, if we look at the content of the speech bubbles, i.e. the “utterance” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 75), we can find a very different representation of the two. The general impression is that Zille starts the dialogue and sets the agenda, while Manuel expresses approval of what she says. Indeed, 3 times out of the 15 verbal processes in which he is a sayer, his utterance is limited to the expressions of approval (“yes” two times and “Yes. Exactly”). Manuel’s utterances start with a word of approval, either “yes” or “exactly” in other five cases, in which he then elaborates or expands Zille’s utterances, accounting for 8 out of 15 utterances in which he follows Zille’s lead. On the contrary, Zille only uses “yes” as a sign of approval at the beginning of two utterances, while she never limits herself to just approving whatever Manuel says. Thus what, looking at the visual mode, seemed to be a balanced and equal representation becomes a much more nuanced and complex one when the verbal mode is brought back into the picture. Such slightly unbalanced

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At the Intersection of Class and Race

construal of the two representatives of the ruling class responds to the need to put forward NUMSA’s argument on the nature of the NDP. Indeed the whole pamphlet is designed to explain that the NDP is a policy based not on the needs of the black working class that the ANC declares it represents, but on the needs of white capital, represented by the DA. The accusation of the ANC is also made explicit in the third text box on the first page of the pamphlet, the one that presents NUMSA’s position. Numsa says: They are both saying the same thing. They are saying that unemployment is caused by trade unions. Now we can see we are right; the NDP copies DA policies.

This box is placed below the strip reproduced in figure 5 above and seems to echo Irvin Jim’s utterance in the speech bubble. This is the recurring pattern throughout the cartoon, where Irving Jim is mostly a sayer in verbal processes. Mostly he deconstructs what Zille and Manuel say or he offers a rebuttal to their arguments. Contextually, Jim is also a senser in the mental processes of hearing and seeing. In Kress and van Leeuwen's terms he is a reacter (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 67) and Zille and Manuel are a phenomenon. Indeed, his gaze has a double vectoriality. His eyes are positioned in such a way that, if he looks straight in front of him, he sees what Zille and Manuel are doing, but we see him always with an oblique gaze that intercepts the readers’ eyes in an offer of information (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 117). By such double vectoriality Jim is represented as the eyes of the working class in the rooms of power, where decisions are taken, and at the same time manages to build a direct relationship with the reader, addressing her/him using an inclusive “we”. The reader is also involved through the use of direct, albeit rhetorical, questions such as “You see? They want to control our wages but not theirs”. Here again we can see the inclusive possessive adjective “our” being used with an inclusive sense. Such use of pronouns is also an indirect rebuttal to what Manuel and Zille say in figure 5 above – as well as in all media outlets whenever they have the possibility to do so – i.e. that trade unions are only trying to defend their interests and not those of society at large.

4. Concluding remarks The pamphlet presented here is an example of counter-hegemonic discourse that attacks the hegemonic neoliberal economic doctrine, and at the same time it is a document that projects the view of the subaltern part of the South African society on the issue of race and class identity. Indeed,



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before moving into the document itself and explaining it in simple terms, the author needs to make it clear that the ANC, which still receives the majority of black votes, is not the defender of the interests of the black working class as it used to be during the struggle against apartheid. By construing ANC representative Trevor Manuel as belonging to the same social world as DA leader Helen Zille, the cartoon does exactly this. By attributing the same skin colour to the two politicians, despite their being different in reality, the author underlines their similarities, which are also reflected in their actions in the cartoon. Most importantly such an attempt at creating an equation between the two confirms the intuition according to which labels such as black and white in South Africa are becoming less and less linked with actual skin colour but are more and more used as proxies for class identity.

References Bond, Patrick. Elite transition: Globalisation and the Rise of Economic Fundamentalism in South Africa. London: Pluto Press, 1998. Bond, Patrick and Zapiro. Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms. Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwa-ZuluNatal Press, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. “Neoliberal newspeak: notes on the new planetary vulgate.” Radical Philosophy 105 (2001): 1–6. Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge, 2003. Halliday, Michael A. K. and Christian Matthiessen. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). London: Hodder Education, 2004. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design. London, New York: Routledge, 2006. Marais, Hein. South Africa: Limits to Change? London: Zed, 2000. —. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: the Political Economy of Change. London, New York: Zed, 2011. Ortu, Claudia. “Trade Unions in South Africa and the discourse of the neoliberal state.” In South African Political Discourses, edited by M. Dedaic. Sage (forthcoming). —. “The denial of class struggle by British Governments in their antiunion discourse (1978-2007).” Critical Discourse Studies, 5(4) (2008): 289-301.

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—. Industrial Relations and Conservative Governments in the Eighties: Argumentation and Linguistic Strategies for the Taming of Trade Unions (2nd ed.). Roma: Aracne, 2012. Orwell, George and Reynolds Reginald (eds). British Pamphleteers, Vol. 1, From the Sixteenth Century to the French Revolution. London: Allan Wingate, 1948. Toulmin, Stephen E. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.

Notes 1 The Plan was designed by a committee known as the National Planning Commission, headed by ANC member and Minister in the Presidency, Trevor Manuel. The 444-pages-long document purports to provide a “Vision for 2030” (South Africa and National Planning Commission 2011: 1) and promises to finally give an answer to the dramatic problem of unemployment and poverty in the Country.



BUILDING ETHNIC INCLUSIVENESS IN A PLURAL SOCIETY: KAMLA PERSAD-BISSESSAR’S 2010 ELECTION CAMPAIGN IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO ELEONORA ESPOSITO

1. Trinidad and Tobago: voting along ethnic lines In his attempt to trace an ontology of the Caribbean existence, Holger Henke said: “Perhaps nowhere else in the world do so many different people, value systems and logics cohabit in such a limited space” (1997: 43). This is most certainly true for Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost islands of the Caribbean archipelago, boasting an extremely varied and complex socio-political history1. Spanish, French and British colonialism shaped Trinidad’s current population through the use of African slave labour and, after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, East Indian indentured labour, which proved to be a rewarding workforce for the maintenance of European plantations (Tinker 1974). Coming at first as temporary sojourners on five-year contracts, East Indians eventually became permanent settlers on the island, sharing spaces with the liberated African slaves. These two colonial ethnic groups have come to share the sociopolitical scenario of independent Trinidad & Tobago, where “East Indians”, represent 35.4% of the population, and “Africans” constitute another 34.2%2 (Trinidad and Tobago Central Statistical Office 2011). In the 1950s, the colony moved progressively towards self-governance: with a large East Indian ethnic group on the one hand, and an African one on the other, there were two ready-made constituencies for two major parties with largely ethnic bases, in the context of an inherited Westminster-styled Parliament (Brereton 1981; Yelvington 1993). The pre-independence 1956 general elections saw the emergence of the People's National Movement (PNM) under the leadership of Eric Williams, supported by the urban-based middle and lower classes, who were mainly of African ancestry. The Democratic Labor Party (DLP) led

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by Rudranath Capildeo, expression of the rural, more conservative IndoTrinidadian middle and upper-middle classes, was rapidly relegated to the opposition (Ryan 1972). The PNM won every General Election between 1956 and 1981; Williams became Prime Minister at independence in 1962, and remained in that position until his death in 1981. With the rise to power of the People’s National Movement, assimilation was favoured instead of cultural pluralism as the party tried to glue together all the disparate cultures of the two islands in a postcolonial nation-building effort (Meighoo 2003). “There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India…There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin […]. The only Mother we can recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago” (1962: 279), Eric Williams said, although he was speaking of a society comprising only people with gene pools originating elsewhere in the world, as even the few survivors of the indigenous Taino tribes were actually immigrants from the Greater Antilles. Under the PNM administration, Afro-Creole culture became more predominant, while Indo-Trinidadians were still largely confined to the primary sector of the economy, with a number of religious, linguistic and cultural differences symbolically positioning them outside of the nation3. Throughout the post-independence era, the legacy of British colonial policies and its plantation society structure have influenced many aspects of socio-political life on the island, marking and reproducing the “Us vs. Them” partition between the two major ethnic groups (Puri 1997; 1999). Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians have been struggling for political control through census counts and racial voting for over forty years, but the 2010 General Elections marked a turning point in the history of the nation. On May 24th, 2010, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla PersadBissessar, its first female Prime Minister and the second person of East Indian origin (after Basdeo Panday in 1995) to hold the PM office in 48 years of independence. She won as the leader of a new coalition party, the People’s Partnership (PP), comprising the United National Congress (UNC), the UNC-derived Congress of the People (COP), the AfroTobagonian and autonomist Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP), the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), a black nationalist movement established in 1969 by the Trinidadian Black Power activist Makandal Daaga, and the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), supported by the labour movement and led by the renowned labour leader Errol McLeod. The People’s Partnership defeated three-term Prime Minister and Leader of the PNM Patrick Manning and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of 41 in the House of Representatives, also by conquering a large number of PNM-held constituencies in the urbanized North of the country.



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2. Doing CDA in the Archipelago Understanding the contemporary structures of power, control and dominance in the postcolonial Caribbean requires going beyond the traditional units of analysis of the social and political sciences. Although the latest major contributions in Caribbean studies seem to have underestimated the potential of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to the field, a proper deconstruction of texts and their associated discourses within a CDA framework would naturally bring to the fore how dominant or contending groups—whether political, social, economic, or scholarly—reconcile ideological interests and conflicts by disguising them through […] mystified tropes and discourses (Edmondson 1999: 4).

Critical Discourse Analysis, referred to either as a programme of study (Wodak and Meyer 2001) or as a form of critical social research (Fairclough 2003; 2006), allows to explore the role of semiosis in social change, starting from a definition of discourse that emphasizes the link of semiosis to society and their dialectical mutual relationship (Fairclough 1995). By perceiving language use as a “social practice” (Fairclough 1989), CDA offers a context-sensitive alternative to Discourse Analysis, encompassing the whole set of cultural, social and psychological frameworks in which language operates. Largely and fruitfully applied to the study of political discourse (Van Dijk 1998; Fairclough 2000; Wodak et al. 2009), CDA aims at revealing the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias as well as how these discursive sources are maintained and reproduced within specific social, political and historical context (Van Dijk 2001a). This focus on the socio-political context, and on its mutually influencing relationship with language, gives CDA a strong potential for the analysis of political discourse in the postcolonial scenario of Trinidad. This study aims at investigating some of the linguistic and multimodal strategies that enabled the Indo-Trinidadian leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and her coalition party to cross the atavistic ethnic and political divide in the country. The corpus of data is constituted by 25 political speeches (88,507 tokens), delivered by the PM candidate throughout the election campaign (from April 12th to May 24th, 2010), by images retrieved from the 2010 People’s Partnership manifesto, and by the “We Will Rise” publicity video broadcasted during the electoral campaign. In the following analysis of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s speeches, a CDA approach will be used in order to understand how she was able to create a discourse of power and legitimation for herself and her new coalition

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party, deeply embedded in the celebratory narrative of a multicultural nation. Since political communication is inherently multimodal, images and music played a very active role in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign. A complete analysis of the campaign, therefore, should necessarily include those multimodal resources mainly used by the party to convey ethnic inclusiveness in a visual, immediate and straightforward way. Thus, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (1996) is a fruitful integration to the multidisciplinary CDA framework, for its focus on composite, multimodal texts, defined as “any text whose meanings are realized through more than one semiotic mode” (183). Building upon a Systemic Functional approach, they established an authentic inventory of common patterns (such as conventions and established structures) of various visual semiotic resources and analysed the way these are used to produce meaning. In particular, their studies on visual composition in a multimodal text are relevant for the analysis of the pictures from the People’s Partnership manifesto.

3. The 2010 People’s Partnership Campaign: building ethnic inclusiveness We might argue that all pronouns are, in a sense, political, as their usage always entails a form of representation of the relationship between ourselves and the world. Some of the functions of pronouns have been defined in terms of their capacity to act as a means of expressing different social relations (Hanks 1992), or as a means of discursively constructing identity (Goffman 1974; 1981). Also Fairclough (1989: 125) describes pronouns as bearers of relational values, which he explains as being a representation of social relations between people, or between the speaker/writer and the text. The vast use of pronouns in political discourse has been widely scrutinized, as the pronominal choices of politicians serve persuasive and strategic political functions. As Boyd (2013) aptly summarizes, pronouns are closely tied to the notion of identity and ideology and their usage in political discourse is highly influenced by the role of people and groups in social and political spaces (Chilton and Schäffner 1997). They can constitute an effective way to express (or silence) collectivity and individuality (Fairclough 2003), or to polarize any representation of ingroups and outgroups (Van Dijk 2001b; Suleiman and O’ Connell 2008). The usage of the first person plural is among the most interesting aspects of political discourse analysis. More specifically, using an inclusive “we” reduces the distance between the speaker and the audience, builds relationships and gives a sense of shared communality.



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By giving the feeling that the speaker and the audience are not divided entities but a cooperative, single entity, it develops pride in the listeners. As Fairclough (1989: 127) points out, “the rhetorical implication is that the audience must share the Party’s views as being the only correct ones”. Unquestionably, part of this group creation is achieved through the classic polarization of a positive “we” as opposed to a negative “them”. But who is “we” in the multi-ethnic, plural nation of Trinidad and Tobago? The Afro-Trinidadian PNM and the Indo-Trinidadian UNC have been addressing a primarily ethnic-based electorate in the last 48 years of campaigning, but a multi-ethnic coalition party like the People’s Partnership had to discursively redefine its pattern of inclusivity. Rather than from the simple need to popularize the party’s view, PersadBissessar’s inclusive “we” stems from the urgent necessity of attenuating the East Indian ethnic matrix of her affiliation party, with the ultimate goal of underscoring the plurality of the coalition and eventually broadening her electorate. The first person plural is used in the People’s Partnership’s election slogan (“We Will Rise”), as well as in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches, where is the most frequent pronoun throughout the campaign: Pronoun We You I He They

Number of occurrences 1683 964 643 520 352

Freq. PTW 19,01 10,8 7,2 5,8 3,9

Table 1. Frequency of Personal Pronouns in Persad-Bissessar’s Campaign Speeches4

In previous research on the use of “we’” in political interviews (Urban 1986), the pronoun is considered to have a varied distribution of referents ranging from “self + one other” to “self + humanity”. When using the pronoun “we” in her speeches, Kamla Persad-Bisessar seems to move along a rhetorical continuum building up from the particular to the universal. As in a set of Chinese boxes, Persad-Bissessar starts creating a bond at a personal level, where “we” is meant for “you and I” and she invites any single Trinidadian citizen to symbolically “take her hand” and follow her lead:

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Building Ethnic Inclusiveness in a Plural Society We’ve got less than five weeks to build that future and I’m asking each of you to join me. I’m going to need each of you. So take my hand and join me on this path. And we will walk it together and we will not lose (Speech in St. Helena, Apr 16th, 2010).

Then she moves to the discursive creation of the future government “we”. Here the referents are Persad-Bisessar and her coalition, the People’s Partnership: A broad government that delivers what the nation and the people need. And that’s exactly what our People’s Partnership will do. It’s how we return government to the people, how we make it accountable to all of us and how we end Patrick Manning’s near decade long government for and by corruption (Speech in La Horquetta, Apr 30th, 2010).

Finally, she shifts to a wider national level, where “we” is meant to include the “people” or the “nation” of Trinidad and Tobago. As expected, this is the level where Persad-Bisessar mostly positions herself: We are a nation that derives its strength from its diversity. We are one nation, comprised of people whose ancestors came from different continents, whose skins have different tones, and who pray to different gods. And the result is a beautiful culture that has produced music, dance, food and festival known throughout the world. We are not merely tolerant of our differences; we embrace our differences. We combine, share and exchange; and the result is that we are all better for it. We are stronger for it. And now the People’s Partnership finally presents for the people of Trinidad and Tobago a political choice that mirrors the strength of the nation. For the first time, our politics is not confined to a contest of race against race; region against region; interest against interest. For the first time, our politics now embraces our differences, and creates strength from what was once divisive in the past (Speech in Gasparillo, May 11th, 2010).

As shown in the quoted passage, Persad-Bissessar’s stance throughout the campaign was often “epideictic” rather than “deliberative” (Aristotle 1982): she regularly contemplated the audience with the goal of highlighting and praising its inherently plural nature. If election speeches can be considered as a form of “political advertising” (Reisigl 2008), PersadBissessar contributed in advertising (and, simultaneously, discursively creating) a national culture of multiculturalism while looking for political consent for her coalition party. Persad-Bissessar’s use of “we” here echoes Trinidad and Tobago’s motto, “Together We Aspire, Together We Achieve”, embodying the atavistic preoccupation with producing “a Trinidadian people” in an ethnically fragmented country. The call for



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racial and cultural harmony is often explicit in Persad-Bissessar’s discourse and articulated through a rhetorical celebration of diversity. Eriksen (2006: 14) proposes a clear-cut contrast between diversity and difference in minority debate, underscoring two radically distinctive ways of responding to cultural variation. While diversity involves a set of “largely aesthetic, politically and morally neutral expressions of cultural difference” that find their allotted space in the public sphere, difference, on the other hand, refers to “questionable notions and practices in a minority group or category”, which create conflicts, weaken social solidarity and constitute an impediment to national cohesion. When diversity is systematically celebrated by political speech as the dominant trope of nationality and as a national strength, it produces a narrative of Trinidad and Tobago as intrinsically homogeneous and diverse. Persad-Bissessar’s speech in Gasparillo alludes to those aspects of Caribbean culture that Belinda Edmondson (1999: 2) calls “romances”, that is to say, “particular tropes and paradigms identified with an essential Caribbeanness”, such as Carnival and cultural hybridity to name two of the most popular examples. The People’s Partnership’s inclusive discourse aims at levelling history, class, and racial inequality by positing a space in which all ethnic groups are equal, and all brought an equally important contribution to the making of the independent nation. The racialized “Us vs. Them” dichotomy is flattened by promoting an imagined, “larger” unified people. PersadBissessar’s speech does not attempt at erasing differences à la Eric Williams, but keeps them below “the veneer of ... homogeneity” (Premdas 1996: 3). There might not be “Mother India” or “Mother Africa”, as Williams used to say, but surely there are “Grandmother India” and “Grandmother Africa” in the background of Persad-Bissessar’s new national narrative. Ethnic inclusivity is achieved even more straightforwardly in the front cover of the People’s Partnership manifesto, where Kamla is in the foreground, dressed in a yellow suit, yellow being the new colour introduced in the Trinidad and Tobago political scene for the new PP coalition party, as opposed to the PNM’s red and UNC’s orange (see Figure 1, colour centerfold). The four men in the background on the left are the co-protagonists of the coalition, and three out of four are of African origins: from left to right, Ashworth Jack (leader of the Tobago Organisation of the People), Errol Mc Leod (leader of the Movement for Social Justice), Makandal Daaga (leader of the Trinidadian Black Power revolution in the 1970s and founder of the National Joint Action Committee), and finally the IndoTrinidadian Winston Dookeran (leader of the Congress of the People). The

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Trinidad and Tobago flag and the symbols of the parties in the coalition complete the composition at the top (“ideal”) and bottom (“real”). According to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, the role of the participants (and the way they relate to each other and with the viewer) is enhanced by the zone they occupy in the image, and by the “informational value” (1996: 177) embedded in that specific area of the image. Here Persad-Bissessar is in a “new” position on the right, while the four men are in a “given” position on the left, although backgrounded and smaller compared to the female leader. We might argue that they have a legitimizing function: they are renowned and experienced politicians, and they are men. But it is their ethnicity (implied by their skin colour and by Daaga’s traditional dashiki), that strikes the viewer the most and completes the composition, both legitimizing the multi-ethnic afflatus of the coalition and acting as a visual counterpart for Kamla’s ethnicity, which is clearly not African. Second from left, Errol McLeod, former President General of the renowned Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU), represents an authentic symbol of the Trinidadian labour movement. The 1970s oil boom occurred under the PNM government, and the oil industry was rapidly monopolized by the Afro-Trinidadian part of the population. The inclusion of Errol McLeod had a great symbolic value for the People’s Partnership coalition and it was meant to speak primarily to the Afro-Trinidadian electorate. A strategy that proved effective, as McLeod was candidate in the Pointe-à-Pierre constituency, site of the country’s largest Petrotrin oil refinery, and succeeded in winning it for the People’s Partnership. The same multimodal narrative of ethnic inclusivity is displayed at page 34 of the manifesto, where Kamla Persad-Bissessar is depicted on the left side (and is now in a “given” position as the Leader of the coalition), presenting her candidates for the country’s forty-one constituencies. These are portrayed in smiling close-ups that are consistently smaller than the picture of the PM candidate, with party logos positioned like halos behind their heads. Similarly, the UNC party logo under the title “2010 Candidates of the People’s Partnership” title is visibly larger than the other two, being the UNC the major party in the coalition. The reader may easily recognize the first three candidates at the top centre of the page not only because they are situated in a salient position (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 177) in order to attract the viewer’s attention, but also because they were already portrayed on the front page of the manifesto. Ethnic inclusivity is achieved not simply by listing their names and constituencies (although surnames could have been enough to detect the candidates’ ethnic backgrounds), but with a two-page group picture in full colour,



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where all the different ethnic backgrounds of the candidates are juxtaposed and visually ‘staged’ for the reader to see (see Figure 2, colour centerfold). Visual ethnic inclusivity and multimodal legitimation are also the leitmotif of the “We Will Rise” party ad. One of the most famous of the campaign, the video features the local celebrity Nigel Rojas, vocalist and guitarist of the Trinidadian reggae/rock band Orange Sky. This moving rock ballad constituted a neat and modernizing departure from the fast soca or the loud and catchy political kaiso that have traditionally dominated the Trinidad and Tobago political arena5. The ad seems to have been inspired by the globally famous “Yes We Can” Obama video of 2008: shot in stark black and white, with an alternation of Nigel Rojas singing, Kamla Persad-Bissessar speaking and a number of Trinbagonians chanting “We Will Rise” in the refrain. The video ends with the slogan “Kamla 2010 – a New Day, a New Way Forward” written on the background image of a sky at dawn. The images and the lyrics in the video are taken from the Election Launch Speech delivered on April 12th, 2010 in the constituency of Pointe-à-Pierre: We stand for a vision of a nation in which our abundant natural resources are invested in the people not in political profiteering. We stand for a society where law and order is restored and women and children can be safe in their homes and on the streets again. We stand for a system of government that is accountable to the people: not just those who elected them, but for all of the people of Trinidad and Tobago.

The use of text on screen is limited, only the “We Will Rise” phrase appears in capital white letters, always synchronised with the refrain. During the refrain, Kamla leaves the scene to her electorate and Nigel Rojas singing, projecting the audience into an unspecific future: We will rise, we will rise, I can see a new day dawning from the hope that’s in your eyes. We will rise, we will rise, turn the pages of our history, change the courses of our lives.

The guest appearances are Trinibagonians of varied ethnic background, age and gender, in a basic East Indian – African alternation, similar to the one branded by Luciano Benetton in the renowned “multicultural” ads of his “United Colors of Benetton” clothing company. The presence of the dread-locked, Afro-Trinidadian Nigel Rojas acts as a visual counterpart for Kamla’s East Indian ethnicity.

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Fig. 3. Frames from the “We Will Rise” video

Given the similarities between the videos of Obama and Persad-Bissessar, it is plausible that Obama’s success in 2008 influenced the stylistic choices of the party: the majority of Trinidad’s electors is less than 45 years old, and this modern, American-inspired style has proven to be effective. As expected, the “Yes We Can” catchphrase trademarked by Obama is substituted with Kamla’s “We Will Rise”, repeatedly used throughout the campaign in her speeches. Compared to Obama’s “can”, Kamla’s “will” represents a higher scale of modal commitment, and signals a higher degree of certainty about the validity of her proposition (Radden and Dirven 2007). Because of the idea of permission and ability inherent in “can”, Obama’s modal choice constitutes the lowest degree of pressure, shortening the distance between himself and his audience. Although the “Yes” at the beginning of the catchphrase increases the epistemic force of the preposition, Obama’s “can” primarily concerns ability and potential, and its elliptical nature further opens up to potentially infinite possibilities. On the contrary, “will” is an epistemic modal rendition of Kamla’s strong mind and keen desire to lead Trinidadians through the difficulties, and confirms that more actions will be definitely taken in the future. Being plural, future, and biblical, “We Will Rise” sticks to all the staples of political communication, and links to both the context of corruption and scandals that led to the 2010 snap elections, and to the future of the nation, currently involved in the “Vision 2020” programme, with the final goal of



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achieving the status of a fully-developed country by that date. Just like the Obama video, Persad-Bissessar does not mention election day or voting, and, although its primary communicative goal is linked to the general elections, it could be considered a sort of universal claim for multiculturalism.

4. Concluding remarks Although elections in Trinidad and Tobago have usually represented a struggle for ethnic assertion, the 2010 general elections seem to have marked the beginning of a new politics of multiculturalism in the country. A discourse inherently based on the celebration of diversity and multiethnicity was deployed by Persad-Bissessar to present her coalition as a new order of democratic governance that could avoid exclusivism and promote power sharing. More than addressing the Indo-Trinidadian UNC electorate (whose support for an East Indian candidate was almost taken for granted), it seems that the coalition aimed at convincing the AfroTrinidadian part of the population, traditionally PNM electors. It did so both with a national rhetoric of inclusiveness in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches, but also, and even more powerfully, with visual representation, as in the “We Will Rise” video. Although further investigation is required, this preliminary analysis also shows how Kamla Persad-Bissessar, being an East Indian Trinidadian woman, legitimated her demand for political power by including Afro-Trinidadian men in leading positions in her coalition, and stressed this inclusion by means of a powerful multimodal discourse throughout the campaign.

References Anthony, Laurence. AntConc (Version 3.4.1w) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University, 2014. Available from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ (last accessed July 2014). Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric. London: Heinemann, 1982. Boyd, Michael. “Reframing the American Dream”. In Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice, edited by Piotr Cap and Urzula Okulska. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Brereton, Bridget. A History of Modern Trinidad 1783–1962. London: Heinemann, 1981. Chilton, Paul and Christina Schäffner. “Discourse and Politics”. In Discourse as Social Interaction, edited by Teun Van Dijk. London: Sage, 1997.

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Edmondson, Belinda. “Introduction”. In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, edited by Belinda Edmondson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. “Diversity versus difference: Neo-Liberalism in the Minority Debate”. In The Making and Unmaking of Difference, edited by Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction Publishers, 2006. Fairclough, Norman. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman, 1995. —. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989. —. New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge, 2000. —. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge, 2003. —. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2006. Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. —. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London: Harper and Row, 1974. Hanks, William. “The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference”. In Rethinking Context, edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Henke, Holger. “Towards an Ontology of Caribbean Existence”. The Caribbean(s) Redefined, Latin American Issues 13 (1997): 37–68. Khan, Aisha. “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol”. Cultural Anthropology 16(3) (2001): 271–302. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge, 1996. Meighoo, Kirk. Politics in a Half Made Society: Trinidad and Tobago 1925-2001. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003. Munasinghe, Viranjini. Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Premdas, Ralph. “Ethnicity and Identity in the Caribbean: Decentering a Myth”. Working Paper # 234. Notre Dame, Indiana: The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1996. Puri, Shalini. “Race, Rape, and Representation: Indo-Caribbean Women and Cultural Nationalism”. Cultural Critique 36 (1997): 119–63. —. “Canonized Hybridities, Resistant Hybridities: Chutney Soca, Carnival, and the Politics of Nationalism”. In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, edited by Belinda Edmondson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.



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Radden, Günter and René Dirven. Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2007. Reddock, Rhoda. “Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad and Tobago: The Little Tradition”. Caribbean Quarterly 44 (1-2) (1998): 62-80. Regis, Louis. The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago, 1962-87. Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998. Reisigl, Martin. “Rhetoric of political speeches”. In Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, edited by Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Ryan, Selwyn. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Suleiman, Camelia and Daniel O’ Connell. “Race and Gender in Current American Politics”. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 37(6) (2008): 373-89. Tinker, Hugh. A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Trinidad and Tobago Central Statistical Office. 2011 Population and Housing Census Demographic Report. Retrieved 20 August 2013 from http://www.cso.gov.tt/. Urban, Greg. “Rhetoric of a War Chief”. In Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies (N°5), edited by Richard J. Parmentier and Greg Urban. Chicago: Center for Psychosocial Studies, 1986. Van Dijk, Teun. “What is Political Discourse Analysis?”. In Political Linguistics, edited by Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998. —. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001a. —. “Multidisciplinary CDA: a Plea for Diversity.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. London: Sage, 2001b. Williams, Eric. History of the Nation of Trinidad and Tobago. London: Andre Deutsch, 1962. Wodak, Ruth and Michael Meyer. “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. London: Sage, 2001.

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Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart. The Discursive Construction of National Identity (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Yelvington, Kevin. “Introduction: Trinidad Ethnicity”, in Trinidad Ethnicity, edited by Kevin Yelvington. London: Macmillan Press, 1993.

Notes 1 In this study, I refer to the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago as “Trinidad”. It should be noted that the two islands were made a single crown colony of the British Empire only in 1889. Both Tobago’s colonial history and post-Independence socio-cultural forms require further and separate analysis (see also Williams 1962; Brereton 1981). 2 A brief note on terminology: I use the terms “Afro-Trinidadian” and “IndoTrinidadian” as the analyst’s categories to refer to the population of Trinidad and Tobago having African and East Indian ancestry respectively. Real-life usage of ethnic terms in Trinidad and Tobago follows far more complex patterns. For a more complete terminological taxonomy see Munasinghe (2001: x-xiii). 3 For a conceptualization of Creole culture in Trinidad, and its deep implications in the exclusion of the East Indian ethnic group from the national socio-political scene, see Reddock 1998, Khan 2001, Munasinghe 2001. 4 The software employed to carry out the frequency analysis is Antconc 3.4.1w (Anthony 2014). 5 For Calypso music and its role as political communicator in Trinidadian society, see Regis 1998.



“BLACK MAN RUNNIN’ AND IT AIN’T FROM THE POLICE”: RAP MUSIC, POLITICAL ENDORSEMENT AND BLACK IDENTITY PAOLA ATTOLINO

Introduction In a 1996 song called Changes, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, talking about America, said: “and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president”. This was the case until November 2008, when the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States has made Martin Luther King’s dream come true. In the months leading up to the election, many African American rappers endorsed Obama’s candidacy, giving rise to a new Hip Hop genre called Obama Rap. Political endorsement is unusual for rap music, a genre strongly related to the experience of race and American Blackness in particular. Rap has always been against the Establishment, marked by disruptive lyrics expressing black America’s rage and discontent. Applying the Appraisal Framework1 to a small corpus of rap songs, the present paper investigates to what extent lexical choices, linguistic uses and the employment of pragmatic strategies in the lyrics of so-called Obama Rap may reveal a sort of reconciliation between rap music and politics, in an attempt to discuss whether or not a new idea of (Black) American identity is emerging. When theorizing about identity, there is a common dualism between essentialism and social constructionism. Essentialist theories consider identity as something taken for granted, located ‘inside’ the person, whereas constructionist approaches view identity as a socially constructed and negotiated category, investigating “how people perform, ascribe and resist identity” (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 11-12). In view of the significant potential of rap lyrics for social insights, a constructionist

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approach will be adopted, and special attention will be paid to the negotiation of identity in this particular discourse context.

1. Barack Obama: the first “Hip Hop President”? The attention the Hip Hop community devoted to Obama dates back some time before his historical presidential election. Hip Hop artists all over the East and West Coasts were riding hard for the Democratic candidate, supporting him in their recordings and in interviews. On August 2007, rapper Common told CNN: He’s fresh, you know. He’s got good style. As far as people in my age group and people that love Hip Hop, there’s a love for Obama. He represents progress. He represents what Hip Hop is about. Hip Hop is about progress, the struggle (Hamby 2007).

In the same period another rapper, Talib Kweli, declared: His youth, his being black, the way that he speaks, the way that he lays out his point of view. It’s someone who looks more like you. I don’t mean black, but I mean the young thing. And his name is Barack Obama (Springer Jr 2007).

Indeed, Obama is not the first politician to get support from the Hip Hop community: a 1984 song from rappers Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel was devoted to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, leader of the Rainbow Coalition and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination: He’s coming… He’s here! His name is Jesse… Brothers stand together and let the whole world see Our brother Jesse Jackson go down in history… So vote! (Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, Jesse, 1984)

However, Hip Hop artists never fully invested in Jackson’s candidacy, they remained sceptical about a political will to elect a black president at that time. The political scenery has changed thirty years later, as rapper Snoop Dogg explained on CNN’s Larry King Live in February 2008: I think America is ready for a Black President. […] you know, I remember in the past when we had Presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, it was a gimmick, it was like a joke because nobody really believed Jesse could win… Right now, people really feel like this man could really win, he’s



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got the right thing goin for him; he’s got the right conversation. [my emphasis]

In describing Obama as having “the right conversation” Snoop Dogg not only grasped his linguistic ability to styleshift, but also his ability to reach multiple audiences. Obama himself contributed to his own emergence as a Hip Hop byword. In a number of high profile media outlets, he recurrently cited Hip Hop as one of his music interests (Alim and Smitherman 2012). As a US senator, Obama was interviewed by Jeff Johnson on the BET special What’s In It for Us? in 2007. To the question “Would there be space in your White House, when you talk about education, when you talk about incarceration […] would there be a place to explore how Hip Hop can be effectively used?”, Obama answered: Absolutely. You know, and I’ve met with Jay-Z and I’ve met with Kanye, and talked with other artists, about how potentially to bridge that gap, you know, I think the potential for them to deliver a message of extraordinary power, that gets people thinking – you know, the thing about Hip Hop today is it’s smart. I mean, it’s insightful. And, you know, the way that they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

The future President demonstrates his familiarity with Hip Hop culture, but he also walks the tightrope, making evident his criticism about the potentiality of Hip Hop message. In fact, he continues: So, the question then is, what’s the content? What’s the message? I understand folks wanna be rooted in their community, they wanna be down. But what I always say is, is that, you know, Hip Hop is not just a mirror of what is, it should also be a reflection of what can be. […] Art can’t just be a rear-view mirror, you know, it should have a headlight out there, you know, pointing to where we need to go. [my emphasis]

By using the term “art”, Obama reveals his respect for a culture that continues to be misunderstood and misinterpreted in the mainstream. That Hip Hop is an art is obvious to many African Americans, but not in public discourse. The attitude of Senator Barack Obama towards Hip Hop has been defined as a “delicate dance with Hip Hop heads and haters” (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 137), striking a balance between legitimate criticism and support. Mark Anthony Neal (2008), professor of black pop culture at Duke University, describes this “dance” like this:

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Rap Music, Political Endorsement and Black Identity The challenge that Barack Obama had was really to be able to wink to the Hip Hop community and say, ‘I really can’t acknowledge you in the mainstream, but understand that I’m hearing what your critique is… what your concerns are, and you now have a wide-open space in the so-called underground to talk about why my candidacy is important’.

Obama seems to be the first politician to reframe the debate about Hip Hop as a discussion about an art, a culture deserving respect. And what’s more, he seems to ‘speak the code correctly’: on April 17, 2008, during one of his speeches in South Carolina where he responded to a sharp attack from his rival Hillary Clinton, Obama looked over his shoulder and brushed it two or three times. While the crowd appreciated the gesture, anyone familiar with Hip Hop knew exactly what he meant: the presidential candidate was referencing Jay-Z’s hit Dirt Off Your Shoulder in order to decry the textbook Washington politics represented by Hillary Clinton, thus engaging in a move that “illustrated both a generational and a cultural gap” (Wiltz 2008). Barack Obama also showed his ability to combine ‘White syntax’ with ‘Black style’, putting most Americans at ease: more than any other cultural symbol, his linguistic flexibility allowed Americans to simultaneously “Whiten”, “Blacken”, “Americanize” and “Christianize” the black candidate for president in the eyes and ears of both Black and White Americans (Gates Jr 2012). Indeed, language is a crucial factor in determining whether a politician is likable or relatable. Obama’s mastery of so-called ‘standard English’ allowed White mainstream Americans to feel not alienated by a language style that was seen as transcending Blackness and that made both Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and former president George W. Bush describe Obama as “articulate” (Schouten 2007), a compliment that implicitly and unintentionally turned into a racist remark: “articulate while Black” (Moore 2007). However, it is not his ‘articulateness’, but Obama’s familiarity with Black American Vernacular and Hip Hop lexicon that represents a real presidential first. Such familiarity is not merely symbolic and is part of what has prompted people to refer to Barack Obama as the “first Hip Hop President”. It is also part of the reason why many political observers have acknowledged Hip Hop for inspiring the largest young Black electorate in American history to vote, including many Hip Hop artists (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 135). A good number of rappers offered their support for Barack Obama through their songs, uncommon behaviour in a genre rooted in antipathy toward the political establishment. Rap music is not



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only a sociological mirror of society, and its relationship with politics has always been controversial, as stated by scholars and rappers: Hip Hop narratives do not merely reflect society; they reflect on society, providing critiques of the United States of America’s most pressing social problems and broadcasting them to every corner of the globe” (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 149-150). Political rap affiliates through a rhetorical trope of condemnation. In other words, a consumer of political rap aligns themselves with the rap artist and the African-American “political” community more generally through the “shared feeling” that the “dominant forces” (who have traditionally oppressed African-Americans) should in turn be condemned or “judged” for their actions (Caldwell 2008: 24). Rap continues the long history of Black cultural subversion and social critique in music and performance (Rose 1994: 11). Rap is Black America’s TV station […] Black life doesn’t get the total spectrum of information through anything else (Chuck D of Public Enemy quoted in Leland 2004: 70). Rap music has warned the Reagans and Bushes and politicians. We’re screamin’ out what the problem is, and they’re screamin’ back, “Don’t say what you’re sayin” (Luther Campbell of 2LiveCrew quoted in Weeks 2004: 19).

Not surprisingly, many rap songs include explicit lyrics against the Establishment, like “Fuck tha Police!” (N.W.A. 1988), “Fight the Power!” and “Don’t Believe The Hype!” (Public Enemy 1988), “Throw the Constitution Away!” (Ice-T 1989), “Let’s Gang Bang on The System!” (Dead Prez 2001), through which rappers have distanced themselves from the values of the dominant forces, from The Power, and hence from politics.

2. Obama Rap analysis The Obama Rap’s lyrics can be expected to undergo a change in attitude towards the Establishment with respect to previous rap lyrics. As outlined before, this paper performs a linguistic analysis of a small corpus of 15 Obama-endorsing rap songs. The data (see Table 1) has been sampled from the dedicated web page of Billboard.com2, the online version of the

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well-known American music magazine. The rap lyrics have been accessed from the Original Hip Hop Lyrics Archive3.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Title Ba-rock Song Black President Dear Obama Go tell yo mama 2 vote 4 Obama Letter to Obama Lyrics to Obama ‘08 My President Obamaway Open Letter to Obama Politics (Obama is here) The People Why Change (Work to do) Yes We Can You’re All Welcome

Artist Greg Reese Nas Mekka Don J-Xavier Joell Ortiz Various Artists Young Jeezy Ti$a Jin Ludacris Common Jadakiss Kidz in the Hall Dr. Crime Jay-Z

Table 1. The data: 15 Obama-endorsing rap songs released in 2007-2008

As mentioned, the methodology used for the analysis is Appraisal, an analytical framework designed to identify evaluation in language and comprising three main sub-systems: Attitude, Dialogue (or Engagement) and Intertextuality. Attitude concerns “the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgments and valuations” (Martin 2000: 145). Dialogue resources “are used by speakers to negotiate a space for particular attitudes and points of view within the diversity of value positions operative in any speech community” (White 2000: 71). Under Intertextuality, speakers adopt evaluative positions towards what they represent as the views and statements of other speakers (Martin and White 2005). The data analysed show that the most common types of Attitude in the Obama Rap songs are usually realised by the use of the first-personal singular pronoun “I”. Positive Judgements are directed at Obama, who is generally addressed with culture-bound terms: (1) You motivate us homie, that’s what it is. (Young Jeezy, My President)



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(2) I’m thinking I can trust this brotha. (Nas, Black President) (3) America’s favorite son, Who they choose in the polls Barack O. (Greg Reese, Ba-rock Song)

As stated by rapper Talib Kweli, Barack Obama’s name is “a nugget of lyrical gold. It sounds like a gunshot going off… Obama rhymes with a lot of things” (Hamby 2007). Rhyming, in fact, is a prevailing stylistic feature in the Obama Rap songs, as shown in the following examples: (4) I see the I in We my nigga, yours is my drama Standin’ in front of the judge with no honor Barack stick, knight the people like Obama (Common, The People) (5) Go tell yo mama to vote for Obama! (J-Xavier, Go tell yo mama to vote for Obama!) (6) Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama Why don't we impeach him and elect Obama (Jadakiss, Why)

Extract (6) also offers an example of negative Judgement directed at the incumbent president George W. Bush. Not surprisingly, negative Judgements in the Obama Rap lyrics are persistently directed at past, present and putative White Presidents: (7) Why vote republican if you black (Jadakiss, Why) (8) No president ever did shit for me (Young Jeezy, My President) (9) Every other president was nothin’ less than white (Nas, Black President) (10) McCain don’t belong in ANY chair unless he's paralyzed Yeah I said it cause Bush is mentally handicapped (Ludacris, Politics: (Obama is here))

Alongside Attitude, the lyrics display Dialogic resources, as extracts (4), (5) and (6) illustrate. In (4) the rapper engages in a dialogue with Obama

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(“I see the I in We my nigga”), whereas in (5) and (6) the interlocutor is the Hip Hop or the wider Black community (“Go tell yo mama…”; “Why don’t we…”). The Engagement system developed in the Appraisal Framework follows Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogic perspective of language and his notion of heteroglossia, namely the diversity of voices, style of discourse or points of view occurring in any form of verbal communication. An example of heterogloss is offered in extract (7), where the rapper engages with the possible alternative view of Republican voters. Actually, the Obama Rap lyrics display a higher frequency of monogloss, that is to say utterances which do not engage with alternate ‘voices’ or speakers’ point of view, as shown in extracts (8), (9) and (10), where the negative evaluation of the ‘dominant forces’ is non-negotiable. Extract (4) also presents the expression “my nigga”, which is the eyedialect form of the highly controversial N-word. The word ‘nigga’ “comes from the lexicon of the counter-language created over the centuries by African Americans, in an attempt to transform bad into good” (Smitherman 2006: 51). Arthur Spears has explained this phenomenon of re-appropriation with the term “uncensored mode”: In this mode, expressions that in censored contexts are considered obscene or evaluatively negative are used in an almost or completely evaluatively neutral way (Spears 1998: 232).

Looking into the various terms the rappers use to address Obama, the history-inspired “New-improved JFK”4 and the creative “Chocolate rain”5 stand out. Indeed, further Engagement values are to be found in the fact that most of the songs analysed are structured like a letter. The Democratic candidate is addressed simply as “Dear Obama”6, optimistically as “Dear Future President”, “Mr Future President” 7 and “Mr No More Drama” 8 , empirically as “Mr Black President” or informally as “Man”, “Homie” and the aforementioned “my nigga”9. The notion of heteroglossia pertains also to the Intertextuality system developed in the Appraisal Framework, which comes to the foreground when a speaker chooses to quote the words of another, either endorsing or dis-endorsing them. As a musical genre born from 1970s DJs, rap is largely based on the practice of sampling, which is “the incorporation of copyrighted musical compositions and/or recordings into new musical works” (Thomas 2012: 5). Not surprisingly, in the Obama Rap lyrics the most sampled voice is Obama. Four of the fifteen songs analysed include a sample of the famous slogan “Yes We Can!”10 , two songs contain the exhortation “Change the World!”11, and two songs12 sample a portion of



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Obama’s Iowa Victory Speech after he won the Democratic caucus on January 3, 2008: They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.

These words by Obama serve as a prompt to introduce some considerations about the supposed emergence of a new idea of (Black) American identity in the Obama Rap lyrics. In particular, the data have been divided into two sub-sets according to the physical location they broadcast. Forty percent of the songs talk of America as the place that needs a change, as shown in the following extracts: (11) For way too long America has been separate and not equal (Various Artists, Lyrics to Obama ‘08) (12) Yes the things you say are true put it together for the red white and blue (Greg Reese, Ba-rock Song) (13) Red states Blue states that’s kinda late in your eyes there is only the United States (Jin, Open Letter to Obama)

On the other hand, sixty percent of the songs broadcast the black ghetto into America’s public conscience: (14) They forgot us on the block / Got us in the box [...] I got a semi to spark / The game’s in a drought (Nas, Black President) (15) You know where the hell I’m from I’m from the bottom (Jay-Z, You’re All Welcome) (16) My president is black, my Lambo's blue And I’ll be goddamned if my rims ain’t too My momma ain’t a home, and daddy’s still in jail Tryna make a plate, anybody seen the scale? (Young Jeezy, My President)

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Extract (16) offers an example of what Alim (2006: 109) defines as a strategic use of language aimed at constructing “a street-conscious identity”. “Lambo” stands for Lamborghini, a status symbol car in the ghetto. As rapper Jeezy proudly says over the fading music in the outro of the song: “I was, I was the first nigga to ride through my hood in a Lamborghini, yeah” (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 148). “My rims” refer to that visible part of a car’s wheels that rappers consider in the same way as jewellery13. In street slang, “the scale” refers to the equipment used by drug dealers to weight their product to sell, often the only way in the ghetto to put food on the table (to “make a plate”). Authenticity and “the real” are fundamental also to a political-endorsing genre like Obama Rap, as Hip Hop “remains one of the few, if not the only, musical genre in America that consistently talks openly, boldly and honestly about race” (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 159).

3. Some closing remarks Appraisal positions us to feel – and through shared feelings to belong. In this respect, Appraisal is a resource for negotiating solidarity (Martin 2004: 326).

On the surface, Obama Rap is a celebration of the (not yet elected) nation’s first Black president. The application of Appraisal theory to its lyrics has shown that most songs are a continuation of Hip Hop’s relentless and uncompromising critiques of social inequality. A reconciliation between rap and politics seems to be prospected: (17)

I hope you heard this letter and do some things to make sure the next one I’m writing is better (Joell Ortiz, Letter to Obama)

(18) But will he keep it way real? When he wins – will he really care still? (Nas, Black President)

The rappers drew upon Obama’s rhetoric of hope and change, but the songs portray this rhetoric as a sort of closed circle: hope for a change, and then hope again. At the time I am writing, “Obama’s honeymoon with Hip Hop is over” (Nielson 2013). By the time of his second mandate, America’s first black president seems to have become part of the mainstream political establishment Hip Hop has always attacked:



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Gaza Strip was getting bombed Obama didn’t say shit That's why I ain’t vote for him (Lupe Fiasco, Words I Never Said, 2012)

As he sang the lyrics above during an event celebrating President Obama’s second term, rapper Lupe Fiasco was escorted off stage by security forces (Weiner 2013). However, has Obama been able to change the black myth of “acting white” to be successful? The opinion of a Fox News white online reader, quoted in Alim and Smitherman (2012: 153), may be thought provoking: “The very fact that you’re celebrating the election of a black man is conflicting with the idea of racial equality”. Indeed, any discussion on African American identity cannot be fruitful “without emphasizing the twoness of African American consciousness in the United States first exposed by DuBois” (Spears 1998: 248). African Americans try constantly to reconcile the two personalities that cohabit in their mind, the White and the Black, the hegemonic and the subalternal. As Potter (1995) claims, Hip Hop culture employs African American vernacular as a tool of resistance against the dominant power. The high frequency of monogloss propositions in the Obama Rap lyrics indicates a rhetorical trope that may be defined as ‘ignoring’ rather than ‘challenging’ the hegemonic forces. The rappers seem to avoid reproducing the dominantsubalternal relations, expressing their values as ‘absolute’, non-negotiable, exclusive. “Hip Hop is a site of identity negotiation” (Richardson 2006: 9), but black rappers’ identity seems to be hardly negotiable.

Dedication I dedicate this paper to ML for being with me in this journey at every step, at every breath I took.

References Alim, H. Samy. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Alim, H. Samy and Geneva Smitherman. Articulate While Black. Barack Obama, Language and Race in the U.S. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bakthin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1930s].

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Benwell, Bethan and Elizabeth Stokoe. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Caldwell, David L. “Affiliating with Rap Music: Political Rap or Gangsta Rap?” In Novitas Royal. Research on Youth and Language, Vol. 2(1), 13-27, 2008. Gates Jr, Henry L. “An Interview with H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman.” Oxford African American Studies Center, 2012. Accessed: December 29, 2013. http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/interviews/interview_4.jsp. Hamby, Peter. “Barack Obama gets name-dropped in Hip Hop”. CNN.com, August 17, 2007. Accessed: December 28, 2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/17/obama.hip.hop/. Leland, John. “Armageddon in Effect”. In And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. Edited by Raquel Cepeda. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004. Martin, James R. “Beyond exchange: APPRAISAL systems in English.” In Evaluation in Text, edited by Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson, 142-175. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Martin, James R. “Mourning: how we get aligned.” In Discourse and Society, Vol. 5, 321-344. London: SAGE Publications, 2004. Martin, James R. and Peter R.R. White. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Moore, Philip A. “Barack Obama is AWB: articulate while black”. In Racialicious: The Intersection of Race and Pop Culture, January 25, 2007. Accessed: November 29, 2013. http://www.racialicious.com/200 7/01/25/barack-obama-is-awb-articulate-while-black/. Neal, Mark A. quoted in “Obama Hip Hop: From Mixtapes To Mainstream”. In NPR Music, November 07, 2008. Accessed: November 17, 2013. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=96748462. Nielson, Erick. “Obama’s Honeymoon with Hip Hop is Over”. In New Republic, January 23, 2013. Accessed: January 05, 2014. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/112118/the-honeymoonover-obama-and-hip-hop. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Richardson, Elaine. Hip Hop Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2006. Schouten, Fredreka. “Biden burden by ‘clean’ language”. In Usa Today, January 31, 2007. Accessed: December 29, 2013.



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http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-31-biden2008_x.htm. Smitherman, Geneva. Words from the Mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge, 2006. Spears, Arthur. “African-American Language Use: Ideology and SoCalled Obscenity”. African-American English: Structure, History and Use, edited by Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh. New York: Routledge, 1998. Thomas, Woo J. “A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip Hop, Sampling and Semiotic Democracy.” Connecticut Law Review, 2012. Accessed: October 30, 2013. http://works.bepress.com/thomas_joo/7. Weeks, Edward J. From Reagonomics to Ebonics: The Urban Cultural Dissonance of Hip Hop. Department of History: University of Utah, 2004. Weiner, Rachel. “Lupe Fiasco escorted off stage after anti-Obama comments.” The Washington Post, January 21, 2013. Accessed: January 06, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/postpolitics/wp/2013/01/21/lupe-fiasco-escorted-off-stage-after-antiobama-comments/. White, Peter R.R. “Dialogue and inter-subjectivity: reinterpreting the semantics of modality and hedging”. In Working with Dialogue, edited by Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cotterill, and Frances Rock, 67-80. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. Wiltz, Teresa. “Obama Has Jay-Z on His IPod and The Moves To Prove It.” The Washington Post, April 19, 2008. Accessed: December 29, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR 2008041803282.html.

Notes 1

The Appraisal Framework is an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances and to manage interpersonal relationships (Martin and White 2005). 2 http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/474274/barack-obama-10best-songs-about-the-president (last accessed: 01/01/2014) 3 www.ohhla.com 4 Song nr. 2 from Table 1. 5 Song nr. 1 from Table 1. 6 Songs nr. 3, 5 and 9 from Table 1. 7 Song nr. 5 from Table 1. 8 Song nr. 15 from Table 1.

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Song nr. 7 from Table 1. Songs nr. 1, 2, 9, 14 from Table 1. 11 Songs nr. 2 and 12 from Table 1. 12 Nr. 2 and 6 from Table 1. 13 See www.urbandictionary.com. 10



CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES

LANGUAGING DIVERSITY IN EU INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE1 VANDA POLESE AND GERMANA D’ACQUISTO

Introduction According to the EU, ‘integration’ is a “two-way, multidimensional process” which involves different target groups, i.e. the main target group of migrants and their descendants, ethnic or national minorities, refugees and undocumented (irregular) migrants, and the native population of host countries. Different thematic dimensions offer a pragmatic framework for integration research: structural (e.g. labour market participation and educational attainments), cultural (e.g. language competences, values and norms), interactive (e.g. friendship and marriage patterns and transnational networks), and identificative integration (e.g. feelings of belonging), the openness of the majority society (e.g. personal and systemic openness), contextual aspects of migrants (e.g. the duration of stay and transnational patterns), and societal aspects (e.g. social-spatial criteria) (cf. Heckmann et al. 2010). In addition, ‘age’ and ‘gender’, as also resulting from this study, are among the new dimensions for integration research: The field of integration has expanded [to include], along with the traditional domains of work, education, housing and health and political, social and cultural/religious dimensions, new topics such as language, policymaking in the field, interethnic relations, discrimination, age, gender and generation (Penninx et al. 2008: 7).

Integration is also acknowledged to have different outcomes in various social areas and institutions. The harmonisation of sets of indicators on the European level, for instance, is recognisable in the implementation of national integration reporting or monitoring systems, although these differ because of their methodological approaches and data type used. One aspect of this is represented by existing monitoring systems on the European level which focus on individual aspects of integration (e.g. labour market participation) and thus do not reflect the multi-dimensional,

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non-linear process of integration. One further discriminatory element seems to be that whereas third country (non-EU) nationals are the target group of integration, datasets “only rarely differentiate by duration of stay and second generation migrant” (Heckmann et al. 2010: 4). Another discriminatory element is provided by official statistical information which in most European countries relies upon census data, register and counts. However, while official statistical data provide systematic reporting on the data situation of migrants by registration of objective structural data, multi-topic survey data constitute the basis for thematically differentiated analyses and analyses of the long-term and intergenerational character of integration processes. This chapter begins by identifying dominant concepts for the study of integration highlighting differences and/or similarities among them with special attention to immigrant integration from a European perspective. The research is then developed in links between notions identified in dimensions of integration and analysis of roles through words, especially nouns, deployed in EU institutional discourse in dealing with immigrant integration. In order to provide a conceptual basis to be developed through quantitative data by means of AntConc 3.1.2 interrogation software, different approaches to immigration and integration are examined in Section 2. The main research questions underlying this study concern the adoption of apparently divergent terminology which affects the understanding and treatment of such a complex phenomenon and “rescaling” of EU institutional discourse of immigrant integration.

1. Corpus, aim and methodology As mentioned above, our investigation is based on a quantitativequalitative analysis of the texts in a Corpus ad hoc collected and searched by AntConc 3.1.2 software. The Corpus includes different text types2 in a time-span that extends from 2008 to 2013, notably specialised legal texts and texts addressed to a broad and mixed audience. The EU Directives, which were retrieved from the area of Justice, freedom and security, are listed below: •

•

DIRECTIVE 2008/115/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 16 December 2008 on common standards and procedures in Member States for returning illegally staying third-country nationals; COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 2009/50/EC of 25 May 2009 on the conditions of entry and residence of third-country nationals for the purposes of highly qualified employment;

78 •

•

•

•

•

•

Languaging Diversity in EU Institutional Discourse DIRECTIVE 2011/36/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 5 April 2011 on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2002/629/JHA; DIRECTIVE 2011/51/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 May 2011 amending Council Directive 2003/109/EC to extend its scope to beneficiaries of international protection (Text with EEA relevance); DIRECTIVE 2011/95/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 13 December 2011 on standards for the qualification of third-country nationals or stateless persons as beneficiaries of international protection, for a uniform status for refugees or for persons eligible for subsidiary protection, and for the content of the protection granted (recast); DIRECTIVE 2011/98/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 13 December 2011 on a single application procedure for a single permit for third-country nationals to reside and work in the territory of a Member State and on a common set of rights for thirdcountry workers legally residing in a Member State; DIRECTIVE 2013/32/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 26 June 2013 on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection (recast); DIRECTIVE 2013/33/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 26 June 2013 laying down standards for the reception of applicants for international protection (recast).

The other EU texts selected for analysis are: “Strengthening the Global Approach to Migration: Increasing Coordination, Coherence and Synergies” (8.10.2008), “European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals” (20.7.2011), “EU Initiatives Supporting the Integration of ThirdCountry Nationals” (20.7.2011). The main aim of this study is to investigate EU institutional discourse of immigration and integration mainly with reference to terms/notions related to immigration (e.g. assimilation, inclusion, intercultural/social integration and other related terms), also with a view to analysing conceptualisations and processes of “re-scaling” of EU institutional discourse of im/migrant integration in discourses conceived as “particular and diverse ways of representing aspects of the world” (Fairclough 2007: 33) and as markers of the ideology which mediates migrants’ needs and local needs in the host country on the grounds of the “operationalization of discourses and specifically their enactment and inculcation […] in part processes within discourse […]; discourses […] in part enacted as changes in genres, and in part inculcated as changes in styles” (Fairclough 2007: 33, italics in the original).



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As to the methodology adopted, this investigation is based on studies on social aspects of immigration (notably Alba 1999; Alba and Nee 1999; Berry 1997; Esser 2000, 2004; Heckmann et al. 2003, 2010; Lockwood 1964; Penninx et al. 2008); and on recontextualisation and re-scaling of discourse (Fairclough 1992, 2006, 2007, 2011; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Reisigl and Wodak 2009; van Dijk 2007, 2011).

2. Towards a definition of “integration” The political definition of ‘integration’ provided by the European Commission (2003: 17-18) specifies3: […] integration should be understood as a two-way process based on mutual rights and corresponding obligations of legally resident third country nationals and the host society which provides for full participation of the immigrant. This implies on the one hand that it is the responsibility of the host society to ensure that the formal rights of immigrants are in place in such a way that the individual has the possibility of participating in economic, social, cultural and civil life and on the other, that immigrants respect the fundamental norms and values of the host society and participate actively in the integration process, without having to relinquish their own identity.

This two-way process has its main objectives in granting equal opportunities and full participation of immigrants (and minorities) in core areas of society while respecting the cultural and ethnic practices and identity and in association with fundamental legal norms and ethic core principles of the host society. These objectives are, however, dependent on conceptualisation and ideological sets which underpin processes of operationalisation. A primary effect of immigration, in fact, is continuous change in the size and composition of the host country/society which affects interrelations among newcomers and local people. These are reflected in the different nouns used to refer to the processes that are operationalised (e.g. assimilation, acculturation, inclusion, incorporation, integration, and so forth) (see Heckmann 1992: 162-207). The same phenomenon is thus differently connoted and may account for divergent views. Divergent views point to different ways of acting and operationalising processes of immigrant integration. The German sociologist Esser (2000), for instance, considers two dichotomy dimensions, (a) social integration in the context of the host society and (b) social integration in the ethnic context or the context of the country of origin, as the basis for four types

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of incorporation: multiple integration, segmentation, marginalisation and assimilation. He concludes that “multiple integration” is very difficult to achieve and considers “assimilation” a better term. The Canadian scholar Berry (1997) also identifies two dichotomy dimensions, (a) contact and participation within the majority group and (b) cultural maintenance, as the basis for his four forms of “acculturation” (i.e. assimilation, separation, marginalisation and integration) and highlights “(bicultural) integration” as the best type of acculturation. Moreover, for Esser (2000), as well as for the American sociologists Alba and Nee (1999), the term “assimilation” does not denote a unidirectional and suppressive concept but the diminishing of socially relevant differences between groups. Nonetheless, the term is subject to bias by the general public and also partly in the political and academic field. Integration has thus appeared to be a better or at least a politically correct term. Integration can be understood in two different ways: as a (sociological) concept, it describes stable, cooperative relations within a social system with distinct borders; as a process, it refers to the strengthening of relations within a social system also with reference to relations determined by additional newcomers entering an existing social system and its core institutions. The integration of immigrants can be mainly understood as a process, specifically when success has been achieved. This type of integration seems to fit the concept of “social integration”, which is used to refer to the inclusion of new individual actors in a social system, the conscious and motivated creation of mutual relationships among actors and their attitudes to the social system as a whole, in opposition to “system integration”, which stands for the functioning of coordinating institutions and mechanisms without taking into account the goals and relations of individual actors (see Lockwood 1964). Of the four basic dimensions of “social integration” described by Esser (2000: 272-275), culturation refers to the acquisition of knowledge, cultural standards and competences by an individual; placement to the individual’s acquisition and occupation of significant positions in society (i.e. the educational system, the economic system, the professions, and the role as citizen also in relation to the acquisition of rights with reference to particular positions, the creation of relevant social relations and the acquisition and/or use of cultural, social and economic capital). Interaction refers to the formation of relations and networks within the social system like friendships, love or marriage relations, or membership in groups. Finally, identification refers to identifying with a social system as part of a collective body and is characterised by cognitive and emotional



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elements which create a feeling of belonging to a group. The four dimensions of social integration can be applied to immigrant integration into the systems of a host society. Heckmann and Schnapper (2003), however, prefer to adopt different conceptualisations for them, i.e. structural integration, cultural integration (or acculturation), interactive integration and identificative integration in order to include other concepts based on the concept of social structure like “social inequality” and “social differentiation”: “Immigration and (non-, partial or encompassing) integration will not only have consequences for new structures of inequality and processes of group formation, but for the integration of the societal macrosystem as a whole: societal integration” (Heckmann et al. 2010: 11, bold in the original). In such complex scenarios with so many definitions and alternative notions that are sometimes substantially the same, yet which give rise to divergent views in the operationalisation of processes related to immigrant integration, this study has attempted to highlight how words combine in the selected Corpus to build values underpinning decisions and roles of participants in processes, specifically with regard to immigrant integration.

3. Analysis We now examine the values of the nouns which appeared to be the most significant in the debate on immigrant integration. After searching specific words and phrases with AntConc 3.1.2, a quantitative schematization was drawn so as to make it possible to differentiate the subcorpora by length for the interpretation of findings: Corpus EU Directives (2008-2013) Strengthening the Global Approach to Migration: Increasing Coordination, Coherence and Synergies (2008) European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals (2011) EU Initiatives Supporting the Integration of Third-Country Nationals (2011)

Word tokens 70822 903 4250 21728

Table 1. Total number of tokens per subcorpora ptw

Quantitative data were taken into account to support assumptions concerning the values of words in the subcorpora in order to analyse the process of conceptualisation and recontextualisation of EU institutional

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discourse on immigrant integration which can be indicative of a new stance of the supranational institution starting from the text that enhances and supports the Global Approach to Migration (2008) through to the texts which attempt to adopt a more practical approach towards efficient policies on immigrant integration (2013).

4. Findings and discussion As a first step, we decided to pay special attention to the occurrences of keywords which appeared to be most closely associated with processes of im/migration, i.e. “protection”, “application”, “migration”, “cooperation”, “right(s)”, “inclusion” and “integration” (see Table 2).

protection application migration cooperation right rights inclusion integration

Directives (2008-2013)

Strengthening the Global Approach to Migration: increasing coordination, coherence and synergies (2008)

European Agenda for the Integration of ThirdCountry Nationals (2011)

EU Initiatives Supporting the Integration of ThirdCountry Nationals (2011)

% 6.90 4.95 0.12 0.19 0.97 1.27 0 0.18

% 0 2.21 18.82 9.96 0 0 0 0

% 0.94 0 14.11 2.35 0 2.11 1.17 14.11

% 1.74 0.23 2.53 0.92 0.59 2.57 1.47 11.09

Table 2. Frequency of occurrences of nouns (action) per subcorpora ptw

As shown in Table 2, the highest frequency of occurrence was found for “protection” and “application” in the Directives, “migration” and “cooperation” in the Strengthening text, “migration” and “integration” in the European Agenda and “integration” in the EU Initiatives text.



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4.1 Findings and discussion: “application” and “protection” A second step consisted in searching the collocates of the words having the highest frequency of occurrence. The word “protection” in the Directive subcorpus (505 occurrences) was very frequently found to collocate with “international” and to refer to legal aspects concerning the grant of protection, as illustrated in Fig. 1:

Fig. 1. Concordances of “protection” in the Directives subcorpus

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No occurrences of “protection” were found in the Strengthening text, though. It is interesting to notice that in its 4 occurrences in the European Agenda, “protection” was found to collocate with “international” as in the Directives and as a constituent of the phrase “beneficiaries of international protection”, i.e. “The integration of beneficiaries of international protection requires particular attention”. Again, in the EU Initiatives text the word “protection” was mainly found to collocate with “international”, as in the Directives, and in most cases as a constituent of the phrase “beneficiaries of international protection”, as in the European Agenda, referring to legal aspects relating to policies:

Fig. 2. Concordances of “protection” in the EU Initiatives subcorpus



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In the EU Initiatives subcorpus, “protection” was also found to collocate with “social”, stressing the link between social protection and social inclusion, viz. “Guaranteeing migrants the same social protection rights as EU citizens is also a key aspect of ensuring their successful integration” which fits in with a positive stance as in the extract: “The reception of asylum-seekers and the integration beneficiaries of international protection present challenges, which require particular attention in the context of EU measures to support integration policies in Member States”. The next term under analysis was “application”. In the Directives, the term “application” was found to occur with two main meanings: x x

“enacting” or “complying with” norms; “applying for”, collocating with verbs such as “reject”, “examine” or nouns such as “examination of”, “decision on”.

In the Directives, the value of ‘application’ was found to stress the role of the Member States as co-actor with the European institution while in the Strengthening text the 2 occurrences of “application” were found to express only the EU’s concern for the legal aspects of migration. Finally, in the EU Initiatives subcorpus, the 5 occurrences of “application” were found with the second meaning as in the Directives, i.e. “enacting” or “complying with” norms with an eye to the migrant counterpart and with reference to actions of compliance by migrants with norms of the host country.

4.2 Findings and discussion: “migration”, “integration”, and “cooperation” The next term under analysis was “migration”. In the Directives subcorpus, “migration” was found to occur with a very low frequency:

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Fig. 3. Concordances of “migration” in the Directive subcorpus

In the Directives, “migration” (9 occurrences) was found to collocate with “legal” (2), “circular” (1) also in association with “geographical and” (1) / “appropriate, circular and temporary” (1), “well managed” collocating with “policy” (1), “better control of” (1), and “Community statistics on” (2), stressing the EU’s role and concern for processes of migration and development of policies of control and management of types of migration in legal settings and in particular with reference to encouragement of circular and temporary forms of migration. In the Strengthening subcorpus, instead, the term was found to cooccur with words like “legal economic” or “illegal”, as in phrases like “Fighting illegal migration. In order to curb irregular migration […]”, or with “irregular as well as legal economic”, “labour”, or “to tackle the root causes of migration” or “the risks associated with illegal migration” expressing the EU’s decision to oppose illegal forms of migration. Conversely, in the European Agenda, “migration” was found to occur 12 times, often with a positive connotation as in “Legal migration can help […]”, “If the full benefits from migration are to be realised, […]”:



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Fig. 4. Concordances of “migration” in the European Agenda

Four out of the 12 occurrences of “migration” in the European Agenda were found to be constituents of such phrases as “[The Europe 2020 Strategy3 and the Stockholm Programme4] fully recognise the potential of migration for building a competitive and sustainable economy”, “[…] integration is crucial for realising the full potential of migration, both for the migrants and the EU”. Also in the EU Initiatives subcorpus, “migration” mainly occurred with a positive connotation:

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Fig. 5. Concordances of “migration” in the EU Initiatives subcorpus

Here “migration” was found to co-occur with “integration” as in “Integration and migration are two sides of the same policy coin” or to point to the role of migration as a potential, e.g. “to realise the potential of migration. Achieving the Europe 2020 objectives of employment”, or as “the contribution of migration and migrants to European societies”, to stress that “There is a strong link between integration and migration policies”, or in phrases like “mainstreaming social aspects of migration”, or in opposition of “legal and irregular” (where the occurrence of “irregular” in place of “illegal” seems somehow indicative of a more positive stance), or collocating with “social” / “effective”, which altogether highlights a positive view of migration. From the findings resulting from the investigation, the occurrences of “migration”, while stressing the EU’s role and concern for this multidimensional phenomenon in the Directive and the Strengthening subcorpora, point to a much more positive view in the 2011 subcorpora. As for the term “integration”, it was found to occur in the Directives (13 occurrences) mainly with reference to maintaining or introducing conditions and measures to facilitate integration policies and programmes, while no occurrences were found for “integration” in the Strengthening



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subcorpus. In the European Agenda, “integration” appeared to occur as part of EU social policies and to show a more favourable stance in phrases like “Successful integration is a priority for the EU and its Member States”, “for migrants in order to facilitate their integration into society”. The EU Initiatives subcorpus, instead, while also representing integration as a “multidimensional process”, appeared to use the term with a focus on promoting the integration of third-country nationals / supporting migrants’ integration, to stress that “managing integration is crucial for European economic development”. In fact, the analysis of the occurrences of the term “integration” highlights the attention on the part of the EU for the social aspects of integration in the 2011 subcorpora. Indeed the EU Initiatives text constitutes a step forward, since integration is represented as a multidimensional process that is “crucial for European economic development” or “as a multidimensional process of interactions between”, “support to actions in Member States to promote integration of third country nationals”. Other examples are: “Integration is also promoted as part of EU social policies”, “More effective integration of migrants can make an important contribution”, “Succeeding in the integration challenge is crucial for European, economic, social”, “Successful integration is a priority for the EU and its Member States”. Occurrences were also found where “integration” was associated with “cooperation” as in “the development of EU cooperation in the area of integration”. Overall, quite a positive view of migration and integration resulted from the analysis of the EU Initiatives subcorpus. This is more ˆ—ŽŽ› expressed in the following extract: Managing integration is crucial for European economic development and social cohesion, and to realise the potential of migration. Achieving the Europe 2020 objectives of employment, education and social inclusion will depend on the capacity of the EU and its Member States to manage migrants’ integration, ensuring fair treatment of third-country nationals and granting rights, opportunities and obligations comparable to those of EU citizens. Managing integration is also crucial to respect cultural differences and share a common vision of future European societies characterised by diversity and multiple identities.

The word “cooperation”, rather unpredictably, showed very low frequencies of occurrence both in the Directives, the longer subcorpus, (only 18 occurrences) and the 2011 subcorpora, both intended to operationalise processes in favour of immigrant integration, and the highest frequency in the Strengthening subcorpus (2008). It may not be particularly relevant here, although this smaller text does stress the need

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for starting processes in line with the more recent stance of the supranational institution as early as 2008:

Fig. 6. Concordances of “cooperation” in the Strengthening subcorpus

Although in the smaller subcorpus, “cooperation” was found to occur with a positive connotation in phrases like “strategic cooperation activities”, “dialogue and cooperation”, “strengthened cooperation”, stressing the need to enhance cooperation and extend cooperation between the EU and third countries.

4.3 Findings and discussion: nouns denoting roles A third step in the analysis regards the investigation of keywords indicating roles in processes of im/migration. i.e. “applicant”, “person(s)”, “victims”, “child”, “minor(s)”, “refugee”, “beneficiaries”, “migrant”, and “immigrants” (see Table 3). As can be noticed, a low or very low frequency of occurrence was found for the words in the table above except for “applicant” and “person” / “persons” which showed the highest frequency in the Directives and “migrant” in the European Agenda. In the Directives, the word “applicant” (294 occurrences) was found to collocate with such verbs as “be allowed / given”, as in “The applicant shall be allowed to challenge the application of”, “the applicant shall be given the opportunity of a personal”, or with “allow” in the active voice as in “allowing the applicant to continue to stay legally on its territory until”, “allow the applicant to reside on its territory”, or “permit” as in “which, as a minimum, shall permit the applicant to challenge the application”, “oblige”, as in “oblige the



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applicant and his family members, in accordance with”, referring to concessions given to migrants. The occurrence of “applicant” in the Directives thus shows two different angles: 1) on the one hand it stresses the role of actor for Member States and that of beneficiary for migrants; 2) on the other hand it is used with an eye to what is expected of migrants such as “Member States may require the applicant to provide his address in the territory of the Member State”.

applicant person persons victims child minors minor refugee migrant immigrant

Directives (20082013)

Strengthening the Global Approach to Migration: increasing coordination, coherence and synergies (2008)

European Agenda for the Integration of ThirdCountry Nationals (2011)

%

%

%

4.15 2.45 1.90 1.12 1.15 0.36 1.20 1.11 0.01 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1.10 1.10

0 0 0 0 0 0 0.09 0.47 4 0.23

EU Initiatives Supportin g the Integratio n of ThirdCountry Nationals (2011) % 0 0.18 0.92 0 0.27 0.55 0 0.27 0.23 0.18

Table 3. Frequency of occurrences of nouns (roles) per subcorpora

The word “persons” in the Directives (141 occurrences) was mainly found to occur as a generic term, as in “for third-country nationals or stateless persons who ask for international protection”, or “for third-country nationals or stateless persons who make an application for”. In the Strengthening text, one occurrence of “persons” was found: “make sure that third countries meet their obligations to readmit persons staying illegally in the EU”. In the European Agenda two occurrences of “persons” were found referring to third-country nationals: “Third-country nationals are referred to as migrants coming from countries outside the EU and not holding the citizenship of an EU country. This group includes both

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persons born in a country outside the EU and persons born in the EU but not holding the citizenship of a Member State”. In the EU Initiatives text “persons” was found to collocate with “stateless” or “disadvantaged” as in phrases like “third-country nationals and stateless persons in the territory of Member States”, “Persons at risk of poverty or social exclusion”, “Persons at risk of poverty after social transfers”, “The ESF targets disadvantaged persons, including migrants”, stressing the role of migrants as “persons in need of”:

Fig. 7. Concordances of “persons” in the EU Initiatives text

As to “migrant”, only 2 occurrences of this word were found in the Directives subcorpus. In both instances, “migrant” was a premodifier of workers / labour. In the Strengthening subcorpus, only one occurrence of “migrant” was found, i.e. as a premodifier in a phrase collocating with “groups” and “diaspora associations”. In the European Agenda, although always functioning as a premodifier, “migrant” was found to collocate with women / men / youth / children / organisations / representatives / workers / temporary or definitive return / qualifications and skills, as illustrated in Fig. 8:



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Fig. 8. Concordances of “migrant” in the European Agenda

In addition, two occurrences were found in the European Agenda with “migrant” in an s-genitive structure, i.e. “to prepare the migrant’s temporary or definitive return” and “to improve methods of the migrant’s qualifications and skills”. Finally, the EU Initiatives subcorpus stresses the gender role for children or young people from a migrant background, for women in relation to employment, as in “helped migrant women into employment”, and migrants in relation to a socio-economic setting (migrant/ethnic entrepreneurs), as in “The problems that appear to affect migrant/ethnic entrepreneurs include” or “Many of the problems faced by migrant/ethnic entrepreneurs are shared with small”, as illustrated in Fig. 9:

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Fig. 9. Concordances of “migrant” in the EU Initiatives text

One occurrence was found of “migrant” with an active role though within a negative context as in the following extract where it is used as a head word followed by postmodification and collocates with verbs expressing potential failure: […] integration of migrants into the receiving societies is essential for the success of any migration policy. Without it the migrant, whether a worker, family member or asylum seeker, risks encountering difficulties in getting a job, and faces the prospect of social exclusion.

No occurrences were found for “immigrants” in the Directives subcorpus and a low or very low number of occurrences in the other subcorpora. Conversely, the word “immigrants”, though showing a low frequency of occurrence in the EU Initiatives subcorpus (2011), was found to have a highly positive value, being represented as participants, contributors, interactants:



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Fig. 10. Concordances of “immigrants” in the EU Initiatives text

In the EU Initiatives subcorpus the word “immigrants” occurred with a higher frequency in structures with nominalisation which depersonalises the role of immigrants as actor (“doer”), as in “the entrepreneurship potential of immigrants needs to be better exploited”, “creativity and entrepreneurship of immigrants and minorities by stimulating their participation in the information society”, or in the extract “Access for immigrants to institutions, as well as to public and private goods and services, on a basis equal to national citizens and in a non-discriminatory way is a critical foundation for better integration”. The same goes for structures with a role of beneficiary as in “Sport enables immigrants and the host society to interact in a positive way”, or in the extracts “Efforts in education are critical to prepare immigrants, and particularly their descendants, to be successful and more active participants in society”, and “[…] additional efforts are needed to ensure that immigrants have the opportunity to integrate into their host society and to allow them to fully contribute to the EU labour market and economy, making use of their education level and expertise”. However, the word “immigrants” was also found with a role as actor, as in “Immigrants enrich themselves and the community they join”.

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5. Concluding remarks The investigation of the keywords selected for analysis has highlighted the fact that “protection”, “migration”, and “integration” show the highest frequency of occurrence. Thus, “migration” and “integration” can be said to characterise the 2011 subcorpora, specifically “migration” the European Agenda and “integration” the European Agenda and the EU Initiatives subcorpora. The word “cooperation” was found to have unexpectedly low frequencies in the more recent subcorpora, and to express a positive value in the Strengthening subcorpus (2008). The analysis has also shown a move in the 2011 texts towards the gender perspective and a more careful look at the figure of the “ethnic entrepreneur” with a socio-economic role in the host society in the EU Initiatives text both as concerns the figure of the migrant and the figure of the immigrant, which seems to mark a step forward in the EU stance to migration and immigrant integration. On the whole, the analysis has highlighted a process of “re-scaling” EU institutional discourse of immigrant integration from concern for legal aspects - as marked by the much higher frequency of “protection” and “application” in the legislative texts (Directives) - towards a recontextualisation of immigrant discourse through the use of “migration” and “integration” in the 2011 texts. Also the migrant’s identity moves from a generic “person” or “applicant” in the Directives to figures of migrants as beneficiary (man, woman, child, migrant) to whom rights (education, public health, residence and so on) are to be granted, and who at times are granted a role as actors. A depersonalised discourse on immigrant integration appears to be cautiously being replaced by a new stance which, while providing the EU with a role in the management of issues relating to such a complex area, stresses its involvement in operationalising processes and activities in favour of immigrant integration.

References Alba, Richard. “Immigration and the American realities of assimilation and multiculturalism”. Inclusion or Exclusion of Immigrants. Demographie aktuell 14 (1999): 3-16. Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. “Rethinking assimilation theory.” In The Handbook of International Migration. The American Experience, edited by Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz and Josh DeWind, 137160. New York: Sage Foundation, 1999.



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Berry, John Widdup. “Integration, acculturation, and adaptation”. Applied Psychology: An International Review 46 (1997): 5-34. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Esser, Hartmut. Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Band 2: Die Konstruktion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2000. —. “Welche Alternativen zur ‘Assimilation’ gibt es eigentlich?” IMIS Beiträge 23 (2004): 41-60. European Commission (2003), “Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on Immigration, Integration and Employment”, COM (2003) 336 final, Brussels, 3.6.2003. Accessed 3 June, 2014. http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2003:03 36:FIN:EN:PDF. Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. —. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2006. —. “Introduction”. In Discourse and Contemporary Social Change, edited by Norman Fairclough, Giuseppina Cortese and Patrizia Ardizzone, 921. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. —. “The Contribution of Discourse Analysis to Research on Social Change”. In Discourse and Contemporary Social Change, edited by Norman Fairclough, Giuseppina Cortese and Patrizia Ardizzone, 2547. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. —. “Discursive Hybridity and Social Change in Critical Discourse Analysis”. In Genre(s) on the Move. Hybridization and Discourse Change in Specialized Communication, edited by Srikant Sarangi, Vanda Polese and Giuditta Caliendo, 11-26. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2011. Heckmann, Friedrich and Dominique Schnapper (eds). The Integration of Immigrants in European Societies. National differences and trends of convergence. Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius, 2003. Heckmann, Friedrich, Claudia Köhler, Mario Peucker and Stefanie Reiter. “Quantitative Integration Research in Europe – Data Needs and Data Availability”. 2010. Accessed 3 June, 2014. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Publications/Reports/Migr ation%20and%20Integration%20in%20Europe.pdf. Lockwood, David. “Social integration and system integration”. In Explorations in Social Change, edited by George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch, 244-251. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1964.

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Penninx, Rinus, Dimitrina Spencer and Nicholas Van Hear. “Migration and Integration in Europe: The State of Research”. University of Oxford, 2008. Accessed 3 June, 2014. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Publications/Reports/Migr ation%20and%20Integration%20in%20Europe.pdf. Polese, Vanda and Stefania D’Avanzo. “Linguistic and Legal Vagueness in EU Directives Harmonising Protection for Refugees’ and Displaced Persons”. In Researching Language and the Law: Textual Features and Translation Issues edited by Davide Simone Giannoni and Celina Frade, 89-111. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010.

Notes 1

This study was carried out within the research project “Dimensioni, misure e determinanti dell’integrazione degli immigrati nelle società di destinazione” (Dimensions, measurement and determinants of immigrant integration into host societies) (scientific coordinator: Professor Salvatore Strozza) co-funded by Compagnia San Paolo, Banco di Napoli and Polo delle Scienze Umane e Sociali of Università di Napoli Federico II within FARO 2010-2011 programme (CUP: E61J12000180005). Although this article was planned and discussed jointly by the authors, Vanda Polese is responsible for the Introduction and sections 2, 4.2, 4.3, and 5 and Germana D’Acquisto for sections 1, 3, 4 and 4.1. 2 EUR-Lex.europa.eu (Last access 04-02-2014). 3 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri= COM:2003:0336:FIN:EN:PDF (Last access 04-02-2014).



THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE OF BIODIVERSITY: CDA OF VANDANA SHIVA’S HONORARY DOCTORATE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH ANNA FRANCA PLASTINA

Introduction Critical approaches to diversity in language focus on how discursive processes dynamically mirror unequal power relations, contribute to resisting and eventually to transforming them. Diversity in discourse is constructed in different ways by different social agents according to the context from which it emerges (Phillips and Hardy 2002). According to Fairclough (1999: 76), “discourses are partial and positioned, and social difference is manifest in the diversity of discourses within particular social practices”. While discourses on diversity can encompass a wide range of factors (Nieto 2000), they are all connected in one way or another to the concept of hegemony. According to Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 24), “[…] the concept of hegemony emphasizes the importance of ideology in achieving and maintaining relations of domination”. Hegemonic discourse is embedded in daily discourse to establish asymmetrical power relations that advantage “the haves over the havenots, men over women, the conventional over the dissenting, the dominant over the subordinate” (Hoffman 2004: 91). In this, “concealment, legitimation, manipulation and related notions that are seen as the prime functions of ideologies in society are mostly discursive (or more broadly semiotic) social practices” (van Dijk 1998: 5). Damaging ideologies are thus commonly hidden from people through language complexity which is deliberately constructed to downplay the truth. As Fairclough (1995: 219) notes, “it is mainly in discourse that consent is achieved, ideologies are transmitted, and practices, meanings, values, and identities are taught and learned”.

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On the other hand, opponents of hegemonic systems contest their ideologies, and despite they are “[…] easily branded as either not understanding how the system works or as trying to pursue ‘special interests’ at the expense of the general good” (Evans 2000: 230), they play a key role in defending diversity. Opponents fight back hegemonic discourses by using strategies of contestation to construct counterhegemonic discourses which delegitimise dominant ideologies. The social responsibility of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is thus to “[…] help increase consciousness […] of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others” (Fairclough 2001: 3) as very often, ordinary people are unaware of the ideological mediation of power in language. One of the most debated concepts of our times is the phenomenon of globalisation, a complex process which is “[…] destroying local cultures, widening world inequalities and worsening the lot of the impoverished” (Giddens 1999: 15) according to anti-globalist activists. From a different angle, alter-globalists seek alternative solutions for a more sustainable world. This paper considers how the hegemonic construct of biodiversity as a global resource is contested by alter-globalisation activists who support the conservation of the diversity of plants, animals and other living things (Maass 2008). According to this view, “it is reckless to suppose that biodiversity can be diminished indefinitely without threatening humanity itself” (Wilson 1997: 23). Although biodiversity does not exist in an absolute discursive sense (Escobar 1998), it has become a powerful discourse in international development circles since the early 1990s (Escobar 2008), and is now strongly contrasted by counter-discourse which advocates biodiversity as a local process (Garì 2000).

1. Counter-hegemonic discourse Due to its nature of resistance to dominant discourse and social power (Marston 2004), counter-hegemonic discourse is basically constructed by combining different operational and discursive strategies with a number of linguistic devices for the broad purpose of contestation. Operational strategies are deliberately deployed to frame processes of enactment, inculcation and materialisation, which are not mutually exclusive, but can be interwoven in different ways within the same counter-discourse. Typically, there are three common operational strategies which are strictly linked to discursive strategies. Exposing damaging ideologies intentionally is the first operational strategy generally used in all counterhegemonic discourses as these would not come into existence without



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some sort of conflictual discursive frame which legitimates opposition. Heracleous (2006: 191) notes that “in terms of its existence, however, the counter-discourse is made possible by the effects of the very discourse that it opposes”. This operational strategy thus supports the discursive strategy of creating a conflictual frame, which is not, however, shaped by its counterpart. In this respect, Terdiman emphasises that counter-discourse cannot draw […] from the dominant discourse for legitimation because the very nature of the dominant discourse places […] the originators and the consumers of the counter-discourse in a disadvantaged position (1985: 185).

Both these operational and discursive strategies help introduce new ways of (inter)acting (enactment) for the purpose of social change (Karlsberg 2005). A second operational strategy is to propose new alternatives to hegemonic ideologies. In this case, counter-hegemonic discourse is not limited to creating mere resistance, but assumes a positive connotation in suggesting alternative ideologies which are perceived as being more beneficial for the whole collectivity. New ways of being are proposed (inculcation) for change by social agents who intentionally resort to the discursive strategy of setting up an antagonistic relationship between hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourse. The agents’s task here is to delegitimise institutional agents and defend his/her autonomous sphere by finding ruptures in dominant discourse in order to neutralise its power and legitimacy. In this sense, counter-discourse “projects a division of the social space, and seeks to segregate itself in order to prosecute its critique” (Terdiman 1985: 185). The third operational strategy serves the purpose of demonstrating that materialised changes can be made possible (materialisation) for the benefit of the collectivity. Discourse can have social resonance when hegemonic values and norms are resisted through the use of strategies which materialise extra-discursive entities for the purpose of societal changes. Terdiman (1985: 68) points out that “once one posits consciousness of a dominant discourse, then a series of diverse and unpredictable openings towards strategies of counter-discourse will successfully be detected and exploited. The varieties of counter-discourse are related only in that they contest the dominant”. Counter-discursive strategies work towards the deconstruction of dominant discourse not only for the purpose of creating a conflictual discursive frame as the first operational strategy does, nor simply for setting up an antagonistic relationship as in the case of the second operational strategy. Counter-discursive strategies are carefully selected by

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social agents to create semantic changes which leverage the existing gap between dominant and alternative ideologies in order to bring notions of diversityto the fore. Macgilchrist (2007: 76) proposes five main counter-discursive strategies, namely, logical inversion, parody, complexification, partial reframing and radical reframing, and claims that “the first and most straightforward strategy used to contest the mainstream view is to invert it”. Instead, parody highlights different aspects of hegemonic ideologies, legitimises them with the end purpose, however, of subverting these even through the use of irony to convey the message. On the other hand, complexification refers to the use of complex discursive frames, for example, by mixing genres in order to shape a more detailed and convincing discursive event which achieves major consensus. Counter-discursive strategies of reframing refer to the concept of recontexualisation, or […] the appropriation of elements of one social practice within another, placing the former within the context of the other and transforming it in particular ways in the process (Fairclough 2003: 32).

Appropriation is closely related to the goal pursued by social agents, and subsequently to the different meanings they wish to convey. A social practice can therefore be partly recontextualised (partial reframing), or completely recontextualised (radical reframing). In the latter case, there is “[…] a more radical attempt to break into the consensus and entirely turn around the reporting of an issue” (Macgilchrist 2007: 81). Among the many approaches to discourse analysis, CDA seems to be on common grounds with counter-hegemonic discourse in terms of power, ideology and the historical dimension of discourse. First, both resist social power and inequality. While by its very nature, counter-discourse fights power, van Dijk underlines how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context (2001: 352).

Moreover, CDA shows a particular interest in the ways in which ideology is mediated by language, and thus relates to hegemony like counterhegemonic discourse. It further takes into account that “[…] every discourse is historically produced and interpreted - i.e., is situated in time and space […]” (Wodak 2002: 12). If this dimension were to be precluded, the resulting discourse analysis would be more theoretical than explanatory within the socio-cultural discursive context, thus running



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counter to CDA principles (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Thus, the discourse-historical approach considers discourse as a form of knowledge and memory of social practice (Reisigl and Wodak 2009). These aspects are particularly important in counter-hegemonic discourse as they “[…] connect together past and present” (Lawler 2002: 242), and point out the historical shift from conservation of biodiversity to its globalisation. Thus, counter-discourse is characterised by dynamic combinations of operational and discursive strategies which generate new orders of discourse, in which diverse genres, discourses and styles are articulated without fixity to construct new meaning (Fairclough 2002).

2. The case study The present study focuses on the counter-hegemonic discourse of biodiversity. Alter-globalisation activists have come to realise that the hegemonic construct of biodiversity as a global source “opens up a space for the construction of culturally based forms of development that could counteract more ethnocentric and extractivist tendencies” (Escobar 1998: 61). It is within this space of construction that counter-hegemonic discourse plays a key role in defending local cultures and territories (Aistara 2011). Biodiversity, in fact, “anchors a discourse that articulates a new relation between nature and society in global contexts of science, cultures and economies” (Escobar 1998: 55). Thus, a central role can be ascribed to activists as the sites of important counter-hegemonic discourses which strive to construct understandings of diversity and equity. The study focuses on the figure of Vandana Shiva, the renowned Indian environmental activist as one case of important counter-hegemonic discourse.

2.1 Aim The aim of the study was to investigate how counter-hegemonic discourse contests and reframes hegemonic discourse of biodiversity as a global source, offering an alternative perspective on its conservation. Two main research questions were addressed in the study: 1. how are actional, representational and identificational meanings constructed by Vandana Shiva in an agent-centred perspective? 2. which linguistic devices are employed by the social agent to delegitimise hegemonic discourse on biodiversity? In detail, the first issue attempts to investigate how the interplay, or the dialectics of discourse (Fairclough 2002) between “genres (ways of

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acting), discourses (ways of representing) and styles (ways of being)” (Fairclough 2003: 26) are strategically interwoven to counter hegemonic discourse. Fairclough (2003) further relates these three types of meaning of discourse as social practice to Foucault’s (1982) three axes (or dimensions): actional meaning refers to the axis of power, or the relations of action upon other people, representational meaning to the axis of knowledge, or the relations of control over things, while identificational meaning corresponds to the axis of ethics, or the relations with oneself. The second issue attempts to identify and analyse recurring linguistic devices and to interpret the operational and discursive strategies lying behind them.

2.2 Research corpus and method In April 2013, Vandana Shiva was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in Nutritional Science by the University of Calabria in Italy. During the formal conferment ceremony, Shiva delivered her honorary doctorate acceptance speech to a wide heterogeneous audience. This speech was used as the corpus of the present study, which was made up of 2,362 running words, 123 sentences with a sentence mean length of 19.4 words. CDA was the main methodological approach adopted to perform qualitative analysis on the corpus as it appears to cover inquiry on counterdiscourse from a perspective of opposition and resistance. As this interdisciplinary approach to discourse analysis contemplates multifaceted methods, the study is theoretically grounded in a dialecticalrelational approach between language and other elements of social practices (Fairclough 2009), which derives from the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The methodology further draws upon Fairclough’s CDA analytic framework (2003) and the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2009) to analyse actional and representational meanings in terms of the discursive construction and qualification of environmental actors, objects, phenomena, events, processes and actions. Moreover, the methodology uses the concept of positioning from the Positioning Theory in socio-psychology to analyse identificational meaning (Davies and Harré 1999). In addition, Macgilchrist’s (2007) counter-discursive strategies were introduced to tackle the second issue addressed in the study.



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2.3 Procedure The acceptance speech was recorded and transcribed for critical discourse analysis which was performed in three phases. In the first phase, the generic structure of the discourse was analysed for actional meaning. Genre was considered the locus of opposition and resistance and its structural organisation as key to framing the audience’s comprehension of discourse. In the second phase, analysis was conducted on significant representational elements including processes, participants and circumstances to seek how the issue of biodiversity was represented from the perspective of alterglobalisation. Representational meaning was considered extremely important in considering how seemingly similar aspects of the world can be understood from hegemonic and counter-hegemonic perspectives. The analysis of representational meaning was framed by the important semantic concept of transitivity: “transitivity is the set of options whereby the speaker encodes his experience of the processes of the external world, and of the internal world of his own consciousness, together with the participants in these processes and their attendant circumstances […]” (Halliday 2002: 119). The third phase of analysis focussed on how the social agent positioned her own personal and social identity, as well as the identity of others: […] one can both position oneself and be positioned – as powerful or powerless, authoritative or lacking in authority, dependent or independent, and so on” (van Langehove and Harré 1999: 17).

Discourse style was thus considered crucial for the analysis of identificational meaning. In each phase, analysis of the counter-discursive strategies and linguistic devices employed was related to the different meanings, based on the assumption that “although the three aspects of meaning need to be distinguished for analytical purposes and are in that sense different from one another, they are not discrete, not totally separate” (Fairclough 2003: 29).

3. Findings and discussion Qualitative findings referring to actional, representational and identificational meanings, as well as to the strategic reorder of discourse are presented and discussed.

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3.1 Generic structure: actional meaning Two main deep structure genres were found to frame the counterdiscourse: narrative and hortatory. The narrative genre covered the first 38 sentences (30.9%) out of the total 123 which made up the corpus. The genre was also embedded with two surface structure genres, namely, folk songs and dialogues which covered a total of 13 of the 38 sentences (34.2%). On the other hand, the hortatory genre was used as the main structure to frame counter-discourse with its 85 sentences (69.1%). In detail, the hortatory structure reflected its conventional components: the thesis, or the announcement of biodiversity concern in 4 sentences (4.7%); the arguments, or the reasons for concern where opposition was created through 61 sentences (71.8%); the recommendations, or clear statements of what ought or ought not to happen which covered 20 sentences (23.5%). This last component was further embedded with the institutional genre acting as a surface structure genre in two of the sentences (10%). Thus, narrative was intentionally used as the most universal genre acknowledged by all cultures and societies to legitimate the autonomous sphere of counter-hegemonic discourse as in the opening sentence of the speech in example (1): (1) My biological life and ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya (S1).

In addition, songs and dialogues were embedded into the narrative through processes of typification in order to facilitate mutual comprehension within a shared recognised context: “[…] the typification of utterances in genres is related to the recognizability of acts and the location of facts” (Bazerman 2012: 231), as shown in example (2): (2) The folk songs of that period said – ‘These beautiful oaks and rhododendrons/They give us cool water/Don’t cut these trees/We have to keep them alive’ (SS13-16).

While genre typification is the result of socio-psychological processes which serve the purpose of establishing complicity with the audience, the locus of opposition and resistance was found in the different theses and arguments of the speech, which were followed by recommendations and substantiated by institutional policies for major objectivity. A typical discourse thread is provided in example (3):



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(3) Separatism is at the root of disharmony with nature and of violence against nature and people (S40; thesis); Diversity has been destroyed in agriculture on the assumption that it is associated with low productivity. (S92; argument); Diverse native varieties are often as high yielding or more high yielding than industrially bred varieties (S94; recommendation); The UN report submitted to the General Assembly on 20th December 2010 also confirms that ecological agriculture produces more food (S 117; substantiation).

On the whole, actional meaning was enacted through the complexification of the generic structure to achieve major consensus and to create a conflictual discursive frame.

3.2 Transitivity: representational meaning Representational meaning was found to be constructed through selective processes, participants and circumstances to create antagonistic relationships. 3.2.1 Processes Antagonistic relationships were shaped by means of transitive processes (Actor + Process + Affected) which represented different counter-actions. Example (4) shows a verbal transitive process in which what the social actors say (verbiage) omits the addressees, i.e., the loggers who were felling trees. The process creates both a global-ecological antagonistic relationship and a gender conflict in a non-violent manner through the action of hugging: (4) Women Sayers

declared Verbal process

that they would hug trees... (S7) Verbiage

Example (5), instead, shows a material transitive process in which the recipient ȋthe reductionist commercial forestry) is affected by the actors’ material process:

The Counter-Hegemonic Discourse of Biodiversity

108 (5) Peasant women

came out, openly challenging

Actors

Material Process

the reductionist commercial forestry (S34) Recipient

A third type of transitive process, also acknowledged by SFL, was the mental process used by the agent as a collective sensor (we) and based on her experience (are finding) with the resulting appreciated phenomenon (biodiversity as a solution to hunger and malnutrition) as shown in example (6): (6) We

are finding

Sensor

Mental Process

that biodiverse ecological production systems are the solution to hunger and malnutrition… (S53) Phenomenon

On the other hand, intransitive processes (Affected + Process) were constructed to delegitimise global biodiversity as in example (7): (7) the forests the stream Natural Recipients

were was Material Processes

gone, a trickle (S7) Value

3.2.2 Participants The participants represented in the speech were mainly biodiversity actors, who were obviously placed in the foreground in an active role, and often tagged with a social class as in example (8): (8) My father was a forest Conservator, and my mother chose to become a farmer after becoming a refugee in the tragic partition of India and Pakistan (S2).

Conversely, hegemonic participants were mostly represented as passive recipients with the general attribute of their social roles as in example (9):



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(9) The forest officials arrived to browbeat and intimidate the women but found the women holding up lighted lanterns in broad daylight. Puzzled the forester asked them their intention (SS21-22).

3.2.3 Circumstances Processes and participants were also intentionally placed in spatiotemporal circumstances to highlight the difference between local and global biodiversity through the use of deictic expressions as shown in example (10): (10) The folk songs of that period said… (S12); The lessons I learnt about diversity in the Himalayan forests have been transferred to the protection of biodiversity on our farms (S33) Today, most of the one billion people who lack adequate access to food are rural communities … (S110).

Alternative views of sustainability emerge from the comparison between local placed-based knowledge and global biodiversity in circumstantial representations. In particular, temporal deixis was found to create a divide between past and present times, and the historical dimension to strengthen the legitimacy of the narrative genre and empower discursive agency.

3.3 Positioning: identificational meaning Within the narrative genre, positioning was found to have a two-way orientation: the agent situated her social identity, and the identity of others. In the first case, social identity was positioned within the context of localbased knowledge in a crescendo from learning about ecology to founding the movement for biodiversity conservation as shown in example (11): (11) It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that most of my learning of ecology took place (S3); My involvement in the contemporary ecology movement began with “Chipko”, a non-violent peaceful response to the large-scale deforestation (S5); I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement … (S19); Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming that I started in 1987 has saved seeds… (S37).

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The identities of others relied mainly on an Us-Them relationship of opposition in which female agents were positively identified against the undefined global agents (they) with their damaging actions as in example (12): (12) The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests and India’s Forest Civilization (S4); They produce profit and resin and timber (S26); They produce more toxics and Green House Gases, and more debt (S56); Women have a key role, because they are biodiversity experts... (S120).

These identificational meanings were further backed up by a We-Her relationship with nature in order to create a sense of solidarity with the audience as in example (13): (13) And when we respect nature and her diversity, when we recognize relations and connections that maintain the web of life, we not only protect nature, we are better able to ensure human wellbeing (S51).

In sum, the style of identification was charged with ethical “statements about desirability and undesirability, what is good and what is bad” (Fairclough 2003: 172).

3.4 Strategic Reorder of Discourse Besides the counter-discursive strategy of complexification used in the generic structure, the other four strategies were employed throughout the corpus to reorder discourse so as to bring biodiversity conservation to the fore. Example (14) shows how this was accomplished respectively by means of logical inversion, parody, partial reframing and radical reframing: (14) The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ and genetic engineering have been offered as ‘intensive’ farming, creating a false impression that they produce more food per acre (S54; Logical inversion); Ironically, while the poor go hungry, it is the hunger of the poor which is used to justify the agricultural strategies which deepen their hunger (S91; Parody through the use of irony);



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Under conditions of low capital availability and fragile ecosystems, Green Revolution varieties are not higher yielding (S97; Partial reframing); And in this transition, women have a key role, because they are biodiversity experts, especially in the Third World (S120; Radical reframing).

In addition, the linguistic mechanism of semantic amelioration or pejoration was found to make the meaning of lexemes/expressions respectively more positive and negative. The biased use of this mechanism was intended to delegitimise global biodiversity in favour of biodiversity conservation as shown in the ten examples in Table 1. Biodiversity Conservation (Amelioration) 1. ‘Chipko’, a non-violent peaceful response… 2. ecologically intensive systems 3. higher nutrition 4. diverse crops 5. soil water 6. nourished by the sun 7. living Earth 8. Terra Madre 9. pure air 10.Nature as Living

Global Biodiversity (Pejoration) 1. farmers’ suicides 2. industrial chemical monocultures 3. Vitamin A deficiency 4. one-dimensional productivity 5. scarcity of water 6. chemically intensive 7. dead matter 8. Terra Nullius 9. climate crisis 10. Nature as dead fragmented matter

Table 1. The Counter-discourse Mechanism of Semantic Amelioration and Pejoration

Moreover, the device of personification was used to represent Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) with their social dominant status (the Emperor), endowed with the negative human state of nakedness as in example (15): (15) As the Navdanya report The GMO Emperor has no Clothes has shown, we do not reduce hunger through genetically engineered crops … (S57).

Furthermore, the example shows how intertextuality was subtly used to recall Andersen’s popular fairy tale, The Emperor's New Suit, in which the selfish Emperor parades around in invisible clothes, fooled by his tailors. As these make everyone believe that only intelligent people could see the

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clothes, the Emperor’s subjects continue to deny the truth until a child exclaims that he has nothing on at all.

4. Concluding remarks The present study has shown how the keyword ‘diversity’ has unlocked a discursive space in which biodiversity is articulated as a response to the legitimacy of capitalist globalisation and its discourse. The CDA approach adopted in the study provided the opportunity to gain valuable insights into how the mechanisms of local biodiversity discourses are realised by means of texts, which reÀect the social practices that govern those texts (Fairclough 1992). In this respect, Fairclough points out that […] how a text is produced or interpreted […] depends on the nature of the sociocultural practice which the discourse is part of (including the relationship to existing hegemonies) (1995: 97).

Accordingly, the ¿rst research question examined how actional, representational and identificational meanings were constructed, and the discursive implications of genre mixing, transitivity and subject positions were interpreted to understand the purpose for social change. By talking of biodiversity, Shiva reaf¿rmed her right to speak and construct diversity in ways that are functional to the collective interest of living organisms. The analysis showed how operational and discursive strategies were carefully selected to defend this right at the expense of global actors. Hence, the second research question addressed the ways in which discourse was deliberately reordered within the existing context of hegemonic discourse on biodiversity to highlight its hidden ideologies: thus we see that by studying the context of a text and not least the participants in this context we end up being able to say something about the wide range of hidden purposes which people also intend to realise by means of a text (Askehave 1999: 21).

Lastly, in uncovering prediscursive experiences of local biodiversity, the counter-discourse unfolded connections between past and present practices, emphasizing the state of current social inequality caused by global biodiversity. The ultimate goal was to secure the audience’s consensus that alternative practices which do not endanger the future are feasible.



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References Aistara, Guntra A. Land and Seeds: The Cultural, Ecological, and Global Politics of Organic Agriculture in Latvia and Costa Rica. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2009. Askehave, Inger. “Communicative Purpose as Genre Determinant.” Hermes-Journal of Language and Communication Studies 23 (1999): 13-23. Bazerman, Charles. “Genre as Social Action.” In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by James P. Gee and Michael Handford, 226-238. London: Routledge, 2012. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Davies, Bronwyn and Rom Harré. “Positioning and Personhood.” In Positioning theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, edited by Rom Harré and Luk van Lagenhove, 32-52. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Escobar, Arturo. “Whose Knowledge, Whose nature? Biodiversity, Conservation, and the Political Ecology of Social Movements.” Journal of Political Ecology 5 (1998): 53-82. —. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Evans, Peter. “Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization.” Contemporary Sociology 29(1) (2000): 230-241. Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. —. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman, 1995. —. “Global Capitalism and Critical Awareness of Language.” Language Awareness 8(2) (1999): 71-83. —. Language and Power (2nd ed.). London: Longman, 2001. —. “The Dialectics of Discourse.” Textus 14(2) (2002): 3-10. —. Analysing Discourse - Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. —. “A Dialectical-relational Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis in Social Research.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.), edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyers, 122-143. London: Sage, 2009.

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Fairclough, Norman and Ruth Wodak. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse as Social Interaction, edited by Teun van Dijk, 258-284. London: Sage, 1997. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8(4) (1982): 777-795. Garì, Josep-Antoni. The Political Ecology of Biodiversity: Biodiversity, Conservation and Rural Development at the Indigenous and Peasant Grassroots. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Halliday, Michael A. K. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse. New York: Continuum, 2002. Heracleous, Loizos. “A Tale of Three Discourses: The Dominant, the Strategic and the Marginalized.” Journal of Management Studies 43(5) (2006): 1059-1087. Hoffman, John. Citizenship Beyond the State. London: Sage, 2004. Karlsberg, Michael. “The Power of Discourse and the Discourse of Power: Pursuing Peace through Discourse Intervention.” International Journal of Peace Studies 10(1) (2005): 1-25. Lawler, Steph. “Narrative in Social Research.” In Qualitative Research in Action, edited by Tim May, 242-258. London: Sage, 2002. Maass, Petra. “The Cultural Context of Biodiversity Conservation.” In Valuation and Conservation of Biodiversity, edited by Michael Markussen, Ralph Buse, Heiko Garrelts, María A. Máñez Costa, Susanne Menzel and Rainer Marggraf, 315-342. Berlin: Springer, 2005. Macgilchrist, Felicitas. “Positive Discourse Analysis: Contesting Dominant Discourses by Reframing the Issues.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 1(1) (2007): 74-94. Marston, Greg. Social Policy and Discourse Analysis. Aldershot, HPH: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Nieto, Sonia. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (3rd ed.). New York: Longman. 2000. Phillips, Nelson and Cynthia Hardy. Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction. London: Sage, 2002. Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak. “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.), edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyers. 87-121. London: Sage, 2009. Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.



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van Dijk, Teun A. Ideology. A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage, 1998. —. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schriffen, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton. 352-371. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. van Langehove, Luk and Rom Harré. “Introducing positioning theory.” In Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, edited by Rom Harré and Luk van Lagenhove, 14-31. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Wilson, Edward O. “The Diversity of Life.” In Law and the Environment: A Multidisciplinary Reader, edited by Robert V. Percival and Dorothy C. Alevizatos, 18-24. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Wodak, Ruth. “Aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 36 (2002): 5-31.

“HOW ARE YOU FEELING?”, “WHAT’S HAPPENING?”: IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION VIA FB STATUS MESSAGES NICOLA BORRELLI

Introduction With a global audience of nearly one billion active users as of April 2013, Facebook is the most popular social network. Figure 1 (see colour centerfold) shows that 56% of these users reside in only twelve countries of the world, split between the Americas, South Asia and Western Europe. The UK and Italy, the two countries considered in this paper, rank 7th and 11th respectively in this list of countries with the highest FB penetration, with similar overall shares of male and female users and similar percentages of users in each age band (Figure 2, see colour centrefold). The focus of this study was Facebook status update messages. A status update message is a message the users of the social network enter into a publishing box and share with their friends. When Facebook started in 2004, it did not have a status box: it was introduced in 2006, and it was a blank box, except for a prompt that began with the name of the user followed by the verb “is...”. Typing a short message to finish the sentence, users could tell their friends what they were doing. In 2007, the network changed the language and the new Facebook box asked “What are you doing right now?” In 2009, the status question was changed again and ever since it has been asking “What’s on your mind? How are you feeling? What’s happening?”, namely a variety of questions eliciting the users to talk not only about what they were doing, but also about what they were feeling or thinking. Since 2009, users have also been able to include such media as hyperlinks, photos, and videos in their Facebook status updates.

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Three main research questions prompted this study: 1) what primary communicative functions do Facebook status-update messages serve (why do users post?); 2) can recurring topic patterns be identified in Facebook status update messages (what do users post?); do the identities negotiated on Facebook ensue from large cultures or small cultures?

1. The corpus and the methods The corpus analysed consisted of two small subcorpora of status update messages collected from 20 British and 20 Italian users (10 men and 10 women) over a period of 6 months (October 2012-March 2013). All the users met a set of fixed criteria: they were aged between 30 and 40, they had a university degree and they declared in their Facebook profile they could speak at least one foreign language. Consent was obtained from all the participants in the study, who were then anonymised by only using the country abbreviations (Uk and I) followed by the letter ‘m’ for male users and ‘f’ for female users, and by a numeral from 1 to 10 to distinguish between them. This study being a pilot for a larger study accounts for the small size of the corpus analysed as well as for the fact that, at this stage, no statistical generalisations were attempted and a descriptive qualitative approach to the data collected was preferred. As for methods, discourse and semiotic analysis (Brown and Yule 1983; Stubbs 1983; Johnston 2002; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Chandler 2007) and traditional and new media sociolinguistics (Holliday 1999; Block 2007; Thurlow and Mroczek 2011; Lee 2011; Hyland 2012) were combined to describe the cases selected and to comment on the results. As Thurlow and Mroczek (2011: XXV) point out, “technologies are best understood as prosthetic extensions of people’s activities and lives [...]”, so the messages users post via FB become a digital extension of their real-life discursive practices. Lee (2011: 111) has stressed the highly multimodal nature of these discourses, noticing how “all texts, all communicative events, are always achieved by means of multiple-semiotic resources, even so-called text-based new media like instant- and text messaging”. In this way, the identities communicated via the digital medium come to be inherently multimodal (Block 2007: 41).



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2. The analysis 2.1 Humour among the Italian users A striking feature of the Italian corpus was the use of humour as a communication tool among female users on a variety of topics. If1 Ecco. ogni tanto arrivano le parole del dalai lama come un cartiglio di cioccolatino. solo che, al contrario del cartiglio, sto maledetto c'ha sempre ragione. cioccolatino avvolto in stagnola gialla e rossa.1 If4 Io: "Pronto dottoressa. Sono ***." Lei: "Oh, buongiorno signora. Mi dica. Come va? Tutto bene?" Io: "No, dottoré. Abbiamo di nuovo la mastite. Non è possibile. Questa è la terza volta, se non la quarta addirittura. E mica possiamo andare avanti a botta di antibiotici. Secondo lei da che dipende? Che devo fare?" Lei: " La mastiiiite?" Io: "Sì, dottoré. La mastite." Lei: "Ma come? Ma Popì non l'avevamo sterilizzata?" Io: "..." Lei:" Signora, c'è ancora?" Io: "Ehm... Scusi dottoré.. Credo di aver sbagliato numero. Ehm.. scusi tanto" 2

Humour was used as a rhetorical device to comment on current news, as is the case with If1 who ironically compares the Dalai Lama’s wisdom to that of the notes hidden in the foil wrapping of some chocolates, to the point that the Dalai Lama himself is metaphorised as a “chocolate wrapped up in yellow and red foil”. Another recurring strand of humour was the anecdote, like the hilarious phone call If4 has with her vet thinking it is her gynaecologist.

3 4

If7



If1 Cospargi il tuo valentino di gorgonzola...

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Sometimes humour was achieved by using visuals, alone or ‘anchored’ by captions. If7, for example, interlinks different semiotic modes to portray the point of view of a male cat on his owner’s decision to neuter him. If1, instead, puts forth a kinky serving suggestion for a gorgonzola cheesebased special Valentine recipe. If1 Orlo del baratro: 5 euro da Orlo Express

5

If1 Francia: passa l’articolo chiave sulle nozze gay. Bagnasco: “Siamo sull’orlo del baratro”

In some cases, humour was visually and verbally irreverent: for instance, no comment is needed for If1 illustrating ‘the’ reason behind Pope Ratzinger’s resignation. Other times, it was cleverly devised playing with language, as is the case with the second example above. Here, If1 comments on Cardinal Bagnasco’s slander of gay marriages as “the brink of an abyss” joking with the polysemy of the Italian word ‘orlo’ (which means both ‘brink’ and ‘hem’). Im2

Im3 Cari Juventini, più che imbattutti direi...abbattuti...ahahah6

Im4 Vi vedo “Messi” male with *** and ***7

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Among Italian male users, humour was found to be less frequent and more topic-bound. For example, a common strand was that concerning football, usually consisting of irony or mild insults against a rival team. So, for example, for Im2 a toilet is the right place for a Juventus supporter to be and Im3 chuckles about Juventus’s defeat, joking with the similarity between the adjective “imbattuti” (unbeaten) and “abbattuti” (dejected) to describe the change of mood of the team. A pun is used by Im4 about Milan’s match against Barcelona, when he plays with the word Messi, the name of the famous Barcelona striker, and the Italian idiom “Messi male”, “In big trouble”.

2.2 Humour among the British users Instances of humour were not so frequent among the British female users investigated, and the few cases I found were work-related. UKf1 Thinking I could be a 'tennis wife/girlfriend', what are the requirements? Be prepared to travel the world - tick, watch a lot of tennis tick, look young and glamorous....oh well, nearly! Super match- exhausted watching! UKf2 A strange teaching-shape void has appeared in my weekly timetable...Must be the Easter holidays!

In the first example above, UKf1 jokes she has nearly all the requirements to be a sort of professional tennis wag; in the second, UKf2 ironically describes Easter holidays as a “teaching-shape void” in her usually overbusy schedule. UKm1 After the failure of my work's party, I decided to have another party. All my friends came along. UKm1 My six-year-old daughter asked if a human had ever given birth to a rabbit, and then made me Google it when I said, "Of course not". I then discovered the strange story of Mary Toft: "In 1726, she became the subject of considerable controversy when she tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits."



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Humour proved to be more frequent and varied in the sample of British male users than among their female counterparts. It occurred in the form of irony, like UKm1’s picture of a lonely Christmas party clashing with his jocular caption ‘all my friends came along’. Other times, it was nonsensical: in the second example, UKm1 describes how his 6-year-old daughter’s question about humans giving birth to rabbits prompted a Google search that revealed that someone had really claimed she had given birth to rabbits!

UKm3 If you think horse meat in burgers is bad, have you heard about tesco's veggie burgers? They're 100% uniQuorn.

 Ukm3 Instances of naughty humour were also found among British male users, as shown in UKm3, so as were instances of language play. In the second example, Ukm3 recalls the scandal of horse meat in burgers to cleverly pun on the word uniQuorn, that resembles both in the spelling and in the sound the word ‘unicorn’ but obviously refers to the leading brand of imitation meat mycoprotein in the UK.

2.3 Politics: a serious matter? A very frequent topic covered by Italian users was politics, with Berlusconi being by far the most popular target in posts that spanned from sarcasm to outrage. If3 IO GLI CREDO A BERLUSCONI, ME LO HANNO CONFERMATO ANCHE BABBO NATALE, GLI ELFI E LA STREGA DEL NORD, QUELLA DEL SUD DICE CHE NON E' POSSIBILE, MA LEI E' TERRONA, QUINDI INAFFIDABILE!!! ;-) 8

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Im1 E PENSARE CHE NEL 2013 C'E' ANCORA CHI CI CREDE....

9

Female users tackled politics in a humourous way, like If3, who makes fun of Berlusconi’s promises saying they have been endorsed by Santa, the elves and the witch of the north. The witch of the south said he’s a liar, but she’s a ‘terrona’ (a derogatory term to refer to a person from Southern Italy), so she’s unreliable. By contrast, no hint of humour was noticed in the posts of male users: for example, Im1 looks bitterly surprised that in 2013 there are people who still trust Berlusconi’s pledge to reduce taxes after all his previous unkept promises. UKm4 I spent 5 years of my life studying Chávez. It's been a while since I finished my PhD but it feels odd he's gone. Good luck Venezuela. You've got hard and dangerous days ahead.

No instances of political posts were found among British female users, whereas they were very rare and very serious among their male counterparts, as is the case with UKm4 who expresses his concern for the political future of Venezuela following Chavez’s death.

2.4 Sharing daily life on Facebook The bulk of the British messages, regardless of the user’s gender, were about daily personal life, with ordinary events being recounted in a plain verbal style.



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UKf4 Christmas shopping and dinner with mom — with *****. UKf4 Is having a lovely family weekend with BBQ queen isra! UKm2 I am far too proud of myself for fitting a lock onto the side gate of our new house. Many people would consider this very simple, but I still get excited when any DIY job I do is successful. Ukf5 This post will not be cool - I know, such a shock from me - but how lovely to have Ant and Dec back on a Saturday night - that's what I call proper weekend telly!

Most of the time, users just wish to share what they are doing, be it shopping, having a BBQ, fitting a lock on a gate or watching the telly. UKm2 Welcome to the world ***** - born today at 17:06 7lbs 4oz and already kissed and stroked by his brother, who actually seemed really happy! — with ***** UKf6 My hubby is back in the UK, and my dinner is in the slow cooker. I am a happy lady. UKf6 1st meal in the slow oven was a success. ***** had 3 helpings of cottage pie. That has never been heard of before. UKf7 Marmite the cat decided to start her day by wolfing down her breakfast, pelting up the stairs, jumping on the bed and throwing up all over my new Tempur pillow. Thanks for that, Marms...

Other times, Facebook becomes the medium to share an important event in one’s life or the mood of the moment. For example, UKm2 is a proud father who celebrates the birth of his second son, and UKf6 is a happy wife and mother, just because her husband is back from a business trip or because she cooked a good cottage pie. UKf7 even shares the news of her cat wolfing down its food and then vomiting it all over her new memoryfoam pillow. Two interesting recurring and contrasting topics were work and home life. UKf5 So tired, I could do with a week off work! Well hey presto!!! #halfterm as the youth might say - as if I'd know! UKf6 I got to take ***** to Harry Potter World as part of my work. I really like my job - sometimes

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UKm1 It's awful having to work outside in this weather. Poor me.

Work-related messages in the British corpus share the same underlying idea: work can be pleasant occasionally- UKf6 says she likes her job, sometimes – but most of the time it is something to get over with as soon as you can. UKf5 Dodgy boiler, noisy pipes, permanently locked patio doors, a ton of old furniture on the drive waiting for the rubbish collection and an even bigger ton of decorating to do - and this is STILL the best house in the world ever! Ukf7 I now own a lot of paint! Looking forward to tarting up the new house :) Ukf7 Thanks to everyone for the birthday messages! We have no internet in the new house yet but it's still fantastic :)

By contrast, all the posts in connection with the idea of home have a positive connotation, indicated not only at the verbal level (see the adjectives best and fantastic, or the verbs look forward and tart up) but also at the non-verbal level, by means of punctuation (exclamation mark) or digital pictograms (the smileys at the end of the messages). Under these circumstances, a study of the collocates of the two words conducted on a more extensive corpus of messages might yield interesting results on their semantic prosody.



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Ukm3 Rather looking forward to my first glass of wine of the year later. Ukf7 celebrating the end of a day of diy with a pint of gin and tonic :) Ukf5 I've climbed 'on the wagon' again for January - but thank ***** and ***** for supplying enough champagne last night to ensure I won't miss alcohol well into February! Have a great 2013 everyone and may it bring health and happiness to all x Interestingly, quite a productive topic in the British corpus proved to be drinking, with many a post about wine, champagne, and gin and tonic. No such posts were found in the Italian corpus. If1 Domenica appena trascorsa ha visto a milano due eventi semplici, popolari, di quartiere, che hanno attratto un gran numero di persone: l'apertura della (prima tratta della) linea lilla, e il capodanno lunare/cinese. Forse complice la crisi, forse la giornata di sole, forse il carnevale, la gente è tornata in strada coi bambini per mano nonostante il freddo pungente, per andarsi a meravigliare sì di frutti della tecnologia della globalizzazione, ma con lo stesso sorriso e la stessa umiltà delle grandi esposizioni universali di una volta, stupendo gratis, bambini oltre il metro e 0-99 compresi. Allora dico, se la crisi ci riporta anche queste semplici soddisfazioni, pur con in mano dolci di riso invece di frittole e senza conducente sul metrò, ben venga.10

Searching the Italian corpus for examples of daily-personal-life messages, I found very few instances, and in the few examples I pinned down, the personal event always became an excuse for a wider-ranging reflection on the part of the user. This is the case with If1’s account of her Sunday trip to downtown Milan to visit the newly-opened metro line and enjoy the celebrations for Chinese New Year. This simple event becomes an occasion to comment on the amazement of people in front of the achievements of globalized technology, an amazement that is compared to the people who visited the great exhibitions in days gone by. Im7 Lo zen e l'arte della manutenzione della motocicletta

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Even a day spent maintaining a motorbike is reported on FB by means of a well-educated reference to a philosophical book called Zen and the art of motorbike maintenance.

3. Concluding remarks In conclusion, we can say that a more factual approach to FB status updates was observed among the British users, with plain verbal messages focusing on ‘what happens to me and to my inner circle of family or friends’; conversely, a more speculative approach was detected among the Italian users, with frequent multimodally-constructed messages focusing on what happens around me and in the outer circle of my world.

Fig. 3. Graphic representation of the British findings in Johari Window

Using the Johari window in a creative, unorthodox way to give a graphic representation of what Rasulo (2008) calls the ‘online persona’, we could represent the British findings in the shape of an oval roughly divided into two halves lying across the Arena and the Facade quadrants. In fact, the aim of the considered users seemed to be to share some basic information and facts about their daily lives likely to be already known in part to their FB friends, as well as to inform their friends about recently occurring novelties they might not be aware of.



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Fig. 4. Graphic representation of the Italian findings in Johari Window

By contrast, the graphic representation of the Italian results could be an oval divided between all four quadrants of the window. In fact, sharing mostly thoughts, anecdotes or visuals would reveal some information and leave some in obscurity, thus triggering a process of decodification of the users’ mental processes and semiotic representations on the part of their friends. This may possibly even lead to the FB friends identifying aspects of the users’ identity unknown to the users themselves, and to other aspects being left unknown to both. As for the third research question, owing to the small size of the corpus, it doesn’t seem wise to attempt any sort of generalization, even if the observations made suggest that large national cultures might have greater impact than small cultures. In particular, if we assume self to be a ‘stance-taking entity’ according to Goffman’s definition, it is undeniable that the Italian users appear more conscious of impression-management. Finally, given the significant differences observed between male and female users, gender might be a variable worth looking at, even if unpostulated in the present study.

References Brown, Gillian and George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Block, David. Second Language Identities. London: Continuum, 2007. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics – The Basics. London-New York: Routledge, 2007.

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Hyland, Ken. Disciplinary Identities, Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. Holliday, Adrian. “Small Cultures” in Applied Linguistics, 20/2 (1999), 237-264. Johnstone, Barbara. Discourse Analysis, Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design – Second Edition. London, New York: Routledge, 2006. Lee, K.M.C. “Micro-Blogging and Status. Updates on Facebook: Texts and Practices.” In Digital Discourse – Language in the New Media, edited by C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, 110-128. Oxford: OUP, 2011. Rasulo, Margaret. The Role of Participant Discourse in Online Community Formation. Roma: Aracne, 2008. Stubbs, Michael. Discourse Analysis: the Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Swales, John M. Genre Analysis – English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge-New York, Port Chester-Melbourne-Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Thurlow, C. and K. Mroczek. “Fresh Perspectives on New Media Sociolinguistics.” In Digital Discourse – Language in the New Media, edited by C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, XIX-XLIV. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Websites www.checkfacebook.com (last accessed on 13th December 2013).

 Notes 1

Here, from time to time, Dalai Lama’s words arrive like a chocolate note. It’s just that, unlike the note, this wretch is always right! He’s a chocolate wrapped up in yellow and red foil (my translation). 2 Me: Hello doctor, it’s ***; She: Oh, good morning madam. So, how’s it going? Is everything all right; Me: No, doctor. We have mastitis again here! It’s unbelievable; it’s the third time, if not the fourth. I can’t go on with antibiotics. What’s the cause? What shall I do?; She: Mastitis?!; Me: Yes, doc, mastitis; She: How is that? Didn’t we spay Popì?; Me: …; She: Madam, are you still there?; Me: Er…sorry doc…I am afraid I have the wrong number. Er..I’m very sorry (my translation). 3 Spread your Valentine with gorgonzola… 4 Why don’t you take a seat and explain to me how it ever occurred to you to neuter me?



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(Headline) France passes the key article on gay marriage. Bagnasco “We’re on the brink of abyss” (User’s message) The brink of abyss: 5 euros at Hem Express. 6 Dear Juventus fans, you longed to be unbeaten, but you ended up …beaten and bruised, hahaha. 7 I believe you’re in a ‘Messì’ state. 8 I trust what Berlusconi says. It was also confirmed by Santa, the elves and the witch of the north. The witch of the south said he’s a liar, but she’s a terrona 9 (Headlines) Berlusconi leads a crusade against taxes (1999), Berlusconi launches the fiscal challenge: “I will lower taxes for everybody”, Marzano: tax cuts only from 2002, Berlusconi: “Lower taxes from 2003, “Lower taxes for companies in 2004” (User’s message) And some people still trust him in 2013... 10 The Sunday that’s just passed saw in Milan two simple, popular, neighbourhood events that attracted a number of people: the opening of the new metro line and the celebrations for the Chinese New Year. Maybe it was an effect of the economic crisis, or of the sunny day, or again of the Carnival, but people were back in the streets, together with their children, looking up, nose in the air and marvelling at the achievements of technology and globalization, with big smiles on their faces and the same humility as the visitors to the Great Exhibitions. If the economic crisis also entails these old little joys, even if the children eat rice cakes instead of ‘frittole’ and the metro train is driverless, let it be welcome.

IDENTITY, DISCOURSE AND TRANSLATION URSZULA ZALIWSKA-OKRUTNA

1. Identity defined Identity is currently an “in” term. Ever since Plato and Aristotle started asking questions about what is ‘different from the other and the same as itself’ (360 B. C./1871) and ‘why a thing is itself’ (350 B. C./1896), the problem of identity has appealed to philosophers and logicians. Its history is marked by such names as Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, C. J. F. Williams and Kai Wehmeier. Leibniz formulated the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, called the ‘Leibniz law’, meaning that no two objects have exactly the same characteristics (Leibniz 1686/1956). Hegel concentrated on “being, pure being - without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly” (Hegel 1832, 1813, 1816/2010: 59). Wittgenstein, Frege and Russell, on the other hand, each contributed to denying identity as a relationship. Frege (1892/1952) inquired into the nature of the relation - whether between objects or names or signs of objects; Russell stated that “identity cannot be a relation, since, where it is truly asserted, we have only one term, whereas two terms are required for a relation”, but, nonetheless, “identity must be something” (Russell 1903/1996: § 64); while Wittgenstein added “that identity is not a relation between objects is obvious” (Wittgenstein 1921/1922: 5.5301) and: “... to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing” (ibid.; 5.5303). This line of thought, contemplating the relational, or, rather, non-relational nature of identity, has been continued by C. J. F. Williams (1992) and Kai Wehmeier (2012). The philosophical-logical sources then appear to indicate that identity is non-relational, referring to the object different from other objects and the same with itself. Psychology, sociology and anthropology provide a different type of input. In their terms, identity is a set of characteristic features of an entity: an individual or a group of individuals; it is perceived as relational,

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construed in relation to others, and contextual, i.e. environmental. The tradition initiated by Sigmund Freud (Freud 1995) of researching the tripartite character of individual identity, the id, the ego, and the superego, can be traced in Erik Erikson's (1998) personal, social, and cultural identity, though Erikson's research reality is different than that delineated by Freud. Another tendency in identity-oriented psychology is to emphasise the process of identity formation, visible in the moral and other development of children (Piaget 1998; Kohlberg 1984), reinforced by social in-group favouritism (see the social identity theory by Tajfel and Turner 1979). Finally, there is also a philosophical anthropological slant in discussing identity, best represented by Paul Ricoeur (1992), who distinguished between ipse- and idem-identity, i.e. between ‘who’, the stable core selfhood, and ‘what’, the characteristics of selfhood that can change over time. Ricoeur's theory is also important here for another reason - the role ascribed to the narrative in forming one's identity, recognising language as playing a prominent role in identity development. The traditional theories on identity survive only to some extent in the changing socio-political reality in Europe, where integration and globalization are promoted. The danger of a weakening of national identity results in the proliferation of ‘identities’ created to substitute for the losses suffered so far and the forecasted losses. Ethnic, cultural, national and post-national identities seem to become secondary to gender, institutional and corporate, nominal and digital, online and virtual, commodified and contingent identities. There is, nonetheless, one identity which may reflect any of the above types, and may also be an instrument in creating any one of them, namely the glottic identity.

2. Glottic identity introduced Glottic identity has been introduced by Roy Harris, an integrationist, into the discussion of the nature of language: “The concept of ‘a language’ belongs with those in terms of which individuals and communities construct a glottic identity for themselves, and in different cultures this can be done in very different ways” (1998: 55). The process of acquiring glottic identity, (although obviously not referred to as such) was addressed as early as 1915 by Jan Niecisáaw Baudouin de Courtenay. Contrary to de Saussure (1913/1966), whose theory presented language as social and abstract, realized in individual speech acts, Baudouin de Courtenay viewed language as socially induced but, like speech, individual and developed in the course of individual

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‘lingualisation’. Baudouin de Courtenay considered each subsequently acquired language as influential in one's lingualisation and in one's view of the world, treated as the projection of an individual (1915/1984). About half a century later, the validity of Baudouin de Courtenay's thoughts on language found confirmation in the work of Sydney M. Lamb, notably the theory which eventually achieved the form of neurocognitive language theory (1998/2004, 1999). In neurocognitive theory there are no such entities as languages that are “relatively uniform across different individuals, which have some kind of existence of their own, apart from people’s minds” (Lamb 1999: 42). Individual languages are unique, as unique as the individual cognitive systems. Although it is recognized that there are similarities at the basic levels of human mental and other functioning, the individuality of locations of functionally similar cognitive subsystems and the individuality of experience override the former. Individuality is not the sole common feature of glottic identity, lingualisation and language uniqueness. All three are closely connected with experience and context. Glottic identity, according to Harris, emerges as a result of interaction and integration of a number of ‘human abilities and activities’, which justifies the approach that does not separate the linguistic from the non-linguistic and stands in opposition to segregationist approaches, treating language as an object of study in its own right. Being communicationally proficient in a given community is not only about the acquisition of a certain ‘vocal behaviour’ but about the acquisition of many integrated types of behaviour (Harris 1987). Therefore, communication is contextualized and dynamic, continuously demanding the ‘creation of signs’, as formulated in the two basic axioms of integrational semiology: 1. 2.

What constitutes a sign is not given independently of the situation in which it occurs or of its material manifestation in that situation. The value of a sign (i.e. its signification) is a function of the integrational proficiency which its identification and interpretation presuppose (Harris 1996: 154).

These axioms may clearly be treated as postulates addressed to language researchers. What Harris postulates has been intuitively adopted by Bronisáaw Malinowski in his anthropological studies. While investigating the Mailu community on the south coast of New Guinea and the inhabitants of the Triobriand Islands at the beginning of the 20th century, Malinowski, in order to understand the point of view of the local people, learned the local vernacular and could thus begin to truly appreciate the value of context in communication: how difficult, if not impossible, it is to



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understand the message correctly if one does not comprehend 'the context of the situation' (Malinowski 1922). Moreover, he distinguished between different types of context; in discussing magical formulae he was hardly satisfied with offering linguistic comments on the structure of the formula or mode of its recitation - he systematically described the sociological, ritual, and dogmatic contexts of the formulae (1935). The theoretical background set here for the discussion of discourse and translation is intended to guide the reader in the following directions: - assuming the individuality of one's path of language development, i.e. different lingualisation processes and, ultimately, different glottic identities of individuals; - appreciating the significance of context, both narrow or co-cedant (situational) and broad or ante-cedant (experiential) in interactions; - being open to accepting the value of both individuality of language and other experience as well as contexts for interpreting discourse and translation.

3. Glottic diversity in discourse presented Discourse diversity discussed from the perspective of glottic identity must necessarily differ from approaches taken in discourse analyses so far and typically dealing with political, generational, geographical, gender or business diversification reflected in language. The approach oriented according to glottic identity may combine a number of the above areas and is centred on an individual. The sample for analysis comes from a recent novel by the author of the Harry Potter series, namely The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling (2012). The title refers to a situation in which a seat on an administrative body is vacated during that body's term, due to the death, resignation or disqualification of its holder. The novel is set in a suburban town and begins with the death of a parish councillor, Barry Fairbrother. As a result, a seat on the council becomes vacant and a number of candidates begin to run for it. In the process different political and social conflicts are revealed and local characters, of different social standing, have a chance to present themselves through their discourses. There are three prospective candidates for the seat on the council who come onto the scene when transmitting or receiving the news about Barry Faibrother's death. The first is Miles Mollison who, with his wife Samantha, had witnessed Barry Fairbrother's collapse outside the golf club the night before and calls his parents early in the morning to deliver the news. Miles’ father, Howard, answers the phone:

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Identity, Discourse and Translation 'What's happened?' boomed Howard's voice, with a slightly tinny edge; Miles had put him on speakerphone for Samantha's benefit. Mahogany brown in her pale pink dressing gown, she had taken advantage of their early waking to apply another handful of Self-Sun to her fading natural tan. The kitchen was full of the mingled smells of instant coffee and synthetic coconut. 'Fairbrother's dead. Collapsed at the golf club last night. Sam and I were having dinner at the Birdie.' 'Fairbrother's dead?' roared Howard. The inflection implied that he had been expecting some dramatic change in the status of Barry Fairbrother, but that even he had not anticipated actual death. 'Collapsed in the car park,' repeated Miles. 'Good God,' said Howard. 'He wasn't much past forty, was he? Good God.' Miles and Samantha listened to Howard breathing like a blown horse. He was always short of breath in the mornings. 'What was it? Heart?' 'Something in his brain, they think. We went with Mary to the hospital and -' But Howard was not paying attention. Miles and Samantha heard him speaking away from his mouthpiece. 'Barry Fairbrother! Dead! It's Miles!´ (Rowling 2012: 8).

One can conclude from this short exchange that Miles Mollison must be very close to his parents - otherwise he would not have thought about calling them first. Also, he evidently wants to stress the assistance rendered to the deceased’s wife and to exude the air of being matter-offact and everything-is-under-control. Though this is not a regular everyday morning for the Mollisons, the paraphernalia and the morning activities of the couple do not change: the coffee is brewing and Samantha does not deprive herself of her regular application of cosmetics. On the other end of the line Miles' father is shocked, but the shock caused by the death of the middle-aged and apparently healthy councillor is not free from thoughts about anticipated changes in the local council and could be rated average across the accepted norm range. The second candidate, Simon Price, learns the news from his wife, Ruth, a nurse at the local hospital: 'Barry Fairbrother's dead,' panted Ruth Price. She had almost run up the chilly garden path so as to have a few more minutes with her husband before he left for work. She didn't stop in the porch to take off her coat but, still muffled and gloved, burst into the kitchen where Simon and their teenage sons were eating breakfast.



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Her husband froze, a piece of toast halfway to his lips, then lowered it with theatrical slowness. The two boys, both in school uniform, looked from one parent to the other, mildly interested. 'An aneurysm, they think,' said Ruth, still a little breathless as she tweaked off her gloves finger by finger, unwinding her scarf and unbuttoning her coat. A thin dark woman with heavy, mournful eyes, the stark blue nurse's uniform suited her. 'He collapsed at the golf club - Sam and Miles Mollison brought him in - and then Colin and Tessa Wall came... She darted out to the porch to hang up her things, and was back in time to answer Simon's shouted question. 'What's ananeurysm?' 'An. Aneurysm. A burst artery in the brain.' (...) 'Couldn't they do anything for him?' asked Simon. 'Couldn't they plug it up?' He sounded frustrated, as though the medical profession had, yet again, bungled the business by refusing to do the simple and obvious thing (Rowling 2012: 11-12).

Simon is surprised, but not moved, which may be indicated by the ‘theatrical’ aspect of his reactions. His primary interest is in the medical term his wife uses referring to the reason of Barry Fairbrother’s collapse. His incorrect use of the term and the crude reaction ‘Couldn’t they plug it up?’ may indicate either his ignorance or his wish to ridicule his wife and, possibly, the whole medical profession for their incompetence. The readers learn about the third candidate, Colin ‘Cubby’ Wall and his reaction towards Barry Fairbrother’s death when he, a deputy headmaster at the local comprehensive, informs the students about it: 'Lastly,' said Cubby again, and his voice wobbled out of control, 'I have a very... I have a very sad announcement to make. Mr Barry Fairbrother, who has coached our extremely socksess... success... successful girls' rowing team for the past two years, has...'he choked and passed a hand in front of his eyes. '...died...' Cubby Wall was crying in front of everybody; his knobbly bald head drooped onto his chest. A simultaneous gasp and giggle rolled across the watching crowd...

A very unusual rendering of news for a headmaster, deputy or not. Colin Wall's emotions seem unjustified - after all, a coach of the school team, not his friend or member of the family, has died. One may wonder whether the relationship between the two men was closer than revealed or whether there is some psychological reason, a mental problem, to account for his emotionality. For the student audience the whole situation is pathetic.

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Finally, there is also Gavin Hughes, Barry Fairbrother’s friend, not married, in a ‘relationship’ with Kay: The mobile phone in his jacket pocket buzzed loudly and he pulled it out, wondering whether he would have the nerve to pretend it was an urgent summons. 'Jesus Christ,' he said, in unfeigned horror. 'What's the matter?' 'Barry. Barry Fairbrother! He's... Fuck, he's... he's dead! It's from Miles. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ!' She [Kay] laid down the wooden spoon. 'Who's Barry Fairbrother?' 'I play squash with him. He's only forty-four! Jesus Christ!' He read the text message again. Kay watched him, confused. She knew that Miles was Gavin's partner at the solicitor's, but had never been introduced to him. Barry Fairbrother was no more than a name to her (Rowling 2012: 24-25).

Gavin Hughes admits he is in horror. He has recently witnessed Barry Fairbrother's prowess in squash, he knows Barry’s age and, also, that there have been no symptoms of Barry’s illness of any kind. He does not control his emotions, as often is the case when people close to us, relatively young and healthy, pass away unexpectedly. In addition to the comments above, drawn on the basis of very short text samples, treated as samples of language and narrow situational context, it is possible to tell, provided one is competent enough in the British English language variations and the signs of social stratification in Britain, what stratum each candidate represents. It is not only a case of Professor Higgins’ ‘simple phonetics’, which let him 'place a man within six miles (...), within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ The phonetic features deviating from the standard are not marked here, but there are other signs of a character’s social standing, like restraint in talk or in showing emotions. There is also dress and address and a number of other cues. For example, the reader is led to assume that Howard Mollison is a big heavy man - he ‘roars’ to his wife and is ‘short of breath’. The broader context allows the reader to infer things about the particular character's attitude to the deceased and his family and read between the lines to see, in the case of Miles Mollison and his wife, the so-called ‘commercial’ aspect of the story: the reward for enduring the dire experience is the right to reveal to others all its gory details. The indications of diversity in discourse of the novel's characters, revealing their different glottic identities, pose, as usual, a challenge to a translator.



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4. Glottic diversity in translation analyzed The authorship of Joanne K. Rowling was sufficient to have The Casual Vacancy translated into Polish shortly after the publication of the original (Rowling 2012a). The analysis of the translated text may result in diagnosing it as good or bad, domesticated or exoticised, adjusted to the prospective readers or not; the evaluation may refer to the translator's competence, translation errors, techniques and strategies used. All these elements may lead to conclusions about the identity of the translated text. However, the issue here is the glottic identity of the translator and how this influences the translation. The four examples below are taken from the first pages of the novel. When Barry Faribrother arrives at the golf club to celebrate their nineteenth wedding anniversary with his wife, the way he feels is reflected in the following stream of thought: He was a bad golfer: his swing was erratic and his handicap was high. He had so many other calls on his time. His head throbbed worse than ever (Rowling 2012: 4). The Polish version is included here for technical reasons: Byá marnym golfistą: jego zamachowi brakowaáo páynnoĞci i zawsze musiaá dostaü duĪy handicap. Istniaáo tyle rzeczy, którym mógáby poĞwiĊciü czas spĊdzony na polu golfowym. dotknąá gáowy - jeszcze nigdy tak potwornie go nie bolaáa (Rowling 2012a: 10).

Although translated texts are as a rule longer than the original texts, this example is somewhat extreme: there are 29 words, 116 signs without spaces and 144 signs with spaces in the English text to 34 words, 196 signs without spaces and 229 signs with spaces in the Polish one. The Polish translator (Anna Gralak) smoothes the original text and offers explanations while the English text is erratic - as one's thoughts are when one's head is throbbing. When talking on the phone, Miles had adopted the voice he often used when speaking to his mother: deeper than usual, a take-command nothingfazes-me voice, punchy and no-nonsense (Rowling 2012: 9). Miles’ voice could be paraphrased as: lower than usual, I-am-in-control nothingconfuses-me voice, energetic and earnest. The Polish translator interprets Miles' voice as: the lower than usual voice of a fearless leader, charismatic and serious (niĪszy niĪ zazwyczaj gáos nieustraszonego przywódcy, charyzmatycznego i zasadniczego, Rowling 2012a: 14). When Miles talks, Samantha, his wife, listens and notices the ‘commercial’ aspect of Miles’ activities mentioned above. But: Samantha did not blame him (Rowling 2012; 8). In the Polish version Samantha was

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not at all surprised (Samantha wcale nie dziwiáa siĊ mĊĪowi, Rowling 2012a: 13). The fact that the Polish translator interprets the original ‘not blaming’ as ‘being not at all surprised’ changes the quality of Miles’ statements: Miles does not deserve to be blamed. Samantha does blame her husband, because she also values the ‘commerciality’ of the story: She imagined telling customers at the shop about how a man had dropped dead in front of her, and about the mercy dash to hospital (Rowling 2012: 10). The ‘mercy dash’ is a dash caused by one feeling compassionate to those in need. For the Polish translator the Mollisons are kind and generous (“Potem wyobraziáa sobie, Īe opowiada klientkom w sklepie o tym, jak czáowiek padá martwy na jej oczach i jak w swojej áaskawoĞci pojechaáa z nim do szpitala”, Rowling 2012a: 15). Feeling compassionate to someone who witnesses the death of a spouse is not the same as feeling kind and generous - the latter implies some kind of superiority on the part of those who are kind and generous. Generally, one may have the impression that the Polish translator presents the Mollisons more favourably than the author of the original. This attitude is legitimized by the Polish version of the title: Miles Mollison wins the race for the seat at the council and The Casual Vacancy is rendered as Trafny wybór (The Right Choice, Rowling 2012a). The above observations are another interesting contribution to what has been noticed about the impact of translators’ glottic identity on their productions. The analyses conducted so far point to such changes in the translations, when compared to the original texts, as changing the status or temperament of characters; favouring the particular genderlect or a certain cultural/political affiliation; modifying the realia in order to make them more 'truthful' according to the translator's knowledge about them. The level of the translator’s competence in a foreign language is only partly responsible for those changes. The other possible factors are the translator’s temperament (Stanaszek 2013) and his/her own cultural/political affiliation or information-processing style (Zaliwska-Okrutna 2011; 2013). The data appear to support Baudouin de Courtenay’s observations about the individual aspect of the process of lingualisation, Lamb’s views on the uniqueness of human cognitive systems, Harris’ views on glottic identities of individuals formed in the contexts impossible to replicate - an idea that Malinowski would have willingly subscribed to. A number of factors such as one’s genetic endowment, the cognitive and language abilities, the exposure to one's native language, at a particular time, in a particular type of family and beyond, and the extra-linguistic experience of an individual - lead to conclusions about the uniqueness of one's worldview, which is a projection of one's identity, revealed in the texts one produces and in



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translations - if one has the sufficient competence and happens to engage in such an activity.

5. Concluding remarks Identity and language diversity have been extensively covered in a variety of works on discourse analysis. In specifying the difference in the approach adopted here and the typically discourse-oriented sources, two discourse researchers can be cited. Van Dijk admits that discourse analysis is not a simple enterprise. In its full richness it involves all the levels and methods of analysis of language, cognition, interaction, society, and culture. This is of course not surprising, since discourse itself is a manifestation of all these dimensions of society (van Dijk 1985: 10-11).

The emphasis is on ‘a manifestation of the dimensions of society’. In contrast, discursive ventures of glottic identity analysis focus on the individual. In a more recent reflection on discourse, Gee writes that We use language to get recognized as taking on a certain identity or role, that is to build an identity here-and-now. For example, I speak and act one way and I am speaking and acting as ‘chair’ of the committee; at the next moment I speak and talk in a different way and I am speaking and acting as one peer/colleague speaking to another. Even if have the official appointment or chair of the committee, I am not always taken as acting as the chair, even during meetings. I have to enact this identity at the right times and places to make it work (Gee 2005: 11).

Glottic identity analysis is not about group roles or group identities, it is about the individual flavours added to these roles, or, rather, how one's individuality makes one remain different even if reenacting the same role. The issue of identity and translation still has to be systematically studied from the perspective of the translator’s glottic identity. Marshall Morris, an integrationist like Roy Harris, quotes Harris as dividing translation theories into transference theories, concerned with re-encoding the message, and replicational ones, engaged in replicating, or reproducing, the features of the source language in the target language. The two types of theory have one fundamental feature in common: they assume the invariance of signs in the language and attribute problems in translation to ‘a lack of match between the invariant signs’. For integrationists, however,

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Identity, Discourse and Translation If translation is a communicational process, it follows that translation itself creates new signs. Consequently, any account of translation in terms of (matched or mismatched) invariant signs is to be rejected, [since] the identity of a sign is constituted solely by its communicational integration with other relevant variables (including other signs) in the context of a specific communication situation. Translation must therefore be a process which supplies a simultaneous interpretation of the identities of two sets of signs (the ‘original’ set and the ‘translation’ set), neither ‘given’ in advance of the other (Harris in Morris 1998: 316).

In applying the glottic-identity-of-the-translator approach, one goes a step further: the ‘simultaneous interpretation’ Harris refers to is highly individual. Even when the translators have a very good command of the two languages and an equally good understanding of the two cultures, their stories in the two languages would never be the same and, therefore, the outcomes would also be different. It is hoped that studying the non-replicable identities of speakers, discourse participants and translators, even in the academic context of advanced generalizations, may offer contributions that will be hard to dismiss.

References Aristotle. The Metaphysics of Aristotle. Translated by J. M'Mahon. London: George Bell and Sons, 350 B. C./1896. Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Niecisáaw. Charakterystyka psychologiczna jĊzyka polskiego". In J. B. De Courtenay O jĊzyku polskim (wybór prac pod red. Jana Basary i Mieczysáawa Szymczaka), 139-225. Warszawa: PWN, 1915/1984. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1913/1966. Erikson, Eric. The Life Cycle Completed. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988. Frege, Gottlob. On Sense and Reference. Translated by M. Black. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by P. Geach and M. Black, 56-78. Oxford: Blackwell, 1892/1952. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1916 - 1917. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Harris, Roy. "Language as Social Interaction: Integrationalism versus Segregationalism". Language Sciences, vol. 9(2) (1987): 131-143.



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—. Signs, Language and Communication. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. —. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd., 1998. Hegel, Georg. The Science of Logic. Translated by G. di Giovanni. New York: CUP, 1832, 1813, 1816/2010. Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Lamb, Sydney M. "Linguistics to the beat of a different drummer". In Language and Reality. Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb, edited by J. J. Webster, 12-44. London and New York: Continuum, 1998/2004. —. Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. Translated and edited by L. E. Loemker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1686/1956. Malinowski, Bronisáaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. —. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. London: Routledge, 1935. Morris, Marshall “What Problems? On Learning to Translate”. In Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader, edited by Roy Harris and George Wolf, 313 - 323. Elsevier Science Ltd.: Oxford, 1992/1998. Piaget, Jean. The Child's Conception of the World. Translated by J. and A. Tomlinson. London: Routledge, 1998. Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by B. Jowett. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 360 B. C./1871. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rowling, Joanne K. The Casual Vacancy. London: Little, Brown, 2012. —. Trafny wybór. Translated by A. Gralak. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2012. Russell, Bertrand. The Principles of Mathematics. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1903/1996. Stanaszek, Maciej. Unpublished pilot study and personal communication. 2013. Tajfel, Henri and John C. Turner. "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict". The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by

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W. G. Austin and S. Worchel, 33-47. Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole, 1979. van Dijk, Teun A. "Introduction: Levels and Dimensions of Discourse Analysis". In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, vol. 2, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 1-11. London: Academic Press, 1985. Wehmeier, Kai "How to Live Without Identity - And Why". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90(4) (2012): 761-777. Williams, C. J. F. Being, Identity and Truth. Oxford: OUP, 1922. Zaliwska-Okrutna, Urszula. "Double Face of Glottic Identity Revealed in Translation". In LACUS XXXVI, edited by Patricia Sutcliffe, William J. Sullivan and Arle Lommel, 347-355. 2011. —. "Etholinguistic Approach to Translation". In Translation and Meaning, Part 9, edited by Marcel Thelen and Barbara LewandowskaTomaszczyk, 91-98. Maastricht: Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, 2013.



Zanca Fig. 1. Alterity in Google Images (06/10/2013)

Zanca Fig. 2. Diversity in Google Images (06/10/2013)

Ortu Fig. 1. Trevor Manuel

Ortu Fig. 2. Helen Zille

Ortu Fig. 3. Irvin Jim

Esposito Fig. 1. Front Page of the People’s Partnership 2010 manifesto

Esposito Fig. 2. List of Candidates in the People’s Partnership 2010 manifesto

Borrelli Fig. 1. FB monthly active users by country (Source: www.checkfacebook.com)

Borrelli Fig. 2. FB penetration in the UK and in Italy as of April 2013, broken down by gender and age band (Source: www.checkfacebook.com)

Vigo Fig. 1. IT Corpus (ITC)

Vigo Fig. 2. UK Corpus (UKC)

Vigo Fig. 3. UKC + ITC distribution from 1992 to 2005

Vigo Fig. 4. ITC distribution from 2006 to 2013

Vigo Fig. 5. UKC distribution from 2006 to 2013

Vigo Fig. 6. ‘revised’ UKC distribution from 2006 to 2013

Vigo Fig. 7. Comparison between ITC distribution 2009-2011 and 2012-2013

Vigo Fig. 8. Comparison between UKC distribution 2009-2011 and 2012-2013

ACROSS GENERATIONS AND GENDERS

OLD AND YOUNG: CHANGING EVALUATIONS OF INTERGENERATIONAL DIVERSITY ALISON DUGUID

Since the 1970s we have been accustomed to a discourse of difference and diversity that involves ideas of empowerment, of being seen, being respected, given space, and avoiding discrimination; in the investigation of the way diversity is treated discursively newspaper discourse can be used fruitfully. With this in mind and with a coprus of broadsheet newspapers as a source of data, this paper will be looking at aspects of age as a construct of diversity. The press has always used age as a signifier and as a way of constructing the identity of participants. Age is also interesting in ‘them and us’ discourse in which perceptions can be influenced by either a process of identification with ‘the other’ or an inability to de-centre, that is to stand back, removing themselves from the centre and see themselves as others see them and to see another point of view. We all are, or have been, young and will probably become old so we are, will be, or have been them. The discourse of the old and the young as collective identities is changing. This paper looks at the ways in which this changing discourse is constructed in newspaper discourse (from 1993 to 2010) using the methodology of corpus assisted discourse studies.

Introduction: the intergenerational equity debate Age is a sociocultural construct particularly when it is groups rather than individuals that are under consideration; various studies suggest that social and personal age identities are negotiated and constantly renegotiated. Sociolinguists have investigated the ways in which older adults formulate their age identities (Coupland and Coupland 1994; Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1989; Coupland, Coupland, Giles, and Henwood 1991; Taylor 1992). Conventional stereotypes of old age tend to be more negative than stereotypes of younger groups (Kite and Johnson 1988; Mautner 2007). Even though we might say that it is possible to conceive of ourselves as

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having been young and living to be old, demographic history has produced the identification of a special generational cohort (the ‘baby boomers’, from a surge in postwar births) the use of the term set this generation apart and discursively constructed them as different from previous and subsequent generations. A conjunction of elements - critical mass in terms of numbers, rapid changes in society and technology, improvements in health and life-expectancy, together with the financial crisis after the banking crisis of 2008 - has placed this cohort within a wider discourse of political economy as a threat to the concept and future of welfare. This population shift has entailed a changing construction of the identity of that particular generation from a source of wealth for commerce and industry to a discourse of calamity (the ‘demographic time bomb’) and a sense of resentment by a working population outnumbered by, and having to pay for, a retired population. The construction of age has changed as that generation has progressed through life. Media language now constructs age as a serious and dichotomized problem. The way diversity is ‘languaged’ is frequently a matter of the construction of positive and negative evaluations. Evaluation is a significant element of our lives: as a device for interpreting the world and offering this evaluation to others, it pervades human behaviour: when we interact with the world around us, we perceive, categorize and evaluate what we encounter. Our short term evaluations turn into long term values (Bednarek 2006: 4).

The discourse of old and young is also a site for ideological battles and again evaluation is a key factor Every act of evaluation expresses a communal value system and every act of evaluation goes towards building up that value system. This value system is in turn a component of the ideology of the society that has produced the text (Hunston and Thompson 2005: 6).

In a world of diminishing resources questions are asked about intergenerational equity. The Baby Boomers are constructed as a ‘problem’ generation (Phillipson, Leach, Money, and Biggs 2008). They are accused of hedonistic waste, weighing down their children’s future with a vast national debt incurred in order to fund their own generous pensions and welfare entitlements. Research into the topic began in the 1980s. In America policy discussions, framed in terms of fairness in the distribution of resources between generations, and the emergence of a debate about equity, have been examined in detail (Kingson and Williamson 1991,

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1993; Binstock 1983) together with the ways in which discourses of intergenerational equity are susceptible to political and ideological manipulation (Duncan 2008). As a matter of framing and ideological interpretation the debate revolves around competing views and definitions of fairness: A political climate has emerged in which a number of welfare state programs are vulnerable to pressure to shift away from state provision toward private alternatives. In short, the generational equity debate may be best understood as an important ideological discussion that is generating a variety of views about the future of aging and social welfare (Kingson and Williamson 1993: 41).

In Britain, those born between 1946 and 19641, make up the wealthiest age group. The post-war generation, healthier and wealthier than any before, are now accused of pulling up the ladder behind them, having lived through a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Meanwhile we are told that one in five 16-to-24-year-olds are unemployed, housing is now expensive, pensionable age is receding, and pensions decreasing. Framing the debate in this way tends to emphasize one kind of inequity while airbrushing out others, as Binstock warned: “Contemporary preoccupation with generational inequity blinds us to inequities within age groups and throughout society” (Binstock 1985: 421). We find evidence of the generational inequity debate and competing discourses in our corpus data. In the Times of 2005 the issue appears with a strong positive evaluation for the idea 1) Should today's 25-year-old be prepared to fund the retirement of today's 50-year-old? In a brilliant speech on Monday, David Willetts, the Shadow Trade and Industry spokesman, set out why today's 25 year-old will be significantly worse off in 25 years' time than a 50-year-old is now (Times Nov. 05).

In the 2010 dataset, the argument appears again, with a thread of evaluation running through it: 2) This is the fourth book inside six months aiming to align British politics along generational lines. David Willetts opened up the debate with The Pinch, Francis Beckett and Neil Boorman have weighed in with various versions of baby boomer mea culpa, and now it's over to the disinherited themselves. Ed Howker and Shiv Malik stake out their complaint with a waspishness which comes from personal experience - the struggle to find somewhere to live in London, and to find a secure job (Guardian 2010).



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Comments from readers provide evaluations suggesting the issue is a contentious one. 3) David Willetts's pernicious book The Pinch. It's a piece of scapegoating twaddle under the veneer of serious academic research and discourse (Guardian 2010).

1. Corpus studies on diversity The way certain diversities are construed and constructed by the press has frequently been the object of corpus investigation. What a corpus analysis does best is uncover the subtle and pervasive meanings that construct identity. Collocates are used as a tool to sort the data into homogeneous groups and make any recurrent patterns visible. Krishnamurthy (1996) investigated media discourses around the words racial, ethnic, and tribal. Baker (2004) used the debates over a Bill in the House of Lords to equalize the age of sexual consent for gay men with that for heterosexuals, comparing the word-frequency lists of the speakers for and against. Those who argued in favor of law reform favoured a discourse of equality and tolerance, while those who were against law reform tended to employ key words relating to danger, ill health, crime, and unnatural behavior. Duguid (2010: 212) discovered that in the two lists she had prepared of the most frequent words prefixed by anti in 1993 and in 2005, the items antisemitism and anti-semitic retained exactly the same place in the rankings, that is, 4th and 8th most frequent respectively. Discourses in the newspapers relating to antisemitism had, therefore, remained not only very frequent but statistically very consistent. A closer comparison of the contexts of the two items suggested that there might be important differences in the kinds of discourses around anti-semitism and consequently in the way it was being represented. Partington (2012) followed up on this work and analysed changing discourses around anti-semitism from 1993 to the 2000s using keywords and concordancing. His paper examined the discourses relating to anti-semitism in the three leading UK national “quality” newspapers from 1993 to 2009, the way anti-semitism is represented, by reporting and discussion in the UK broadsheets, and how these representations have changed over time. A number of analyses of the journalistic representations of minority groups employ techniques from corpus linguistics. Baker (2010) investigated the representation of Islam in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers in the UK, Marchi (2010) carried out an MD-CADS analysis of changes in the way the UK press treated issues of “morality”, including attitudes towards gay people, between 1993 to 2005; Baker and McEnery (2005), Baker et al. (2008), Gabrielatos and

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Baker (2008) and Khosravinik (2010), all provide analyses of the portrayals of refugees, asylum seekers and (im)migrants (collectively “RASIM”) in the UK press, combining techniques from corpus linguistics and methods and theories from critical discourse analysis. The research analyzed a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (collectively RASIM). It tested the ability of collocation and concordance analysis to identify common categories of representation of RASIM, as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out more detailed qualitative analysis. Their study was not corroborated however by Morley and Taylor (2012) who were concerned with representations of non-EU immigrants in the UK and Italian press and found that the negative representation of immigrants occurs in the Italian corpus but not in the UK data. They point out that the difference might be due to the absence of tabloids in their corpus. Jaworska (forthcoming) has investigated the way different countries were represented in a corpus of websites advertising holidays. She found that when discussing locations, for those outside Europe there was a greater use of evaluative adjectives (in the superlative form) (unforgettable, breathtaking, magical) and the further away the destination, the greater the focus on creating a sensual experience and descriptions of dream-like worlds. And on the topic of ageing, Mautner (2007), searched large computerised corpora for lexico-grammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and ageing. Tommaso (2013) has studied American news discourse diachronically around the term baby boomers showing that they shift from a construction of baby boomers as a large market of consumers, with an emphasis on active individuals with high incomes and independent life-styles, to being seen as a social welfare issue and a demographic emergency.

2. Methodology As we have seen above, Modern Diachronic Computer Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) can track variation in discourse over time. General newspaper corpora can provide a lens for viewing changing attitudes. The SiBol/Port corpus2, used in several of the studies cited above (Partington, Duguid, Marchi) tracks three British broadsheets over 20 years. The corpus consists of Guardian, Times, Telegraph and the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph from 1993; a sister corpus, containing the complete set of articles in the same newspapers (plus the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer) from 2005; a third corpus was compiled by Taylor, then at Portsmouth University, containing the output of the Guardian, Times,



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Telegraph for 2010. A further collection for 2013 is being compiled extending the range of newspapers. I have used here the SiBol and Port corpora for the years 1993 to 2010. Alongside these large pre-gathered corpora, a smaller more specialized ad-hoc corpus, using issue-related search words, was gathered in order to identify more recent changes reflected in the press, where new questions have become part of the national conversation. For this corpus articles were gathered from UK newspaper websites from 2011 to 2013 with the search words ageing, baby boomers, pensioners, the young, the elderly. Many of the articles in the two corpora (SiBol and the ad-hoc corpus) contained references to the Intergenerational Foundation 3 , set up specifically to investigate intergenerational equity and a collection of their reports was also downloaded for comparative purposes and with the articles make up the Old/Young corpus. -

IF reports 192,786 tokens Old and Young 44,836 tokens (ad hoc search term articles) Sibol 1993 96,137,204 Sibol 2005 153,162,158 port (SiBol) 2010 143,293,696 tokens

The procedures involved in interrogating these corpora included the compilation of wordlists and keyword lists, the examination of concordance lines, and the identification of collocational profiles using Wordsmith 5 (Scott 2008) and close reading of some of the texts themselves

3. First findings Previous studies using other corpora provided findings for corroboration by our study. Mautner for example (2007) found a collocational profile showing that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. The hypothesis is borne out with the SiBol data using the Wordsmith collocate function in the Concord tool. Elderly has collocates like frail, ill, blind, in 1993 and 2005 and by

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the time we get to 2010 we get vulnerable and also needy, but interestingly we also find middle class and wealthy. In all three sample years, old has mixed prosody ripe, lovely, hoary, grand, wise and funny as well as silly, poor, and tired. This can be compared with young which has collocates such as: bright, new, promising, talented, brilliant, innocent, idealistic. The only negative collocate is angry (mostly an intertextual element: angry young men). But in 2005 a negative prosody begins to build up with angry, disaffected, disadvantaged, vulnerable and troubled. The discourse seems to be starting to frame the young as being in need of help as well as the old. The polysemic nature of the words old and young meant that often a manual search of concordance lines was needed. In lines for the phrase the young and the old, to catch the collective identity, similar discourses can be seen (data from 2010) even from just twenty randomly extracted concordance lines; both sets have a pervasive negative co-text in most of the lines (poor, expendable, ill-looking, vulnerable, decaying for the old and drugabuse, obesity, problems, threat, exploitation, unemployment, debt burdens, welfare and repossessions for the young); both sets have lines which refer to the other set (young to old and vice versa); neither are given agency, since both seem to undergo rather than to do. N Concordance 1 National Edition Needles at the ready to help the old and poor alike BYLINE: Laura Dixon SECTION: 2 and the young and less well off are quicker to adopt, while the old and entrenched and chronically dripping in money fear 3 disgrace if it happened to children or working people. But the old are expendable. That they are imprisoned by slippery 4 jeunes au boulot, Les vieux aux bistrot" - The young at work, the old in the pub. Marseilles, a city that exaggerates, and 5 Edition 1; National Edition Fears for the old as town hall frontline services take big hit BYLINE: 6 in pensions are to be reduced. The free TV licence for the old is under threat. What next? "Pensioners have 7 didn't it cry when the good-looking miners came out - only the old, or ill-looking ones? Will the Chilean Government now 8 the warmth, the excellent gin and tonics and respect for the old, include Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, 9 new generation could have done with some help from the old. James Purnell, Ruth Kelly, Alan Milburn, John Hutton 10 to set their own rate to protect services for our children, the old and vulnerable. Labour believes any rise should be 11 Pg. 26 LENGTH: 19 words "It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date" George 12 the rule of the traffic warden. Fines are issued to the young, the old, the sick, the lame and even the dead, as several 13 "adults mix with adults; children with children; the old with the old," she says. "It's terrible; you get more when you mix; 14 however, the technological divide between the young and the old is narrowing. Half of all over-55s now have broadband 15 an adult serving on a jury: age is not, in itself, one of them. If the old cannot be trusted with the democratic responsibility of 16 to society. He identified two key groups among his subjects: "the old old" who, viewing themselves as decaying, act 17 "It is enthusiasm of which we have the most need, we [the old] and the young." The most public decline has been that 18 Society: alzheimers.org.uk * "We are disgusted by the old and frightened of them; theyrepresent decay 19 against cuts in 2010, now hammering the young and the old and putting people on the dole?" Mr Skinner, 20 that brutalise may lend glamour to the young, they uglify the old. Someone who had seen a corpse close up told me

Fig. 1. Concordance lines with the old



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N Concordance 1 without taxation,' say I. But I wonder if I'm being too hard on the young. For even if their views are ill-informed and only 2 had been expressing public concern about drug abuse by the young. He and the President were as one on this, as they 3 are becoming celibate. Media images suggest sex is just for the young. It's intimidating and celibacy is convenient for 4 problems including high unemployment, particularly among the young, enormous public debt burdens, crippled banking 5 phone company HTC found. But the trend isn't limited to the young. Twenty nine per cent, of those aged over 65 also 6 a feel-good factor - but inflict a feel-bad factor on the young trying to get on the property ladder. Even the 7 Programme was introduced in 2006 to curb rising obesity in the young. For the 2010 /11 school year, 19 per cent of Year 8 of the jobs market to treat their employees, particularly the young, with contempt. As the Government considers a 9 happens to the children' and put profit before the welfare of the young. As he spoke, trolls were busy targeting the Hannah 10 move or into sports.' Yet overall apple consumption among the young is in decline. While the over-75s eat an average 11 easy to guess what will happen: as the repossessions begin, the young will be scurrying back in their droves to the family 12 be helping. I sincerely hope that culture is changing, for all the young people who will otherwise suffer and be put off 13 against women - and they are quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them. "The legal situation is that 14 The alert across London and the South East warns that the young, old and those with chronic diseases could be at 15 of around £11,250 a month'. Honestly, youth is wasted on the young. © Daily Mail LOAD-DATE: July 13, 2013 16 and unpopular, so they are always happy to be pictured with the young and popular. Within a matter of days, the White 17 of studies have found a link between general anaesthesia in the young and  problems with speech or learning difficulties. 18 rigid economic policies are having a devastating effect on the young with youth unemployment heading for 30 per cent 19 it is thought their behaviour is driven by a perceived threat to the young. The brightly coloured uniforms of postal workers 20 a society radically altered by the sexual revolution where the young were seen as ripe for exploitation? Despite Jack's

Fig. 2. Concordance lines with the young

Taking the observation that old age is often constructed in terms of being increasingly a user of state resources, an investigation of the word pensioner seemed a good starting point. In all three years the collocational profile of pensioners (an identity which is defined by recipient status) is fairly clearly characterised by a negative prosody of poverty and need: poor, poorer and poorest. In 2005 poverty struggling and impoverished are collocates but also vulnerable. That this is part of a stereotype is attested by these exasperated comments in the Guardian and the Daily Mail from the O/Y corpus: 4) ‘When I was working I wasn't defined by my job, no one talked of me as a salesmaner or a care assistant, but now because I live off my pensions, all of which I paid into, I have become a pensioner.’ 5) Have you noticed that two words have become inextricably linked: the words pensioner' and problem'? Every day, pensioners are routinely referred to in terms of the P-word. We're viewed as sick, we need care, we clog up hospitals, we need feeding and cleaning. If only we'd all snuff it at 70, turn up at Drop In And Die Centres, then there would be enough housing to go around (Daily Mail 2013).

There is however a change in 2010: we still find poor and poorest as collocates but new associations come in: wealthy, rich, richer, middleclass. The needs of these recipients are being questioned and a profile which appears to be less vulnerable and more powerful appears.

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N Concordance 1 subject to the scalpel. NHS bureaucrats, Scottish students, wealthy 2 low-speed, two-wheeled "personal transporter" favoured by wealthy 3 social networks will be forced apart - at the same time as wealthy 4 grave. But sometimes, as when the state sends healthy and wealthy 5 it will hit the poorest hardest. It will look increasingly unfair if wealthy 6 To claw it back there would need to be a rule that affects all wealthy 7 June 9) suggests scaling back on Government payments to wealthy 8 the rich, legal aid for civil litigation and free TV licences for wealthy 9 protected as welfare reform bites - and difficult to argue that wealthy 10 fuel allowances and bus passes, being cut. Others ask why wealthy 11 fuel payments, bus payments or free TV licences from wealthy 12 out of work who don't pay tax, leaving those in work and wealthy 13 Treasury has rebuffed efforts by Mr Cameron to encourage wealthy 14 began from 60 to 65. The details about the number of wealthy 15 by some Tories to protect universal benefits, which help wealthy 16 even a feasible hope. Even if it were, the implied subsidy to wealthy

pensioners and Brussels must also be part of the pensioners and egomaniacal corporate lunatics. As pensioners cash in their winter fuel payments and pensioners cheques for their fuel bills, the free-for-all pensioners continue to receive free bus passes, pensioners - maybe a special pensioner tax or pensioners on such items as free TV licences. I pensioners. Other expensive programmes must be pensioners should continue to get their winter fuel pensioners should receive a generous basic state pensioners. The reform credentials of the pensioners to pay the £6bn bill, the economic pensioners to pay their winter fuel allowance back to pensioners, which the Treasury said this week were pensioners, who often vote Conservative. This comes pensioners would make it difficult to defend on the

Fig. 3. Concordances for wealthy pensioners

This change in terms of the collocational profile of pensioners is a reflection of a changing economy, changing demographics, affordability and the ensuing debate about intergenerational equity. The age issue becomes visible in other ways. Duguid (2010) looked at anti- in the Sibol corpus for 1993 and 2005; in 1993 among the highest collocates in the field of science were anti-malarial, antibiotic, antiAIDS in a discourse of world wide problems of infectious diseases and cure but, when comparing SiBol 1993 with SiBol 2005, in 2005 the items antiinflammatory and anti-inflammatories were more common as collocates and the contexts included discussion of the properties of anti-inflammatory drugs for use with arthritis sufferers: in this case the salient discourse concerned problems mainly linked with the ageing body as opposed to epidemics, endemic tropical disease and the cure of infections. Other collocates were similalry related to problems of ageing: antioxidants and antioxidant, anti-ageing and anti-wrinkle; it seems that the ageing process itself was becoming salient and probably part of promotional material in the features sections of the papers rather than the news, and might be part of ‘advertisement equivalent exposure’. A report entitled Quality and Independence of British Journalism: Tracking the Changes over 20 Years (Lewis et al. 2008) found that 60 percent of press articles come wholly or mainly from ‘pre-packaged’ sources. The findings suggest that public relations often does much more than merely set the agenda: it was found that 19 percent of newspaper stories were verifiably derived mainly or wholly from public relations material, while fewer than half the stories appeared to be entirely independent of traceable PR. The most PRinfluenced topic was health. This latter piece of data fitted in with



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Tommaso’s 2013 account of babyboomers being seen as a target market. Among the collocates of ageing (see Table 1 showing an increase from 1993 to 2005 and the natural salience of the concept of this process for the Old/Young corpus) we find population, society and baby boomers and also infrastructure and workforce showing a concern for resources; but also cream, creams, products, body, treatments, in R1 position; in L1 position we find anti (as in anti-ageing), but also rapidly and increasingly which focus on change and give a prosody of an out-of-control, impending deterioration of affairs. Ageing

1993

2005

2010

O/Y

IF

Frequency %

1,226 0,00124

3,286 0,00207

2,949 0,00195

17 0,03714

59 0,02817

Table 1. Ageing in the corpus

A further search of the SiBol corpus found that the discursive construction of an older generation as having power, was ccarried out by phrases using grey as a determiner; back in 1993 there was only one reference to grey voters and it concerned the welfare state: such a move would initially involve substantial extra state spending. It would also be unpopular, alarming the “grey voters” (SiBol 1993) suggesting that the old are a substantial demographic and there are 16 occurrences of grey power mostly involving decisions about cuts to the welfare state, thus contrasting perceived power with perceived vulnerability. For example: 6) John Major ran into trouble on the emotive issue of the "old and cold" when he was junior social security minister seven years ago. The ensuing row provided him with early proof of the strength of "grey power", the burgeoning political clout wielded by people of retirement age (Times 93).

The use of such phrases increases in 2005, we find explicit references to grey power (35 occurrences) and the economic strength for example of the grey market and grey pound (118) but the frequency of such markers declines significantly for 2010 (see Table 2).

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grey pound grey power grey vote

1993 frequency 0

% -

18

0,00002

0

-

grey pound grey power grey vote

2005 frequency 28

% 0,00006

2010 % 0,000003

88

0,00019

0,00002

14

0,00003

0,000005

Table 2. Grey matters in the SiBol corpus

4. The topic based corpora When comparing the specific topic-based search-term-generated corpora with the SiBol corpora we can see how they approach the topic differently. From the grammatical keywords it is clear that there is a them and us approach (Table 3): They Them Their We Our Us

O/Y 0,77567% 0,28405% 0,83248% 0,46977% 0,23598% 0,17043%

2010 0,28708% 0,109209% 0,249340% 0,248044% 0,090717% 0,05105%

Keyness 259.46 88.59 386.26 71.86 73.60

Table 3. Them and us in the corpus

The lexical keywords of IF vs. 2010 reveal the economic basis for their discussions with keywords: loans, housing, transport, loans, debt, repayment; but also a moral one: justice, fair, fairness, moral, morals. On the other hand when we compare OY with 2010 the tone of the discourse changes, we get a more personalized set of keywords; boomers, elderly, pensioners, oldies, kids, grandchildren but also keywords indicating a different moral basis, that of negative evaluation and a discourse of blame: blame, whingeing, selfish, greedy, scrounger, fecklessness.

5. Rhetorical strategies Kingson and Williamson (1993: 41) were of the opinion that



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[t]his generational inequity debate can be seen as providing a unique opportunity for those seeking to substantially reduce the role of government in the provision of social welfare […]

and to undercut the contractual nature of social security. They warned that this would be done by reducing public support for welfare by delegitimizing social welfare programmes, creating divisions among groups who might benefit from such programmes, and scapegoating those who receive social welfare as non-deserving. Delegitimisation and scapegoating are usually done through language by framing and by evaluation: The debate is as much a symbolic contest as one over competing policies. The competing advocates of the framings attempt to depict their interpretative packages in ways which resonate with broader cultural themes. Each group adopts rhetorical strategies that attempt to make its framing more appealing and credible than that of its alternatives (Kingston and Williamson 1993: 41).

In a close reading of the texts in our data many of these rhetorical strategies are apparent; for example, headlines are framing devices which evaluate and focus on certain issues in the Old/Young newspaper corpus. 7) Headlines How swinging in the '60s made baby boomers five times more likely than other adults to get hepatitis C Gluten-free dog food and heated kitty beds: Baby boomers spend $52billion a year on pet supplies Booze toll of baby boomers: Their alcohol abuse costs NHS £825m Knee replacements double and new hips skyrocket in 10 years as more baby boomers undergo surgery to hold on to their youth

The press is fond of shorthand terms, often taken from other sources such as books and the US press, e.g. Greedy geezers, babyboomers, Generation X, Generation Y, Generation 13, boomerang kids, the millennium generation, helicopter parents, bed blockers, bedroom tax, granny tax. Journalists also play with acronyms Kipper - Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement, Yuckies: 8) the latest acronym trotted out to denote what I am: a Young Unwitting Costly Kid, sapping my baby-boomer parents of all their hardearned savings, and probably their will to live. New research released this week has found that an incredible 93 per cent of parents contribute to the finances of their Yuckies (Telegraph 2010).

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Evaluation through the choice of lexis is evident not just in the news data. For example the IF report talks of hoarding of housing and empty nests, under-occupation, and constructs a dichotomized discourse through careful choice of images and the lexical cohesion of antonymy. 9) While younger families are increasingly being squeezed into small flats and under-sized houses, older people are often rattling around in big houses with many bedrooms standing empty (IF corpus).

The way in which ‘the other’ is discussed also involves grammatical devices, one or other of which we find in nearly all the concordance lines examined: i) the use of definite article or demonstratives, overgeneralization, for example: i.i) LIFE for most of those aged 45 or over is increasingly comfortable and fulfilling, with the children gone and the mortgage paid, according to a new report on the attitudes, activities and spending habits of 'third agers'.

ii) the use of present simple to express a universal truth: ii.i) the so-called Generation X, as compared to the baby boom generation, is much more interested in work-life balance than going the extra mile (Times 05).

iii) generalising with they: iii.i) They are a very diverse group and most of them do not conform with traditional stereotypes.' According to Mintel third agers are the most discerning and demanding consumers, because they have had years of experience. They search out quality and value for money (Telegraph 93).

iv) Assertion and missing quantifiers provide yet more generalizations and un-nuanced debate: iv.i) Current pensioners enjoyed a golden postwar era of housing market gains, Stock Exchange bull markets, mortgage interest and life assurance premium tax relief, secure employment, free school milk etc, etc. (Times 93). iv.ii) In other words, these aren't members of Generation X pampered, navel-gazing and atomised youths who can only engage



Alison Duguid with their drug dealer or their shrink. This is Generation Scared young people who missed out on the safety of the 1990s, when the economy was booming, terrorists worked abroad, and the ice caps were intact (Telegraph 2010). .

v) Deontic modality about obligation and desirability: v.i) To claw it back there would need to be a rule that affects all wealthy pensioners - maybe a special pensioner tax or national service for the over65s. v.ii) If some of the "never had it so good" generation failed to think ahead, then why should the current struggling generation shed any tears? (Times 93).

vi) Rhetorical questions: vi.i) the sense of entitlement the young have these days. What makes them think that without any experience, any proven staying power, any track record of problem solving and having made far less of a contribution to the UK budget than their parents have, they somehow deserve to fill their elders' boots before we have even finished with them? vi.ii) The shocking poverty faced by older female pensioners … does not afflict younger pensioners. These relatively younger women often benefit from the increase in both occupational pensions and home ownership. Why should struggling younger working generations subsidise such people through their taxes? vi.iii) And why should middle-class pensioners continue enjoying their generous universal benefits while families with children on identical incomes are cut off?

Often the papers bring in research to frame their articles: 10) CHILDREN hoping to inherit their parents' wealth are in for a shock, according to a survey of 2,000 adults by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Two in three adults with the means to make a bequest said they “plan to enjoy life and not worry too much about leaving a legacy” (Telegraph 05). 11) Research carried out this summer on behalf of MTV identifies my peers and me as “Generation Y”, young people whose “private lives are now partially or fully expressed through the purchase of branded products, services and experiences” (Telegraph 05).

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Old and Young: Changing Evaluations of Intergenerational Diversity 12) Those who belong to Generation Y, those born between the 1980s and 1990s who are now in their twenties, have an inflated sense of entitlement but lack the work ethic to achieve their goals. They also hate being criticised, it is claimed. Researchers at the University of Hampshire believe that the twentysomethings were told from birth that they were special. They now believe it and will ignore anybody who says otherwise (Telegraph 2010).

The fact that many of the texts in our corpus use such reports and surveys or are to be found on the financial pages of the papers again leads us to wonder how much of the discourse comes from a hidden intertextuality, worked-over press-releases; the insurance world is particularly well represented as they are in the front-line where pension schemes are concerned but it is not always clear how much of an article comes from the journalist and how much from a pre-prepared source (Lewis et al. 2008).

6. Concluding remarks By analyzing sets of data diachronically we can track changes in language usage which reflect extralinguistic (social, political, historical, cultural, etc.) changes. CADS combines the inductive approach, a bottomup, data-driven analysis that relies on a large amount of linguistic data, with the discourse analysis approach providing in-depth analysis of texts, but also looking at the context outside the concordance lines, using a variety of starting points and inputs to the analysis of texts and their construction of particular versions of the social world. We have seen, through quantitative data, how certain items begin to enter the discourse, how new stereotypes can come in alongside older ones. And by close reading of the texts we can examine the rhetorical strategies of an ongoing discussion. We need to ask why occurrences of many of the topic words rise in the 2005 data followed by a drop in 2010, the first set of data after the financial crisis of 2008. The debate is clearly present in 1993: the cluster, demographic time bomb, occurs in all three Sibol corpora with similar frequencies. What does become clear is the way the discourse has changed and a new subset of pensioners in particular has been constructed with the onset of austerity, bearing out Kingston and Williamson’s predictions. Arguing that most of the elderly are financially secure, using aggregate data, downplaying diverse economic situations among different subgroups of elders, means that a generation once constructed as vulnerable and needy might be on its way to being re-positioned as powerful and in no way deserving and that the principle of universality of welfare for this age group is an overgenerous waste of resources,



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promoting acceptance of the notion that it is not politically feasible to raise taxes or cut defence funding to raise the funds for social welfare programmes. The meagre blanket of resources is presented as being whisked away from protecting the young in times of dwindling resources. We should remember Binstock’s 1983 warning: It may be that the emergence of the generational equity debate signals the replacement of the old stereotype of elderly people as weak, ill and poor, with a new and equally false stereotype of elders as healthy and well heeled (Binstock 1983: 143).

It must be admitted that the data is taken from old media and in general the data exemplifies the older talking about the younger generations. The young are no longer represented in positive terms but have begun to take on the collocational profiles previously connected with age – in particular vulnerable. Where pensioners used to be represented as poor, their neediness is now increasingly being questioned and a different prosody has begun to creep in to the press data reflecting the intergenerational equity debate and the question of the distribution of resources from the state. As a strategy it involves questions of affordability and fairness. The keywords lead us into the corpus but qualitative close reading is required to unpack the narratives and the different ways of ‘languaging’ this particular diversity and its changing evaluations.

References Baker, Paul. “‘Unnatural acts’: Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1) (2004): 88-106. Baker, Paul and Tony McEnery. “A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts.” Journal of Language and Politics 4(2) (2005): 197-226. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid Khosravinik, Michal Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery and Ruth Wodak. “A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.” Discourse and Society 19(3) (2008): 273-306. —. “Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999-2005.” Journal of Language and Politics 9(2) (2010): 310-338. Bednarek, Monika. Evaluation in Media Discourse. London: Continuum, 2006.

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Binstock, Robert H. “The Aged as Scapegoat.” Gerontologist 23(2) (1983): 136-43. —. “Compassionate Aging Revisited.” Health and Society 63(2) (1985): 420-451. Coupland, Justine, and Nicholas Coupland. “Old age doesn’t come alone: Discursive representations of health-in-aging in geriatric medicine.” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 39 (1994): 81–95. Coupland, Justine, Nicholas Coupland, and Karen Grainger. “Intergenerational discourse: Contextual versions of aging and elderliness.” Aging and Society 11 (1991): 189-208. Coupland, Justine, Nicholas Coupland, Howard Giles and Karen Henwood. “Formulating age: Dimensions of age identity in elderly talk.” Discourse Processes 14 (1991): 87-106. Coupland, Nicholas, Justine Coupland and Howard Giles. “Telling age in later life: Identity and face implications.” Text 9 (1989): 129-151. Duguid, Alison. “Investigating anti and some reflections on Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS).” Corpora 5(2) (2010): 191-220. Duncan, Colin. “The dangers and limitations of equality agendas as means for tackling old-age prejudice.” Ageing and Society 28 (2008): 11331158. Gabrielatos, Costas, and Paul Baker. “Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press (1996-2005).” Journal of English Linguistics 36(1) (2008): 5-38. Hunston, Susan, and Geoff Thompson (eds). Evaluation in Text. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Jaworska, Silvia. “The quest for the 'local' and 'authentic' Corpus-based explorations into the discursive constructions of tourist destinations in British and German commercial travel advertising.” In Höhmann, D. Tourismuskommunikation. Spannungsfeld von Sprach- und Kulturkontakt. Frankfurt a. M. u.a: Peter Lang, 2013. Khosravinik, Majid. “The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Language and Politics 9(1) (2010): 1-28. Kingson, Eric R. and John B.Williamson. “Generational equity or privatization of social security.” Society 28(6) (1991): 38-41. Kingson, Eric R. and John B.Williamson. “The Generational Equity Debate A Progressive Framing of a Conservative Issue.” Journal of Aging & Social Policy 5(3) (1993): 31-53.



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Kite, Mary E. and Blair T. Johnson. “Attitudes toward older and younger adults: A meta-analysis.” Psychology and Aging 3 (1988): 233-244. Krishnamurthy, Ramesh. “ETHNIC, RACIAL AND TRIBAL The language of racism?” In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Carmen. R. Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 129–149. London: Routledge, 1996. Leach, Rebecca, Chris Phillipson, Simon Biggs and Annemarie Money A. "Sociological perspectives on the baby boomers: An exploration of social change." Quality in Ageing and Older Adults 9(4) (2008): 19-26. Lewis, Justin, Andrew Williams, Bob Franklin, James Thomas and Nick Mosdell. The Quality and Independence of British Journalism: Tracking the Changes over 20 years. Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2008. Marchi, Anna. “The moral in the story’: a diachronic investigation of lexicalised morality in the UK press.” Corpora 5(2) (2010): 161-189. Mautner, Gerlinde. “Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly.” Language in Society 36 (2007): 51-72. Morley, John and Charlotte Taylor. “Us and them: how immigrants are constructed in British and Italian newspapers.” In European Identity What the Media Say, edited by Paul Bayley and Geoffrey Williams, 190-223. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Partington, Alan. “The changing discourses on anti-semitism in the UK press from 1993 to 2009: A modern-diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study.” Journal of Language & Politics. 11(1) (2012): 51-76. —. “Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project.” Corpora 5(2) (2010): 83-108. Partington, Alan (ed.). “Modern Diachronic Corpus-assisted Studies (MD-CADS).” Corpora 5(2) special issue (2010). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid and Charlotte Taylor. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Tommaso, Laura. The Discourse of Baby Boomers in American Media: A Diachronic Investigation. Paper: IWODA Santiago, 2013.

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Notes 1 But see a letter in Times 12/12/2013 from Professor David Clark, writing from Warwick: “Sir, John Walsh (Dec 11), who was born in the early 1950s, claims to be a baby boomer. He is not. The postwar baby boom was short-lived. Live births in the UK exceeded 900,000 per annum between 1946 and 1948 but fluctuated around 800,000 in 1950-56. More live births were recorded in every year between 1900 and 1914 (and in 1920 and 1921) than in any year between 1948 and 1963. The concept of a baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, is a meaningless generalisation that has no basis in demography […]”. 2 For a full description of the SiBol group and the corpora see http:// www3.lingue.unibo.it/blog/clb/. 3 http://www.if.org.uk/.



THE CONSTRUCTION OF AGE IDENTITY IN AN ONLINE DISCOURSE COMMUNITY: THE CASE OF BOOMER WOMEN SPEAK* LAURA TOMMASO

1. Online communities and older adults With the widespread availability of Internet, and the changes in patterns of interacting, interpersonal computer-mediated communication has increasingly become a means of conducting life’s business and for negotiating social support and engagement among many older adults. As previous research shows, older adults benefit from ICT in various ways. The main functions described are communication medium, information source, task-orientated tool, and leisure activity (Cody et al.1999; Iyer and Eastman 2006; Loges and Jung 2001; Opalinski 2001; Xie 2007; Wagner et al. 2010). Moreover, using the Internet seems to have a positive impact on older adults’ well-being. For example, it is associated with higher levels of social connectivity, higher levels of perceived social support, decreased feelings of loneliness, lower levels of depression, and generally more positive attitudes toward ageing (Dickenson and Hill 2007; Fokkema and Knipscherr 2007; Van De Watering 2005). According to a 2009 study sponsored and prepared by AARP and Microsoft, US Baby Boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – have a “dynamic, thoughtful and ever-changing relationship with new technology, viewing the world ahead with great enthusiasm and just a touch of caution” 1 . Despite social networking’s seemingly universal popularity, it’s only recently that older adults have begun to participate on a broad scale. Preliminary research 2 suggests that the so-called “young old” are the fastest growing demographic to adopt social media. The major break came as recently as 2012, when Internet usage by people over age 65 surpassed 50 percent – up from just over 16 percent in 2000. Previous studies report that, due to the considerable amount of leisure time they enjoy, improvements in health care that extend “middle age”, and the desire among many within this group to use new technologies to help

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maintain a vital life style, they have become enthusiastic Internet users who use the Web to gather all kinds of information that helps or entertains them. Moreover, social linkages in the form of e-mail, chat groups, forums, and posted bulletin boards have grown dramatically in the past decade, ushering in a new relational world which in many ways is not much different from face-to-face interaction (Parks and Floyd 1980: 80). As discussed by Freed and Broadhead (1987), a discourse community is a distinct body that shares common rules and language for their communications; the rules and language are usually internal to the community, and participants have to standardize their discussions within the parameters set by the discourse community in order to join in the conversation. Although originally developed by linguists interested in speech habits, the notion of discourse community has significantly broadened in the last decade with the advent of computer-mediated communication. Whether we conceive of them as “communities of practice” (Eckert 1992) or simply “discourse communities” (Swales 1990), it is clear that online communities provide an interactive venue for people with similar interests, or for advice and self-advocacy with others with similar life stories. Readers can observe others interacting without directly participating themselves and still receive informational and social benefits (Preece et al. 2004). While members may actually change names and profiles or disguise their identities, they still somehow stick to, and defend values, beliefs, and the in-group identity of the community in their virtual discourse practices (Herring 2002). Online forums and networks have received increasing attention from social scientists and communication scholars over the past few years. More recently, researchers who focus on ageing are studying the phenomenon to see whether the online communities can provide some of the benefits of a group of friends while being much easier to assemble and maintain (Wright 2000; Wright and Query 2004). Others have focused on the exploration of the “fun culture” in these online environments (Nimrod 2011). However, only a limited number of researchers have analysed the discourse of elderly online communities and still fewer have done so using a sociolinguistic perspective. Moreover, as Lin, Hummert and Harwood write, for discourse scholars, on-line interactions have an advantage over face-to-face interactions because an Internet discussion forum offers the opportunity for unobtrusive observation of ingroup interaction (2004). For this reason, the forum on the Boomer Women Speak website was selected as a rich source for the study of age identity presentations. The ways in which older adults disclose their ages and formulate their age identities have attracted the attention of sociolinguistic scholars



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(Coupland and Coupland 1994; Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1989; Coupland, Coupland, Giles, and Henwood 1991; Taylor 1992). Instead of viewing age identities as static, these studies suggest that social and personal age identities are constantly renegotiated in a context of societal stereotypes of age. Although, they tend to be more negative than stereotypes of younger groups (Kite and Johnson 1988), research has identified multiple positive and negative subtypes of old age (Brewer, Dull, and Lui 1981; Brewer and Lui 1984; Hummert 1990; Hummert, Garstka, Shaner, and Strahm 1994). Analysis of older adults’ discourse on ageing can reveal how they draw upon these stereotypes in building their age identities.

2. Research questions In the current study, the Boomer Women Speak forum is proposed as an example of a discourse community (Swales 1990) in which contributors construct later adulthood as a marked social condition with its relational demands and opportunities, and its identificational possibilities. Our purpose is to uncover the strategies that boomer women employ to present and negotiate age identity in a natural, non-institutional setting. In particular, four research questions are addressed: 1. 2. 3. 4.

how is the sense of community built via online communication? what age-related themes are embedded in the online discussions? what kinds of expectations do female boomers have about their life in older age? more specifically, how is “retirement” talked about and conceptualized in the data?

3. Data and methodology The data used in the current study were generated from a sample of messages posted on the Boomer Women Speak forums from 2011 to 2013, when most of the boomers reached retirement age. In particular, the data were retrieved from a section called Re-inventing life which includes topics such as life changes and expectations. Therefore, it provided a natural context for new (age) identities to emerge in the “talk”. Moreover, to gather data on how users see this particular online community, the whole collection of Forum Testimonials was retrieved from the website. The Boomer Women Speak administrator was contacted and provided with study information via email as per the approved procedure. Subject

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identity has been protected, as all posts were analyzed anonymously. To prevent bias during online discussion, the objectives of the study were not made known to the participants during the investigation. The Testimonials Corpus (TC) is of approximately 6,400 words. The Boomer Women Speak Corpus (BWSC) amounts to a total of approximately 43,000 words for a total of 384 messages (See Table 1). The active participants in the study totalled 62. As for the reference corpus, the home corpora were compared with the BNC written sample (Claridge 2007). Discussion threads

Messages

Are We Headed For Encore Careers? Being alone at our age... Being single can have its challenges Bragging about retirement Dealing with Wrinkles Do You Tolerate "Stuff" That Holds You Back? I am retired Let's Talk: Are You Feeling "Fierce With Age?" Next few years: your priorities? Preparing long before retirement Purpose: do you know what yours is? Relationship questions Starting over What are the pros and cons of being retired..?? When will you retire? Would you remarry? Total

18 13 37 32 6 9 22 11 9 9 22 8 26 54 31 77 384

Table 1. Discussion threads included in the corpus

To conduct the current investigation, a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies methodology was adopted (Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013; Partington 2010). This approach seeks to understand discourse and the kinds of social identities these representations make possible through analyzing quantitative sets of data. The messages were analyzed as a collective body of text through Wmatrix3 (Rayson 2009), a web interface for corpus analysis. Wmatrix3 not only produces concordances and allows for comparison with a reference corpus through the “keyword analysis”, but is also a tool for semantic annotation of running text. These semantic fields are thus a good description of the prominent topics within the corpus. As Hardie, Koller, Rayson, and Semino (2008) have suggested, they may be viewed as roughly corresponding to conceptual domains.



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4. Overview of findings and discussion 4.1 The Forum Testimonials Corpus To gain insight into the key functions of Boomer Women Speak and understand how members use the forum, how they communicate with others, how others communicate with them, and how that communication make them feel, I first retrieved texts from the public Forum Testimonials section. This small corpus consists of fifty messages written by fifty among the most active forum participants. In fact, all of this information would not be available by simply looking at the forum posts, not least because private messages cannot be seen by the researcher, which justifies the decision to integrate the analysis with context information. In other words, the “offline” testimonials offer a more intimate look behind the curtain and represent a further proof of the reinforcement of group identity through computer-mediated communication. A preliminary investigation of the semantic domains by means of semantic tagging made it possible to identify the main themes in the corpus:

Z8 L1+ S2.1 S1.1.3+ T3-S1.2.4+ M6 A3+ X2.2+ W2 L1 S8+ S3.1 S1.1.2+ E4.1+

Semantic Fields Pronouns Alive People: Female Participating Time: New and Young Polite Location and Direction Existing Knowledgeable Light Life and Living things Helping Personal Relationship: General Reciprocal Happy

Table 2. Most frequent semantic fields in the Testimonials Corpus (compared with BNC written)

The first topic to emerge in the offline narratives is that of reciprocity. As the following concordance shows, sharing personal experiences and giving support are the key forum functions:

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1. eps, graduations, weddings to share and chit-chat about. Here at the 2. gratitude enough to D. for sharing her resources. I hired M. to work with, 3. some strong and willing to share their strength , wisdom and expertise 4. down the same road. There 's give and take, we ebb and flow with wisdom, 5. lost, or found, whatever, we give and take; we just gather here to connect 6. Forums is like writing in an interactive journal or book that speaks back! 7. Sometimes its easier to share things that are close to the quiet 8. of an in-person visit. We can interact at the time it is most needed an 9. It is not just the human interaction, but the timing for each human 10. but never lonely ... This site shares my coffee with me in the morning 11. she willingly shared her positive experiences with other boomer women 12. When we share with each other, we help each other 13. because healing through sharing has infinite possibilities. 14. Responses. For me, I 'm just sharing my journey. It helps me. And I 15. we are sisters of the heart - sharing each others pain and blessings. 16. I couldn’t imagine myself sharing my thoughts, hopes, and dreams 17. are wise , funny and open to sharing their ideas and experiences. 18. strong and creative women and interact with them daily. Boomer Women Table 3. Concordances of the semantic tag reciprocal

In fact, the most frequent multi-word expressions in the Testimonials Corpus, such as each other and one another, reveal the centrality of the “give and take” discourse which is closely related to the sense of “gratitude” that in turn facilitates the development of socially rather than individually oriented projects (thank you; thanks to). Boomer women find friendship, emotional support and information using the anonymous and comfortable environment of the virtual community: “I am a proud, participating member of NABBW and BWS who finds support and resources at all times, visiting the forums with acceptance and without pretension any time, day or night”. Moreover, many of the participants refer to other users as their “sisters” and talk about forming a “sisterhood” with users on the site: “My boomer sisters graciously share wisdom, humor, honesty, and stories of success and failure, as well as courage and fear.” Some refer to other users as “friends” and build closer ties in the outside world: “I found friends, an editor, and a virtual assistant. I made a successful connection”. This “sense of belonging” is defined according to shared interests and common experiences in the midlife stage: Here at the BWS forums, it’s so great to be among women who have lives outside of their children. I can virtually converse with those on subjects that I can identify with, without feeling as though I have two heads by not



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being a mother. Thank you for offering a neutral place of comfort for all “walks” of life. I feel at home with you!

By analyzing the concordances of the semantic field “happy”, it is also possible to observe that humour is an important component of the Boomer Women Speak discourse. As the testimonials show, it has the function of constituting and maintaining the group solidarity. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

thanks for your help and support and laughter and tears and advice and we ebb and flow with wisdom, laughter, healing, prayer, whether I 've known her , I’ve also delighted in her humor, optimism, and Then we can go to another thread and have a good belly laugh. to talk about all topics ... we 've smiled ... we 've laughed ... we 've cried I come here for comfort and healing, laughter and the chance maybe to responses from warm, intuitive, wise, and humorous women magically Their aim is to help each other through encouragement, humor, and can always count on getting a hearty laugh or two from the posts to The women are supporters, cheerleaders, directors, and in my I have found encouragement, support, comfort, humor, courage, I love the forum because women of the boomer years are wise, funny camaraderie that comes from just being a woman and we can laugh, cry, Mostly I like it for the fun knowing what boomers are doing 

Table 4. Concordances of the semantic tag happy

These initial findings provide evidence that strong feelings of community have determined the flow of information among all participants, commitment to group goals, cooperation among members, and satisfaction with group efforts. Additionally, participants benefit from community membership by experiencing a greater sense of well being, also through humorous discourse, and by having an agreeable set of individuals or pairs to call on for support when needed.

4.2. The Boomer Women Speak Forum Corpus: retirement as opportunity In order to direct the current investigation to salient concepts within the Boomer Women Speak corpus, which may help to obtain a better idea of the main embedded discourses, a keyword list was generated (Baker: 2006, 123). Retirement, love, life, and eating and sport habits (diet; eat; eating;

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exercise; fat) emerge as the most prevalent topics in the corpus. By deriving lists of collocates, it can immediately be seen that positive age identity themes are more frequently presented in these online messages, as the following table shows: retirement life love eat* exercise

early, until, real, age, years purpose, better, changes life, freedom healthy, food, breakfast, meat weight, loss, control

Table 5. Collocates sorted by minimum frequency of 4, with span -3 to +3

A closer look at the concordances list of retire* confirms its positive connotation. Forum participants look at retirement as a positive option, enabling a newly engaged lifestyle, as several examples below illustrate: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

and more and more of us are healthy and vibrant at retirement time -I 'm happier now than I’ve ever been. It 's nice to be retired. Love that. you got your pool, a good retirement resort, your new little companion, enough time you enjoy it all. Congratulations to your retirement. always posting. Congrats on the retirement. Enjoy life to the fullest! and congratulations. So much for my retirement at least for a week budget is enough for us to enjoy our retirement, and travel; - just like ear from you again! I am sure you will enjoy your retirement. Last for is..how are you girls feeling right now about retirement? What are felt that you are quite satisfied in your retirement..and quite busy.. So along with having more time...retirement is a changing mind set. fortunate to be able to take early retirement and live very comfortably We have a lot of hobbies, so retirement was not a big adjustment for Life can AND IS sweet after retirement. The only downside I can see I reinvented myself after forced retirement. I began writing publicly, the real cons of retirement is wasting time -- its a gift to explore all the think a day goes by without me imagining being retired . I am so ready I am retired and loving every minute of it ! I love to crochet and cook I can not retire yet , but look forward to it. I 'm sure I will find things

Table 6. A selection of the concordances of retire* seen as a positive transition

From the above exemplary group of concordances we may derive that the forum participants report feeling happy and content during retirement, as the following extract highlights:



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I am RETIRED ... I have decided with my impending birthday I want to spend more of my time enjoying my life instead of being trapped behind a desk 8/10 hours everyday. I have done that now for over 35 years. And I am going to do lots of running around. I can write whenever the mood strikes me and see how it goes. I could never stop writing and publishing my work, but this way the pressure is off. My goodness I feel happier and more relaxed already ... Good for you. Enjoy your free time! … It 's high time you enjoy it all. Congratulations to your retirement!

The remaining subjects show a particular eagerness to retire and enjoy life. Such positive considerations invoke a more general discourse on retirement as a new era of discovering one’s dreams, talents and things of great creativity that could not be manifested or pursued during the working life. The baby boomer generation is fostering an “ageing well” trend that is reshaping retirement as a period of new opportunities for activity rather than seeing it as a time of inevitable decline and dependency: “I am much more comfortable in my own skin in spite of the new aches and pains that come and go on a daily basis. I am counting down to retirement next year and am so looking forward to writing more, starting a garden, going out more to take photographs, and so much more”. When negative discourses surround the retirement issue, forum participants urge each other to take positive action to maintain their health, well-being and lifestyles relating to things such as food/nutrition and exercise. In particular, the subjects find that their identity comes to be challenged by their ageing body over which they wish to exert control and turn to anti-ageing knowledge. In this sense, one comment by a forum user is particularly significant: There is a wonderful chapter in the Wayne Dyer book "The Power of Intention" about how very powerful our minds are in the aging process and in being healthy. Dr. Dyer taught me that if I "thanked" my body (and God, of course) for being healthy, beautiful and youthful, it would actually become more healthy, beautiful and youthful. Amazingly enough, I have found this to be true. Recently I read a Blog of a new author friend who basically said we all ought to get over it and accept we are getting OLD! I wrote her back and told her I would be blogging a respectful rebuttal, because I just don't believe that! Yes, aging is inevitable. But, our minds are so much more powerful than we realize! We can create more youth OR more aging according to how we program ourselves.

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5. Concluding remarks The findings of the current study provide evidence that the online communities are a rich communication arena that older individuals use to reach out to peers for support and to express their identities (Harwood 2004; Lin, Hummert, Harwood 2004). Female Boomers establish boundaries for their community, creating a sense of “here”, a place “for women”, “among women”, and present themselves as adaptive, goaloriented, and focused on individual choices. In the interactive forum environment, they are confident in their ability to reinvent old age and are determined to maintain their autonomy. In particular, retirement is seen as a positive change in life, being centered on community involvement, prosperity, freedom and health.

References AARP and Microsoft. Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation (2009). Accessed October 3, 2013. http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/computers/2009_boomers _and_technology_final_report.pdf. Baker, Paul. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, 2006. Brewer, Marilynn B. and Layton Lui. “Categorization of the Elderly by the Elderly”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 10 (1984): 585–595. Brewer, Marilynn B., Valerie Dull, Layton Lui. “Perceptions of the Elderly: Stereotypes as Prototypes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41(4) (1981): 656-670. Claridge, Claudia. “Constructing a Corpus from the Web: Message Boards.” In Corpus Linguistics and the Web, edited by Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf and Carolin Biewer, 87-108. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Cody, Michael J., Deborah Dunn, Shari Hoppin, Pamela Wendt. “Silver Surfers: Training and Evaluating Internet Use among Older Adult Learners.” Communication Education 48(4) (1999): 269-286. Coleman, Peter G. “Facing the Challenges of Aging: Development, Coping, and Meaning in Life.” In Handbook of Communication and Aging Research (2nd Ed.), edited by Jon F. Nussbaum and Justine Coupland: 6-39. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. Coupland, Justine and Coupland, Nikolas. “Old Age Doesn’t Come Alone: Discursive Representations of Health-in-Aging in Geriatric Medicine.”



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International Journal of Aging and Human Development 39 (1994): 81-95. Coupland, Justine, Nikolas Coupland, Karen Grainger. “Intergenerational Discourse: Contextual Versions of Aging and Elderliness.” Aging and Society 11 (1991b): 189-208. Coupland, Justine, Nikolas Coupland, Howard Giles, Karen Henwood. “Formulating Age: Dimensions of Age Identity in Elderly Talk.” Discourse Processes 14 (1991a): 87-106. Coupland, Nikolas. “Introduction: Towards a Stylistics of Discourse.” In Styles of Discourse, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 1-19. New York: Croom Helm, 1988. Coupland, Nikolas and Justine Coupland. “Discourse, Identity and Aging.” Handbook of Communication and Aging Research (2nd Ed.), edited by Jon F. Nussbaum and Justine Coupland, 79-104. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Coupland, Nikolas, Justine Coupland, Howard Giles. “Telling Age in Later Life: Identity and Face Implications.” Text 9 (1989): 129-151. Coupland, Nikolas, Jon. F. Nussbaum, Alan Grossman. “Introduction: Discourse, Self and the Lifespan.” In Discourse and Lifespan Identity, edited by Nikolas Coupland and Jon F. Nussbaum, xx-xxviii. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. Dickinson, Anna and Robin L. Hill. “Keeping in Touch: Talking to Older People about Computers and Communication.” Educational Gerontology, 33(8) (2007): 613-630. Eckert, Penelope. “Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender and Power all Live.” In Locating Power: Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, edited by Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz and Birch Moonwomon, 89-99. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1992. Reprinted in Jennifer Coates (ed.) Readings in Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Fokkema, Tineke and Kees Knipscheer. “Escape Loneliness by Going Digital: A Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of a Dutch Experiment in Using ECT to Overcome Loneliness among Older Adults.” Aging & Mental Health, 11(5) (2007): 496-504. Freed, Richard C. and Glenn J. Broadhead. “Discourse Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms.” College Composition and Communications 38 (1987): 154-165. Herring, Susan C. “Computer-mediated Communication on the Internet.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 36 (2002): 109168.

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Hummert, Mary L. “Multiple Stereotypes of Elderly and Young Adults: A Comparison of Structure and Evaluations.” Psychology and Aging 5 (1990): 183-193. Hummert, Mary L., Teri A. Garstka, Jaye L. Shaner, and Sharon Strahm. “Stereotypes of the Elderly Held by Young, Middle-aged, and Elderly Adults.” Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Science 49 (1994): 240-249. Iyer, Rajesh and Jacqueline K Eastman. “The Elderly and their Attitude toward the Internet: The Impact on Internet Use, Purchase, and Comparison Shopping.” The Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 14(1) (2006): 57-67. Kite, Mary E. and Blair T. Johnson. “Attitudes toward older and younger adults: A meta-analysis.” Psychology and Aging 3 (1988): 233-244. Koller, Veronika, Andrew Hardie, Paul Rayson, and Elena Semino. “Using a semantic annotation tool for the analysis of metaphor in discourse.” Metaphorik.de 15 (2008): 141-60. Lin, Mei-Chen Lin, Mary Lee Hummert, Jake Harwood. “Representation of Age Identities in On-line Discourse.” Journal of Aging Studies 18 (2004): 261-274. Loges, William and Joo-Young Jung. “Exploring the Digital Divide: Internet Connectedness and Age.” Communication Research 28(4) (2001): 536-562. Nimrod, Galit. “The Fun Culture in Seniors’ Online Communities”. The Gerontologist 51(2) (2011): 226-237. Opalinski, Laural. “Older Adults and the Digital Divide: Assessing Results of a Web-based Survey.” Journal of Technology in Human Services, 18(3/4) (2001): 203-221. Parks, Malcolm R. and Kory Floyd. “Making Friends in Cyberspace.” Journal of Communication 46 (1996): 80-97. Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid and Charlotte Taylor. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pew Internet and American Life. Four in Ten Seniors Go Online, 2010. Accessed October 3, 2013. http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2010/January/38-of-adultsage-65-go-online.aspx. Preece, Jenny, Blair Nonnecke, Dorine Andrews. “The Top Five Reasons for Lurking: Improving Community Experiences for Everyone.” Computers in Human Behavior 20(2) (2004): 201-223.



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Rayson, Paul. Wmatrix. A Web-based Corpus Processing Environment. Lancaster: Computing Department, Lancaster University, 2009. Swales, John. M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Taylor, Bryan C. “Elderly Identity in Conversation: Producing Frailty.” Communication Research 19 (1992): 493-515. Van De Watering, Marek. The impact of computer technology on the elderly, 2005. Accessed May 30, 2013. http://www.few.vu.nl/~rvdwate/HCI_Essay_Marek_van_de_Watering. pdf Wagner, Nicole, Khaled Hassanein, Milena Head. “Computer Use by Older Adults: A Multi-Disciplinary Review.” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (2010): 870-882. Wright, Kevin B. “The Communication of Social Support within an OnLine Community for Older Adults: A Qualitative Analysis of the SeniorNet Community.” Qualitative Research Reports in Communication Vol. 1(2) (2000): 33-43. Wright, Kevin B. and James L. Query. “Online Support and Older Adult: A Theoretical Examination of Benefits and Limitations of ComputerMediated Support Networks for Older Adults and Possible Health Outcomes.” In Handbook of Communication and Aging Research (2nd Ed.), edited by Jon F. Nussbaum and Justine Coupland, 499-519. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Xie, Bo. “Using the Internet for Offline Relationship Formation.” Social Science Computer Review 25(3) (2007): 396-404.

Notes * The author thanks Anne Holmes, Boomer in Chief of Boomer Women Speak, for her interest and support. 1 AARP and Microsoft. Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation (2009), p. 25. Accessed October 3, 2013. http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/computers/2009_boomers_and_techn ology_final_report.pdf. 2 Pew Internet and American Life. Four in ten seniors go online, 2010. Accessed October 3, 2013. http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2010/January/38-ofadults-age-65-go-online.aspx.

DISCURSIVE SHIFTS AND ‘MIS-PREMISING’ IN THE REPRESENTATION OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN AVT BRONWEN HUGHES

In recent years the theme of homosexual identity has catalysed considerable attention in the social, cultural, legal and linguistic spheres. From the “Sexual McCarthyism” (Warner 1999: 17) of the pre-Stonewall era, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals are now progressively gaining long-awaited rights in most Western societies. The concept of “gender” itself has undergone a shift from the merely ontological and binary male/female acceptation in which there is a “mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (Butler 1990: 9) to the “performative” value awarded to the term by Judith Butler and post-Butlerian thinkers. In the field of linguistics, much scholarly research has been done on investigating whether there is such a thing as “gay language”, with extensive treaties such as The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon (Rodgers 1972), now rather dated, providing more than 10,000 terms commonly used by homosexual men to talk about themselves and others belonging to the gay community. Recently, however, it has become apparent that a focus on mere terminology, or on taxonomical groupings of gay-relevant terms on the basis of their lesser or greater offensiveness, is a sterile activity. Thanks essentially to the work of scholars such as Paul Baker, Don Kulick and Deborah Tannen there has been a significant shift away from gay language towards gay discourse, with discourse taken to indicate a form of social practice which constructs the object to which it refers feeding on both existing and previous discourses in multifarious ambits. Thus the term discourse indexes: […] a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events […] surrounding any one object, event, person etc., there

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may be a variety of different discourses, each with a different story to tell about the world, a different way of representing the world (Burr 1995: 48).

Discourses relating to homosexuality clearly vary depending on the social practice to which they are connected, but it can be said that whatever the chosen ambit, such discourses are often steeped in ideology and stereotypes and vary from nation to nation. Translation, be it literary or audiovisual, is a key ambit in which culture-specific discourses come to the fore. When representing the “cultural other” in the target language, gatekeeping devices are often applied in keeping with the social, cultural and moral concerns of the culture of arrival. Indeed, the “place of enunciation” (Tymoczko 2003: 185) of the translator “is an ideological positioning as well as a geographical or temporal one” (Tymoczko 2003: 185). Such positioning can stem from the translator’s own idiosyncratic ideological outlook and beliefs or, as is occasionally the case, from a system of patronage exerted by “ […] groups of persons, a religious body, a political party, a social class, a royal court, publishers, and, last but not least, the media.” (Lefevere 1992: 15). As for stereotypes, although sometimes considered to be merely “categorizing” devices, useful when we need to collate, process and recall vast amounts of information, the move from “a value-free process to a value-laden one” (Ramirez Berg 2002: 14) occurs when the stereotyped category is considered to be de-centred, marginal, and more often than not inferior with respect to the locus and dominant discourse inhabited by the speaker. Hence, a stereotype is: “a negative generalization used by an in-group (Us) about an out-group (Them)” (Ramirez Berg 2002: 15). When considering the numerous discourses which surround the topic of homosexuality, it is evident that prejudice and discrimination are often still the order of the day. We still live in a heteronormative society, and “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1986) still appears to stand as the “Us” discourse. The numerous dysphemic terms or homophaulisms (faggot, poofter…) employed to name (and offend) male homosexuals are a clear pointer to the fact that negative stereotypes do still live on. Audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT), which is the focus of this work of research, applies to any text which is transferred through two codes: the visual and the audio. An audiovisual text can be a film, an advertisement, a documentary, a YouTube video or any other source of information provided using audio, visual, verbal or non-verbal elements through different channels (cinema, television, internet…) whose technology is in constant evolution. AVT can reach the viewer in different ways: through subtitles which appear on the screen in the viewer’s language (or in a language presumed to be understood by the viewer), thus



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adding an extra-diegetic semiotic dimension to the viewing experience; through “voice-over” which commonly entails one single narrating voice but allows the original spoken script to permeate; and through dubbing where actors belonging to the country of arrival recite the translated version of the original dialogues. Whereas subtitling and voice-over are considered to be overt forms of translation, as they allow the original sound track still to be heard, dubbing is in practice a covert form of translation as the substitution of the original source text/source dialogue can be conducive to more consistent manipulation. All three methods entail both affordances and constraints, and all three involve the key issues of ideology and stereotyping together with the more pragmatic but strongly interconnected question of linguistic and cultural transferal. This work of research focuses on the dubbing of the British television series Queer as Folk UK into Italian: the fact that the series is destined for a homosexual/homophilic audience makes the question of linguistic and cultural transferal particularly stimulating.

1. Corpus and methodology The Italian dubbed version of Series 1 and 2 of Queer as Folk UK (total running time 345 minutes) is the focus of this analysis. The programme was created, written and produced by Russell T. Davies of Doctor Who and Coronation Street fame. In the UK the series ran from 1999 to the year 2000 and was originally broadcast by Channel Four as a late night show for adult viewing due to the explicit language and visuals. In Italy the series was originally bought by the national television network La7 in 2001, but due to the network’s radical overhaul in programme selection and target audience, it was never aired. Indeed, in the spring of 2002 La7 ceased to be an entertainment channel, destined mainly for young viewers, and focused its editorial line on more serious in-depth information and sports programmes. The Queer as Folk series was therefore no longer considered suitable for prospective viewers. The programme was then sold to the Hot Bird satellite channel Gay.tv and aired in the Italian dubbed version as a late night show for adult viewers throughout the summer and autumn of 2002. The Gay.tv satellite channel shut down in December 2008. The set of DVDs which reproduce the dubbed Italian version of the series came out in 2006, produced by Dynit Srl. The contrastive analysis of the original British version and dubbed Italian version presented in this paper is based on the 2006 DVDs. An American/Canadian co-production of Queer as Folk was aired on Showtime, the American premium cable and satellite television network,



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from 2000 to 2005. The fact that, in the absence of language barriers, the American/Canadian production team felt the need to produce a “local” version of the series rather than merely import the British show clearly illustrates how culture-specific the programme is, a point we shall be returning to when investigating the transferal of specific cultural references from the original into the Italian dubbed version. Queer as Folk UK is set in Manchester’s Gay Village, the Canal Street area, and follows the lives and loves of two adult gay men, Stuart Alan Jones (Aiden Gillen) and Vince Tyler (Craig Kelly) and a 15-year-old youth Nathan (Charlie Hunnam). Stuart is a high-ranking advertising executive accustomed to obtaining whatever he wants whenever he wants. His main concerns are satisfying his unquenchable sex drive, worrying about ageing and living the Canal Street gay scene to the full. Vince works as a supermarket manager, has a lifelong crush on Stuart and, due to his more retiring nature, is less successful in picking up casual partners. Nathan who is 15 when the series begins (16 in the Italian dubbed version) has his first homosexual experience with Stuart and progressively becomes a habitué of the Canal Street gay scene and the third member of the Stuart/Vince/Nathan trio. Although Russell T Davies classifies Stuart, Vince and Nathan as “gay archetypes” (Davies 2013), their unbridled sexual promiscuity and rather monothematic lifestyle would appear to make their behaviour more stereotypical of what Barrett refers to as the “desire-based model” (Barrett 2003: 534) for whom the sense of gay community is based solely on sexual desire. The secondary characters present in the programme are neatly divided into two categories: those who are either homosexual or heterosexual with homophilic sentiments (positive), and those who are heterosexual and strongly homophobic (negative). This second category also extends to certain institutional figures such as Nathan’s anti-gay school teachers and the immigration service employees who deny one of the lesbian characters the right to contract a “sham marriage”. Thus the entire series is imbued with a sort of compulsory homonormativity which is not surprising considering the genre and the target audience. As regards research methodology, this paper presents an empirical, data-driven investigation of the Italian dubbed version of Queer as Folk UK. The overriding framework is that of Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995) applied to AVT, with a focus on the product of the translational event. In line with Toury’s initial norm, the first investigative thread will seek to ascertain whether the dubbed target version is “adequate” – that is to say produced according to the norms found in the original source text – or “acceptable” – produced according to the norms



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of the target culture. The terms “adequate” and “acceptable” are often considered overly subjective and “terminologically confusing” (Hermans 1999: 76) and Lawrence Venuti’s “foreignized” or “domesticated” are perhaps more commonly used by translation scholars. However, as Venuti’s prescriptive outlook ill-fits with a descriptivist investigation, for the sake of clarity the terms “source-oriented” and “target-oriented” will be employed. While all Toury’s norms should be considered when analysing translations, throughout the first thread of this investigation the main focus will be on the textual-linguistic norms (a subset of the Operational norms) and on the use of “coupled pairs” or “solution + problem units” (Toury 1995: 38). The translation problems envisaged in the shift from British source dialogue to Italian dubs all concern cultural references in the very wide sense of the term. Cultural references constitute one of the most challenging problems translators have to face and, as stated by Hatim and Mason, translators must possess […] not only bilingual ability but also bi-cultural vision. Translators mediate between cultures (including ideologies, moral systems and sociocultural structures), seeking to overcome those incompatibilities which stand in the way of transfer of meaning (Hatim and Mason 1990: 223).

Jan Pederson’s strategies for dealing with “crisis points” in translation caused by Extralinguistic Culture-bound References (ECRs) present in the source text, have been employed to analyse the techniques used to successfully – or otherwise – transfer the numerous ECRs when crossing over from the original to the dubbed target version. Pederson’s definition of Extralinguistic Cultural References reads as follows: Extralinguistic Cultural Reference (ECR) is defined as a reference that is attempted by means of any cultural linguistic expression which refers to an extralinguistic entity or process. The referent of said expression may prototypically be assumed to be identifiable to a relevant audience as this referent is within the encyclopaedic knowledge of this audience (Pederson 2011: 43).

Though Pederson’s strategies were originally formulated to investigate the transferal of ECRs when creating subtitles in a language which differed from the original, it is widely felt that such strategies can also be exploited when investigating foreign language dubbing. Thus, in the first investigative thread we will be looking at the degree of source or target orientation of the dubbed Italian version by observing the way in which



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ECRs are conveyed in the target language by means of Pederson’s taxonomy of transferal strategies. The second investigative thread will centre on what has been termed “mis-premising”. Though the field of translation studies is indeed littered with terms and acronyms often used to denote very slight shifts in meaning, no expression appears to have been coined to describe the manner in which a fictional character’s identitary make up and personality traits can be skewed if their “in-character” utterances are mis-translated. The term “mis-translated” must not be taken to indicate an erroneous translation, merely that certain lexical features present in the utterances have been either over or under emphasised, thus affecting the characterization of the fictional role and, consequently, the character’s unfolding relationships with the other personas. As we shall see this causes a number of secondary roles to lose a part of their original characterization, and the viewer of the Italian dubbed version is presented with a slight reconfiguration in terms of character definition. The descriptive paradigm adopted throughout this study aims to observe the way in which certain translation “crisis points” have been solved, and whether such solutions present the target audience with a product which in some way differs from the original. The question of individual translator agency is not called into question as the overall quality of the Italian dubbed version of Queer as Folk UK is excellent, especially considering the various types of constraints (temporal, financial…) which audiovisual translators routinely have to contend with, and the fact that due to the explicit visuals, and focus on action rather than dialogue, there is often a great deal of intersemiotic redundancy in Queer as Folk UK with verbal exchanges taking a back seat. To quote Keith Harvey: I would suggest that the attribution of responsibility to the flesh-and-blood individuals who produced the event that is the translational object is something of a red herring. Indeed in-house editorial policies make it dangerous to assume that the translator as individual – whose name may or may not be on the cover of the text – is singly responsible for textual outcomes […] (Harvey 2003: 69).

2. The research Throughout the first research thread we will investigate a small sample of the numerous ECRs present in Queer as Folk UK. As Pederson states, certain genres such as comedy and drama can be described as being more “extrovert” (Pederson 2011: 63) and therefore more liable to offer numerous



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ECRs as they contain a great deal of “verbosity” and, in the case of British TV programs in particular, tend to have a strong local flavour. Again, according to Pederson, the ECRs present in the source text (problem) and rendered in the target version (solution) can be taxonomically grouped into a variety of domains such as: Proper names, Geographical names, Institutional names, Food and beverages, Brand names (Pederson 2011: 63) etc.. Due to the limited scope of this paper, we will only investigate a very limited sample of ECRs from the domain of proper names as these items are repeatedly used throughout the whole Queer as Folk UK series to convey humour and sexual allusion. In line with Pederson’s translation strategies, generalization by means of paraphrase or with a superordinate term, or substitution with an equivalent transcultural ECR, have been employed to reproduce the ECRs in the target text. Although the end result is perfectly acceptable, the domestication process most definitely brings about a loss of intertextuality as most of the original ECRs employed have particular resonance in the British gay repertoire. The coding system employed works as follows: as regards the time setting, the first number refers to the number of the DVD - in the Italian dubbed version the series is distributed across three DVDs - the second number represents the number of the episode, the third set of numbers are the time at which a particular excerpt is present within the specific episode. Proceeding from left to right across the columns, each extract presents: the time/place positioning of the excerpt, the speaker, the original British version, the Italian dubbed version, and the back translation of the Italian dub.

2.1 Proper Names as ECRs time/place speaker original British Italian dub back translation version Si toglie la camicia… He takes off his 1/1/1:40 Vince He takes off his… shirt shirt… Marky Mark! addominali a tartaruga! washboard abs. I take off mine… Norman Wisdom

Mi tolgo la mia…

I take off mine…

ciambelle di ciccia.

rolls of fat.

Table 1. ECR transferral – generalization with paraphrase



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In this excerpt Vince is talking about a casual sexual encounter with a particularly muscular partner. ‘Marky Mark’ refers to Mark Wahlberg, former model and member of the band Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, since turned actor. Wahlberg became a gay icon in the early ‘90s thanks to a Calvin Klein underwear ad and a series of keep fit videos. The generalization with paraphrase ‘washboard abs’ used in the dubbed version does justice to the idea of a muscular physique, but the intertextual reference to a recognized gay icon is completely lost. Likewise, the source text reference to Norman Wisdom has more to do with the idea of “wimpyness”, as the British actor was known for his comical impersonations of ordinary, rather insignificant little men. The dubbed reference to “rolls of fat” merely serves to contrast the previously mentioned “washboard abs” but misses out on the intertextual comical element. time/place

speaker

2/7/1:11:12

Stuart

original British version If anyone’s bought him a Jeff Stryker cock and balls, then you’re getting booted out!

Italian dub E se qualcuno gli ha regalato un super vibratore, verrà buttato fuori!

back translation And if anyone’s given him a super vibrator, s/he will get thrown out!

Table 2. ECR transferral – generalized hypernym

Jeff Stryker is a famous American porn star who had a dildo moulded from a cast of his penis. More than for the dimensions of his anatomical parts, Stryker became famous for the lengthy (and amusing) legal battle which he launched against the makers of a Jeff Stryker fake dildo which he felt did not do true justice to the original. The generalized hypernym ‘vibrator’ used in the target text renders the idea but again forfeits the comical element.







184 Discursive Shifts in the Representation of Male Homosexuality in AVT time/place

speaker

original British Italian dub version 1/3/1:03:56 Alexander He’s a love job, E’ un vero amore, we met in the l’ho conosciuto al club… club Vince

What club?

Alexander Mile High!

back translation He’s a true love, I met him in the club

Che club?

Which club?

Tacchi a spillo!

Stiletto heels!

Table 3. ECR transferral – substitution with TL ECR

Alexander, the markedly camp gay of the series, is introducing his latest sexual conquest met during a flight to Manchester. The Mile High club is a “virtual” association to which individuals who have had sex on a plane are said to belong. The substitutive term employed in the Italian dubbed text is rather obscure even within the target context. It most probably refers to Pedro Almodóvar’s 1991 film “High Heels”, which centres on a drag-queen. The Italian film title was effectively “Tacchi a spillo”. Here again the comical sexual allusion is entirely lost. time/place 3/1/16:35

speaker Alexander

original British version Here, try that, it’s brandy, gin and vodka. It’s called a Jill Dando, one shot and it goes straight to your head!

Italian dub Tieni prova questo, è brandy, gin e vodka. È meraviglioso, si chiama Concord, un sorso e vai subito in orbita!

back translation Here, try this, it’s brandy, gin and vodka. It’s marvellous, it’s called Concord, one sip and you shoot into orbit!

Table 4. ECR transferral – substitution with transcultural ECR

In this excerpt the ECR is rather macabre. Jill Dando was a well-known BBC journalist and TV presenter who was murdered with a single shot through the head in 1999. The translation strategy chosen is that of substitution with the transcultural ECR “Concord”, the idea of a potent alcoholic beverage is indeed rendered but the macabre humour is again completely lost.



Bronwen Hughes time/place

speaker

1/3/1:09:30

Alexander

original British version I snogged a woman once, it was like kissing the Body Shop

185 Italian dub Ho baciato una donna una volta, era come baciare il bagnoschiuma.

back translation I kissed a woman once; it was like kissing bubble bath.

Table 5. ECR transferral – From hypernym to hyponym

This coupled pair (Bodyshop – Bubble bath) presents us with an interesting inversion of hyponymy and hypernymy. It is a common feature of generalization as a translation strategy to use a superordinate term to render a specifically local brand name found in the source text. Thus, for example, Tesco’s will become a generic “supermarket” in translation. In this case, the hypernym “Bodyshop” (a British chain store selling natural beauty products) is rendered with the hyponym ‘bubble bath’ (one of the products sold in the shop). Here the comic effect is successfully conveyed although the unpleasantness of the experience is slightly reduced in the dubbed version as kissing what tastes like one single product cannot be as bad as kissing an entire shopful of products. time/place

speaker

1/2/49:57

Phil

original British version How are Mr and Mrs Jones? Still waiting for golden boy to get married?

Italian dub Come stanno il signore e la signora Jones? Sempre in campagna a fare i piccioncini?

back translation How are Mr and Mrs Jones? Still in the countryside being all lovey dovey?

Table 6. Mis-premising with loss of source-text intertextuality

This last excerpt does not deal with the translation of source text ECRs, but rather serves to illustrate how, by misplacing the original emphasis when carrying the source text across into the target culture, far more than mere comical allusion is lost. The original utterance is both intertextual and interdiscursive, both of which aspects are lost in translation; as such, it neatly introduces the concept of “mis-premising” which will be discussed at length in the following section. The wealth of meaning encapsulated in the original source utterance necessarily entails a rather lengthy explanation. Phil, another of the Canal



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Street aficionados, is in love with Vince and resents Stuart Jones for being the object of Vince’s unrequited love. The sarcastic remark in the British version is addressed to Stuart who, due to his remarkable personal and professional success, is seen as a “golden boy” by friends and parents alike. The interdiscursive reference to gay secrecy and the objective difficulties of ‘coming out’ is rather less transparent. Basically, Phil is referring to the fact that notwithstanding his extremely open and promiscuous lifestyle, Stuart has never told his parents that he is gay; in fact Stuart’s Irish Catholic mother lives in the hope that he will soon bring a nice girl home. In the target version, the idea of “happy marriage” is transferred onto Stuart’s parents; this is all the more confusing as the first time we encounter Mr and Mrs Jones, we are told that they are on the verge of separation. The intent of this first section was to illustrate that although the intertextual weight of the original ECRs is effectively not rendered in the Italian dubbed version, as many of the proper nouns investigated have British gay-specific connotations, the overall outcome is sufficiently smooth to justify the claim that the series has been successfully targetoriented. The last excerpt above serves as an initial pointer to the concept of mis-premising which will now be developed in the latter part of the paper.

2.2 Mis-premising The second research thread, and the one which appears to have brought to light the most note-worthy findings, broadly deals with the character definition of a number of secondary figures present in Queer as Folk UK. As the plot centres on the Stuart/Vince/Nathan trio, the secondary characters are clearly not granted a substantial number of utterances. The idea of mis-premising relates not only to the individual personality traits but also to the social category to which these characters belong. Indeed, such characters could be said to stand as the representatives of social/cultural/ideological macro-categories or schematas which differ considerably in the original and dubbed versions. The crossing over from English to Italian leads to a skewing or “mis-premising” of these social roles. Thus we have: A) Janice “the Mother”: Janice is Nathan’s mother. In the original British version, though she initially has difficulty coming to terms with her 15-year-old son’s homosexuality, Janice eventually allows Nathan to live his life and



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sexuality in an autonomous manner. When crossing over from source text to target text, as the excerpts below illustrate, Janice’s utterances become steeped in what is known in Italy as “mammismo”, that is to say the cloying sentiment of a mother who wishes to pander to her son’s whims and keep him firmly attached to her apron strings. time/place

speaker

1/2/40:31

Janice

original British version Donna, your mother should start charging him rent.

Italian dub Donna, tua madre ci farà pagare l’affitto.

back translation Donna, your mother will make us pay rent.

Table 7. Mis-premising – from emancipation to ‘mammismo’

In this first excerpt, Janice is referring to the fact that Nathan spends a considerable amount of time at his best friend Donna’s house (Nathan in reality uses staying at Donna’s as a ploy to spend time in Canal Street). The change of pronoun from the English “him” to the Italian “ci” (us) indicates that in the target version, Janice still considers Nathan to be an integral part of the family nucleus, thus firmly denying him an independent lifestyle. Furthermore, the omission of the deontic modal “should” in the dubbed version further diminishes Nathan’s autonomy and intensifies Janice’s involvement in her son’s life. Basically, the difference between the two utterances lies in the subtextual pre-supposition; in the first case (the original British version), the pre-supposition is: “If he’s going to/insists on behaving this way….” then he should be made to pay rent; whereas in the dubbed Italian version, the subtext is: “If we continue to allow our son to spend time at your house…” then your mother will make us pay rent. The mis-premising of the original utterance, and consequently of Janice’s role as a mother, hinges on her involvement in, or externality to, her son’s life.







188 Discursive Shifts in the Representation of Male Homosexuality in AVT time/place

speaker

1/4/1:51:51

Janice

original British version Your driving is dreadful!

Italian dub Ma sei bravissimo!

back translation You’re fantastic!

Table 8. Mis-premising – incongruity

This extract is a perfect example of the emotional switch when moving from source text to target text. Janice has taken Nathan out for a driving lesson and a few minutes into the drive Nathan miscalculates a curb and ends up on the pavement. It must be underlined that the Italian utterance is wholly devoid of sarcasm, making it all the more incongruous. time/place 1/4/1:52:34

speaker Janice

original British version You’re 15 years old, Nathan, remember?

Italian dub

back translation

Hai 16 anni! Questo è quello che mi preoccupa, hai solo 16 anni!

You’re 16! That’s what worries me, you’re only 16!

Table 9. Mis-premising – from reprimand to concern

In the original British utterance Janice is rather tartly reminding her son that he is too young to lead such a promiscuous social/sexual life: the tone adopted is one of reprimand rather than worry. In the dubbed version, we again have an overlaying of “motherly” sentiment. As has already been mentioned, Nathan automatically becomes 16 in the Italian version and this time his behaviour “worries” his mother as he is “only” sixteen (the additional year seems to do little to placate her anxiety). time/place 3/1/1:06:00

speaker Janice

original British version He’s done enough running away; we really don’t need any more of that!

Italian dub

back translation

E’ già scappato abbastanza, non potrei proprio sopportarlo di nuovo!

He’s done enough running away; I really couldn’t bear it again!

Table 10. Mis-premising – from inclusive ‘we’ to exclusive ‘I’



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This time, Janice’s utterance is a comment on Nathan’s brief escapade to London (to seek out a bigger and better gay scene). Again, the tone in the original British version is of reprimand meaning: “we really won’t tolerate any more such behaviour”. The inclusive “we” adopted refers to the parental nucleus, mother and father, who are effectively wielding their authority over their wayward son. In the dubbed Italian version, the emphasis is on Janice herself and on the suffering Nathan is causing her: “I really couldn’t bear it again”. As was the case in the previous excerpt, the mis-premising of Janice as a mother-figure lies in the move from parental authority to the individual participation and suffering of an Italian Mamma. time/place

speaker

1/7/1:10:53

Janice

original British version Not long now to his birthday, sixteen, he’ll be able to live anywhere.

Italian dub Non manca molto al suo compleanno… ne fa diciassette… potrà andare a vivere dove vuole, e allora come farò?

back translation Not long now to his birthday... he’ll be seventeen... he’ll be able to live wherever he likes, and then what will I do?

Table 11. Mis-premising – legal incongruity

In this excerpt, Janice’s utterance in the original British version is not devoid of worry and refers to the fact that in the UK, young people can effectively leave home at 16 without parental consent. There is a double incongruity in the Italian dubbed version: on the one hand, from a legal point of view, young people cannot leave home at 17 without parental consent, on the other, the added comment “…and then what will I do?” yet again puts the onus on Janice’s maternal suffering, a point which is entirely lacking in the original text. time/place 3/1/21:54

speaker Janice

original British version And to be honest, you might as well be going out with a girl, but that’s your decision.

Italian dub E secondo me dovresti anche provare ad uscire con una ragazza, mi faresti felice.

Table 12. Mis-premising – from epistemic to deontic modality



back translation And I believe you should also try going out with a girl, you’d make me happy.

190 Discursive Shifts in the Representation of Male Homosexuality in AVT

At this point in the series, Nathan is involved in a semi-permanent relationship with Dazz and has taken the young boy home to meet his mother. Upon observing Dazz’s hysterical attitude, Janice comes out with the comment above. As is evident, Janice’s utterance in the original British version is totally objective and devoid of any form of blame or moral obligation. Indeed, respectful of Nathan’s autonomy, she adds “…but that’s your decision”. In the Italian dubbed version, the use of the deontic modal ‘should’ again expresses a form of control, an impingement on Nathan’s freedom to act; the addition of “… you’d make me happy” which contrasts with the original “…but that’s your decision” again confirms the belief that an Italian mother should hold centre stage in her son’s life. time/place 2/5/21:16

speaker Donna

original British version So? She’s your mother, it’s her job.

Italian dub Allora? È tua madre, è quello che le piace fare.

back translation So? She’s your mother; it’s what she likes doing.

Table 13. Mis-premising – collateral effects on secondary relationships

This final excerpt - a comment made by Donna, Nathan’s best friend, to justify the fact that Janice is organizing her son’s birthday party - has been deliberately selected to give credence to the claim that when a fictional persona is mis-premised, due to the over or under-emphasis of certain discoursal elements, such mis-premising also affects the ongoing relationships with other characters. Thus, whereas in the English version, Janice’s motherly obligations are seen as a duty, in the target text they are seen as a pleasure. B) Lisa the “bitchy Lesbian”: Whereas that of the ‘mother’ can be considered a social role, the role of the “bitchy, man-hating lesbian” is undoubtedly more of a negative stereotype present in the original version of Queer as Folk UK. Lisa is characterized by the evil sentiment she nurtures towards Stuart, the biological father of her companion’s child. Her caustic and often comical utterances lead viewers to categorize her as “bitchy” and her personality delineation stands in contrast to the other lesbian character, her companion Romey, who comes across as loving and level-headed. In the Italian dubbed version, Lisa’s utterances are wholly devoid of any form of criticism or unpleasantness; indeed she comes across as sweet



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and caring with the consequent loss of comical effect and character definition. time/place 1/2/43:44

Speaker Lisa

original British version And mind you don’t take your eyes off the road just because you’re cruising cute boys on the pavement!

Italian dub ci sono tanti matti in circolazione, stai attento, va bene?

back translation There are loads of lunatics driving about, be careful, ok?

Table 14. Mis-premising – loss of comical effect

In the above excerpt, Stuart is driving Lisa and Romey home with his (and Romey’s) new-born baby. Well aware of Stuart’s roving eye, Lisa preempts any distractions. In the Italian dubbed version, Lisa warns Stuart about the risk of possible accidents but in this case the blame is attributed to an external factor: the presence of lunatic drivers. Whereas the source version comes across as a threat, the target text sounds more like a warning, softened by the use of “ok?” tagged on in final position. The rephrasing of Lisa’s utterance leads to the re-configuration of a secondary character whose role definition lies precisely in her sarcasm and caustic remarks. Much as the matter-of-fact English mum was mis-premised as a rather clingy over-anxious mother, Lisa the ‘bitchy lesbian’ loses her sting and becomes merely apprehensive, with the consequent loss of intertextuality and comic effect. time/place

Speaker

1/2/44:09

Lisa

original British version Watch out for a Ford Mondeo!

Italian dub Sai, c’è chi guida come un matto!

back translation You know some people drive like lunatics!

Table 15. Mis-premising – from death threat to altruistic sentiment

Here, Lisa is trying to encourage Stuart to take out life insurance for the sake of his new-born child. She lists the numerous ways in which he could meet his death, including the risk of being run over. This would appear to be an altruistic exercise if it weren’t for the fact that she drives a Ford Mondeo and is therefore a prime contender for Stuart’s demise. The



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underlying comical effect clearly lies in her wish to get rid of Stuart. Again, the Italian dubbed version misses out on the intertextual comical effect and attributes non-existent altruistic feelings to Lisa. time/place 2/5/23:19

Speaker Lisa

original British version He’s our token straight.

Italian dub

back translation

Ci aiuta a pagare il fitto.

He helps us pay the rent.

Table 16. Mis-premising – double loss of intertextuality

In this extract Lisa is introducing Lance to Stuart. Lance is the new African lodger who has taken up a room in Lisa and Romey’s house. In her usual caustic style, Lisa refers to Lance as the “token straight”; the pun in this case is doubly intertextual. The first layer refers to the use of the term “token” which in the film and advertising industry historically occurred in the collocation ‘token black’ and referred to the brief presence of a black person in a film or ad. Such brief appearances were intended to placate the black community and give the impression of racial integration and political correctness. Lance, being the only African in the household (and indeed in the series), is effectively a “token black”. However, as Lisa and Romey have set up a gay household, Lance is also the “token straight”. The Italian dubbed version, by qualifying Lance as a mere lodger who simply helps to pay the rent completely misses out on the comic effect. time/place 2/7/1:25:18

speaker Lisa

original British version Doubt it, joined up handwriting.

Italian dub Ne dubito purtroppo, ha una pessima calligrafia.

back translation I doubt it, unfortunately she’s got really bad handwriting.

Table 17: Mis-premising – misplaced criticism

In the above excerpt, Lisa is showing Stuart some of the love letters Romey has written to her over the years. When Stuart rejoins that he is perfectly able to read and understand them without her help, Lisa expresses her doubts by stating that they are written in “joined up handwriting” (thus implying that Stuart, not being very bright or literate, is only able to read block capitals). The implied criticism and Lisa’s usual



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caustic humour is entirely lost in the Italian target version and Lisa’s character definition is mis-premised once again. Indeed, as Lisa is madly in love with Romey throughout the whole series, it is incongruous for her to voice any form of criticism. Whereas the mis-premising of Janice, the mother-figure, merely led to a surfeit of “motherliness” in the dubbed Italian version, the reconfiguration of Lisa in the target text leads to a considerable loss of humour and intertextual reference, as has been illustrated in the various excerpts. C) Alexander the “Camp gay”: This third example of mis-premising is rather more difficult to illustrate as it concerns voice pitch and tonality as opposed to concrete utterances. This final section focuses on Alexander who in Queer as Folk UK stands as the stereotypical Camp gay. Alexander’s clothes and gestures, vocal pitch and taste for hyperbole, what Harvey refers to as the “emphatics of camp” (Harvey 1998: 348), all index the performative nature of his homosexuality. In the original British version Alexander’s camp identity is monolithic in that his flamboyant style and high, effeminate vocal pitch remain unaltered whether he is talking to his homo- and heterosexual friends in a private or social situation, or addressing his mother on the few occasions in which they meet. In the Italian dubbed version, Alexander’s performativity becomes…mere performance. Indeed, in the target text Alexander speaks in a high-pitched “camp” voice when in the company of his gay and hetero friends; when, however, he is in a ‘family’ situation, with his mother, or in a “public” situation in which authority is meted by heterosexuals, Alexander’s voice-pitch loses its acute quality and descends to a level which is commonly considered “manly” and more characteristic of heterosexuals. As De Marco states: Generally speaking, we notice that gay characters’ voices tend to be subject to manipulation more often than other characters’ voices, and this manipulation always manifests itself through either the overemphasising or the neutralisation of the camp pitch” (De Marco 2012: 146).

Throughout the Italian target version of the series, Alexander’s voice quality mutates from high-pitch camp to low pitch hetero on three separate occasions. The first instance occurs when Alexander is sitting on a bench in the town square with Nathan, Vince and Vince’s boyfriend Cameron. They have just been clothes shopping, and Alexander is commenting on their various purchases in his usual extrovert style and high, camp-pitched



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voice. The camera closes in on Alexander’s parents crossing the square with their backs to the group sitting on the bench. Although it is wellknown to the entire gay community that Alexander’s wealthy parents refuse to acknowledge their son’s homosexuality, Alexander starts waving and shouting “Hey, look at me, I’m here” to the backs of his fast-retreating parents. In the original British version, when shouting, Alexander’s voice maintains its usual high-pitch tonality; in the Italian dubbed version his voice takes on a deeper, more “manly” tone. This same voice switch or vocal “mis-premising” occurs on two further occasions: When Alexander goes to visit his dying father in hospital he holds a lengthy, acrimonious conversation with his mother who forces him to relinquish his inheritance rights. In the source text his voice remains camp, in the target it loses the camp inflection. The last voice-switch episode occurs after one of Alexander’s numerous suicide attempts. When the ambulance staff come to pick him up to take him to hospital, Alexander tells them not to worry, shows them the bottle of pills that he’s taken and reassures them that he can make it to the ambulance on his own two feet. In the original source text, all this is uttered in Alexander’s usual camp voice; in the dubbed Italian version, he yet again loses his acute tonality and voices the various statements in a lower, more masculine pitch. It has to be said that the three episodes referred to above are all particularly poignant. Indeed, they depict the only three occasions in the entire series in which Alexander loses his clown-like demeanour and is forced to face serious issues. The change of voice pitch in the target text could therefore have been adopted as a device to underline the fact that such serious events have had a “sobering” effect on Alexander, to the extent of making him lose his habitual camp voice. We wish to posit, however, that the voice pitch transformation which occurs in the Italian dubbed version is yet another instance of character mis-premising. Alexander’s voice, along with his taste for hyperbole, his rather uncouth sense of humour and his flamboyant dress style, constitute a primary identitary trait. To deprive him of his characteristic “sounds” is to divest him of his intrinsic nature and serves to bolster the binary definition: hetero manliness is for serious business, camp is merely for fun. As Medhurst states: Camp is a part of gay men’s daily lives, one of the ways in which we have managed to make sense of a world which at best tolerates and at worst exterminates us […] Camp is one of our most fearsome weapons (why else would the paid assassins of heterosexual supremacy be so over-



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whelmingly determined to eradicate our queening?) and one of our most enriching experiences (Medhurst and Munt 1997: 275).

3. Concluding remarks On a surface level, if one focuses the attention on the trio of protagonists, the original British version of Queer as Folk UK appears to have been relatively successfully target-oriented when crossing over to Italy in the dubbed version, albeit with the loss of British culture-specific ECRs and the consequent loss of humorous elements. It is when attention is focused on a number of secondary characters (with relatively few utterances apiece), that the issue of mis-premising comes to the fore. It would appear that, to make the series more palatable for an Italian audience, the character delineation of the secondary characters investigated above has been slightly skewed. Whether one should espouse the theory of ‘ideological manipulation’, or conclude with Peter Fawcett that “Film translation, like other modes of translation, is also subject to human randomness and simple cussedness” (Fawcett 2003: 69), remains a moot point; suffice it to say that these secondary figures are most definitely granted social and characterial traits which are wholly lacking in the original version of Queer as Folk UK.

References Barrett, Rusty. “Models of gay male identity and the marketing of “gay language” in foreign-language phrasebooks for gay men” Estudios de Sociolingüística 4(2) (2003): 533-562. Burr, Vivien. An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge, 1995. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1990. Davies, Russell T. [22/5/2013] “Interview & Life Story – Gay/Queer as Folk/Dr Who/Coronation Street”. Video clip, accessed 10/9/2013 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNaLa3ypgxQ . De Marco, Marcella. Audiovisual Translation through a Gender Lens, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Fawcett, Peter. “The Manipulation of Language and Culture in Film Translation.” In Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies, edited by M. Calzada Pérez, 145163. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2003.



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Harvey, Keith. “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. 2012, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 344-364. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1998. —. ‘‘‘Events’ and ‘Horizons’ Reading Ideology in the ‘Bindings’ of ‘Translations.’’ In Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies, edited by M. Calzada Pérez, 43-69. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2003. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason. Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman, 1990. Hermans, Theo. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System oriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1999. Lefevere, Andre. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Medhurst, Andy and Sally R. Munt. Lesbian and Gay Studies: a Critical Introduction. London: Cassell, 1997. Pederson, Jan. Subtitling Norms for Television: An Exploration Focussing on Extralinguistic Cultural References. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Ramirez Berg, Charles. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In Blood, Bread and Poetry. New York: Norton, 1986. Rodgers, Bruce. The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tymoczko, Maria. “Ideology and the Position of the Translator; in what sense is a Translator ‘in-between’?” In Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies, edited by M. Calzada Pérez, 181-201. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2003. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999.



AND WHAT ABOUT SAME SEX MARRIAGES? A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL CHOICES AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES FRANCESCA VIGO

In 1995 Deignan, Knowles, Willis and Sinclair (1995: 37) stated that “[...] a speaker is, to a certain extent, bound by the lexis of his/her language in the range of meanings he/she can express [...] especially when there does not seem to be a neutral term available”. This statement is widely influenced by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and reinforces the strong bond which ties culture, lexis and cognition together. The way in which each society is influenced by words makes it different from other cultures or speech communities. The claim is simple and was particularly visible and true as long as cultures could be clearly identified. However, this is no longer the case, since globalization has weakened and reduced distances between people and places, making cultural differences or features increasingly difficult to identify. Running parallel to globalization, and somehow supporting it, is the ongoing spread of English. English is diversely used worldwide and for this reason it is currently influencing other cultures from a lexical point of view, too. Language contact is strikingly visible on the lexical level, and in fact words can be considered important indicators as to how two languages and cultures merge and how society is shaped accordingly, in accordance with the above-mentioned claim that cultures are shaped by their lexis. The lexical aspect is particularly revealing when we consider discussions of taboos or highly controversial issues. Language contact research shows how frequent it is for one culture/speech community to start using a luxury loanword to avoid the explicitness of domestic words. Speakers seem to perceive loanwords as less overtly connoted and, consequently, more convenient and effective in keeping face.

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In this article some preliminary results of an ongoing corpus-based research on lexis, sexual preferences and relationships will be presented. For the purpose of this research I have collected a diachronic corpus of Italian and English newspaper articles with the aim of tracing and describing how the two cultures deal with certain social phenomena and sexual preferences. This approach is worthwhile as there seems to be only a limited number of projects which analyse gendered texts in newspapers using diachronic corpora (Baker 2010). I will start from a description of the relation between language and culture as the basis from which my research moves. My final aim is to compare two linguistic behaviours – English and Italian – to corroborate my claim that the English/British culture is more open-minded, less prejudiced and more willing to find alternative words for the existing connoted ones. I will focus on a set of terms highlighted by two Italian linguists as part of research on the development of Italian vocabulary to be used in updating an Italian dictionary. I will start by looking at the diachronic development of some of them to understand whether the timing in the two cultures converges or diverges. I will then proceed to analyse the terms qualitatively to draw a picture of human relations in the two cultures and bring out what is implied by their descriptions in terms of their relationships with the respective societies.

1. The corpus and method The starting point of my analysis is a research project carried out in 2005 by Bencini and Manetti, who, with the aim of updating the Italian Language Dictionary as described in Le parole dell'Italia che cambia [*Words of changing Italy], present lists of neologisms or semantic extensions of existing words subdivided thematically. Section 8 of their work gathers words belonging to "Lessici famigliari, sessuali, generazionali" [Family, sexual and generational lexicons], which made a good starting point for our research, since we are interested in the words used to describe or name or define human relationships. We selected these words as our keywords and translated them into English, given the contrastive nature of our analysis. The words we searched for and looked at are listed in Table 1:







Francesca Vigo

ITALIAN

ENGLISH

matrimoni* gay(1a)

gay marriage*(1b)

nozze omosessuali (2a)

gay wedding* (2b)

matrimoni* omosessual* (3a)

homosexual marriage* (3b)

nozze omosessuali(4a)

homosexual wedding*(4b)

coppi* di fatto(5a)

same-sex marriage* (5b)

union* civil*(6a)

same-sex wedding* (6b)

199

Table 1. List of the words chosen for our research and their English translations

Unlike the first four couples, the last two (same sex marriage/wedding) are not to be considered mutual translations. For the purpose of our contrastive lexical analysis we collected a corpus of newspaper articles through LexisNexis1. The chosen newspapers are among the major ones in Italy and Great Britain respectively, La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, The Guardian and The Times. We investigated the Corpus using AntConc (Antony 2011). The observed time-span is 1992-2012, which was subsequently divided into several sub-groups for analytical purposes2. The UK corpus (from here on, UKC) is much larger than the Italian one (ITC) because some older Italian issues were not available at the time of the research. In fact the Corpora we created and investigated can provide information about trends and development but cannot be compared in terms of absolute figures. Naturally, values have been normalized per 100,000. The following table sets out the sizes of our Corpora:







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NAME OF THE CORPUS

TOKENS

N. of ARTICLES

Italian Corpus (ITC)

937,330

Corriere della Sera 591 La Stampa 999 TOT 1,590

British Corpus (UKC)

3,107,550

The Guardian 1,838 The Times 2,237 TOT 4,075

ITC + UKC

4,044,880

5,665

Table 2. Sizes of Corpora

2. Words, thoughts, meaning and society We are firmly convinced that lexical choices are unconscious culturally influenced cognitive actions, whose existence can be disclosed through lexical analysis, and a corpus-based analysis is a perfect means to accomplish this target. We are also deeply convinced that working on lexis and on the way speakers perceive it may prove an efficient strategy of social improvement or observation. However, do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do words merely express thoughts, or do the structures in language shape the very thoughts we wish to express? With reference to Stubbs (1996: 2) and to his question: “How can an analysis of the patterns and grammar in a text contribute to an understanding of the meaning of the text? And to the value words have in society?” we investigate whether and how the general social attitude towards some key social phenomena, usually considered as more or less taboo or dealt with stereotypically, is influenced and modified by the way language describes them and by the available linguistic tools. Words help shape the perception speakers have of social phenomena. Last year, in one of my translation classes for a postgraduate course, some students kept highlighting the discrepancies of meanings not in terms of availability of equivalent lexemes but in terms of availability of equivalent ‘attitude(s)’. We were working on translating ESP texts and some of them worked on legal language; one of the texts they were asked to translate described the legal situation of European States as far as human relationships were concerned. Among the various items they needed to translate, the locution proved particularly challenging and triggered a discussion as to whether the Italian language



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could provide a solution for it. My students firmly stated that there were no Italian words apt to translate the English expression because it was as if Italian society did not consider that possibility and as a consequence does not name it. We can thus go back to what Sapir asserted in 1929: Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (Sapir 1958 [1929]: 69; our emphasis).

and to Whorf extension of this in 1940: We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees (Whorf 1940: 213-14; his emphasis).

For the purpose of our research we may enlarge these assertions by saying that the influence words exert on society makes society distinct from any other culture or language group. Without denying, and indeed strongly corroborating the pivotal importance of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it might be time for it to be integrated (Hadley 1997). It seems particularly helpful to link it to some cognitive and psycho-linguistic paradigms such as those contained in the model of cultural prototypes3 (Aitchison 1995) as opposed to the structural semanticists' positions (Carter 1992; McCarthy



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1994; Quirk 1982). According to this point of view, word meanings are abstract, and prototypes rather than lexis shape a society’s world view (Hadley 1997: 484). Aitchison maintains that “Word meanings cannot be pinned down, as if they were dead insects. Instead, they flutter around elusively like live butterflies. Or perhaps they should be likened to fish which slither out of one's grasp” (Aitchison 1995: 39-40). She supports the claim that we do not seem to be cognitively capable of choosing and organizing words, but, instead, we have emotional mental images of lexemes, which turn out to be more important and fruitful for our lexical choices and uses. A prototype is, then, a mental model of the world, similar to a schema4: prototypes “[...] are private and cultural architectures, and only partially in touch with ‘reality’” (Aitchison 1995: 70); they are indefinite images of words. Despite her firm position, Aitchison does not entirely deny the structural semanticists’ point of view and recognises the possible existence of a ‘core vocabulary’: words with more basic meanings. As for culture and the way lexis affects it or is affected by it, their positions are opposite: Aitchison claims that lexis is influenced by the prototypes of the dominant culture whereas structural semanticists assert that culture is affected by lexis, at least by the neutral core vocabulary. However, we find it very difficult to find neutral words because cultural connotation cannot be avoided, even in most of what is defined ‘core vocabulary’. As Hadley puts it: “[...] cultural neutrality in core words is, at best, relative” (Hadley 1997: 487). Core words are full of cultural connotations, and similarly to other words they are also fluid and difficult to control; connotations and meanings change fast and rarely match the dominant cultural views immediately. It is therefore necessary to shift from a rigid model of concept categorization to a more flexible one, which encompasses variation and contexts, as found in society. Frye (2005: 48-49) declares that “social categories are not sets, and thinking of them as sets is disastrous”, because society is not organized on defined arrays of meanings but on fluxes of meanings. This being the case, a theory of concept which categorizes reality/society on the basis of fixed items is not fruitful, whereas prototype theory may provide a more productive approach to social categories. As early as 1963, Wittgenstein highlighted the difference that occurs within categories: “For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them [...]” (Wittgenstein 1963: 31 n.66), meaning that it is not possible to retrieve clear-cut commonalities but only similarities, links and resemblances. Therefore, the abstract conceptualizations provided by the classical concept theory are too hazy to explain the meaning of a word and its appropriate use. Wittgenstein’s



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insights stimulated Rosch (1999) to develop her prototype theory, which claims that being a member of a category does not imply possessing all the features the other members possess; it is sufficient to possess enough qualities for the structure of the concept to hold. The prototype secures the ideational content of the concept, and comprises variants without considering them as deviant. Meanings are, therefore, not in the words but mediated by societies, i.e. by the context they are used in, and enriched and modified by connotations, i.e. by the way speakers use them. However, language is not a property of individual users: individuals take over ways of using language5 from the speech communities they belong to (Stubbs 1996), and the way speech communities use language stems from how concepts are categorized, i.e. it stems from the mental images individuals, as members of society, possess. Up to now, we have tried to highlight how prototype theory can help describe what words are and how they can be grouped in developing categories. However, words are also used in a culture and play a social role, thus turning language studies into social studies6. For this reason it may be appropriate to choose social science tools and approaches to investigate this matter. Among the components of culture, sociological research lists: values, norms, concepts and symbols, and we will focus on the latter. Words are symbols: cultural constructs, entities that refer to something else. The connection between language and symbols is immediate since language is the most important symbolic system (Sciolla 2002: 63). Symbols can be seen to influence individuals’ social life; they enable human beings to perceive and enjoy the environment, their strength lies in their not being physically fixed in reality but detached from what they represent and refer to. They are not in space and time, and being out of them allows speakers/users to access what is no longer present or what has not yet been. They are thus powerful because they let users choose new usages, thus possibly changing traditional lexical habits and consequently the environment/culture. Culture can be considered as stemming from the way speakers name it (Giaccardi 2005). Language creates culture; it blooms from the shared experience of speakers and mirrors their perceptions. We can then say that using a language is a means to creating culture. Since it would be impossible to provide a complete list of how has been variously described and defined, we would like to end this preparatory introduction by recalling that as early as 1871, Tylor defined culture as “[...] that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871: 1, our emphasis),



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and that in both Hall’s Iceberg model (1976) and Hofstede’s onion model (1991) the reference to language is primarily present7.

3. The research With references to Said’s Orientalism (1978), Stubbs provides evidence of how fixed and semi-fixed expressions encode cultural information and disclose ways in which experience is represented. This is why “the study of recurrent wordings is of central importance in the study of language and can provide empirical evidence of how culture is expressed in lexical patterns” (Stubbs 1996: 169), also showing how words can be considered indicators/tools of social attitudes. Going back to our initial questions, namely: Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do words merely express thoughts, or do the structures in language shape the very thoughts we wish to express?, we will try to answer them by investigating how some social phenomena are named diachronically, claiming that a change in individuals’ lexical habits mirrors a change in their mental models which may fail to categorize the named concept in one existing category. As previously said, we started from research carried out by Italian linguists and constructed two corpora which could help us gather lexical data and precious information for the description of a culture’s lexical behaviour and for a contrastive analysis concerning some social phenomena. Due to our corpora’s sizes, it is not possible to compare absolute figures, and we will report and analyse trends. As may be clear from Table 1-1, we are now focusing on relationships between people. However our research 8 started from looking at single words like , , , etc. and highlighted a significant difference in the starting date, showing how awareness and sensitivity towards these matters in the UK started much earlier than in Italy; furthermore, our previous research revealed a trend towards informality in our UKC compared to our ITC. As for our current research, the first graph (see colour centrefold) refers to the IT corpus and shows a general stable trend in the distribution of words along time with some peaks for which seem to counterbalance the trend of . We must also remember that no qualitative analysis will be described, and this means that we are not going to check the co-text of our search-words during this stage of our research. A relevant datum is the insignificant presence of and .



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Figure 2 (see colour centrefold) refers to the general distribution of the words in the UK Corpus. Compared to the ITC, frequencies are higher but the trend is equally visible and somehow similar to the ITC. English occurrences start earlier and this is hardly surprising: it is perhaps worth remembering that Italy ‘hosts’ the Vatican and this presence variously influences its behaviour as far as some social aspects are concerned. As for the term , it is right to remember that it is also biased by its meaning of . However, having searched the clusters and rather than the adjective on its own may balance out the results. and have an equally low significance. Given the contrastive nature of this analysis, a comparison between the distributions is the starting point for further research and reflections. Figure 3 (see colour centrefold) refers to a specific initial time span: 19922005, one of our sub-corpora. Despite the existing difference in the number of available newspapers, distribution can reasonably be compared. The graph shows that while the UK is overtly talking about , Italy focuses on alternative, perhaps less problematic, items like , an item which displays a significant number of occurrences. As newspapers are naturally highly influenced by what goes on in the country, for this particular time span it is necessary to remember that in Italy, in 2005, Romano Prodi, the then Italian Prime Minister, was working on a new law aimed at the recognition of different family organizations and modelled on the French PACS. It goes without saying that newspapers were full of articles reporting, commenting and discussing this matter, and occurrences increased consequently. Figure 4 (see colouor centrefold) displaying general distribution for the following timespan (2006-2013) shows a remarkable variation in relation to time: the nearer we become chronologically, the higher the number of occurrences. The trend is evident and discloses a definite change in Italian society. Talking about ‘other’ kinds of marriages is no longer a problem, and naming them highlights a creative attitude which may mean that the topic is no longer perceived as a taboo, as something to be ashamed of, which required a ‘protective’ language like the non creative one. A sharp increase in the number of occurrences of is to be highlighted. The graphs that follow both refer to the UKC general distribution for the time span 2006-2013 (see Figure 5, colour centrefold). For a more user-friendly graph, a ‘revised’ version is added (see Figure 6, colour centrefold). The revision consisted in deleting the figures related to the number of occurrences of and since they were much higher than the others and altered the lay-out of the graph itself, making reading challenging. As may be evident from the first graph, there is a sharp increase in the number of occurrences of ; this matches the trend towards informality noticed during the first phase of this research. Looking at single words, in fact, showed how, as far as these social phenomena are concerned, the English language was experiencing a trend towards informality and nonconnoted words. The evident rise in the use of corroborates this claim and makes the difference between English and Italian societies deeper. In the ‘revised’ version of the graph, in which figures and trends are much clearer, only suffers a remarkable decrease; the values for the other occurrences are stable apart from ones. This might support the claim of an ongoing trend towards informality and non-connoted words. For our last comparison and in order to have a reliable picture of the current situation we have selected data concerning the last four years of our corpora. This allows us to make a more consistent comparison since, unlike the situation in previous years, the sizes of corpora are here comparable, both newspapers being equally available for both languages (see Figures 7 and 8, colour centrefold). The trend these graphs reveal confirms what was previously highlighted. In ITC, an increase in the number of occurrences of and is clearly visible and may support the claim that Italian speakers prefer to use foreign words, perceived as less connoted and/or embarrassing, to name certain social phenomena. Furthermore, the increase in the number of occurrences of might also be the result of a more neutral lexical choice which probably mirrors Italian speakers' attitudes. In-field research is necessary to confirm these claims. In UKC, a sharp increase can be noticed in the number of occurrences of , which is becoming a fixed collocation and corroborates the assertion that English Speakers’ lexical choices tend towards informality as far as these topics are concerned. We think that this is strictly related to how speakers perceive the topic in relation to their culture’s social attitudes. Speakers’ perception needs to be investigated concerning the lexical choices made in naming possible taboo topics.

4. Concluding remarks As previously claimed, we understand lexical choices as being unconscious culturally influenced cognitive actions. This is true above all



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when the lexical item to choose is related to phenomena that are problematic from a sociological and social point of view. We also claimed that lexical choices are good indications of a culture's attitude. In this second stage of research, we contrastively observed lexical usage trends which help describe the two cultures involved: the British and the Italian. The preliminary results we gathered allowed us to spot trends rather than defined attitudes, for which we deem in-field research necessary since they need to be supported by qualitative data. The revealed trends show how talking about homosexual relationships becomes increasingly frequent and that this 'habit' in talking about previously taboo issues can be spotted in language by means of lexical analysis. The two cultures observed in our research have changed their lexical behaviours over time: the British are tending towards informality, which ends up with the recurrent use of instead of or ; Italy seems to accept these topics more slowly and manages to talk about them happily. These new behaviours are mirrored in some changes such as in the choice of borrowing instead of . Therefore, there is a move, a lexical and a sociological change. And if a linguistically prescriptive tool like a Dictionary decides to change one of its definitions, it may mean that a deeper change has occurred. In 2012, in fact, both the Macmillan Online Dictionary (1) and the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (2) modified their definition of to include same-sex couples: (1) “[...] the relationship between two people who are husband and wife, or a similar relationship between people of the same sex [....]”; (2) “(a): the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law; (b): the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage ” [emphasis not added]. Finally, the OED reads: “The condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony. The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex”. marriages are variously taken into consideration: from the more open and direct MacMillan definition to the slightly hidden one proposed by MerriamWebster’s use of angle brackets to the tentative smaller font chosen by OED. Unfortunately, Italian speakers do not have the same chances, as some of the most popular and reliable Italian Dictionaries do not mention marriages other than those between ‘man’ and ‘woman’, either in smaller print or in some sort of reassuring brackets. The Treccani Italian Dictionary says: “1. Istituto giuridico (o, secondo la Chiesa cattolica,



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sacramento) mediante cui si dà forma legale (e rispettivam. carattere sacro) all'unione fisica e spirituale dell'uomo (marito) e della donna (moglie) che stabiliscono di vivere in comunità di vita al fine di fondare la famiglia” [legal act (or according to the Catholic Church sacrament) which defines legally (and also religiously) the physical and spiritual union of man (husband) and woman (wife) who decide to share their living to build a family]; the Hoepli Dictionary says: “Unione legittima tra un uomo e una donna che di fronte a un pubblico ufficiale o a un ministro del culto si impegnano a vivere in comunione, e quindi a formare una famiglia, procreare figli, allevarli ed educarli” [legal union between man and woman who in front of a public official or a religious minister commit themselves to living together, and consequently to building a family, having children and raising and educating them]. Unlike the English Dictionaries, the Italian ones refer to the Catholic Church or to religion in general and none of them allude to homosexual marriage. The ‘movement’ towards a freer and more appropriate definition of has started, as our data showed, but it is not strong enough to reach and modify prescriptive tools like dictionaries yet.

References Aberra, Daniel. “Prototype Theory in Cognitive Linguistics” 2008. Accessed March 20, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/520950/Prototype_Theory_in_Cognitive_Li nguistics_Draft_2008 . Aitchinson, Jean. Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995. Anthony, Lawrence. AntConc (Version 3.2.2) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University, 2011. Available from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/. Baker, Paul. Sexed Texts. London: Equinox, 2010. Bencini, Andrea and Beatrice Manetti. Le parole dell'Italia che cambia. Milano: Mondadori, 2005. Carter, Ronald. Vocabulary: Applied Linguistics Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1992. Deignan, Alice et al. Lexis. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1995. Firth, John R. “The technique of semantics.” Transactions of the Philological Society (1935): 36-72. Fox, Melodie J. “Prototype theory: An alternative concept theory for categorizing sex and gender?” In Proceedings from North American



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Symposium on Knowledge Organization, edited by Richard P. Smiraglia, Vol. 3: 151-159. Toronto, Canada: 2011. Frye, Marilyn. “Categories in distress.” In Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Barbara S. Andrew, Jean Keller, and Lisa H. Schwartzman, 41-58. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Giaccardi, Chiara. La Comunicazione Interculturale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Hadley, Gregory. “Lexis and Culture: Bound and Determined?” Journal of Psycholinguistic Resarch 1997: 26-40. Hall, Edward. T. Beyond Culture, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. Halliday, Michael A.K. Language as a social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Hofstede, Geertz H. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. London and New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. McCarthy, Michael. Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Quirk, Randolph. “International Communication and the Concept of Nuclear English.” In Style and Communication in the English Language, edited by Quirk, Randolph, 37-53. London: Edward Arnold, 1982. Riley, Philip. Language, Culture and Identity. London: Continuum, 2007. Rosch, Eleanor. “Reclaiming cognition: The primacy of action, intention and emotion.” The Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(11-12) (1999): 61-77. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Sapir, Edward. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” In Edward Sapir. Culture, Language and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [1929] 1958. —. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” Language 5 (1929) 207214. Sciolla, Loredana. Sociologia dei processi culturali. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Stubbs, Michael. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer Assisted Studies of Language and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 2nd ed., 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1871, [1873. Print.]. Whorf, Benjamin. L. “Science and Linguistics.” Technology Review 42 (6) (1940): 229-31, 247-8. Reprinted in Whorf, Benjamin L. Language, Thought and Reality. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956.



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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963.

Notes 1

http://academic.lexisnexis.eu/. The corpora were subdivided into smaller spans, namely 1992-2005; 2006-2008; 2009-2013. For each time-span one sub-corpus was created: [1989-1991; 1992-1999; 20002002; 2003-2005; 2006-2008; 2009-2011; 2012-2013]. 3 For a convincing description of concept theory from Ancient Greek to current times: Melodie J. Fox. 2011. Prototype theory: An alternative concept theory for categorizing sex and gender? In Smiraglia, Richard P., ed. Proceedings from North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, Vol. 3. Toronto, Canada, pp. 151-159. 4 “[...] the relation between schema and a prototype is a mixed one and leads to confusion, especially the summary representation of a prototype category and a schematic representation is really blurred and need clear lines to be used as a model for understanding the relation between categories and concepts” Daniel Aberra, 2008, Prototype Theory in Cognitive Linguistics, https://www.academia.edu/520950/Prototype_Theory_in_Cognitive_Linguistics_ Draft_2008_ (March, 2104). 5 Individuals draw rules and linguistic routines from the culture they live in, and this means that they naturally obey to grammar rules and replicate shared ways of using the language, which encrypt the ideas/concepts mutually shared by the members of their society. 6 It is worth reminding here that the social role of language was unexpectedly mentioned by Firth (1935) and in depth described and codified later by Halliday (1978). 7 In his book Language, Culture and Identity, Riley defines culture as “[...] the way of life and the world-view of a people expressed through their language” (Riley 2007: 25, later in 2008 Favaro claims that language constitutes and carries culture). 8 Results of the first stage of our research are in print. 2



ETHNICITIES

REPRESENTATION OF ETHNIC IDENTITY OF TATARS THROUGH THE ETHNONYM “TATAR” NAILYA BASHIROVA AND MARINA SOLNYSHKINA

Introduction In the last two decades (since the 1990s) the semantic scope of the ethnonym “Tatar” has undergone considerable changes both in the Tatar and Russian languages spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan. The linguistic process followed the radical political and cultural changes in Tatarstan which began on 30 August 1990 with the declaration of sovereignty of the Tatarstan Soviet Socialistic Republic. Further political movements were directed at gaining a greater degree of political and economic independence from the Russian Federation. Simultaneously Tatarstan authorities promoted the development of the Tatar culture by way of reviving and spreading the Muslim religion and raising the status of the Tatar language: great investments were made in the construction of mosques, religious schools and higher institutions, increase in the number of Tatar schools, and promotion of Tatar mass media (Veinguer 2013). In Tatarstan both the Tatar and Russian languages have equal status as state languages recognised by the constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan in 1992; the Tatar language is included in the secondary school curriculum as an obligatory subject. The political processes of self-determination led to the national rebirth of Tatars which was ideologically enunciated by the first president of Tatarstan Mintimer Shaimiev in the 2003 slogan “Ȼɟɡ ɛɭɥɞɵɪɚɛɵɡ” (“Yes, we can!”). The ethnic revival and marked self-presentation of the Tatar ethnic identity in Tatarstan has had a top-down direction beginning at the level of political elites and nationalist parties and gradually involving wider groups of the Tatar population, especially the younger generations.

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The present study examines how young Tatars in the Republic of Tatarstan construct their ethnic identity and assert their ethnic position via the use of the ethnonym “Tatar” in their every-day interactions in Internet social communities. Since at present communication is carried out in the Tatar and Russian languages within Tatarstan, it can be assumed that similar semantic changes have affected the ethnonym “Tatar” in both the languages. In its altered meaning it serves the self-representation of young Tatars speaking Tatar and/or Russian. Therefore the analysis is focused on the context analysis of both the Tatar word «ɬɚɬɚɪ» (Tatar) and the Russian word «ɬɚɬɚɪɢɧ» (Tatar). We aim to demonstrate that in a changed political context the lexical unit “Tatar” has acquired new semantic components which reflect new attitudes of Tatars towards themselves and reveal a new image of their ethnic identity that they actively create and promote by their online discursive practices.

1. Historical background An ethnic group (ethnos) is considered to be a group of people united on the basis of common history, ancestry, culture, territory, language (Peoples and Baley 2012: 389). Gumilev defines “ethnos” as a group of people who oppose themselves to all other such-like groups guided by their unconscious feeling of mutual relatedness and togetherness causing the opposition of “us” to “them” (Gumilev 1992: 10). He argues that the ethnonym accepted as a denomination for a certain ethnic group may not correspond to the real essence of the ethnos (Gumilev 2008: 93-98). The claim can be supported by the evidence of the semantic evolution of the ethnonym “Tatar” and a number of its reference changes. At present “Tatar” is employed with reference to various kindred Turkic ethnic groups living on the territory of the Russian Federation: Republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, European, Volga and Ural regions and Siberia; former republics of the Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tukrmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Republic of Belarus; and in some other states such as US, China, Finland, Australia and Japan. The Tatars are the second largest ethnos in the Russian Federation after Russians – according to the population census of 20101 there are 111,02 mln Russians (80,90%) and 5,31 mln Tatars (3,87%) living in the Russian Federation. The Tatar ethnos is by no mean homogenous, comprising several different sub-ethnic groups: Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, Astrakhan Tatars, Siberian Tatars, Lipka Tatars.



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The majority of Volga Tatars live on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan and constitute the so-called ethnic group of Kazan Tatars. The Tatars of the Republic of Tatarstan constitute 53% (2,012,571) and Russians 39,7% (1,501,369) of the republic’s population, which in total numbers 3,780,436 citizens. Nowadays most Tatars in Tatarstan are bilingual and use both Tatar and Russian in their everyday communication: according to the population census data 69% of Tatars are competent in Tatar and 97,8% are competent in Russian. But a certain number of Tatars have no command of their native language: thus of 2,012,549 Tatars who gave an indication, 1,896,160 Tatars indicated Tatar as their native language and 115,604 Tatars indicated Russian as their native language. The Russian citizens of the republic mostly speak only their native Russian even though the younger generations study Tatar at school. The two nations, Tatars and Russians, have been living together as neighbours and then fellow-citizens since about the 9th century when a Turkic nomadic tribe of Bulgars moved north from the steppes of the Azov region, settled in the Volga-Ural region and founded the Bulgar khanate (Fakhrutdinov 1986; Shamiloglu 1990). The citizens of the Bulgar khanate were called Bulgars/Bolgars/Bulghars. The genesis of the ethnonym “Tatar” goes back to the 8th-9th centuries AD. It was the name of a nomadic tribe which lived along the Kherlen River (in modern Mongolia). Chinese chroniclers used “Tatar” as an umbrella term referring to all nomads inhabiting the lands north of China (Gumilev 1992: 92; Gumilev 2008: 96; Fakhrutdinov 1986: 218). Later those tribes were absorbed by Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde and became part of his army. Together with the advances of the army and expansion of the Horde they migrated to the west and invaded new territories. Finally all the Horde tribes came to be called Tatars/Tartars by Russians and Europeans and the period of Golden Horde dominance was regarded as the Tatar yoke/Tatar-Mongolian yoke. The Bulgar khanate was conquered by the Mongolian army and included in the Golden Horde, too. The newcomer Tatars mixed with indigenous Bulgars and gradually the ethnos of Bulgars, who had lived in the Volga region long before the Tatars, lost its original name and was given the name of their conquerors, i.e. Tatars. After the dissolution of the Golden Horde a new state came into existence on the territory of the Bulgar khanate. It was the Kazan khanate, and its population was referred to as Tatars (Fakhrutdinov 1986: 221). The Kazan khanate was Russia's closest neighbour; the contacts between Tatars and Russians ranged from hostility and wars to economic



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and political cooperation and multifarious personal ties. Tatars and Russians had co-existed preserving their political autonomy and independence for many centuries. The political, economic and cultural balance was broken in 1552 when the Kazan khanate was annexed by the Russian tsar Ivan IV who conquered and devastated Kazan, pursuing his ambition to expand Russia to the east. The Kazan khanate ceased to exist as a sovereign state and its territory was joined to Russia on very severe conditions. Tatars were forced out of the capital Kazan and were not even allowed to enter it, while their houses were handed over to Russian settlers (Khudyakov 1923: 159; Shamiloglu 1990: 41). The policy of political and social discrimination and segregation continued until the late 18th century when Tatars were granted some political, economic and social rights by the empress Catherine the Great: they obtained the right to build mosques and Tatar schools, and print books in Tatar. It was not until 1920 that the Tatars living on the territory of the former Kazan khanate were granted autonomy within the USSR. The Constitution of 1992 proclaimed Tatarstan as a republic and a sovereign state, but the amendments introduced to the Constitution in 2002 declare it a constituent and integral part of Russian Federation. Despite the upsurge of nationalist feelings and political movements in the 1990s which caused a certain animosity and controversies between the Tatar and Russian population of Tatarstan, at present the Republic of Tatarstan is considered one of the most politically stable and balanced multinational regions in the Russian Federation (Suleymanova 2009: 40). In spite of considerable linguistic, religious and cultural diversity, Tatars and Russians maintain peaceful and tolerant relations.

2. Analytic framework This survey of the genesis of the ethnonym “Tatar” and history of the Tatar nation may in part account for its marked negative connotation in the Russian and, partly, Tatar languages. The word “Tatar” does not only bear certain (mostly negative) connotative semantic components, it also reflects certain attitudes and values of the society that have been accumulated in the course of the long use of the word. The present analysis is based upon discourse analysis approaches and is built upon the idea of intertextuality. Word meanings registered in dictionaries and corpora preserve all the previous contexts of word usage. As Bakhtin claims, no word is anonymous, it is always somebody’s word and intertextually it is related to the past texts and –hypothetically–to the future texts it may occur in. The meanings reflect how the word is used in



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various social group and individual discourses (Bakhtin 1986: 283-284). Thus, the fixed semantic components of “Tatar” constitute the “so-called common ground” (Fairclough 2003: 55) and are related to capital Ddiscourse because, on the one hand, they reflect the dominant views and attitudes towards Tatars in the society; on the other hand, the fixed values surrounding the idea of “Tatar” are imposed on individuals and predetermine their textual worlds, discursive practices and identities (De Fina et al. 2006). Present discourses are related to and influenced by previous discourses, but at the same time a discourse is something that is constantly evolving and transforming; by their discursive practices people transform dominant ideologies and attitudes (Fairclough 1995). Identities (gender, ethnic, professional and other) are nowadays viewed not as something inborn and natural, but as “social constructions” (Paltridge 2008: 31). An identity is studied “as fluid, contingent and contextdependent” (Swann 2002: 47), “something that is ‘done’ in context” (Swann 2002: 47). People acquire, construct and represent their ethnic identity through their use of language and other discursive means (De Fina et al. 2006). Young people who assert “I am a Tatar”/“We are Tatars” perform their ethnic identity and become Tatars (Paltridge 2008). By their language use they transform the semantic structure of the ethnonym and contribute to its developing new connotations; through it they promote a new image of their ethnic identity. In order to reveal the meanings with which the ethnonym “Tatar” is employed in present-day interactions of Tatars in Tatarstan, the analysis is carried out on two levels: 1) Corpus analysis focuses on the occurrences of the lexical unit “Tatar” in the Corpus of Written Tatar2 and Russian National Corpus3. The aim of the corpus analysis is to establish collocates of the noun “Tatar” and the connotative components it acquires in these contexts. This part of the study reveals the “history” of the semantic structure of the word, as it is represented in various texts created in the past. 2) The discourse analysis of the use of the lexical item “Tatar” in present-day interactions of young Tatars in Internet social communities is designed to bring out the present semantic structure of the word “Tatar”. The recontextualisation of the lexical item should lead to the emergence of new connotations in its meaning. Besides, the determination of the frequency of its use and the emergent meanings it is used with will reveal the new image of a “Tatar” (very different from its previous stereotype) that is constructed in young Tatars’ discourse.



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3. Analysis The first phase of the study involves a corpus analysis of the ethnonym “Tatar” in the Tatar and Russian languages. The aim is to discover typical connotations of the ethnonym “Tatar” in the two languages and reveal the stereotypical image of the Tatar which was created throughout the long history of its use in various texts. The two studied corpora are very different as to their completeness and elaboration. The Russian National Corpus project started in 2003; it incorporates over 300 mln words referring to a wide range of texts in standard Russian which belong to various genres and sociolinguistic variants from the 1950s to present day. The Corpus contains both written and oral texts and numerous subcorpora. As to the Corpus of Written Tatar, it is somewhat younger as the project started in 2010. It contains about 45 mln words from written texts belonging to literary, scientific and publicist genres. Despite the divergences between the corpora, they represent a significant source of data and allow us to conduct a homogenous contrastive context analysis in the two languages. The study focuses on the context analysis of the collocations of the noun “Tatar” with adjectives in pre- and post-position which are classified as unmarked, positive and negative. By unmarked we mean that the adjective does not contain any marked positive or negative connotation. The connotation of the adjective colours the meaning of the noun it collocates with: positive adjectives colour it positively, and negative adjectives negatively. In the Russian National Corpus the noun «ɬɚɬɚɪɢɧ» (Tatar) collocates with adjectives (A+N, N+A)4 in 315 contexts, of which 68 adjectives are unmarked, 70 positive and 177 negative. Thus the noun “Tatar” is coloured negatively 2,5 times more than positively. Total occurrences of “Tatar” Unmarked occurrences Positive connotation Negative connotation

315 68 70 177

100% §22% §22% 56%

Table 1. Connotations of the noun “Tatar” in the Russian National Corpus

The most typical context is the recontextualisation of the proverb «ɇɟɡɜɚɧɵɣ ɝɨɫɬɶ ɯɭɠɟ ɬɚɬɚɪɢɧɚ» (An uninvited guest is worse than a Tatar) which occurs in various modifications in 32 contexts. The next suggestive context is the collocation with the comparative adjective «ɯɭɠɟ» (worse): «ɯɭɠɟ ɬɚɬɚɪ»/ «ɯɭɠɟ, ɱɟɦ ɬɚɬɚɪɵ» (worse than Tatars)



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with 8 occurrences. In them Tatars are represented as the embodiment of all possible evil features. Other recurrent contexts are the collocations of “Tatar” with the adjectives «ɩɨɝɚɧɵɣ» (unclean, foul; non-Christian, pagan):10; «ɩɪɨɤɥɹɬɵɣ» (cursed): 6. The negative features that Tatars are endowed with include “wild”, “cruel”, “frightening”, “unclean”/“dirty”, “noisy”, “treacherous”. Positive characteristics attributed to Tatars are “honest” (10), “calm” (7), “clever”/“smart” (6), “strong”/“courageous” (5), “handsome” (4). The stereotypical negative image of the Tatar who is “wild”, “aggressive”, “cruel” and “evil” reflects the painful moments in the history of the Russian nation. Gumilev argues that in some ancient Russian chronicles the term “Tatar” was used with reference to Russian (not Tatar) princes in order to conceal the existing enmity between separate Russian kingdoms and their constant feuding (Gumilev 1992: 154). Thus “Tatar” had an ambiguous reference and symbolised a dangerous enemy in general. In the Corpus of Written Tatar the noun «ɬɚɬɚɪ» (Tatar) occurs in 15,899 collocations with adjectives, 10,511 adjectives are unmarked, 5,388 positive, and 45 negative. Total occurrences of ‘Tatar’ Unmarked occurrences Positive connotation Negative connotation

15899 10466 5388 45

100% 65,8% 33,9% 0,3%

Table 2. Connotations of the noun “Tatar” in the Corpus of Written Tatar

The most frequent adjectives collocating with the noun «ɬɚɬɚɪ» (Tatar) are synonyms containing the following semantic components: 1) “famous”, “acknowledged” («ɬɚɧɵɥɝɚɧ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (acknowledged Tatar):1092, «ɤԛɪɟɧɟɤɥɟ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (eminent, distinguished Tatar): 746, «ɢɫɟɦɥɟ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (distinguished, famous Tatar): 393); 2) “great”, “authoritative” («ԧɥɤԥ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (authoritative Tatar): 771, «ɛԧɟɤ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (great Tatar): 388); 3) “smart”, “competent” («ɛɭɥɝɚɧ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (smart Tatar): 381, «ɬɚɥɚɧɬɥɵ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (talented Tatar): 226); 4) “real”, “pure” («ɫɚɮ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (pure Tatar): 466, «ɱɵɧ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (real Tatar) – 425). Collocations of the noun “Tatar” with negatively coloured adjectives are scarce, the most frequent group expressing the meaning of “poor”, “unfortunate”, “miserable” («ɦɟɫɤɟɧ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (miserable Tatar): 13,



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«ɛɢɱɚɪɚ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (miserable, unfortunate Tatar): 12, «ɹɪɥɵ ɬɚɬɚɪ» (poor Tatar): 9). In general, the self-assessment of Tatars observed in written texts is rather high. The few collocations with negatively marked adjectives probably reflect the low living conditions of Tatars during the 5 centuries of political dependency. On the other hand, such Tatar proverbs as «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɬɚɬɚɪɧɵ ɚɲɚɪ» (Tatar will eat Tatar); «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɛɚɪɞɚ ɯԥɬԥɪ ɛɚɪ» (Where there is Tatar there is danger), which are not to be found in the Corpus, reveal a very critical attitude of Tatars towards their own nation. For some Kazan Tatars the word sounds like an insult because of its intensely negative load and its traditional relatedness to the Golden Horde dominance (Shamiloglu 1990). With perestroika the political movement of Bulgarism called for the return of the former ethnonym “Bulgar” to the Turkic population of Tatarstan (Shamiloglu 1998). It provoked great controversy and dissent among the Tatar society. Today the majority of Tatars are against changing their names because it will inevitably lead to the loss of the entire cultural legacy based upon the Tatar ethnicity and entail their ethnic identity reconstruction. The changed socio-political context has contributed to the renovation of the selfidentification of Tatars which is clearly visible in young Tatars’ discursive practices in their every-day communication. In the second phase of the research we make a discourse analysis of the social media communication of young people in virtual communities on the VKontakte social network, the most popular network in RF with 120 mln users 5 . The analysis focuses on those social communities whose names contain the word “Tatar”. There are 4336 such groups registered in Russia and 626 groups registered in Kazan. Out of the latter we have selected 352 groups which have 10 and more members. The biggest group numbers 44,378 members, the smallest 10. Online communication in social communities takes up a great part of young people’s time: they can easily express and share their views and life experience and find friends with similar interests. Virtual communication enables members of such communities to feel at ease and speak their mind without restraint due to the absence of social bonds with interlocutors in real life. We have restricted the present research to the linguistic analysis of online community names because in social media a community name performs the same function as a newspaper headline: a) it imparts information by stating the theme of a discussion and declaring aims and stance of the community creators, b) it entertains users and attracts the attention of as many new members as possible. The community name is its slogan which is also supposed to raise the community members’ status. Through the selective use of language means community creators, firstly,



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display their Tatar ethnic identity, and secondly, promote the created image, i.e. they make sure that Internet users accept this image and associate it with Tatars. A free and demonstrative use of the word “Tatar” in open discussions is a new linguistic act and an important “social event” (Fairclough 2003: 21) which testifies to deep changes in how young Tatars realise, construct and present their ethnic identity. Members of these communities are mostly bilingual Tatars who do not interact purely in Tatar: they sometimes practise code-switching and write parallel texts in Tatar and Russian. Quite often young Tatars interact exclusively in Russian. The same tendency can be observed in the choice of a group name which may be in Tatar, Russian or in both languages, as is seen in Table 3: Total number of communities 352 100%

Communities with Tatar names 175 50%

Communities with Russian names 149 42%

Communities with TatarRussian names 28 8%

Table 3. Languages used in community names

The number of social communities with purely Tatar names prevails but the most numerous community (70,793 members) has the Russian name «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɢ ɬɚɬɚɪɨɱɤɢ» (Tatar boys and girls), and the second largest (44,378 members) has the Tatar name «ɂԙ ɬɟɤԥ ɬɚɬɚɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪɟ» (The toughest Tatar youth). The Tatar denomination of a community does not automatically presuppose their communication in the Tatar language. Even if the group name is purely Tatar, young people may write texts and messages in Russian or use code-switching in their discussions. The content of a community discussion is usually inferred from its name. There are interest groups with specific aims: lovers of Tatar music, those who study the Tatar language, participants of a certain event, etc. The majority of such groups bear Tatar names and their members communicate in Tatar:







Nailya Bashirova and Marina Solnyshkina Community names

Tatar names Russian names Tatar-Russian names

Communities with specified names

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Communities with unspecified names

Total

156

%

196

%

352

%

102 35 19

58 23 68

73 114 9

42 77 32

175 149 28

100 100 100

Table 4. Community names themes

It follows from Table 4 that those Tatars who are competent in their native language often join a community having the name “Tatar” with a certain purpose. Most social communities with Russian names do not seem to have any specific themes for discussion. They appear to have been created only to unite young Tatars to socialise and discuss a wide range of topics; national problems are often not even touched upon. Therefore, the denomination of a community as “Tatar” serves mainly to declare its members’ ethnicity. We now consider the choice of language in those 196 names of unspecified communities, because they demonstrate the acts of performing and promoting the Tatar ethnic identity better than interest groups. The analysis is done separately for Tatar and Russian community names. We examine the following linguistic features of unspecified community names: 1) collocations of the word “Tatar” with other linguistic units in a name; 2) semantic analysis of contextual connotations acquired by the word “Tatar”; 3) syntactical structures employed in community names. In the Tatar community names the word “Tatar” is quite often used attributively combining with the following nouns specifying the reference of Tatar ethnicity: «ɹɲɶɥԥɪ» (youth): for example in the community name «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪɟ» (Tatar youth): 14; «ɤɵɡɥɚɪ» (girls): «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɤɵɡɥɚɪɵ» (Tatar girls): 13; «ɛɚɥɚ» (child): «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɛɚɥɚɫɵ!» (Tatar child): 10; «ɟɝɟɬɥԥɪ ԣԥɦ ɤɵɡɥɚɪ» (boys and girls): «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɟɝɟɬɥԥɪɟ ԣԥɦ ɤɵɡɥɚɪɵ» (Tatar boys and girls): 8; «ɟɝɟɬ/ɟɝɟɬɥԥɪ» (boy/s): «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɟɝɟɬɟ/ɟɝɟɬɥԥɪɟ» (Tatar boy/boys): 6. As a noun without any specific reference “Tatar” occurs in 8 group names: «Ɍɚɬɚɪ!» (Tatar!); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɢɧ» (Tatar man); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ» (Tatars), etc. The results for the Russian community names are different. This may be explained by structural differences between the Tatar and Russian languages (the Tatar lexical unit «ɬɚɬɚɪ» (Tatar) may function both as a



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noun and an adjective, whereas the Russian «ɬɚɬɚɪɢɧ» (Tatar) is only a noun). In 19 Russian community names the noun “Tatar” specifies the gender of users: «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɢ ɬɚɬɚɪɨɱɤɢ» (Tatar boys and girls). In 78 group names the word “Tatar” functions as a noun without any attribute and has a general reference to the ethnicity: «Ɍɚɬɚɪɢɧ»/ «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ» (Tatar/Tatars). It appears from the analysis that the Tatars’ general increased interest in their own ethnicity is combined with the altered self-awareness and selfpresentation of young Tatar girls. Gender does not seem to be a dividing factor in the Tatar society now. If earlier the Tatar social norms prescribed for a female a social role inferior to that of a male, today Tatar girls join the same communities as boys and interact together; moreover, we can observe a greater activity of girls in their self-presentation (13 female communities – 6 male communities). As a noun “Tatar” collocates with synonymous Tatar and Russian adjectives containing the following recurring semantic components: a) “tough” (6): «ɂԙ ɬɟɤԥ ɬɚɬɚɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪɟ» (The toughest Tatar youth); b) “handsome”, “attractive” (6): «Ƚɥɚɦɭɪ, ɦɚɬɭɪ, ɚɤɵɥɥɵ, ɱɢɛԥɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪ» (Glamorous, beautiful, clever, pretty youth); «ɋɚɦɵɟ ɤɪɚɫɢɜɵɟ ɞɟɜɭɲɤɢ ɬɚɬɚɪɨɱɤɢ ɢ ɩɚɪɧɢ ɬɚɬɚɪɵ» (The most handsome Tatar girls and boys); c) “real”, “typical” (6): «ɑɵɧ ɫɚɮ ɬɚɬɚɪ ɤɵɡɥɚɪɵ» (Real pure Tatar girls). Only in Russian community names “Tatar” collocates with the noun «ɫɢɥɚ» (power) and the adjective «ɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ» (strong, powerful) (9), and the verbs «ɪɭɥɹɬ» (guide, rule), «ɩɪɚɜɹɬ» (guide, rule, govern) (10): «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɫɢɥɚ!» (Tatars are power!); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɧɚɪɨɞ» (Tatars are a strong nation); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɪɭɥɹɬ» (Tatars guide). As emerges from the analysis, young Tatars in virtual communities self-present as goodlooking, strong, rather powerful and dominant, and they demonstrate their authentic Tatar ethnicity, emphasising its purity, i.e. absence of other ethnic elements. In the use of syntactical structures Tatar and Russian community names display some differences. Forty Tatar names have the structure of an attributive phrase: A (An) + N, where “Tatar” functions mostly as an adjective: «Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪɟ» (Tatar youth). Nineteen community names are a clause with the prevailing structure NP (P) + C (N)6: I am/We are (a) Tatar child/youth/girls/boys: «Ɇɢɧ ɛɢɬ Ɍɚɬɚɪ ɛɚɥɚɫɵ» (I am a Tatar child); «Ȼɟɡ ɬɚɬɚɪ ɹɲɶɥԥɪɟ» (We are Tatar youth); «Ȼɟɡ – ɬɚɬɚɪ



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ɤɵɡɥɚɪɵ» (We are Tatar girls); « Ȼɟɡ ɬɚɬɚɪ ɟɝɟɬɥԥɪɟ» (We are Tatar boys). Thus the name serves to declare the individual or group Tatar ethnic identity without attributing to the declaration any elements of characterisation or appraisal. Among Russian community names a clause structure prevails (62): we identified 47 statements and 15 inducements. Statements have 3 recurring structures: a) NP (P) + C (Tatar) which presents the identity of the members: «ə/Ɇɵ – ɬɚɬɚɪɢɧ/ ɬɚɬɚɪɵ» (I am/We are Tatar(s)) (10); b) NP (Tatar) + C (A/ N) which attributes to Tatars particular (positive) features: «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ – ɫɢɥɚ /ɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɧɚɪɨɞ» (Tatars are power/a powerful nation) (9). In the other varieties of this type the meaning is “Tatars are the best/ahead/exclusive/in fashion”: «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɜ ɦɨɞɟ ɩɪɢ ɥɸɛɨɣ ɩɨɝɨɞɟ» (Tatars are in fashion in any weather); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɜɩɟɪɟɞɢ!!!» (Tatars are ahead!!!); c) NP (Tatars) + Vi/Vt 7 which states the action that Tatars are apt to perform – “rule/guide (the world)”: «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɪɭɥɹɬ» (Tatars guide) (10); «Ɍɚɬɚɪɵ ɩɪɚɜɹɬ (ɦɢɪɨɦ)» (Tatars rule (the world)) (2).

4. Concluding remarks Today young Tatars in their Internet interactions within social communities demonstrate a strong and marked self-awareness of their ethnic identity; they freely and openly self-present and promote their Tatar ethnicity. Their ethnic self-awareness is not strongly tied with their competence in the native Tatar language: young Tatars socialise in both Tatar and Russian. It may be supposed that a low level of language competence is in a way made up for by a more emphasised and possibly exaggerated assertion of their ethnicity, which sometimes borders on bravado. The ethnonym “Tatar” appears to possess the same connotations in Tatar and Russian (at least in the Republic of Tatarstan). The word “Tatar” in social community interaction bears positive connotations: “high class”, “good-looking”, “strong”, “powerful” and functions for young Tatars’ self-promotion. The previous stereotypical negative image of the dangerous and aggressive Tatar is accepted by today’s young Tatars; moreover, it is invested with positive evaluative connotation. The reasons for such a drastic change in young Tatars’ selfpresentation–clearly displayed in their everyday use of the Tatar and



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Russian languages online–lie in the changed political context in the Republic of Tatarstan. Free assertion of the Tatar ethnicity via linguistic means has a definite top-down direction and is widely promoted by the Tatar political administration and mass media. Besides, such an open selfpresentation of ethnicity is visible not only in online communications but also in the Kazan environment: shop windows, car and truck wind screens carry similar slogans declaring Tatar ethnic identity. In general, it all creates a common homogenous textual background which affects the Tatars’ ethnic self-awareness.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Mikhail Bakhtin Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, edited by S.G. Bocharov, 250-296. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986. De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg. “Discourse and Identity Construction.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth L. Schwarzt, Koen Luyckx and Vivian L. Vignoles, 177-199. New York: Springer, 2006. Fairclough, Norman. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. —. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. New York: Routledge, 2003. Fakhrutdinov, Ravil G. Melodiya kamnei. Kazan: Tatarskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1986. Gumilev, Lev. From the Rus to Russia. Moscow: Ekopros, 1992. —. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth. Moscow: Eksmo, 2008. Khudyakov, Mikhail G. Ocherky po istoriyi Kazanskogo khanstva. Kazan: Gosudarstvennoye izdatel’stvo, 1923. Paltridge, Brian. Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, 2006. Peoples, James and Garrick Baley. Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 9th edition. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012. Shamiloglu, Uli. “The Tatar Public Center and Current Tatar Concerns.” Report on the USSR 1(51) (1989): 11-15. —. “The Formation of a Tatar Historical Consciousness: Sihabäddin Märcani and the Image of the Golden Horde.” Central Asian Survey 9 (2) (1990): 39-49. Suleymanova, Dilyara. “Tatar Groups in Vkontakte: The Interplay between Ethnic and Virtual Identities on Social Networking Sites.” Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 1(2) (2009): 37-55. Accessed November 25, 2013.



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www.digitalicons.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/DilyaraSuleymanova-DI-2.4.pdf . Swann, Joan. “Yes, but is it gender?” In Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis, edited by Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland, 43-67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Van Dijk, Teun. A. “Discourse, ideology and context.” Folia Linguistica XXX/1-2 (2001): 11-40. —. “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17(2) (2006): 359-383. Veinguer, Aurora. “Mutual understanding in Tatarstan? Teachers’ and pupils’ attitudes to Tatar and Russian in Tatar and non-Tatar gymnasias.” Special issue of Pragmatics & Society. Space for all? European perspectives on minority languages and identity 4(2) (2013): 240-257.

Notes 1

See the Russian population census results on http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm . 2 http://corpus.tatfolk.ru/index_en.php . 3 http://ruscorpora.ru/index.html . 4 A – adjective, N – noun. 5 http://vk.com . 6 NP – noun phrase, P – pronoun, C – compliment. 7 Vi – intransitive verb, Vt – transitive verb.



A COURSE OF LIFE OR A CURSE FOR LIFE? DISCUSSING THE NAME OF AN ETHNIC MINORITY IN ROMANIA RALUCA LEVONIAN

Introduction A current view in the field of social and political studies places the birth of the concept of national identity in the 19th century, in relation to the development of the modern nation-states. Though historical reality has changed considerably since then, it would be hasty to judge national identity as an obsolete concept. On the one hand, racial, national, ethnic, religious differences tend to be attenuated within the “globalization” process or as a consequence of contemporary phenomena such as the migration of workforce. In addition, the constitution of international organizations such as NATO or the European Union leads to the construction of supra-national identities. On the other hand, a major change is always accompanied by an opposing trend and, as a result, segregation and exclusion of diversity still represent an important element in the ideologies of various groups that aim to preserve their national uniqueness, which is perceived as being challenged. For example, the construction and enlargement of the European Union, besides achieving unity in the continental sphere, also led to the need to recognize the increasing forms of diversity (Thiel and Prügl 2009: 3) and the conclusion reached by the two authors is that at present, ‘diversity is perceived as both being threatened and as a threat’. The present study explores an authentic recent case where diversity was perceived as a threat and the linguistic expression of diversity was basically framed as a source of evil. This is the case of a campaign conducted by a Romanian daily newspaper designed to replace the term rrom / rom, the official Romanian name for the Roma minority, with the term Ġigan (“Gypsy”) in use until 1990. Besides the strict linguistic dimension of the required change, an element of interest about this case regards the arguments used in the newspaper articles on the topic. These

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contributed ultimately to the discursive construction of the national identity, although the campaign pretended to be centered on the nondiscriminative representation of ethnic diversity. The search for a marked linguistic differentiation of the minority from the majority does not show an attempt to be “politically correct” as the newspaper claimed, but a strong desire for segregation. The case illustrates how language use plays a key role in the process of asserting and conditioning identities and how language diversity is, ultimately, a matter of conceiving and expressing one’s own identity. The first section of the study provides a background to the examined case by briefly outlining the history of the Roma minority in Romania and the etymology of the two ethnonyms under debate. Section 2 presents the selected corpus, the research questions and the methodological framework applied. The following sections represent an analysis of the data obtained, at the macro- and micro-level. The discussion of the main traits of the press campaign is found in section 3 while the analysis of the main strategies used in the articles and of the linguistic means of realization is in section 4. The final section lays out the conclusions of the analysis and proposes further directions of research.

1. Background of the case The Roma minority has represented a component of the population on the Romanian territory since the Middle Ages, and references to their existence occur in medieval chronicles and popular culture. Nomadic groups of Gypsies were not rare in European countries and attempts at assimilating them proved troublesome. In this regard, the situation in the Romanian provinces Moldavia and Wallachia is different to that in Western countries in general. Besides the Gypsy nomads, a significant part of this population is formed by the robi. The status of rob implied a specific form of sedentarization, more exactly of dependence, as this status was more similar to that of a slave than of a servant. Gypsy servants usually belonged to the rich, noble people or to the prince, but they could also belong to a convent (Fraser 2010: 239) or to the state. They were at the disposal of the landlord, they could be purchased like merchandise or offered as a gift and often punished with cruelty; however, they had the right to free themselves in the case they were able to gather and pay the sum required by the landlord. The emancipation of the Gypsies took place only in the 19th century, a period in which Romanian intellectuals advocated the modernization of the two states, Moldavia and Wallachia, and, after 1859, of the newly constituted Romania. The political and cultural life showed a marked preoccupation for human rights, freedom,



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democracy and egalitarianism. Individual freedom and equal rights for all the citizens were among the demands of the revolution which took place in 1821 in Wallachia, conducted by Tudor Vladimirescu (OĠetea 1970: 221). In 1844, Mihail Sturdza, the prince of Moldavia, freed all the Gypsies who were the property of the state or of religious convents (Nicolescu and Rădulescu 1971: 182). The real liberation of the Gypsy robi took place in 1848, during the revolution which touched both Moldavia and Wallachia and marked the beginning of the modern era for both Romanian provinces. One clause in the programme of the revolution stated that all the Gypsies belonging to the landlords be set free (Maciu 1970; Nicolescu and Rădulescu 1971: 188). In order to encourage the upper class to accept the measure, it was also mentioned that amounts of money were to be paid to the owners who considered that this measure caused them financial losses. However, an important Romanian politician and historian of the period, Mihail Kogălniceanu, observed in 1891, in a discourse held at the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, that not all the landlords asked for or accepted the payments, many viewing the freedom of the Gypsies as a democratic measure. The communist regime in 20th century Romania attempted to transform Roma into Romanians, in a process of forced assimilation which paid no attention to their traditional culture. The communist policies may have contributed to an increase in the rate of sedentarization, but it is difficult to assess whether the opinion of the dominating population on Roma people changed positively. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989 and as an expression of the democratization of the state, ethnic minorities acquired more political rights, for instance the right to be represented in the Romanian Parliament. In an attempt to move towards nondiscrimination the ethnonym Ġigan was officially replaced by that of rrom / rom. The first term was considered to convey pejorative connotations as, besides the meaning of “person belonging to the Gypsy minority”, it also signifies “person with bad habits” (DEX 1998). The latter term was advocated by structures representing the Roma minority and means ‘human being’ in Romanes language. A relation of coincidental homonymy emerges, as the noun rom also represents a neologism in the Romanian language, referring to an alcoholic drink, “rum”. In order to solve the ambiguity, it was proposed that the ethnonym of the Roma minority be written rrom, yet the rule is not often observed at present. The situation of Romania, however, is still similar to that of other postcommunist European countries, in that the policies for minority rights are mostly focused on “cultural activities and education” (Budryté and Pilinkaité-Sotiroviþ 2009: 222). The two authors draw attention to the fact



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that such policies do not necessarily guarantee the avoidance of marginalization of traditional minority groups. Based on the results of a survey conducted in Lithuania in 2008, Budryté and Pilinkaité-Sotiroviþ (2009: 226-227) note that “the powerful stereotype linking the Roma to criminal behavior is still prevalent” and that, in spite of the international norms, the majority still represents the Roma as a “security threat”. The pervasiveness of this stereotype is also manifest in the Romanian newspaper discourse examined. What needs to be taken into account, in this case, is the diachronic perspective: collective mindsets or mental models do not change instantly but over hundreds of years. The apparent failure of the legislative measures for minority rights and against discrimination may be attributed to their cultural newness. Corrective legislation may prove its efficiency in the long term if the reiteration and reinforcement of discriminative beliefs and stereotypes in public discourses are also dissuaded.

2. Corpus and methodology The present case study is based on ten articles published in the Romanian newspaper Jurnalul Naаional (The National Journal; JN) between March 2009 and December 2010. JN was launched in 1993 in print format and it currently has a webpage as well. This is a Romanian language publication with nation-wide coverage. As a quality newspaper, it is well-known to the public, being one of the most read newspapers in the country, in spite of a slight decrease in the number of printed copies during the year 2009, according to the data provided by the Romanian Audit Office Transmedia (Biroul Român de Audit Transmedia–BRAT) and commented on the Romanian website HotNews. In March 2009, JN announced the beginning of a campaign regarding the Roma minority in Romania. The campaign aimed to obtain enough signatures from the readers in order to demand that the ethnonym romi be substituted with the former term аigani. The first article posted on 2 March attracted criticism from the National Council against Discrimination (Consiliul Na‫܊‬ional pentru Combaterea Discriminării – CNCD) in the form of a press release. The institution invited the media to avoid discrimination of the Roma minority and to promote tolerance and understanding of diversity. The newspaper answered through another article, posted on 5 March, specifying that the campaign was not discriminative towards the Roma, but it was “a campaign pro-Gypsies”, reflecting “obvious historical, national and cultural realities”. The campaign continued for some weeks and consisted in the publication of articles that argued either



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in favor of or against the change. Emphasis was particularly placed on the argumentation pro-change. The topic was repeated one year later and a concluding article published in December 2010 reviewed the outcome of the campaign; according to this article, 3970 signatures had been gathered. The corpus consists of 10 articles posted on the newspaper webpage (www.jurnalul.ro) which were publicly available when retrieved. All articles selected were marked as belonging to the campaign with the title Propunere Jurnalul Naаional: Яigan în loc de rom (“JN Proposal: Gypsy instead of Roma”). The main aim of the study was to examine how the identity of the Roma ethnic minority as a social actor was represented in the discourse of the Romanian newspaper. In addition, the investigation aimed to assess whether the opinion formulated by the National Council against Discrimination was right, in other words whether the representation of the Roma minority as a social actor was discriminative. The main research questions were: (1) how are the national and the minority identity constructed in terms of in- and out-groups in the campaign texts and (2) how is the advocated change legitimated within the texts. One characteristic of the corpus was its heterogeneity, as the articles published were signed by different authors and they discussed different topics connected with the justification of the required change. Moreover, the intertextual dimension was very marked: a large number of articles included direct or indirect quotes from personalities, from politicians to intellectuals, or from “lay people”. Because of the small number of texts and the stylistic and content diversity of the texts considered, quantitative methods were not applied. Instead, the data analysis is based on qualitative methods within the framework of critical discourse analysis. This approach is in line with the views expressed by Richardson (2007: 18-21), quoting Deacon et al. (1999), with regard to the impossibility of quantitative content analysis to adequately account for the process of construction of meaning within the texts. The main framework chosen for the data analysis is van Leeuwen’s theory of social practice (e.g. van Leeuwen 2008, 2009). Based on the Foucauldian view, this approach views discourse as “a socially constructed knowledge of some social practice” (van Leeuwen 2008: 6). Social practices are “socially regulated ways” of action that include: participants with specific roles ascribed, a specific set of actions, performance modes, presentation styles, times, locations, resources and eligibility conditions that need to be fulfilled (van Leeuwen 2008: 6). The analysis focuses on the representation of the social actors in the given discourse and on the legitimation of the social action, namely the change



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of the ethnonym rom through a law, aiming to identify some of the most frequent strategies employed. In addition, I will also partially draw on the framework outlined by Wodak et al. (2009) for the assessment of national identity construction in discourse. This framework establishes three levels of analysis: contents, strategies and the means and forms of realization of the strategies. The researchers distinguish between strategies of justification and relativisation, of construction, of perpetuation, of transformation, and strategies of demontage and destruction. (Wodak et al. 2009: 33). This approach proved to be useful, first because of the concern of the institutional discourse examined for the construction of a Romanian national identity as opposed to that of the Roma minority. Moreover, the discursive-historical approach theorized by Wodak represents a valid framework for the analysis of texts with a marked persuasive function, because of the attention paid to the rhetorical-argumentative dimension in the construction of meaning.

3. The voices of the powerful and the power of voices Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is viewed as a research type or programme rather than a unitary framework (e.g. van Dijk 2001; Wodak and Meyer 2009). Actually CDA tends to cover various methodologies and approaches, such as the sociocognitive approach (e.g. van Dijk 2009), the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2009), and the dialectical-relational approach (Fairclough 2009). Though methods vary, there is a strong agreement upon the functionality of the research. The distinguishing feature of CDA among the branches of linguistics and discourse studies is its connection to social reality and the ethical goal. According to this perspective, the relation between discourse and society is seen as dialectical, with each influencing the other and being influenced by it: it is vital that critical discourse analysis explore the tension between these two sides of language use, the socially shaped and the socially constitutive, rather than opting onesidedly for a structuralist […] or ‘actionalist’ […] position (Fairclough 1993: 134).

Further, the focus of attention in CDA research is especially on the social relations of dominance and on the expression of power in language use. Recent studies take into account “opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control” (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 10) and attempts at the naturalization of power. Fowler



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(1985) distinguishes between two types of linguistic processes designed to achieve social control: directive practices and constitutive practices. He highlights the achievement of social control especially through constitutive practices which thus contribute to “the construction of institutions, roles, statuses that preserve the hierarchic structure of society” (Fowler 1985: 64). A similar opinion is advanced by Fairclough, who observes that a mark of contemporary societies appears to be the trend to exercise power through consent rather than coercion (Fairclough 2001: 27-28). It might be tempting to view all media as tools serving for the reproduction of elite discourse and for the conservation of the status quo. Yet such a judgment would be rash, as media institutions, in contemporary democratic societies, maintain a significant degree of independence. Media may reiterate or challenge the discourse of the dominating groups (Richardson 2007: 6), rejecting and unveiling propaganda or public relations approaches. Media exercise an important form of social power, with their function of agenda-setting and the role they play in the constitution of events (Rieffel 2008: 44), and one of the tools available to the media for obtaining social or political changes is campaigns. According to Richardson (2007: 116), campaigns target either the public or the authorities and “demonstrate that newspaper discourse is a medium of power”. In part, this is also the case of the campaign analyzed, which aimed precisely at introducing a legislative project in the Romanian Parliament. The target involved various social categories. First, the campaign addressed explicitly the readers in order to obtain their signatures. Second, the journalists addressed Romanian personalities and asked their opinion about the campaign topic. Another particularity of this campaign is its nation-wide character. In his analysis of British newspapers, Richardson (2007: 119) observes that local newspapers tend to use campaigns more frequently than national media as campaigns make it possible to highlight the “localness” of the readers, their sense of community, and to strengthen the readers’ relationship with the newspaper. Undoubtedly, by developing a campaign, a newspaper aims to present itself as truly connected to community life and values and concerned for the well-being of the community. Nevertheless, such traits are more difficult to distinguish in the case of the JN campaign. Forcing the change of an ethnonym does not appear as a high priority or as a measure that would contribute to an improvement in the status quo. This is best illustrated by the low number of signatures gathered after more than a year, rather surprising for the number of articles including “reasons” pro-change. It seems that this was a case when the



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media institution misjudged the interests of the public and the willingness of the authorities. Until today, no legal measure has been taken in the direction of changing the ethnonym rom.

4. Discussion of the results The texts forming the corpus were characterized by formal variety. They were signed by different authors and tackled various topics related to the campaign theme. A common trait regarded the function of these articles, as they were all meant to fulfill the objective of sustaining the campaign. Another characteristic consisted in the presence of certain flaws in the argumentation. In pleading for a modification of the ethnonym rom, the articles did not focus exclusively on the linguistic level. Rather, they activated ethnic stereotypes as well and attempted to construct and to assign a specific identity to the ethnic minority of the Romanian Roma, while also constructing and sustaining a Romanian national identity. The definition of the national identity adopted throughout the research is that proposed by Wodak et al. (2009: 28), as consisting of a complex of common or similar beliefs or opinions, emotional attitudes and behavioural dispositions. In the campaign, both identities of the majority and the minority were constructed through the appeal to generalizations and stereotypes, in other words to ideas perpetuated by the “common knowledge”. Hence, the dynamic dimension of identity construction or the fluidity and multiplicity of identities (Goff and Dunn 2004) were not taken into account. The following two subsections address the double thematic aspects of the campaign. The first one focuses on the representation of the Roma minority as social actors in contrast to that of the Romanian majority. The next one examines the strategies of legitimation applied in order to justify the necessity of the change. Nevertheless, it should be noted that these two aspects were intertwined in the press articles of the campaign and that the negative depiction of the Roma functioned also, by itself, as a legitimating strategy in favour of the change.

4.1 Representation of the social actors The major argument employed in the campaign was that the change of the ethnonym would lead to the avoidance of the confusion between Romanians and Roma people. Therefore, an important argumentative thread was connected to the representation of the social actors involved. The main strategy used in the representation of the social actors was differentiation, which was frequently accomplished in terms of deviance:



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Gipsies are perpetrators of the laws – Romanians may be easily mistaken for Roma – Romanians may be unjustly considered culprits, instead of the Roma - The confusion is dangerous for Romanians. This line of thinking is visible in the article which opened the campaign and attracted the disapproval of the National Council against Discrimination. For reasons of space, the entire text cannot be examined in this study; however, the lead represents a synthesis of the key ideas dominating the campaign: Recrudescen‫܊‬a infrac‫܊‬iunilor comise de ‫܊‬igani în Italia ‫܈‬i nu numai, precum ‫܈‬i asocierea acestor fapte cu poporul român prezentat ca un popor de violatori, ho‫܊‬i are efecte negative nu numai asupra ‫܊‬ării noastre ca imagine, ci ‫܈‬i asupra românilor de bună-credin‫܊‬ă care merg în străinătate să câ‫܈‬tige un ban cinstit. S-a ajuns la situa‫܊‬ii paradoxale, în care România nu mai înseamnă pentru presa ‫܈‬i opinia publică din străinătate ‫܊‬ara Nadiei Comăneci, a lui Constantin Brâncu‫܈‬i sau a lui George Enescu, nu mai este ‫܊‬ara cu tradi‫܊‬ii ‫܈‬i frumuse‫܊‬i tulburătoare, ci o ‫܊‬ară de barbari care fură, violează, dau în cap. ‫܇‬i totul porne‫܈‬te de la o nefericită confuzie de termeni: rom/români, termeni care în alte limbi, cum ar fi italiana – romrumeno, se aseamănă foarte mult, iar diferen‫܊‬ele dispar în mentalul colectiv, astfel că aceste cuvinte devin sinonime ‫܈‬i nimeni nu mai ‫܈‬tie dacă acela care a furat sau a violat este român sau rom. Ca urmare, Jurnalul Na‫܊‬ional propune printr-un proiect de lege revenirea la folosirea cuvântului ”‫܊‬igan” în loc de ”rom”, atât în plan intern, cât ‫܈‬i interna‫܊‬ional pentru a evita confuzia.” (Propunere Jurnalul Naаional: ”Яigan” în loc de ”rom”) The increase of the contraventions committed by Gipsies in Italy and not only there, as well as the association of such deeds with the Romanian folk, presented as a folk of rapists, thieves, has negative consequences not only for the image of our country, but also for the law-abiding Romanians who travel abroad in order to earn their living honestly. There are now paradoxical situations in which Romania no longer represents, for the foreign press and public opinion, the country of Nadia Comăneci, of Constantin Brâncu‫܈‬i or of George Enescu, it is no longer the country with amazing traditions and beauties, but a country of barbarians who steal, rape, murder. And everything arises from an unhappy confusion of terms: Rom / Romanians, terms that in other languages, as Italian for example – Rom / Rumeno – are very similar, and differences disappear for the collective mindset, so that these words become synonyms and nobody knows anymore whether the person who has stolen or raped is Romanian or Roma. Consequently, JN proposes a law project on the resumption of the use of the term ‘‫܊‬igan’ (Gypsy) instead of ‘rom’ (Roma) in the national and international sphere in order to avoid the confusion. (JN proposal: Gypsy instead of Roma; my translation)



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In the case of a newspaper campaign, the introductory text aims to present the campaign topic and to provide a reasonable motivation for it, in other words, to explain its utility to the readers. This lead shows clearly that the campaign refers to the group of the Roma people, nevertheless it does not directly address them but the Romanians, the ethnic majority in Romania. Hence, the campaign topic itself starts from a dubious assumption: to expect that the ethnic majority decide the name of a minority means denying the latter any right to self-determination. As the lead shows, the campaign does not merely revolve around the linguistic issue but focuses on the representation of the Romanian and the Roma people as social actors. The key strategies employed for this purpose are differentiation and appraisement or evaluation. Differentiation regards the construction of difference between the in- and the out-group (Van Leeuwen 2008: 40). Appraisement involves reference to social actors that includes evaluative terms (Van Leeuwen 2008: 44). The two strategies are interconnected in the JN campaign: the entire strategy of differentiation underlying the campaign encompasses a positive presentation of the ingroup in parallel with a negative presentation of the out-group. The polarization between the two social actors is first illustrated by the manner in which they are referred to. On the one hand, the Roma people are directly nominated only once, through the term аigani (“Gypsies”). On the other hand, there are far more occurences of nominations using collective nouns for the Romanian people: poporul român (“the Romanian folk”), аara noastră (“our country”), români de bună-credinаă (“lawabiding Romanians”), indicating that emphasis is placed on the Romanian people as forming the in-group. Here the ideology at work throughout the campaign can be traced, as social actors are referred to as groups, in other words they are assimilated and assertions are generalized, which leaves no place for distinctions but instead fuels stereotypes and prejudices. Romanian national identity is positively valued through the superlative description of the country as аara cu tradiаii Юi frumuseаi tulburătoare (“the country with amazing traditions and beauties”) and of its people. Proper names are used only in connection to the in-group: România … аara Nadiei Comăneci, a lui Constantin BrâncuЮi sau a lui George Enescu (“Romania, the country of Nadia Comăneci, of Constantin Brâncuúi or of George Enescu”). All these names belong to famous Romanian personalities and thus function as a form of positive self-appraisement. The emphasis on the negative evaluation of Roma people is clear from the first line of the article lead, as the Romanian term infracаiune (“contravention”) is used in official legal language: the minority incarnates a complex type of deviance, especially in terms of respect to laws, a



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characteristic implying danger. The illegal deeds allegedly committed by Gypsies are topicalized and placed at the beginning of the lead, thus forming an exordium ex abrupto which is likely to attract the readers’ attention and give the text the attribute of sensationalism. The following references to them are backgrounded: it is not explicitly said that the Gypsies are deviant, but this characteristic is claimed to be falsely attributed to Romanians: poporul român prezentat ca un popor de violatori, hoаi (“the Romanian folk, presented as a folk of rapists, thieves”); România nu mai înseamnă … ci o аară de barbari care fură, violează, dau în cap (“Romania no longer represents… but a country of barbarians who steal, rape, murder”). What is interesting here is the use of nominations like violatori, hoаi (“rapists, thieves”) instead of verbs, which adds to the suggestion of a permanent trait instead of expressing the idea of an action taking place sporadically, at a certain moment. It is implied that these negative characteristics are intrinsically associated with the members of this ethnic group. The negative image of the Other is also constructed by means of intensifications. The terms with negative meanings referring to the Roma do not appear isolated, but tend to cluster in enumerations: “a folk of rapists, thieves”, “a country of barbarians who steal, rape, murder”. There are a number of rhetorical fallacies at work in the lead. First, it is assumed that the contraventions are made only by Gypsies and not by persons with other ethnic backgrounds, including Romanians. Second, the accent is placed on Italy, perhaps not accidentally, especially because of a murder case, known as the Mailat case, that happened not too long before of the campaign. By means of the false negation Юi nu numai (“and not only there”), the impression of danger is even augmented while, at the same time, referential ambiguity also increases. Third, it is assumed that all Romanians are considered culprits and that the contraventions have negative consequences for all of them. Apart from the reference to Italy, this utterance provides no other evidence for the truth of the assertions. There are no references to sources of information like, for example, sociological studies, reports, surveys or materials issued by the police or other legal authorities etc. Another fallacy at work here regards the strategy of assimilation. The authors of the article reject the representation of all Romanians as being dangerous. At the same time, the assimilation strategy is advanced in regard to the Roma, through the suggestion that all Roma are dangerous. The problem is thus identified not as a real, social issue but as a matter of representation or of public image, a matter regarding the “national face” (Magistro 2011) of Romania. Nothing is said about emigration as a social



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issue or about the possibility that persons belonging to other ethnic groups infringe the law, in Romania and abroad as well. The reality is taken as a given and the campaign focuses on the representation level, transforming the complex social situation into a linguistic issue. This is a reductive approach which cannot provide a true solution either for the problems faced by Romanian citizens abroad or for the prevention of law infringements, but which also serves to reassert national positive uniqueness, primarily through the idea that the minorities are “not as good as us”. In the following texts of the campaign, there is a shift of focus from the “us”-group to the out-group represented by the Roma minority. The articles discuss extensively aspects connected to the minority and leave the representation of the national identity in the background. The stereotypes are yet not discarded and the negative image of the Roma is reiterated in diverse forms. This is the case of one of the last articles, posted on December 2010. Ateriza‫܊‬i la Roma sau Paris ca romi au decolat spre România ca ‫܊‬igani. Confuzia post-revolu‫܊‬ionară a fost utilă, numai că fraierii cu turnule‫܊‬e ‫܈‬i-au bătut joc de ea. Vreo doi ani în urmă, un ‫܊‬igan cam la 50 de ani, plecat prin 90 din ‫܊‬ară, zicea la o emisiune tv că ‫܊‬iganii de‫܈‬tep‫܊‬i chiar au devenit europeni, ‫܈‬i-i doare-n-BMW-uri că le spui ‫܊‬igani sau romi. Omul povestea a‫܈‬a: la revolu‫܊‬ie ne-am dat discrimina‫܊‬i în ‫܊‬ară, a‫܈‬a că în Germania ne-au primit cu bra‫܊‬ele deschise. Prea deschise, fiindcă în timpul ăsta, îi căutam prin buzunare. Le-am umblat ‫܈‬i prin case. Nem‫܊‬ălăii erau ului‫܊‬i de ce li se întâmplă. N-aveau ce să ne facă, aveau ni‫܈‬te legi blegi de te umfla râsul. A durat vreo doi ani până ‫܈‬i-au dat seama ‫܈‬i au înăsprit legile. Atunci, cine a vrut să fie om s-a dat pe brazdă. Cine nu, a ‫܊‬inut-o pe furat ‫܈‬i pe cer‫܈‬it. Eu m-am lecuit de prostii. Azi am o afacere bună la München, sunt cetă‫܊‬ean german, mă apără legile germane ‫܈‬i le respect. Morala e ‫܈‬i pentru ‫܊‬igani, ‫܈‬i pentru romi, ‫܈‬i pentru interlopi, indiferent de etnie sau sex: identitatea europeană ‫܊‬ine de muncă, nu de ciordit. ‫܈‬i nu contează că e‫܈‬ti ‫܊‬igan, rom, Audi sau Mercedes. Pentru ăilal‫܊‬i, vorba lui Gu‫܊‬ă, când n-a mai ‫܊‬inut ‫܈‬mecheria, înapoi în România. ‫܇‬i aici, dezbatere di granda: romi sau ‫܊‬igani?” (Romi, аigani sau BMW-uri?) Having landed in Rome or in Paris as Roma, they took off towards Romania as Gypsies. The post-revolutionary confusion was useful, only that the suckers with high towers mocked it. About two years ago, a Gypsy man in his fifties, who had left the country in the 90, said on a TV show that smart Gypsies had really become Europeans and it hurts their BMWs whether you call them Gypsy or Roma. The man was telling this story: after the revolution, we pretended that we were being discriminated in our country, so Germany welcomed us



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Discussing the Name of an Ethnic Minority in Romania willingly. Rather too willingly, because in the meantime, we were stealing from their pockets. We also searched their homes. The Germans were taken aback by the events. They couldn’t stop us, they had such stupid laws that one could laugh at them. It took about two years until they got the idea and made the laws harder. Then, those who wanted to be upright, adapted themselves. Those who didn’t, went on stealing and begging. I’m cured of doing frauds. Today I have a good business in Munich, I’m a German citizen, the German laws protect me and I respect them. The teaching is valid for Gypsies and for Roma and for outlaws, no matter the ethnicity or the gender: the European identity is about working, not snatching. And it doesn’t matter whether you are Gypsy, Roma, Audi or Mercedes. (Roma, Gypsy or BMWs?, my translation)

This text forms the exordium of the editorial and reveals the fact that, though written a year later, the representation of the Roma group is still focused on the idea of deviance which is marked especially at the linguistic level. The content shows a similarity of ideas with the opening article; what is changed regards the formal level. The change may be explained in part by the genre of this article, an opinion-editorial. The style of the opening article is more formal, with lexical items being selected from the standard register of Romanian language. In reverse, the article Roma, Gypsy or BMWs? is written in a markedly informal style and aims to mirror the language used by the Romanian Roma with the insertion of lexical items from Romanian or Romani slang. The informal style is used not only for the Gypsy man’s account but also in the editorialist’s intervention, for instance, in the excerpt above, the pronoun ăilalаi instead of the standard ceilalĠi (“the others”) and the verb a ciordi (informal term for “to steal”, “to snatch”, of Romani origin) instead of the standard verb a fura (“to steal”). The author’s attitude is profoundly subjective as he assumes a viewpoint characterized by a strong deontic evaluation. The moral judgment expressed is profoundly negative towards Gypsies, as it is claimed that the minority is entirely responsible for their marginalized position in society and problems. The portrait of the deviant Other is intertwined here with the strategy of mythopoesis, represented by the embedded tale. According to Van Leeuwen’s framework, mythopoesis serves to legitimise social actions at a symbolic level and it may take two forms, that of a moral or of a cautionary tale. However, in this text, the Gypsy man’s tale combines both functions. It is mainly a “moral tale” in regard to the Roma people, with a teaching which shows how social actors are rewarded for engaging in “legitimate social practices” (Van Leeuwen 2008: 117). This is the case of the narrator, the Gypsy man incarnating the hero of the story. In addition, it fulfills the function of a “cautionary tale”,



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conveying how actors who do not respect social norms are punished in the end (Van Leeuwen 2008: 117). This moral, though briefly expressed (“The teaching is valid for Gypsies and for Roma and for outlaws, no matter the ethnicity or the gender: the European identity is about working, not snatching”), activates a stereotype regarding the reluctance of the Gypsies to turn into “good citizens”. A cautionary teaching can also be identified in regard to the community of foreigners, the German people and authorities in this case. The beginning of the story illustrates the risks tolerant persons are exposed to and thus encourages the readers to mistrust all members of the Roma community. The strategies of assimilation and generalization also play a significant role in this embedded narrative. Through the use of the firstperson plural pronoun, it is implied that the Gypsies are a coherent community and all act in the same manner, which is highly unlikely. It also suggests that all Gypsies who travelled abroad after the 1990s did so in order to infringe the law. The exclusive focus on the Gypsies as a source of deviance and social disruption is expressed in the last two utterances of the excerpt, as the author addresses the morale exclusively to them. The juxtapositions of terms in these utterances is of particular interest as they are not associated with Romanians or with the representatives of other ethnic groups. First, Gypsies and Roma are associated by parataxis with outlaws and, since there is an equivalence between the two ethnonyms, it is implied that the derogatory denotation interlopi (“outlaws”) is also equivalent to the first two terms. The word is commonly used in Romanian in order to refer to persons involved in prolonged illegal, mafia-like activities, thus conveying an even more intense negative evaluation to the verbs “to steal’ or “to beg”. Second, the association of the two names for car brands with the ethnonyms included in the last enumeration requires more detailed knowledge of the cultural background. The reference to the expensive car brands might be an allusion to the possessions of the Gypsies, implying that they are rich and not discriminated. It is also possible that the terms allude to the custom of the Roma of giving their children names that are inspired by concrete nouns or proper nouns like toponyms or brands, chosen especially for their melody. The idea of richness that is unethically or illegally gathered adds a means of differentiation to the image of the Gypsy. The article resembles the opening article through the negative representation of the minority and, at the argumentative level, through the marked generalization applied to the minority. Moreover, the critique is not only assumed by the editorialist but also disguised in the form of the



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tale and attributed to a speaker who may be only a fictitious character. The ambiguity maintained by the author around this figure suggests this interpretation: no name is given, the hero-narrator being just “a Gypsy man”, and the circumstances of his intervention are vague. The insertion of the tale is contextualized in such manner so as to provide an argument in favour of the campaign. These articles reveal that the campaign does not only involve the Romanian majority and the Roma minority as social actors. A third social actor also emerges, represented by the media and the public opinion abroad, and its depiction is inconsistent. Foreign publics are represented as being unable to understand the rightness of the Romanians and the wickedness of the Roma, as naïve and easily cheated by the Roma minority. From this perspective, references to this third actor serve to throw a positive light on the construction of national identity, as Romanians appear more intelligent – or at least as more experienced - in comparison to “foreigners”. The substitution of the ethnonym Ġigan is also explained as the result of “pressure” from the European authorities and of their lack of correct knowledge about Romanian reality. However, according to the articles during the campaign, foreign public opinion is given considerable attention and is involved in the realization of the legitimation strategy.

4.2 Strategies of legitimation Among the strategies regarding the legitimation of social action, references to sources of authority are particularly important, especially in persuasive or manipulative discourse. Van Leeuwen (2008: 109) distinguishes three main types of authority legitimation: through customs, through personal or impersonal authority and through recommendation. All of them are represented in the corpus, but, for reasons of space, only the most prominent ones will be discussed here. The call for the term Ġigan to be reintroduced is based on the authority of custom or tradition, as the journalists argue that this is how the word has been used for hundreds of years. In other words, the campaign adopts a simplistic, conservative perspective which denies any derogatory connotations of the word. What is overlooked is that we are confronted with a clash of traditions and cultures: аigan is considered the “correct” ethnonym from the perspective of the Romanian tradition. At the same time, the noun rom is viewed as traditionally correct from the perspective of an insider belonging to the minority. Such an argumentation pays no attention to the historical evolution of each society and to the



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contemporary situation. A correlate consists in the argument through comparison with other European countries, for example through quotes from foreign newspapers using the term Gypsy in the article Gypsy in London, Roma in Bucharest, from documents issued by Roma organizations or by foreign political organizations. The legitimation through tradition is intertwined with the attempt to naturalize the linguistic difference between the terms аigan and rom. This strategy is visible in the last article published on this topic in December 2010, including an extensive quote from an interview given by the late Romanian writer Adrian Păunescu. As the last article, his intervention acquires particular importance and becomes a summing-up of the campaign message. The intervention is in line with the message expressed in the opening article, which makes the campaign finish in a symmetrical manner. What is different is the reference level: the argumentation of the first article was based on what was presented as a real and concrete problem, the increasing number of crimes committed by Roma people abroad, especially in Italy. Păunescu’s intervention is formulated in a more abstract manner, juxtaposing ideas based on generalizations, which leads to ambiguity. At the same time, the formulation of the speaker’s perspective in terms of general truths forces the consent of the audience: “Printre cei care au sus‫܊‬inut campania Jurnalului Na‫܊‬ional s-a aflat ‫܈‬i marele poet Adrian Păunescu.”… Pentru că este profund dăunător acest sistem de acaparare a rădăcinii numelui na‫܊‬ionalită‫܊‬ii române‫܈‬ti, a rădăcinii numelui na‫܊‬iunii române, a rădăcinii numelui ‫܊‬ării ‫܈‬i al cetă‫܊‬enilor români de către ni‫܈‬te oameni care au prin istoria lor ‫܈‬i ceea ce îi caracterizează, bun ‫܈‬i rău, au un nume – numele de ‫܊‬igan. Dacă în limba spaniolă hitanii se numesc hitani, ‫܈‬i nu spani, dacă în Portugalia nu se numesc port sau portuc, dacă în Polonia nu se numesc poli, nu în‫܊‬eleg ce este această obstina‫܊‬ie a unor lideri români, pentru că despre asta este vorba, de a le împrumuta un nume care face un foarte grav deserviciu ‫܈‬i românilor, ‫܈‬i ‫܊‬iganilor. În fond, nimeni nu trebuie să fie confundat cu al‫܊‬ii. Nimeni nu trebuie să suporte blestemul de a se lucra în numele lui ‫܈‬i de a se face erori în numele lui. Dacă un ‫܊‬igan român, Ion Voicu, a cântat genial, asta nu înseamnă că noi trebuie să-l facem imediat vlah sau bucovinean. … Singura solu‫܊‬ie este ca fiecare să-‫܈‬i poarte numele, destinul, meritele ‫܈‬i blestemul ‫܈‬i să încerce să rezolve problema în fond. … Asta e o chestiune absurdă. Nu ‫܊‬iganii sunt de vină. Unul dintre cei mai străluci‫܊‬i colegi ai no‫܈‬tri, Voicu. Nu l-am auzit niciodată pe Mădălin să se simtă pătat de faptul că e ‫܊‬igan. ‫܇‬i al‫܊‬i oameni de calitate ai etniei ‫܊‬igăne‫܈‬ti care au de lucrat asupra propriei etnii ‫܈‬i au de lucrat dificil , ‫܈‬i trebuie ajuta‫܊‬i în această direc‫܊‬ie, asupra conota‫܊‬iei negative a numelui pe care-l poartă, dar nu la modul superficial ‫܈‬i nu intrând în grădina altuia. Avem drepturi ‫܈‬i noi ca români



242

Discussing the Name of an Ethnic Minority in Romania să ne iubim cu cei cu care ne împăr‫܊‬im destinul, dar avem dreptul să ‫܈‬i pretindem respectarea regulilor de circula‫܊‬ie de natură morală. Nu se paote să se facă în numele ideii de români atâtea aiureli ‫܈‬i noi să le suportăm ca ‫܈‬i când despre noi ar fi vorba” (Fiecare să-Юi poarte numele, destinul, meritele Юi blestemul). The great poet Adrian Păunescu was among the sustainers of the JN campaign: “I have pleaded for this cause various times, I pleaded for it as a journalist, as a writer, as a man of the polity and as a senator […] Because it is extremely harmful, this system for appropriating the root of the name of the Romanian nationality, the root of the name of the Romanian nation, the root of the name of the country and of the Romanian citizens by some people who, through their history and their characteristics, good or bad, have a name – the name of Gypsy. Since in Spanish the gitanos are called gitanos and not Spans, since in Portugal they are not called Ports or Portugs, since in Poland they are not called Poles, I don’t understand this stubbornness of some Romanian leaders, because this is what it is all about, to lend them a name which disadvantages both Romanians and Gypsies. In effect, nobody should be taken for someone else. Nobody should endure the curse of others acting for him and making errors in his name. If a Romanian Gypsy, Ion Voicu, has been a genial singer, that doesn’t mean that we should transform him immediately into a man from Wallachia or Bucovina. … The only solution is that each one should bear one’s name, fate, merits and curse and try to resolve the matter thoroughly. When a real man catches his wife with another man, he doesn’t change the bed. This is an absurd issue.”’ (“One should bear one’s name, fate, merits and curse”, my translation)

The ideas voiced in this excerpt are based on rhetorical fallacies. The topos of threat is introduced first, through the evaluative adjective with a negative meaning dăunător (“harmful”) accompanied by the modifier profund (“extremely”) which functions as a device of intensification. No logical explanation is given in order to sustain this assertion: what is foregrounded is the character of harm or threat. It is not precisely explained who suffers the harm and who is the agent; still, the speaker creates by implication a semantic relation in which the Roma people are the agents, culprits who inflict damage on the innocent victims represented by the Romanian people. Another syntagma that deserves attention in this excerpt is sistem de acaparare (“system for appropriating”). The word “system” suggests an intentional, complex process. The idea belongs again to the linguistic realization of the topos of threat and this time it also represents a symbolic parallel of an ethnic stereotype: Gypsies are known for stealing and cheating, hence the “stealing” of the Romanian national symbols and



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identity appears only logical. An abstract notion like the ethnonym is treated by the speaker as an object or as a property “belonging” to a specific group. Adrian Păunescu further talks about the Gypsies having the name of Gypsies and about the “Romanians lending them a name”, practically contradicting the reality: many Roma people may prefer the ethnonym rom because it is a word in Romanes and the similarity with the word Romania is only coincidental. However, Păunescu’s depiction places the Romanian majority again in a dominant position, as being able to make concessions–for instance, lending something–to the minority. Adrian Păunescu does not seem to pay attention to the theory regarding the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign–proper nouns included–and the entire argumentation perspective is constructed on the idea of a natural relationship between names and their bearers or owners. In comparison to the article opening the campaign, the speaker appears here to be more clement in his representation of the Roma people. While the first article treated the Roma as perpetrators of illegal acts, this one makes a concession and depicts the minority as having both positive and negative features. Still, the positive traits are backgrounded while the negative ones become the focus of attention for the speaker. The term blestem (“curse”) acquires a particular importance in this context. First, it refers to what is perceived as an injustice done to the Romanians, thus reiterating the main argument of the campaign, the confusion between Roma and Romanians. Second, the word is further used in regard to the Roma people and this time it carries a tacit acknowledgement of the pejorative meaning attributed to the ethnonym аigan: “The only solution is that each one should bear one’s name, fate, merits and curse and try to resolve the matter thoroughly”. In the selected corpus, legitimation through personal authority appears particularly interesting. Many articles were focused on the presentation of arguments pro-change, even though the newspaper asserted publicly its desire to create a debate. Most of the voices quoted or referred to were of those public persons sustaining the campaign and they were introduced through positive evaluations as the example above shows. While the moral authority and/or the expert role of such sources is enhanced, the authority of the sources who regarded the change as discriminative was lessened. Such voices were given less space in the articles. Moreover, some articles included metacomments designed to delegitimise the discourse of the Roma representatives: ‫܇‬ucărită pe ideea de ‫܊‬igan, elita romilor bate câmpii cu texte de la Kogălniceanu despre robie, cu lupta negrilor din State, cu psihicul rănit al ‫܊‬iganului care nu scapă de etichetă… E pâinea lor. O iau aiurea pe arătură,



244

Discussing the Name of an Ethnic Minority in Romania ca să ajungă la discriminare, rasism ‫܈‬i tot tacâmul. (Romi, аigani sau BMWuri?) Upset with the idea of Gypsy, the elite of the Roma are talking nonsense, about texts by Kogălniceanu on slavery, about the fight of the Blacks in the United States, about the hurt feelings of the Gypsy person who cannot escape the label… that’s their job. They divagate, in order to get to discrimination, racism and all the blah-blah-blah. (Roma, Gypsies or BMWs?, my translation)

In this excerpt, the delegitimation of the minority discourse is realized through various lexical items from the informal register with marked pejorative meanings: úucărit (a slang adjective of Romani origin, meaning “upset”), a bate câmpii (“to talk nonsense”, “to talk about something not connected to the discussed topic”), a o lua pe arătură (“to divagate”). The explicit conflictual tone assumed by the journalist is partly explained by the text genre, i.e. an editorial, yet it remains aggressive and unfair towards the minority. What is delegitimised and even denied is not only the discourse of the Roma minority at present, but also their past, the history of discrimination and abuses inflicted on a minority deprived of various rights. The article thus succeeds in expressing prejudices against Roma while denying the existence of any prejudices and discrimination.

5. Concluding remarks The excerpts selected from the corpus reveal an extremely marked polarization between the Romanians as in-group and the Roma people as out-group. Both social actors were presented by means of appraisement and generalizations. The in-group was depicted in a positive manner while the out-group was represented through negative judgments. The articles published lead to the construction of the image of the Roma person as a dangerous Other, who needs to be tamed and educated. The differentiation of the minority was emphasized especially in regard to the laws: the Roma people were depicted as wrongdoers, as constantly infringing the laws, especially by stealing. Their deviance was also constructed in regard to the social and familial norms, as one article quoted a report published by a British newspaper regarding the engagement of two Roma children. The practice of encouraging child engagements and teenager marriages, which formed the focus of the article in the British newspaper, was reiterated by JN. In general, the deviance of the Gypsies was framed as being dangerous at two levels. First, they were viewed as posing a threat to the community in which they live, be it Romanian or foreign. Second, the campaign



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asserted that, even when Romanian Roma people are abroad and harm foreigners, they indirectly pose a threat to Romanians as well, by providing reasons for prejudice towards Romanians. Though some articles were generalizing, others attempted to offer a fairer perspective and to distinguish between good and bad individuals within the out-group. Often the critiques were directly aimed at the elites of the Roma minority, who were considered as the only people responsible for the problems faced by their community, a perspective which denied the role of the ethnic majority and of the state administration and policies in the process of integration of social minorities. One of the most significant flaws about this campaign is that the central topic was framed as a linguistic issue instead of being viewed as a social problem, with deeper causes and far-ranging implications for the long term. The topic was a matter of how to express diversity in language, in order to distinguish it from the majority and, at the same time, to segregate it. A flaw in this approach is related to the understanding of language, of the fact that languages change and evolve along with social realities and history. The national and the minority identity were represented as given, not as constructs that may be negotiated and coconstructed. The ethnonym was thus represented as a possession, not as a lexical item or as a linguistic sign, ultimately characterized by convention. By means of the authority strategy, especially the sub-strategy of tradition, the older name Ġigan was recommended as being traditionally suited to the Roma / Gypsy minority, for having accompanied them through their course of life until the present. Nevertheless, its pejorative connotation raises the question whether, instead of being historically fair, such an ethnonym is not more similar to a label for negative appraisement and for discrimination, a life-time curse for all those with such an ethnic background. The analysis showed that the campaign was markedly discriminative, as the National Council against Discrimination observed, and placed the majority and the minority in a relation of dominance, with the majority “giving” a name to the minority and denying the latter any right to self-determination.



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References Aldea, Anca. “Gipsy la Londra, rom la Bucureúti͇. Jurnalul NaĠional, March 13, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://m.jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/gipsy-lalondra-rom-la-bucuresti-146106.html. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1994. Anonymous. “Jurnalul NaĠional, un prieten adevărat al Ġiganilor ͇ . Jurnalul NaĠional, March 5, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://m.jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/jurnalulnational-un-prieten-adevarat-al-tiganilor-145652.html. Antoniu, Gabriela. “Propunere Jurnalul NaĠional: ͂ğigan̓ în loc de ‘rom’” Jurnalul NaĠional, March 2, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/propunerejurnalul-national-tigan-in-loc-de-rom-145427.html. —. “Fiecare să-úi poarte numele, destinul, meritele úi blestemul”. Jurnalul NaĠional, December 5, 2010. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/fiecare-sa-sipoarte-numele-destinul-meritele-si-blestemul-561872.html. Bărbulescu, Răzvan. “Romi, Ġigani sau BMW-uri?” Jurnalul NaĠional, December 5, 2010. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://m.jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/romitigani-sau-bmw-uri-561873.html. Budryté, Dovilé, Vilana Pilinkaité-Sotiroviþ. “European norms, local interpretations, minority rights issues and related discourses in Lithuania after EU expansion.” In Diversity in the European Union, edited by Elisabeth Prügl and Markus Thiel, 221–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Constantinoiu, Marina and Gabriela Antoniu. ͆NumiĠi Ġigani de ziua lor”. Jurnalul NaĠional, April 9, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/numititigani-de-ziua-lor-503886.html. David, Aurel. ͆ğigan, nu rom, chiar úi cu dublu ‘r’”, Jurnalul NaĠional, March 21, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniilejurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/tigan-nu-rom-chiar-si-cu-dublu-r501636.html. Dimitriu, Dania. “Românii, confundaĠi cu rromii fiindcă vorbesc ‘romanes(te)’.” Jurnalul NaĠional, March 16, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/romaniiconfundati-cu-rromii-fiindca-vorbesc-romanes-te-146288.html .



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Fairclough, Norman. “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketization of Public Discourse: the Universities.” Discourse & Society 4 (1993): 133–68. —. Language and Power. 2nd edition. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2001 (1989). —. “A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research”. In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 162–186. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE Publications, 2009. Fraser, Angus. ğiganii. Originile, migraĠia úi prezenĠa lor în Europa. Second edition Translated by Dan ùerban Sava. Bucureúti: Humanitas, 2010. Goff, Patricia and Kevin C. Dunn. “Introduction. In Defense of Identity.” In Identity and Global Politics. Empirical and Theoretical Elaborations, edited by Patricia Goff and Kevin C. Dunn, 1-8. New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Maciu, Vasile. ͆ RevoluĠia din 1848 în ğările Române.” In Istoria poporului român, edited by Andrei OĠetea, 246-59. Bucureúti: Editura ùtiinĠifică, 1970. Magistro, Elena. “National Face and National Face Threatening Acts: Politeness and the European Constitution”. In Situated Politeness, edited by Bethan L. Davies, Michael Haugh and Andrew John Merrison, 232-52. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Mogoú, Adrian. ͆ùi romii se Ġigănesc între ei”. Jurnalul NaĠional, March 10, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniilejurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/si-romii-se-tiganesc-intre-ei-145879.html. Nicolescu, Nicolae C. and Gheorghe Rădulescu. “Epoca modernă.͇ In Istoria României în date, edited by Constantin C. Giurescu, 167-313. Bucureúti: Editura Enciclopedică Română, 1971. OĠetea, Andrei. ͆RevoluĠia din 1821 úi restabilirea domniilor pământene. ͇ In Istoria poporului român, edited by Andrei OĠetea, 221-31. Bucureúti: Editura ùtiinĠifică, 1970. Piciu, Dana. “Silviu Prigoană preia iniĠiativa Jurnalului NaĠional ͇ . Jurnalul NaĠional, March 18, 2009. Accessed June 19, 2013. http://jurnalul.ro/campaniile-jurnalul/tigan-in-loc-de-rom/silviuprigoana-preia-initiativa-jurnalului-national-146429.html. Prügl, Elisabeth and Markus Thiel (eds). Diversity in the European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Richardson, John E. Analyisng Newspapers. An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.



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Rieffel, Remy. Sociologia Mass-Media. Translated by Ileana Busuioc. Iaúi: Polirom, 2008. V.O., “Ultimele cifre BRAT: Scăderi de tiraj la majoritatea ziarelor în trimestrul trei”, HotNews.ro, December 7, 2009. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://economie.hotnews.ro/stiri-media_publicitate-6681129-ultimelecifre-brat-scaderi-tiraj-majoritatea-ziarelor-trimestrul-trei.htm.



USING DIFFERENCE AS A WEAPON: PHENOMENA OF VERBAL IMPOLITENESS IN MAGHREBI ARABIC DIALECTS LUCA D’ANNA

Huntington (1996) described a post-Cold War world in which cultural and religious differences would play a key role in the “remaking of World order”. Although his theories, after a few years of heated debate and considerable initial success, have almost universally been rejected by scholars, the encounter with ethnic, cultural or religious alterity has undeniably often resulted in traumatic experiences, with effects lasting over long periods of time. The observation of these effects occurs at different levels within the cultural and social life of a given society. The present paper will take into consideration their linguistic manifestations with regards to Libyan Arabic dialects. If we describe language as a means through which reality is seen and described, in the case of diversity its most negative connotations are expressed linguistically by dysphemisms, insults and slurs. Insults related to ethnic and religious differences have not, as yet, been analysed in depth in the existing literature. In order to examine these insults data have been collected through field research, carried out both in Libya and in Italy involving informants of different ages and social classes. Three different groups of Libyan speakers, from Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, were treated in Sicilian hospitals during 2011 for more than three months after the outburst of the Libyan civil war. Working as an interpreter gave me the opportunity to observe their linguistic behaviour from a privileged position and for an extended period of time. Other, more sporadic, observations have been collected at the Libyan Cultural Centre in Italy (Accademia Libica, Palermo) over the past three years, while a corpus of 400 telephone conversations between Arab speakers from different Maghreb countries (including Libya) integrated the sources at my disposal. Although most of the occurrences were collected through the observation of spontaneous verbal interaction, some of them had to be explicitly elicited, especially when deeply offensive expressions were

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Phenomena of Verbal Impoliteness in Maghrebi Arabic Dialects

involved or when actual interaction with targeted ethnic or religious groups was impossible. The analysis of wider corpora concerning the most frequent manifestations of verbal impoliteness shows that insults related to the addressee’s ethnic group or religious affiliation don’t rank particularly high amongst the favourite options of native speakers. Many of our informants, when occurrences were elicited, even denied the very existence of ethnic slurs in their dialects. In our corpus, this happened with speakers from different countries (especially Libya and Algeria) and age segments. The reality of current language usage certainly proved them wrong, but this reluctance is at least partially reflected in the relatively scarce number of ethnic slurs, especially when compared with other aspects of the addressee’s public “face” that can be targeted in manifestations of verbal impoliteness1. Speakers wishing to destroy their interlocutor’s positive face, in fact, usually address their insults to other attributes which can be summarised as follows (see Masliyah 2001: 282-308; on the same subject, see also El Habib 2008: 80-88): 1. Physical aspects and bodily defects; 2. Moral qualities; 3. Family origin; 4. Four-letter words and obscenities; 5. Comparison with animals. All these features rank higher than “ethnic group”, showing that ethnicity is not considered as a particularly interesting target to attack. This fact might be seen in relation to the universalistic nature of the Islamic religion, where every form of racism, at least in theory, is prohibited. Within the new perspective introduced by the Revelation, in fact, identity and alterity started to be defined according to acceptance or refusal of the new faith rather than on the basis of ethnic origin. At the same time, Christians and Jews were also granted a place in the new order which originated from the rise of the Arabo-Islamic Empire, the political entity created by the Islamic conquests following Muতamad’s death (632 A.D.). Under the denomination of Ahl al-KitƗb (People of the Book), in fact, they were recognised as legitimate adherents to religious traditions founded upon the same divine revelation that the Qur’Ɨn had completed and brought to perfection. As a consequence, they often held public positions and served as functionaries in the caliphal courts of Damascus and Baghdad. The Arabs obviously maintained a privileged position, due to the fact that the Prophet Muতammad was an Arab himself and that the Qur’Ɨn had been revealed in Arabic, but none of these aspects ever



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justified any form of racial discrimination based on the sheer consideration of an ethnic group as inferior in itself. Several quranic verses, on the contrary, describe differences between nations and tribes as an important part of God’s benevolent plan for mankind: O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! The noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Lo! Allah is Knower, Aware (Qur’Ɨn IL: 13, Pickthall translation).

1. Racist slurs The dysphemistic forms collected during field research essentially confirm these observations, since they seldom make use of ethnonyms or adjectives concerning the colour of the addressee’s skin. Most of them, on the contrary, refer to some allegedly negative aspect of the ethnic group’s condition or behaviour. The origin of these negative considerations attributed to groups felt as different and / or potentially hostile, in its turn, often has to be looked for in famous or obscure pages of Libyan history. A particularly hideous form of racial discrimination, for example, can be considered as the historical legacy of the practice of slavery. Within the new Arabo-Islamic Empire slavery was not abolished but thrived, although Muতammad strongly encouraged Muslim masters to manumit their slaves and traditional Islamic jurisprudence restricted the circumstances under which a man could be lawfully enslaved (as for example non-Muslim prisoners of war or people born in slavery) (Brunschvig 1975: 25-32). The great majority of slaves, in Northern Africa, were of African origin, and the great Libyan towns were important centres on the caravan routes of the slave trade. This situation led, during the centuries, to the almost automatic linguistic identification between Blacks and slaves which is the basis of most dysphemisms and ethnic slurs currently employed to describe or address a Black interlocutor. Most of the following insults are nowadays widely stigmatised and avoided by well educated/polite speakers but, on the other hand, dysphemistic denominations still occur quite frequently, even when no offence is intended2. Despite the fact that Black minority groups played an important role in the history of Libya, the term equally employed to design, address and insult a Black interlocutor is İabd “slave” for males and xƗdim “servant” for females. For male speakers, also the variant u‫܈‬Ưf, which also means “servant”, is employed. Most non-educated informants are nowadays completely unaware of the fact that the term u‫܈‬Ưf (CA *wa‫܈‬Ưf) originally meant “servant” and consider it as a slightly offensive



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Phenomena of Verbal Impoliteness in Maghrebi Arabic Dialects

word meaning “Black”. At the same time, the fact that wet nurses were almost always of African origin led the term dƗda “wet nurse” being used as a dysphemistic synonym of “Black woman”, with the consequent development of racist insults, such as yƗ wuld dƗda! “You son of a Black servant!”. Insults related to the servile condition can also resort to more elaborate structures, hinting at the master / slave relation. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Tripolitanian speakers resort to the insult yƗ bnj‫ ܈‬syƗdΩk! “Kiss (the hand of) your masters!”, while the expression nΩ‫ۊ‬na syƗdΩk yƗ İabd! “We are your masters, slave!” was collected amongst informants coming from Cyrenaica. Another strategy makes reference to the humiliating condition, typical of slavery, of being bought and sold, sometimes for ridiculous amounts of money. Different insults, consequently, employ the term ‫ۊ‬agg “price”, often in collocation with worthless objects, such as in the expression yƗ ‫ۊ‬agg rab‫ܒ‬Ωt mİadnnjs! “You who are worth a bundle of parsley!”. This strategy is widespread in the entire Maghrebi area, with variants mentioning different prices for which Black slaves were sold in the past (e.g. yƗ qimt Ωl-mΩl‫“ !ۊ‬You who are worth a pinch of salt!”) 3 . The heritage of the master / slave relation, finally, is also evidenced by the fact the most Arab Libyan speakers traditionally expected to be addressed as sƯdi “master” by Black interlocutors of equal social status, a habit which has not yet completely disappeared in certain areas of the country. Insults related to the master / slave relation You slave! You slave! You servant (f.)! You son of a black servant! You kiss (the hand of) your masters! nΩ‫ۊ‬na syƗdΩk yƗ İabd! We are your masters, slave! yƗ ‫ۊ‬agg rab‫ܒ‬Ωt mİadnnjs! You who are worth a bundle of parsley! yƗ İabd! yƗ u‫܈‬Ưf! yƗ xƗdim! yƗ wuld dƗda! yƗ bnj‫ ܈‬syƗdΩk!

Table 1. Insults related to the master / slave relation in Libyan Arabic

The word İabd and its plural form İabƯd, moreover, are employed in a wide number of dysphemistic expressions and insults, invariably with a pejorative connotation. When someone is particularly angry, for instance, it is commonly said that İuynjna ‫ۊ‬amra zey l-İabƯd “His eyes are red like those of niggers” or that šwƗrba ‫ۊ‬amra zey l-İabƯd “His lips are red like



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those of niggers”. Even badly cooked rice is usually called rΩzz Ωl-İabƯd “Rice of niggers”. Also the word u‫܈‬Ưf is sometimes used with the same pejorative connotation, as in the joking expression kƯf? zƝy ‫ܒ‬agΩt l-u‫܈‬Ưf!, lit. “How? Like the Black’s ass!”, employed by young speakers in response to the question kƯf ‫ۊ‬ƗlΩk? “How are you?”4. Finally, a racist attitude towards Blacks is also evidenced by the employment of onomatopoeic insults, often containing repeated words. These kinds of insults probably derive from the corruption of words belonging to the languages of the targeted minority groups, but the majority of the informants interviewed seem to consider them as names of unspecified “African or Sudanese tribes” living in Libya. E.g.: 1. yƗ šunfƗk! 2. ya gƯra gƯra! 3. yƗ gƯri gƯri šwƗrba ‫ۊ‬amra! (Eastern variant) 4. yƗ zumbu! 5. yƗ İakkƗri!5 The addressee’s alimentary habits can be another source of discrimination, sometimes resulting in ethnic slurs or dysphemisms. This phenomenon may occur not only with reference to speakers belonging to distant cultures, but also for fellow countrymen or the inhabitants of neighbouring Arab countries. The Libyan minority group of the DawwƗda, for instance, owe their dysphemistic denomination, roughly meaning “worm eaters”, to their peculiar diet. In fact the DawwƗda an ancient sedentary group of preArab settlement, used to feed mainly on the Artemia Salina, a small crustacean living in the lakes of some Libyan oases. The small animals were simplistically considered as worms by other Libyan speakers, which gave birth to the slur yƗ dΩwwƗd! “Worm eater!”, currently employed (especially in Tripolitania) to insult a poor or dirty interlocutor, and to the dysphemistic denomination DawwƗda, whose use is rapidly declining after the members of the minority group were moved from their oases to villages built for them in the Sixties by the Libyan government (Ph. Marçais 2001: XII). The Egyptians, in their turn, are called in the whole Maghrebi area fawwƗla “Fava bean eaters”, with a reference not only to their alimentary habits but also to the financial conditions that cause them. For this reason, Egyptian immigrants living in Libya are often addressed as yƗ fawwƗl! “Fava bean eater!”. The insults addressed to Egyptian and Libyan speakers show that the inhabitants of Libya or of neighbouring countries, despite being Arabs themselves, can be targeted by ethnic slurs as well. While Egyptians are



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generally despised for their allegedly poor financial conditions, Tunisians are often thought of as disloyal and unreliable. This consideration is, for example, reflected in the insult yƗ tnjnsi yƗ šΩxxƗx fi-l-xubza! “You Tunisian who piss on the bread!”. The expression apparently derives from a widespread popular tale, according to which a Tunisian baker working in Libya, after not being paid by his employer, took his revenge by urinating on the dough. Slurs concerning the addressee’s geographical origin, finally, don’t spare the inhabitants of the three main regions of Libya, which traditionally display a mutual rivalry. In particular, the inhabitants of Tripolitania often mock their fellow countrymen from Cyrenaica for leading a “Bedouin” lifestyle until recent times, while Easterners, who are proud of such a cultural heritage, consider the inhabitants of Cyrenaica as jellyfishes. Both Westerners and Easterners, finally, seem to hold Libyans coming from FezzƗn in no particular esteem. These (often joking) discriminations occur linguistically in an interesting set of slurs and dysphemisms; a few examples will be provided. Dysphemistic denominations employed to designate the inhabitants of Cyrenaica include šrƗga “Easterners” and bdƗwa “Bedouins”, while the expression šrƗga fΩllƗga “Easterner bandits” represents an interesting case. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the expression was commonly employed to insult Eastern Libyan speakers, due to their frequent attacks on the caravans travelling eastwards. After the Italian invasion, the colonisers appropriated the term and started using it to define the Resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar. The indignant reaction of the Libyans, at this point, led to the complete disappearance of the expression, which is remembered only by the oldest speakers. Amongst the inhabitants of Cyrenaica, on the contrary, the term ƥarbawi “Westerner” is often used with a pejorative connotation. Other frequent slurs, always related to the same poor consideration of their fellow countrymen, are yƗ šaršnjr! “Pebble, crushed stone!” and yƗ ƥrΩmbiš!, a nonsense word probably playing with the root *ƥ – r – b (expressing the idea of “west”) and the negative suffix of Maghrebi Arabic dialects –š. The slurs yƗ fΩzzƗni! “Fezzanese!” and yƗ fΩzzƗni mga‫ܒܒ‬aİ! “Fezzanese tramp!”, in conclusion, are generally employed to insult the inhabitants of the southern part of Libya. The employment of a relational adjective as an insult seems to contradict the pattern so far evidenced by the data collected, but it should be noted that the term fΩzzƗni (pl. fazƗzna) originally designated only the sedentary inhabitants of the area, held in



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contempt by the nomadic Arabs, Berbers and Tuareg as well (Ph. Marçais 2001: XII). A completely different kind of ethnic slur is linked to traumatic historical experiences undergone by the Libyan population. The distant memory of the Norman invasion of the twelfth century, for instance, was mentioned by (educated) informants to justify the diffusion of the insult yƗ hmaž “Barbarian!”, usually addressed to violent or coarse people. A rather obscure period in Libyan history, during which the Western part of the country was occupied and plundered by a Tunisian army, whose camp was based in Snjsa (Tunisia), must have been particularly traumatic for the inhabitants of Tripolitania. As a consequence, it is still quite common to hear Tripolitanian speakers insult a violent or arrogant collocutor using the expression yƗ İaskΩr snjsa! “You soldier of Snjsa!”. The tragic experience of the Italian colonisation, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century (1911 – 1943), obviously left deep scars in all Libyans. Nonetheless, what emerges from the few insults that can be traced back to that period is not the tragic dimension of war but the ironic little accidents of the daily coexistence with the colonisers. The financial conditions of the settlers arriving from Sicily, for example, were considered as extremely poor even by the standards of the colonised, which resulted in the diffusion of the insult yƗ sicilyƗni mga‫ܒܒ‬aİ! “You Sicilian tramp!”. This expression is nowadays employed to dysphemistically address either interlocutors coming from Sicily or Libyan speakers who have personal or business relationships with Italian partners. The settlers who came from Calabria, on the other hand, were regarded as particularly stupid and ignorant, to the point that the expression yƗ kalabrƝsi! “You Calabrese!” is still employed as a synonymous of “stupid” in the Western part of the country. The insult yƗ ‫ۊ‬abši! “You Abyssinian!”, on the contrary, explicitly contradicts the usual reluctance of Libyan speakers to employ ethnonyms as slurs. The strong resentment felt by Libyans towards the so-called Abyssinians (citizens of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea) seems to be due to the fact that soldiers coming from those countries, despite being in large majority Muslims, fought side by side with the Italians during the colonial invasion.

2. Religion-based slurs The last example clearly did not concern the addressee’s ethnic diversity. The Libyans’ resentment, on the contrary, was due to the fact that the “Abyssinians”, in spite of their alleged religious identity (most Eritreans were actually Christians), fought on the “wrong” side during the colonial



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invasion. This fact brings us back to our first consideration, i.e. that identity and alterity have been defined, within the Islamic civilisation, on the basis of the individual’s religious affiliation. This consideration, however, does not allow the researcher to expect a higher number of insults related to the addressee’s religious diversity, since the Islamic religion granted a place in its new order also to Christians and Jews, considering them as Ahl al-KitƗb (People of the Book), bearers of a divine revelation that, although surpassed and integrated by the Islamic one, still had to be respected (Vajda 1975: 272-274). Slurs specifically targeting Christian or Islamic religion are extremely rare, even though the habit of insulting the addressee’s religion is far from being uncommon in Maghrebi Arabic dialects. One of the most common strategies to express verbal impoliteness, in fact, consists in the use of what might be called the nİal dƯn… “(May God) curse the religion of…” pattern. Speakers can utter this curse in various ways, completing it with bnjk “Your father”, rabbΩk “Your Lord” or an endless list of variants, none of which makes reference to either the Christian or the Jewish religion, since the curse is exchanged regardless of the addressee’s faith. Only Dekkak (1979) mentioned the possibility of using the nonsense word İazrƝn, which he considers as a corruption of IsrƗ’Ưl “Israel”, to mitigate the power of the curse in the Arabic of Tlemcen (Algeria) (Dekkak 1979: 209), but no occurrence was collected amongst Libyan speakers. Libyan dialects, on the contrary, show some interesting occurrences of joking slurs based upon the addressee’s (sometimes alleged) religious affiliation. While the insult yƗ kƗfir! “Unbeliever!”, although possible in theory, is almost never heard, its corruption yƗ kaffnjrdi is commonly employed in affectionate reproaches addressed to children. The expression yƗ rΩbbi! “Rabbi!”, in contrast, was sometimes addressed in a mildly mocking tone to older Jewish collocutors. With regard to the Jewish religion, however, it cannot be denied that Libyan dialects feature a small number of offensive slurs, while its speakers seem to display a schizophrenic attitude. All the informants interviewed, in fact, hastened to clarify that the insults had nothing to do with the Jewish religion in itself, whose tradition and prophets were part of the Islamic revelation, but with the (allegedly) typical behaviour of Jews, thought of as greedy and malevolent. For this reason, these kinds of insults were never addressed to actual Jews, but rather to Muslims displaying the same moral conduct. The term ihnjdi “Jew” is often employed to designate and insult selfish, greedy or malevolent persons (e.g. ihnjdi ‫ۊ‬aqnjd! “Malevolent Jew!”, yƗ kalb ihnjdi! “Jewish dog!” etc.). Similar racial discriminations also occur in proverbs and sayings, such as, for instance, the Eastern Libyan expression



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ihnjdi ma i‫ڴ‬ba‫ۊ‬š illa İala ma‫ܒ‬lab “A Jew doesn’t offer a sacrifice except to find a treasure”. The expression, employed to design opportunistic people, makes reference to the several popular tales in which a sacrifice was required in order for the protagonist to discover a treasure. Sadly, the number and frequency of such expressions seem to be increasing after the outburst of the Israeli-Arab conflict. On the contrary, the same informants were a bit startled when occurrences of slurs mentioning the Christian religion were elicited, although a connection between the Italian colonisers and their Christian religion could have been easily established. The only joking expression collected during field research occurred within the context of a friendly and relaxed verbal exchange, when a speaker from Benghazi addressed his Italian friend as yƗ mmƗsΩx yƗ mİaffΩn yƗ bnj ‫܈‬lƯb! “You dirty, stinky man with the Cross!”.

3. Concluding remarks The data collected allow us to make a few preliminary observations. The system of verbal impoliteness of Libyan Arabic dialects seems to favour other strategies to express negative considerations on the addressee’s public image. Expressions involving ethnic provenance or religious affiliation never represent the first choice for Arab speakers. It seems that, despite the undeniable sense of superiority felt by the Arabs throughout the Modern era, the idea of a “race” inferior in itself did not develop within the Arabo-Islamic civilisation. Nonetheless, racial prejudices arose, in most cases, whenever the Arabs experienced a cultural, social or military clash with a different culture. The long-lasting practice of slavery, for example, left a linguistic legacy of slurs and dysphemisms concerning Blacks, while the different military occupations suffered by the country often resulted in the adoption of names or adjectives pertaining to the invaders within the repertoire of verbal impoliteness forms. Finally religious affiliation is almost completely excluded from the list of possible targets, with the partial exception of the Jewish religion. What seems to emerge is the tendency to focus on peculiar and “deviant” behaviours or conditions, rather than on provenance and affiliation.



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References Bassiouney, Reem. Arabic Sociolinguistics, Topics in Diglossia, Gender, Identity, and Politics. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Brown, Penelope and Steven Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Brunschwig, R. “İabd.” In Encyclopédie de l’Islam, Tome I, 25–41. Leiden – Paris: E.J. Brill – Maisonneuve & Larose, 1975. Dekkak, Mohamed. Sex Dialect in Tlemcen: an Algerian Urban Community. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1979. Ehlich, Konrad (ed.). Politeness in Language, Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. El Habib, Adam. Les langues et les variétés de langues parlées dans la region du Gharb au Maroc. (Cas d’étude: Kénitra, Mehdia, Haddada, Chlihat), Thèse de Doctorat: Sciences du Langage. Études arabes, 2 voll., 2008. Faloppa, Federico. Parole Contro. La rappresentazione del “diverso” nella lingua italiana e nei dialetti. Milano: Garzanti, 2004. Harrell, Richard. A short reference Grammar of Moroccan Arabic, With an appendix of texts in Urban Moroccan Arabic by Louis Brunot. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1962. Holy Quran, English Translation By Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, First Printed in 1930 by the Government of H.E.H. Mir Osman Ali Khan the Late Nizam of Hyderabad. Translated by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. Deccan: Ashraf Publications, 1930. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Marçais, Philippe. Parlers arabes du Fezzân. Liège: Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 2001. Masliyah, Sadok. “Curses and insults in Iraqi Arabic.” Journal of Semitic Studies 46 (2001): 267-308. Pereira, Christophe. Le parler arabe de Tripoli (Libye) (Estudios Árabes e Islámicos. Dialectología árabe, 4). Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2010. Piamenta, Moshe. Islam in Everyday Arabic Speech. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979. Shivtiel, Avihai. “Taboo.” In Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, edited by Kees Versteegh, 416-421. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008.



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Vajda G.. “‘ahl al-kitƗb”. In Encyclopédie de l’Islam, Tome I, 272-274. Leiden and Paris: E.J. Brill – Maisonneuve & Larose, 1975.

Notes 1

For the concept of “face”, see Brown and Levinson 1978. One of my informants, a young female researcher from Benghazi, used to speak in an absolutely neutral tone about her research project, focusing on the tƗrƯx Ωl-Ȝ abƯd (“history of Blacks, but lit. “history of slaves”) in the major Libyan towns. 3 Harrell 1962: 250. qimt is a synonym of ‫ۊ‬agg, while the expression derives from the fact that slave traders, in the Middle Ages, were often paid with salt. 4 Pereira 2010: 281. 5 This expression is particularly puzzling, since the name ȜAkkƗra designates a tribe, probably of Berber origin, whose members settled in Libya from the first centuries after the Arabo-Islamic conquest. It is possible that the term is linked to the CA *‫ޑ‬akƗra “scum”, but this interpretation seems very uncertain. 2



POPULARISING IDEAS

TED CULTURE AND IDEAS WORTH SPREADING MARGARET RASULO

Introduction The power of talk lies in the notion that language reflects or expresses our cultural and physical reality (Tannen 1995). The power of TED Talks (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) lies in bringing back the way humans have always connected with each other, through face-to-face encounters, the true essence of culture and community. From the traditional fireside chats to the more intellectual talks of the cafè littéraires, to today’s multimodal debates, talk communicates ideas and establishes relationships. It is an enabling function that allows us to talk about our world and the actions we perform in it, and in the wake of significant and ongoing social change, it seems that individuals need to talk more than ever. Goffman (1959: 204) argues that “power of any kind must be clothed in effective means of displaying it, and will have different effects depending upon how it is dramatized”. By cleverly presenting ideas clothed in effective popularising features, TED has gotten all of us talking again and has done so by the simple use of a stage. The overarching aim underpinning this study is to reveal the communicative power of TED talks and assess their role in the dissemination of knowledge. The entire research project consists of three main phases, the first of which is the object of this paper and focuses on raising awareness of the complexity of TED and its controversial nature, while phases two and three will be dedicated to analysing TED discourse and establishing its relevance as a new paradigm of popularisation.

1. Research questions and methodology This study’s two broad research questions and sub-questions have a longterm function and will guide the entire three-phase project. In this initial phase, the questions not only enabled the observation of TED’s most salient features, their appeal and impact on TED audiences, but have also steered the research towards the interpretation of the steady flow of

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criticism of these same TED features and towards the construction of a TED controversy-related corpus. The questions are as follows: 1. Is TED’s spreading of ideas a means of knowledge dissemination? a. What counts as knowledge in TED’s terms? b. Who decides which ideas are worth spreading? c. Are all ideas worth spreading? 2. Is TED a proper/recognized platform for popularisation of ideas? a. What is TED’s idea of popularisation? b. Who is responsible for the impact of the idea that is being popularized? c. To what extent does the TED context influence the ‘idea’ itself? Establishing the key factors that have led to the TED controversy meant carrying out an integral reading and in-depth analysis of the TED website, blog posts, tweets, conversation comments, online articles and essays, in order to conduct a comparative study of the stance adopted by the followers of the TED culture and by those opposing it for various reasons considered later in the article.

2. The TED corpus Reaction is a manifest behaviour and for this study’s purposes it needs to be observed and described rather than counted. Hence, the use of qualitative methods in data collection and analysis was not only necessary, but it was the only viable means of giving sufficient substance to the research project, and this is especially relevant when dealing with webbased sources and computer mediated discourse. The TED corpus presented in this paper does not purport to be an exhaustive collection of all the possible reviews that have been written about TED. Nevertheless, this relatively small repertoire is especially representative of a significant number of voices that are talking back to TED. It comprises of nearly 200 comments collected from theme-based blogs dedicated to media issues and the creation of digital genres, 13 articles and essays from online magazines and newspapers with posted comments and, of course, the TED website pages. The sources are listed in the table below.







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Blogs www.alwaysinformative.blogsp ot.com www.educhatter.wordpress.com www.freakonomics.com www.gizmodo.com www. mashable.com www.policymic.com

Online Newspapers – Magazines Journals American Chronicles BBC News Magazine Bloomberg Business Week Magazine LA Times Newsweek TED.com The Atlantic The Economist The Globe and Mail The Guardian UK The New Inquiry The New Statesman The New Yorker Wired Magazine

Table 1. The TED Corpus

3. The TED.com genre Described in recent literature as a knowledge dissemination genre, TED talks are unique in their format as they differ from other forms of oral delivery such as seminars, conference presentations and lectures (Caliendo 2012). Their sharply defined discursive technique is an 18-minute encounter with face-to-face audiences, in the case of the conference venues, and audiences residing online, in the case of TED’s web delivery format. The calibre of the TED speakers generally have well-established credentials. Indeed, past speakers include Bill Clinton, Bono, Al Gore, as well as the founders of companies like Virgin, Microsoft, and Google. Their ‘talking identity’, however, is undoubtedly discursively generated, reproduced and co-constructed within the TED genre, and it is within this relational dimension that their actual ‘self’ is revealed and the significance of their idea takes shape and is facilitated. Broadly described, TED is an annual four-day conference held in California that started in 1984. In 2006 this organisation decided to make all its talks available on the Internet and since then, they have been viewed over 500 million times and translated into more than 90 languages1. The TED style has begun to overtake other media with the launching of an ebook imprint and an e-reader app. TED has also a number of very successful satellite global events like TEDx running at the rate of five per day in a hundred and thirty-three countries, and YouTube enables millions to access these mini-conferences that are held all around the world. As of



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today, along with two annual conferences, the TED Conference and TED Global, TED includes the TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize2. In the light of this information, it is possible to establish that TED has created a new environment and a new technological information paradigm with enormous communicative potential for the spreading of ideas. This potential has been described in many ways. To begin with, it is claimed that TED “has pioneered the return of the lecture format in an age that would seem to make that format obsolete” (Garber 2012). Also, Steven Levy writing in Wired Magazine states that over the past few years, “a TED talk has become for intellectual and artists the equivalent of what Johnny Carson’s couch once was for comedians...doing a TED talk is now an aspirational peak for the thinking set” (Levy 2012). Perhaps the most interesting description of TED comes from Megan Garber’s article in The Atlantic online newspaper. Garber traces TED’s format to that of the highly popular Chautauqua movement, an early twentieth century adult education camp in the United States, named after Chautauqua Lake where the first was held. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s and brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, giving rise to an educational circuit introducing lectures, music and other performances. Garber explains that “what had started as an ad-hoc instructional course had become a movement: Secular versions of the outdoor schools” (Garber 2012). Garber’s parallelism between the Chautauqua seminars and TED conferences seems to endorse the validation of TED’s mission as a new knowledge dissemination and popularisation genre in the digital age. Knowledge dissemination is a key feature of this society as it is the fundamental resource with which to build social and economic well-being, and it is within this society that we are all transformed into relentless knowledge seekers. But what is the purpose of knowledge dissemination and what are TED’s inherent qualities that have favoured the emergence of a proper platform for such a purpose? Maarten Van Dijck explains that dissemination is a process by which content is re-packaged for the benefit of a particular audience in mind. It uses approaches that consider the message, the audience, the expected outcome and the best dissemination method (2008). The method used by TED is the process of popularisation, described by Calsamiglia and van Dijk as “a global communicative act” (2004: 370), which consists in



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TED Culture and Ideas Worth Spreading re-contextualizing and reformulating one’s source in such a way that it is comprehensible and relevant for a different kind of addressee, in a discursive context that, though predictable, differs from that of the original source” (Ciapuscio 2003: 209).

So far, in this first phase, the investigation of TED has revealed that, alongside its widely-acclaimed popularity, the organisation has been under attack and has been facing criticism over the years. It is the writer’s belief that the controversy surrounding TED should be brought to the surface as it sheds light on the nature of newly-developed web-based genres and to the complex issue of ‘form or/over substance’ that characterises multimodal research of this kind. Hence, the awareness-raising approach undertaken in this paper is an attempt at establishing whether the unwavering TED enthusiasm needs to be tempered with the reality that what we set out to deliver is not always possible to accomplish nor is it always well-accepted.

4. Findings and discussion TED’s strategy is essentialised in the following statement that can be found on the ‘About TED’ page: “Our mission: Spreading ideas”3. This page contains similar comments from the speakers, the attendees and the media at large. Some examples are reported below. What attendees say: "Sign me up for next year" Al Gore, activist "A mind-opening experience. If it opens any more, I am afraid it will float past the ozone layer." Amy Tan, author "Truly an amazing experience" Joshua Prince-Ramus, architect What speakers say: “It is not a feeling, it is a fact, that my TED Talks are more important than the rest of my professional life” Frequent speaker Hans Rosling “I can honestly say that doing a TED talk changed my life. Though I've been writing books for a decade, it brought me a whole new audience, a different but compatible sort of audience, and a truly global one” Two-time speaker Alain de Botton







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What the Media say: “TED has broken the mould of what one expects from a speech. Speakers do not explain how to configure a bit of kit nor why one product is superior or inferior to another. Rather, they try to reconfigure listeners' minds” The Economist November 17, 2012 “Consistently the best thing you can watch on the internet: the TED talks. Brilliant people, in the true sense of the word” The Guardian UK July 25, 2008 "If you follow only one link from this blog in your life ... this is the one to choose" Steven Levitt of Freakonomics.com August 27, 2006 The analysis of the above comments revealed TED’s strategic use of rhetorical devices that are typical of the language of advertising, and specifically of those associated with the language of the advert claim. Claims, according to Schrank, have an enormous impact on any advertising campaign as they can give it a positive or negative slant. The author also highlights the centrality of the claim by affirming that all the aspects involved in marketing a product revolve around the claim’s ability to be persuasive and plausible (1976). It is this consideration and the affinity established between the language of claims and the language of TED that sustain the bulk of the argument presented in this paper. As stated above, the famous slogan, “Ideas Worth Spreading” is undeniably TED’s major claim and is supported by the three aspects that make up the TED Event: the speakers, the talks, the audience. However, numerous other statements regarding TED’s mission as well as other TED features have been collected and classified according to the categories of similarity of aspect and frequency of use. For obvious reasons of space and scope of the article, these claims have been grouped together under two broader mission statements: ‘TED is a knowledge dissemination and popularisation medium’ and ‘TED’s platform is a new space-for-growth’ (Turkle 1997). This paper argues that for every TED claim there are as many counterclaims expressed by other TED watchers who beg to differ. Thus, the discussion that follows first introduces the claim statements according to TED’s viewpoint, then reports the relative counterclaim obtained from other sources in comment boxes.



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5. The TED event: speakers, talks, audiences 5.1 The speakers TED affirms that every conference cycle invites nearly “50 of the world’s influential speakers”4 and explains that they create ground-breaking media and are mostly icons and geniuses with remarkable stories. Other sources, however, provide another view of the speakers’ identity: “some (speakers) are inspirational, some are just sales… some are teachers, some are sellers” “the speaker’s word is unquestionable because there is no time for debate, their ideas are assumed to be right even though there may be critics” (www.gizmodo.com) “The speaker reigns supreme, with no challenges to threaten his ideas” (www.policymic.com) “At TED, ‘everyone is Steve Jobs’ and every idea is treated like an iPad. The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons” (www.thenewinquiry.com)

5.2 The talks The acclaim that the talks obtain from the live audience is only part of the real popularity they attract from the millions who view them on the web and through apps on a variety of devices. Ted’s curator, Chris Anderson, provides an interesting view of the speaker-talk relationship that is created by going online. Although he admits that the power of the platform can and will change the nature of TED in real time, in that speakers sometimes have the “huge motivation to be a star”, and are “putting in unbelievable amounts of time” for preparation5, they have created a Crowd Accelerated Innovation6. This, however, is what others have to say about the talks. “The genius of the talk is that nobody really watches them: we play them on iPods or we run them in our browsers while working on other things…they come at us from the side of our vision, sneaking past our preoccupied neural circuitry” “I’ve woken up once convinced that a solar-powered cup holder will end third world debt, but not really knowing why” (www.thenewstatesman.com)



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5.3 The audiences The live audience is the most intriguing TED aspect and this is probably due to its multifaceted nature and to the mysterious motivational drive of its members considering that they willingly pay $7.500 for membership. The “world’s leading thinkers and doers” 7 make up the nearly 1,300 conference attendees: by invitation only. They are CEOs, scientists, intellectuals, celebrities and other individuals who are carefully selected and invited by TED to attend. However, there are other TED followers who are virtually invisible, but outweigh the live attendees by far without paying a dime for a piece of the action. These audiences populate the Web, the blogosphere and the social networks and because of their ‘openness’ they are, perhaps, more authentic and freer to voice out their opinions. “The world’s easiest audience” “Ultimately, the TED phenomenon only makes sense when you realise that it’s all about the audience” “I’m now watching a weirdly artificial standing ovation…the first audience members rise to their feet, then the rest of the audience follows, compelled by social instinct to follow their peers… acts as a single entity: laughs when it should laugh, awe when it should awe” “What better crowd could there be than socialites who’ve invested thousands of dollars for the opportunity to bask in the warm glow of someone else’s intellectual aura” (www.thenewstatesmancom)

The staging of these three aspects is what makes TED’s style so engaging. The lighting on stage is usually on the dark side with speakers picked out by spotlights against dark backgrounds. Quotes or slides are highlighted. They usually pick out the main point of talk. The audience sits in an even darker area and light is at times pointed at people in front rows. Upon your first visit to the TED platform, what strikes you as innovative is undoubtedly the way the talks are orchestrated on stage. It is a dramatic and intense stage, and its speakers belong to it, they adopt the right cadence, they put in the right amount of passion and theatrical quality to the short piece they are delivering. It is understandable and somewhat to be expected that extreme popularity such as TED’s will almost always have a downside. In journalist Paul Bennett’s words writing in the Educhatter.com, “the initial spell cast by the TED Talk phenomenon is beginning to wear off” (2013). Indisputably, the TED community is under constant attack from those who are in the field of the digital spreading of knowledge and who are sceptical about any form of journalism, or information reporting, or lecturing that



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looks too slick, too inspirational and too exclusionary. Below are some extracts of comments posted in response to essays about TED in The Atlantic and The New Yorker online magazines. “TED is both an inspirational peak for the thinking set and a McDonald’s dishing out Chicken soup for the Soul” “TED talks are designed to make people feel good about themselves; to give them the impression that they’re part of an elite group making the world a better place” “TED is a superbowl of schmoozing with well-known attendees who are fairly approachable” (www.theatlantic.com) “By most measures, TED shapes its style against the mores of academia. It’s a recourse for college-educated adults who want to close the gap between academic thought and the lives they live now” “Critics tend to regard TED as a rogue force of idiocy, chasing ideas with a meat grinder while serious thinkers chew their leafy greens” (www.thenewyorker.com)

Onetime TED speaker Evgeny Morozov shares these opinions and goes one step forward by stating that TED is a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books...in the world of TED...books become talks, talks become memes...ad infinitum,

until, according to the writer, “any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void” (Morozov 2013). Almost certainly, any scenario privileging the staging of ideas opens itself up to risks. So much so that some TED speakers have been accused of ‘overpolishing’ their talk. Bruno Giussani, one of TED’s curators, admitted that this is one of their concerns and it is probably sparking criticism that TED talks are more form than substance (Taylor: March 2013). Gary Mason writing in the Globe and Mail suggests that lately...the organisation has been the recipient of some withering critiques. It has been skewered for lectures that are formulaic in design, that emphasize style over substance and that come across as little more than crass sales pitches for whatever book the presenter happens to be flogging (Mason 2013).

It should be obvious at this point of the discussion that TED’s allure is also by reason of the unfavourable criticism that it attracts and the



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controversial issues that it raises as a newly-developing web-based genre. The Talks have fuelled up quite a buzz on social networking sites and among authors, sociologists and tech wizards who are now “holding them up to much closer scrutiny” (Bennett 2013). It was this same kind of scrutiny of the unease caused by TED’s cultural forum that led to the formulation of two major counterclaims that challenge TED’s most popular mission statements and provide another version of TED.

6. Mission statement one: TED is a knowledge dissemination and popularisation medium “ideas worth spreading” “the pursuit of knowledge is of lifelong importance” “ted reinvents the access and dissemination of knowledge, pulls experts through dogmatisms, and resuscitates the exchange of ideas through speech” “the ted talks program single-handedly popularize the phenomenon of brainy programming” (www.ted.com)

Ideas worth spreading, says who? Says TED, apparently. If we look at TED’s “About the Talk” page, the message conveyed is that TED-talked ideas are TED-validated ideas as they carry the TED brand. Yes, we do get to rate them, but the qualifiers are: jaw dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny, informative. To be sure, many talks can be rated by using the above adjectives, but where does one get to express disagreement or dissension. The counterclaim here is that in an environment described as a ‘knowledge-spreading platform’, there should be room for the knowledge construction process which involves expressing opinions and negotiating meaning. We live in a world of increasingly networked knowledge, we construct knowledge by accessing it and we appreciate the value of its truth because it is the result of discourse and interaction. Making room for questions after the talk or making time to offer criticism, raise concerns, or build upon an idea do not seem to be regular activities at TED’s. Lack of debate within the TED structure is the argument made by the following editorials. “TED prevents the public from weighing in on the conversation. It has not been a sufficiently reliable forum for discussion” (www.thepolicymic.com) “with the world’s easiest audience, many accuracies and errors go unchallenged within the TED environment”8 (www.newstatesman.com)



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In other words, the counterclaim is that many propositions are often made without a convincing form of evidentiary support. In expressing serious doubts, the scientific community has claimed that there is little evidence of the existence of an actual vetting process in airing scientific talks. When questioned about who checks the concepts, ideas, notions delivered through TED, Chris Anderson, TED’s curator said that there are units that do fact-checking for TED, but they don’t have a giant fact-checking department. He stated that before a speaker takes the stage, they vet the talks through trusted sources in the field and go through the talks with the speakers (Taylor 2013) What counts as knowledge according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “the circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning”, which makes debate the necessary element for the dissemination of knowledge that is accountable. The lack of a devil’s advocate acting as a validating element has been identified as one of TED’s main critical areas as clearly expressed in an article by Chris Taylor (2013). “everywhere you find the devil’s advocate…but Ted’s team see the talks as fragile things…they need to be kept in their cradle…but in the age of online video, these talks are not fragile at all: they are viral. They are just long enough to stir us…they can change millions of minds in minutes, and must be unleashed with great care” “for the most part (the talks) were genuinely moving, educational and accessible….BUT, it was the lack of critical appraisal around each talk, and the rousing standing ovations that seemed to cut short any notion of debate” “the speakers should be grilled on stage…if an idea can make it through grilling and roasting, it is really worth spreading” (www.mashable.com)

One of the comments posted in response to the Nathan Jurgenson’s essay “Against TED” in The New Inquiry (February 2012), raises the question whether TED is actually disseminating knowledge or if it is recreating Reader’s Digest. Jurgenson’s critique against TED has nothing to do with the appreciation of ideas “across a multitude of modes, be they tweet, blog or book, short talk or long film, street art or graphic design”. His critique questions the corporate, Silicon Valley style of knowledge dissemination, which makes TED not simply “engaging and entertaining”, but it has become “a specific type of entertainment that is increasingly out of touch and exclusionary”. The author states that “fewer and fewer people are falling for this. And they have begun to realize that TED events raise similar corporate-speak flags as well” (Jurgenson 2012).



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This argument falls in the same line of criticism concerning the reliability of popularisation processes in general. The aim of popularisation is knowledge dissemination, but it is also about communicating the degree of usability of this knowledge in our lives. This is why very often popularisation processes involve the dissemination of scientific knowledge for everyone to use, as is the case of medical information. However, what remains is that the wider public of non-experts needs to know and be aware that there are good ideas worth sharing, but there are so many others that need to be analysed, criticised and contextualised and that the sharing of this ‘knowledge’ can be risky if audiences are not given the chance to challenge and make sense of it. Media have an important role to play in the process of dissemination and where knowledge itself is under scrutiny they have to provide arguments and room for discussion. It is a question of establishing credibility with the millions of TED viewers as illustrated in the following two TED cases.

7. The TEDx Charlotte Case In a talk about Vortex Mathematics given at a U.S. based TEDx event in Charlotte County, Virginia, the audience leaped to its feet in applause. Little did they know that, soon after, the talk would be analysed by mathematicians and science writers who, according to author Alan Jacobs writing in The American Conservative, “were pretty upset that the talk was given at all”. Jacobs explains that the talk came under criticism for its lack of scientific validity and reports the opinion of Stanford professor of theoretical physics, Jay Wacker, who confirmed that the information was random and nonsensical. It just so happened that when the TED speaker, Randy Powell, was asked to back up his talk with data for independent review, no response was given and nothing was sent. Jacob’s article ends with a suggestion for the TED team in terms of establishing rules for their audience, and this should be Rule no. 1: “please consider moderating your applause until you’ve had the chance to investigate our speakers’ claims and find out whether they hold any water” (Jacob 2012). THE PANCREATIC CANCER CASE9 We now know that there might be some logic behind Jack Andraka’s discovery of a fast, easy and inexpensive method of detecting pancreatic cancer. But at the time that this talk was aired (June 2012), no one had ever heard of this high schooler whose findings were initially rejected from 199 labs, but when he landed at Johns Hopkins his method earned some attention and won the 2012 Intel Science Fair grand prize. When the



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talk went online Andraka had not written a single scientific paper about the method and, to date (December 2013), Andraka has yet to publish any of his findings. The heated debate on this discovery is still running on Twitter and other social networking sites.

8. Mission statement two: TED’s platform is a new “space-for-growth” Sherry Turkle’s book Life on Screen acts as a backdrop to this paper’s second major counterclaim. A new space-for-growth means providing transitional spaces that enable individuals and groups to make sense of their life conditions (Turkle 1995). TED’s concept of a space-for-growth is about finding an appropriate environment to access information, interact with likeminded people and build a community. Thus, inclusivity and learning are features that TED uses to broadly define its social space as confirmed by the mission statements below. “we had this opportunity not to be a conference, but a platform” “the power of networks only gets stronger if you include others” “we’re building a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers” “we can help make the environment of learning better for all attendees” (www.ted.com)

Generally speaking, inclusivity means promoting full participation upon equal grounds where limitation of private space is never contemplated. Nonetheless, among the data gathered so far there are examples of censorship as represented by this post in The Daily Grail concerning the talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock. “TED Deletes Talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock”10 “… if you visit either of those stories today, you'll find that the videos are no longer accessible. The reason? Complaints were made to the TED organisation - for example, by atheist blogger Jerry Coyne, and of course, P.Z. Myers - about the lectures being unscientific and full of 'woo'. Under pressure from these bloggers and their readers (and others), TED set up a conversation page to get input from TED viewers about these talks. Subsequently, TED made a final decision to pull the videos from their YouTube channel” (www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Science)11



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Web audiences are ready to spot the spreading of ideas that are not in line with TED’s inclusivity claim. In the following excerpt of a talk by Bill Gates at TED 2009, the viewers were quick to pick up on behaviour that even vaguely insinuated the superiority of any human being over another. “(Bill) Gates offered his solutions to Man's Burden and a million mosquito who said, "Malaria won't be fixed development, political stability and a the people.” (Jurgenson 2012)

fix Africa with a heavy dose of White nets. I talked with someone from Africa with nets. The solution is economic view of Africa that doesn't marginalize

Space-for-growth also fosters good learning experiences which, in turn, promote change and new ideas are always carriers of change. This is the underlying concept of the culture that TED is intent on spreading and learning is one of its goals. “What do we actually learn from TED talks” is the title of an article by book author, journalist and TED speaker Annie Murphy Paul posted on her website. In her article, Murphy Paul reviews a study conducted by professor Shana Carpenter of Iowa State University and published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (May 2013). Working on the question whether “effective presentation of speakers in TED-style videos fools us into thinking that we’re learning more than we are”, Carpenter tested levels of learning from fluent videos such as TED’s, where speakers do not use notes, stand upright and maintain eye contact and ‘disfluent’ videos, in which speakers slump, look away and look at their notes. The expectation was that there would be more learning from the fluent videos due the quality of delivery, but the study showed that participants of both groups tested on the videos remembered just about the same amount of content. In all fairness, this is not sufficient data to establish the quality or level of learning that TED fosters nor is it possible to say if TED qualifies as a learning-oriented platform. It is undeniable, though, that well-made videos have always been formidable teaching and learning tools which is good reason to believe that TED’s videos can be vehicles for genuine learning. Murphy Paul ends her article by stating that, “it’s become fashionable to mock the distinctive style of TED videos; their success makes them a tempting target. But in a world in which we want – and need – to be learning all the time, they’re excellent arrows to have in our quiver”. Below are some comments posted in response to Murphy Paul’s article.







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“often it is hard (to learn) since TED Talks are big into story telling” “why would anyone expect to have learned anything just listening to a talk? You need to take it away, reflect on it and internalize the experience” “We do learn from TED talks, but maybe the more precise question is: are we able to recall all the important points in the talk itself? Do we have to? Is TED supposed to teach us just scientific facts or is it supposed to spark ideas? 12

9. Concluding remarks The power of ideas, according to Plato, rules the world. “Men’s minds will receive new ideas and the world will advance” (Fine 1992). This is essentially TED’s mission, to inspire the world through their Talks. The present study represents the first step in determining whether TED affords organisations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue and genuine knowledge sharing and whether it provides space-for-growth within its distinct culture. It is not the project’s intention to suggest that TED is not a successful organisation. No doubt, TED has stirred up everyone’s thirst for knowledge and, no doubt, it makes ideas freely available on the Internet. The TED team have taken the TED talks from the privileged and elitist scenario of the main conference venues to the online reality, and in doing so, they created an innovative platform that can propel ideas forward. As stated many times throughout the article, through the popularisation process TED has helped bring complex thoughts and theories to massive audiences of non-experts in a wide range of topics and fields. However, as Ideas are vital for innovation, creativity and competitiveness, what this paper suggests is that they are also made to be challenged and tested before convincing people that they might be worth spreading.

References Anderson, Kent. “The Jack Andraka Story – Uncovering the Hidden Contradictions Behind a Science Folk Hero.” Accessed June 2013. www.thescholarlykitchen.sspnet.org. Andraka, Jack. “A Promising test for Pancreatic Cancer.” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com. Bennett, Paul. “What are the Ted conference talks teaching us?” Accessed July 2013. http://educhatter.wordpress.com. Caliendo, Giuditta. “The Popularisation of science in web-based genres.” In The Language of Popularisation: Theoretical and Descriptive Models, edited by G. Bongo and G. Caliendo, 101-132. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.



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Calsamiglia, Helena and Teun van Dijk. “Popularisation discourse and knowledge about the Genome.” Discourse and Society 15(4) (2004): 369-389. Ciapuscio, Guiomar. “Formulation and reformulation procedures in verbal interactions between experts and (semi-) laypersons.” Discourse Studies 5(4) (2003): 207-233. Fine, Gail. On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Garber, Megan. “How TED Makes Ideas Smaller.” Accessed May 2012 http://www.theatlantic.com. Gates, Bill. “Innovating to Zero.” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Hancock, Graham. “The War on Consciousness.” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com. Heller, Nathan. “TED Talks reach millions around the world. How has a conference turned ideas into an industry?” Accessed May 2012. www.newyorker.com/reporting. Jacobs, Alan. “Nonsense, Skepticism and TED talks.” Accessed December 2012. www.theamericanconservative.com. Jurgenson, Nathan. “Against TED.” Accessed June 2012. http://www.thenewinquiry.com/essays/against-ted. Levy, Steven. “TED and Meta TED: On-Scene Musings from the Wonderdome.” Accessed May 2012. http://www.wired.com. Mason, Gary. “TED: Ideas worth spreading, or mumbo-jumbo?” Accessed February 2013. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/. Moore, Terry. “Spanish Language and History.” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com. Morozov, Evgeny. “The Naked and the TED.” Accessed June 2013. www.thenewrepublic.com/authors. Murphy Paul, A. “What do we Actually Learn from TED Talks?” Accessed March 2013. www.anniemurphypaul.com. Robbins, Martin. “The Trouble with Ted Talks.” Accessed September 2012. www.thenewstatesman.com/martin-robbins. Schrank, Jeffrey. “The Language of Advertising Claims.” In Teaching About Doublespeak. Edited by Daniel Dieterich, Illinois, USA: NCTE, 1976. Sheldrake, Rupert. “The Science Delusion.” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com. Tam, Brian. “TED Talks Hurt the Free Flow of Ideas.” Accessed March 2012. www.http://policymic.com.



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Tannen, Deborah. “The Power of Talk.” Harvard Business Review 73(5) (1995): 138-148. New York: Harvard Business School Publishing. Taylor, Chris. “Ted needs a Devil’s advocate.” Accessed August 2013. www. http://mashable.com. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Van Dijck, Marten. “The science and journalism of the Belgian Economist Gustave de Molinari.” Science in Context 21(3) (2008): 377-402. Wolfe-Simon, Felisa. “DNA and Bacteria” Accessed August 2013. www.ted.com.

Notes 1

http://www.ted.com/pages/. http://www.ted.com/pages/about. 3 Comments are available at: http://www.ted.com/pages/about. (last accessed November 2013). 4 Source: http://www.ted.com/pages/about. 5 Anderson in www.gizmodo.com (Last accessed: April 2013). 6 Source:http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global _innovation.html. 7 Source: http://www.ted.com. 8 The reference is to talks by Terry Moore: Spanish language and history and Felisa Wolfe-Simon: DNA and bacteria. A talk by Terry Moore on algebra was accused of containing unsourced claims about Spanish language and history. Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s claim that bacteria could incorporate arsenic into their DNA led to a huge backlash from the scientific community, with the accusation that the talks were at best superficial, and sometimes downright misleading. Available at : www.ted.com/talks. Last accessed: December 2013. 9 TED talk “Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer from a teenager” February 2013. 10 Talks by Rupert Sheldrake: The science delusion and Graham Hancock: The war on consciousness. Available at. www.ted.com. 11 Post available at: http://www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Science/2013/3/TEDDeletes-Talks-Rupert-Sheldrake-and-Graham-Hancock. 12 Posts in reply to Murphy Paul, A. 2013. What do we Actually Learn from TED Talks? Available at: www.anniemurphypaul.com. 2



SPEAKER IDENTITY VS. SPEAKER DIVERSITY: THE CASE OF TED TALKS CORPUS STEFANIA D’AVANZO

1. Aims and corpus The aim of this study is to investigate the concepts of “speaker identity” and “speaker diversity” in the TED talks corpus. The main goal will be to focus on language differentiation deriving from different rhetorical choices made by speakers belonging to different professional categories. TED talks are delivered by experts – specialists in a great number of different fields – and are aimed at a non-specialist audience. The talks are made available online by a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”. TED started out (in 1984) as a conference which brought together people from three separate worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become broader. Today TED “[…] offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other” (http://www.ted.com/pages/about). In the present study, attention will be devoted to ‘how’ speakers belonging to a number of different professional categories build up their own identity through the employment of specific rhetorical choices. Thus, 1,131 talks (2,628,455 tokens) have been investigated, subdivided into eight professional categories depending on the speaker: academics - all people working at universities, schools and research centres; professionals - entrepreneurs, employees in companies and consultants; politicians; artists, literary writers and lay people (both VIPs and ordinary people). In the study, particular importance has been given to the distinction between expert and lay, in order to understand to what extent rhetorical choices aimed at achieving proximity with the reader are influenced by the degree of expertise of the speakers themselves.

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2. Theoretical framework The corpus under investigation could be categorized as a popularized genre. It is crucial to understand which specific concepts concerning popularization can be taken into account. The prevailing view of popularization of science implies a model where scientists and popularizers have a different role. More specifically, […] scientists develop genuine scientific knowledge; subsequently, popularizers disseminate simplified accounts to the public. Moreover, the dominant view holds that any differences between genuine and popularized science must be caused by ‘distortion’or ‘degradation’ of the original truths (Hilgartner 1990: 520).

Thus, oversimplification is traditionally implied in popularized texts. Moreover, there is an implicit negative value judgement concerning popularizers, as only the scientist and scientific institutions are assumed to be the authorities on what constitutes science. This negative dimension is implicit in a “dualistic” model where “traditional science” is opposed to “popularized science” on the grounds of different linguistic choices made in the two different textual genres. According to this reductionist approach, science popularization is conceived of as a mere “transcodification” or “translation”, relying on a mediator whose role is considered as translating a specialized level of language into one accessible to the layperson (Ciapuscio 2003: 209). This “dominant” viewpoint concerning popularization seems to be inappropriate in this study. Conversely, taking into account “contextual resources” of a text could help us better analyse the interpersonal dimension under investigation. According to Per Linell (1998: 144), […] discourses and their relevant contexts constitute each other. All this means that discourses and their contexts presuppose and imply each other, and that a piece of discourse cannot be taken out of a given matrix of contexts without changing its interpretations, or its potential of being interpreted in specific ways.

Discourses and their contexts are strongly interrelated. This means that it is possible to understand popularized genres only if their contextual resources are properly investigated. More specifically, it is necessary to understand how “traditional” genres are recontextualized, that is, “relocated” and changed in a different context. According to Per Linell (1998: 144), recontextualization may be defined as “[…] the dynamic



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transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-incontext (the context being in reality a matrix or field of contexts) to another”. This concept implies the co-existence of different genres, as linguistic and rhetorical features peculiar to different genres may co-occur in a single text. This concept is also mentioned by Bhatia (2004: 58) in terms of hybridisation of genres, that is, as a process involving […] invasion of the integrity of one genre by another genre or genre convention, often leading to the creation of a hybrid form, which eventually shares some of its genre characteristics with the one that influenced it in the first place.

Thus, a more detailed investigation concerning the relationship between genres and their contexts is provided in order to better understand the ‘recontextualization’ phenomenon and its relevance to our study (see section 3).

3. TED talks: a new genre? Analysing genre mainly means understanding what people are doing discoursally and what organizational properties characterize a specific discourse (Fairclough 2003: 67).

This definition concerning genres is crucial as the general assumption here is that investigation of genres implies recognizing specific aims and properties implicit in a specialized discourse. More specifically, genre can be conceived as a staged, goal oriented social process. This means that when investigating genres, we are especially interested in the way they serve their social purposes (Martin, Christie and Rothery 1987). In this study, a possible categorization /definition of TED talks as a new genre is provided. Starting from the assumption that genres are strongly related to their purposes, it is possible to better define the talks looking at that their different aims. As stated on the TED website, its mission “[…] and the nonprofit foundation that owns it, is to leverage the power of good ideas and let them spread as widely as possible” (http://www.ted.com/ pages/185). Thus, one of the main goals of TED talks is spreading and popularizing knowledge but also entertaining the audience. Indeed, since their initial release online, the reaction “[…] was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been re-engineered around TED Talks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world's most inspiring voices” (http://www.ted.com/pages/about). As said above (see sections 1 and 2), thanks to TED talks, specialised knowledge is “recontextualized”



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by experts and laymen, that is, it is “remediated” in a new context where different genres and registers interconnect in an intertextual potential (Pagano and De Oliveira 2006). All these features can be summarized as follows: TED talks aims

popularize knowledge Different discourse domains

entertain



Different speakers

Interactional dimension

recontextualize specialized knowledge

Establish social practices which interconnect different genres and registers in an intertextual potential (Pagano and De Oliveira 2006) Table 1. TED talk as genre

As can be observed from the table above, the intertextuality of talks is mainly due to the coexistence of different genres and registers. Their final aims are popularizing knowledge and entertaining, but in this process, different discourse domains and speakers are involved. As asserted above (see section 1), talks are delivered by speakers belonging to different professional categories, who give talks covering some different subject areas. Thus, social practices implied in this process are characterized by several rhetorical choices, which are influenced by disciplinary and



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speakers variation. But, what is fundamental here is to focus on the ‘actors’ involved in this process, as rhetorical variation basically depends on how the speaker decides to “position” himself / herself during his / her interaction with the audience. According to some previous studies (Bakhtin 1981; Goffmann 1979; Coulthard and Montgomery 1981; Rendle-Short 2006) on academic monologues and presentations, interactional dimension is crucial. In particular, How an analyst views the academic monologue, whether choosing to place more or less emphasis on the interactive aspect of the talk, has clear implications for how the data itself is analysed. If minimal emphasis is given to the interactive aspects, then the tendency is to simply focus on the speaker’s talk and to dismiss the role of the audience. If greater emphasis is placed on seeing monologic talk as interactive, then it is imperative to examine the role played by the audience in order to understand the nature of the interaction […] (Rendle-Short 2006: 8).

The talks under investigation could be considered as monologues or presentations on specific topics in various fields, although the audience attending the talk sometimes intervenes after the presentation. In particular, questions are occasionally asked by the audience who may be interested in specific points presented by the speaker during his/her monologue. Notwithstanding, what is crucially important in our corpus is how the speaker construes his own speech using rhetorical strategies to capture the web audience’s attention. Thus, during interaction, writers/speakers’ control the adoption of rhetorical features concerning issues in an unfolding text and construct their identity as people with similar understandings and goals (Hyland 2010: 117).

4. Stance and Engagement - Identity vs. Diversity In the study, close attention will be paid to the concept of identity in terms of “stance” and “engagement”, viewed here as strategies employed by the speaker to involve the audience or to adopt a point of view in relation to the issues discussed in the talk. Thus, identity is understood here in terms of self-representation. As Hyland (2005: 173) asserts, in academic writing, “Writers seek to offer credible representation of themselves and their work by claiming solidarity with the readers […]”. While delivering their talks, the speakers try to establish ‘proximity’ with the reader but at the same time they substantiate their claims by means of plausible reasoning rather than knowledge.



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Speaker Identity vs. Speaker Diversity In short, self-representation is expressed by the two main categories of ‘stance’ and ‘engagement’. ‘Stance’ includes features which refer to an attitudinal dimension, that is, the way speakers present themselves and convey their judgement, opinions and commitments. Conversely, engagement involves alignment, a concept implying speakers’ recognition of the presence of their audience, pulling them along with their arguments (Hyland 2005: 176).

In the present study, attention will be devoted to some sub-categories belonging to these macro-categories. In particular, “stance” and “evidentiality” will be taken into account through investigation of hedges and boosters employed by the speakers to express commitment to the reliability of the propositions they present and their impact on the audience. More specifically, through hedges and boosters, information is presented as an opinion and the writer positions himself conveying his personal viewpoint about the topic he is dealing with. Conversely, engagement implies acknowledgement of the existence of a potential audience. As Hyland (2001: 551) asserts, […] audience is actual people outside a text whom the writer must accomodate, whereas for others, it is a fiction embodied in the writer’s rhetorical choices. […]. Clearly, academic research may have multiple audiences and may be read by specialists, students, practitioners, lay people, and interested members of the discipline. […] Audience, is, in fact, rarely a concrete reality in academic enviroments. Essentially, it represents the writer’s awareness of the circumstances that define a rhetorical context and the ways that the current text is multiply aligned with other texts.

In the talks under examination, as in academic papers, the speakeraudience relationship is crucial, as the speaker relies on the audience’s ability to recognize intertextuality between texts, but, at the same time, he tries to bring the audience into the topic he is talking about by putting emphasis on engagement strategies aimed at both popularizing and disseminating expert knowledge. In short, identity is here conveyed by rhetorical structures employed by the speakers in order to construe a dialogic relationship with their audience. Consequently, focussing on speaker diversity essentially means highlighting the diversified strategies adopted by the speaker to communicate expert knowledge. As asserted above, in the study, emphasis will be given to a possible differentiation between expert and non-expert speakers in order to understand to what extent rhetorical choices aimed at achieving proximity with the reader are influenced by degree of expertise of the speakers themselves.



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4.1 Stance through investigation of hedges and boosters As said above, in the current study, particular emphasis has been given to hedges and boosters, in particular, some adverbs, adverbial phrases and adjectives belonging to these two categories have been chosen from corpus based grammars (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, Finegan 1999); in fact we have chosen some of the most frequent ones in the corpus. These are probably, maybe, perhaps and possible: AC (ACADEMICS) PR(PROFESSIONALS) DR(DOCTORS) POL (POLITICIANS) ART (ARTISTS) LIT(LITERARY MEN) LAYMEN (VIP) LAYMEN(ORDINARY PEOPLE)

Probably 378 317 41 33 73 134 7 4

Maybe 394 306 26 22 97 141 5 0

Perhaps 182 134 19 19 15 64 10 2

Possible 249 225 22 26 52 90 5 0

Table 2. Frequency of selected hedges in the whole corpus

As can be observed in the tables above, the most frequent adverb belonging to hedging is probably. In order to better investigate these phrases in the corpus and their relative frequency in the whole corpus it is necessary to make a distinction concerning the frequency of hedges and boosters with reference to the different professional categories involved in delivering talks: PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES AC (ACADEMICS) PR (PROFESSIONALS) DR (DOCTORS) POL (POLITICIANS) ART (ARTISTS) LIT (LITERARY MEN) LAY (VIP) LAY (ORDINARY PEOPLE)

HEDGES (per 1000 words) 1,27 1,13 1,45 0,87 1,01 1,14 2,27 0,67

Table 3. Frequency of hedges per 1000 words







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PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES EXPERTS LAY (VIP AND ORDINARY PEOPLE)

HEDGES (per 1000 words) 1,17 1,57

Table 4. Frequency of hedges with reference to a distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’

As can be seen in Tables 3 and 4, hedges are more frequently employed by lay speakers rather than experts, but different choices are made by the two different groups. Experts tend to use probably as hedging phrase, conversely, laymen prefer perhaps. It is necessary to emphasize that hedges have a crucial importance in a writer-oriented interaction, as through them, writers or speakers “[…] must calculate what weight to give to an assertion, attesting to the degree of precision or reliability that they want it to carry and perhaps claiming protection in the event of its eventual overthrow” (Hyland 2005: 179; Hyland 1998). In the “narrative of science”, the frequent use of hedges signals carefulness by writers/ speakers dealing with interpretations of data. Conversely, [t]he process of transforming research into popular accounts, involves removing doubts and upgrading the significance of claims to emphasize their uniqueness, rarity or originality (Hyland 2010: 124).

Thus, the immediate co-text of both of the hedges is investigated: EXPERTS-concordance lines (first word cluster: probably the, ‘s probably) 1. pretty new, and I think it’s probably going to get a cot 2. with images of it, it’s probably the most common words 3. popular agreement, and it’s probably image not very 4. did was codify it, and it’s probably the world’s simplest

Table 5. Concordance line of ‘probably’





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LAYMEN-concordance lines (first word cluster: perhaps the) 1.in the whole world. And perhaps the best place to start i 2.hat sync is maybe one of, if not one of the most, perhaps the 3.In the TED spiriti, actually-of an architect-perhaps the 4.So back in 1982, I said ‘Well, perhaps the elephant had a Table 6. Concordance line of ‘perhaps’

As shown in the tables above, no substantial differentiation is observable in the immediate co-texts of probably and perhaps, as both of them seem to be employed to add some personal considerations / doubts to something told before. Thus, it is possibile to assert that laymen seem to emphasize intepretation of data rather than expressing certainty concerning knowledge. Conversely, some different results are found in the investigation of boosters:

AC PR DR POL ART LIT LAY (VIP) LAYMEN (ORDINARY PEOPLE)

Of Certainly Definitely Clearly Obviously course 538 111 25 74 86 434 93 32 63 92 35 10 0 6 6 38 11 2 2 6 112 21 12 13 52 208 44 11 36 52 2 2 0 0 0 0

3

1

1

1

Surely 17 13 5 1 8 12 0 0

Table 7. Frequency of selected boosters in the whole corpus

In table 7 it is possible to observe a very high frequency of of course as adverbial conveying certainty about knowledge. It is most commonly employed by all the professional categories, but not by laymen (ordinary people), who seem to prefer certainly. A further investigation of boosters with reference to their different distribution can help us understand stance choices made by experts vs. laymen:



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PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES AC (ACADEMICS) PR (PROFESSIONALS) DR (DOCTORS) POL (POLITICIANS) ART (ARTISTS) LIT (LITERARY MEN) LAY (VIP) LAY (ORDINARY PEOPLE)

BOOSTERS (per 1000 words) 0,90 0,83 0,83 0,50 0,93 0,96 0,33 0,67

Table 8. Frequency of Boosters per 1000 words PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES EXPERTS LAY (VIP AND ORDINARY PEOPLE)

BOOSTERS (per 1000 words) 0,87 0,48

Table 9. Frequency of boosters with reference to a distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’

“Literary men” is the category of experts who seem to employ the highest number of boosters in comparison with all the other professional categories (Table 8). Conversely, from a comparison between experts and laymen, it is possible to infer a higher frequency of boosters by experts rather than lay (Table 9). This is probably due to emphasis by the speaker on the uniqueness and originality of the claims. If their immediate co-text is investigated, it is possible to infer that they are used to add emphasis to what has been asserted in the immediately prior discourse: EXPERTS-concordance lines (First word–cluster: and of course) 1. many generations ago. And, of course, we all share the same adaptive 2. Climb again over the course of 24 hours. And, of course 3. water in a mountain stream. And of course, this is what Tibetan monks 4. Overconsumption of animals and, of course, junk food, is the problem

Table10. Concordance line of ‘of course’





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LAYMEN-concordance lines (First word - cluster: are certainly) 1.dark skinned. His brothers certainly were able to run long 2.Well, who are we? We’re certainly a polluting, wasteful 3.So appropriately put it, that we are certainly the only anima 4.It just throws you off your feet. It certainly affects the way Table 11. Concordance line of ‘certainly’

In table 10, of course is mainly preceded by and as it is employed to add comments and instances of what has been said before. A similar value is expressed by certainly (Table 11) whose first-word phrase is are certainly, where are is mainly referred to the pronoun we with a possible inclusive value. Moreover, in both the concordance lines above, it is possible to notice the presence of some anaphoric elements (e.g. this, his, it) which seem to reinforce this function.

4.2 Engagement through reader pronouns and directives Engagement is inextricably connected with the concept of proximity. According to Hyland (2005: 125), through engagement, writers acknowledge and connect to others recognising the presence of their readers, pulling them along with their arguments, focusing their attention, acknowledging their uncertainties, including them as discourse participants, and guiding them to interpretations.

In the current study, proximity is investigated through the two categories of reader pronouns and directives. As far as the former category is concerned, the pronouns you and your have been taken into consideration. Thanks to personal pronouns, “Readers are most explicitly brought into the text as discourse participants […]” (Hyland 2001: 557). Thus, relative frequency of the pronouns has been provided:







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PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES AC (ACADEMICS) PR (PROFESSIONALS) DR (DOCTORS) POL (POLITICIANS) ART (ARTISTS) LIT (LITERARY MEN) LAY (VIP) LAY (ORDINARY PEOPLE)

READER PRONOUNS - YOU AND YOUR (per 1000 words) 17,36 17,12 17,56 13,59 16,38 16,13 18,39 12,68

Table 12. Frequency of reader pronouns per 1000 words PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES EXPERTS LAY (VIP AND ORDINARY PEOPLE)

READER PRONOUNS (per 1000 words) 16,8 15,9

Table 13. Frequency of reader pronouns with reference to a distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’

As can be observed in Tables 12 and 13, reader pronouns are more frequently used by experts than laymen. In particular, they seem to be employed to introduce instances of what has been stated before, or to involve the audience in experimentation or confirmation of what the speaker is talking about: (1) I mean, these are extraordinary numbers. You can see here, again, taken from Al Gore's book. But what's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth. (SC08LAY_1.txt) (2) We have blue whales in the waters around here, off Maldives, around the waters of India. You can see them off Kerala. And, in fact, we're very lucky in this region. (SC09EX_pr5.txt) (3) So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see. (SC11LAY_vip.txt) (4) There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right? (SC07EX_ac5.txt)



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In the examples above, the audience is invited by the speakers to participate actively in the interaction, to feel that they are being addressed personally and are directly involved. For instance, in (1) the audience is invited to “see” examples of some “extraordinay numbers” the speaker is talking about. In (3), instead, the audience is involved in a sort of experimentation where the speaker foresees its possible reaction to his “gesture”. Finally, in (4), the speaker tries to receive confirmation by the audience of what he has asserted before. This is proved by repetition of “right?”. This too is an involvement strategy often used in conversation to elicit the agreement and complicity of the listener (Biber 2002). In the study, “Directives” is the last engagement category taken into account. In particular, the obligation modals you must, you should, you need, you ought to included in this category have been investigated in the corpus. “Directives” are mainly employed to involve the audience in three kinds of acts: Textual acts, Physical acts, Cognitive acts. (Hyland 2002). Textual acts are used to guide the readers through the discussion, whereas, physical acts instruct readers how to carry out research processes. Finally, cognitive acts get the readers to understand a point in a certain way and are “[…] potentially the most threatening type of directive” (Hyland 2005: 185). In the corpus under investigation, the most frequent obligation modal is have to, as can be observed in the following table: You must

You should

You need to

You have to

AC(ACADEMICS) PR(PROFESSIONALS)

21 23

80 59

76 92

207 216

You ought to 4 3

DR (DOCTORS) POL (POLITICIANS) ART (ARTISTS LIT (LITERARY MEN) LAYMEN (VIP) LAYMEN (ORDINARY PEOPLE)

2 2 7 15

7 4 10 19

4 9 7 30

13 20 51 66

0 1 2 4

2 1

0 0

1 2

3 2

0 0

Table 14. Frequency of selected obligation modals in the whole corpus

As far as a distribution of Directives according to the different professional categories is concerned, it is possible to assert that a higher frequency was employed by laymen rather than expert people, although



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the amount of Directives in the whole corpus employed by the laymen is very low: PROFESSIONAL CATEGORIES EXPERTS LAY (VIP AND ORDINARY PEOPLE)

DIRECTIVES (obligation modals per 1000 words) 0,40 0,52

Table 15. Frequency of obligation modals with reference to a distinction between Experts and lay

In order to better understand the value conveyed by obligation modals employed by both experts and lay speakers, their immediate co-text has been explored: EXPERTS-concordance lines (first word cluster: we have to) 1. initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable 2. that we’re going to have to work on a lot of fronts 3. what’s going to happen and we have to live with 4. is from different points we all have to act on our

Table 16. Concordance line of ‘we have to’ LAYMEN-concordance lines (first word cluster: ‘t have to) 1.so glad that she didn’t have to say to her mother 2.Well, you don’t have to be a whole creature 3.Always a good thing. You don’t have to be alive 4. And when we die, we don’t have to be place Table 17. Concordance line of ‘’t have to’

As can be observed in Table 16, “have to” co-occurs with we, and the speaker seems to be interested in sharing his /her own experience with the audience. Thus, the latter is “cognitively” guided by the speaker to see the thing in a certain way, as he/she is directly involved in the experience the speaker is talking about. Thus, expert speakers, who are probably used to addressing an expert audience, probably tend to use we taking active participation and understanding by the audience for granted.



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Conversely, a different co-text seems to emerge from the observation of Table 17. As a matter of fact, laymen tend to use the negative form of “have to” in the present and past tense, rather than the positive one, thus conveying lack of necessity that something happens. The high frequency of negative forms in the talks delivered by laymen is consistent with an informal register commonly found in conversation. According to Biber (2002: 431), “Conversation has twice as many negatives as the written registers”.

5. Concluding remarks Starting from the initial assumption that “identity” can be built up by the speakers through stance and engagement while delivering their talks, it is possible to assert that speakers tend to appear as “conversationalists”, as they use discourse patterns typical of conversation. In particular, in the “stance” category, the adverbs probably and perhaps and certainly are the most frequent ones found in the talks, rather than other stance adverbials. Stance adverbs are typical of conversation, as speakers in conversation are particularly interested in conveying their feelings, attitudes, evaluations, and assessments of likelihood. They can be found in instances from conversation such as “She’s cute, pretty really” and “Well, I like the Caesar salad actually”, as confirmed by previous studies (Biber 2002: 433434). This result is also consistent with previous findings concerning stance across registers. As Biber (1999: 981) has stated: “In conversation, over 65% of all stance adverbials are single adverbs”. The only exception is represented by the prepositional phrase of course, which, like certainly, is mainly employed to add comments and instances of what has been said before. Similar findings can be observed in the instances belonging to engagement. Two of the most prominent categories are reader pronouns and directives. In particular, you and your are very frequently employed to engage the audience along with have to as the most frequent obligation modals. Both the pronouns and directives seem to be employed as involvement strategies to bring the audience into their talks and to make them feel like a fundamental interactional component. As far as the second aim of the study is concerned, that is, understanding to what extent stance and engagement are differentiated by different speakers, the high frequency of hedges by laymen rather than experts with a focus on the uncertain value of knowledge, may be due to uncertainty by the speakers, whereas, the higher frequency of boosters among expert people could convey their need to emphasize the uniqueness



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of their claims, thus expressing certainty and self-confidence in what they are asserting. Finally, employment of you and your with a very high frequency by experts rather than laymen may be considered as a flattering strategy aimed at convincing the audience about their claims. Directives, mostly employed by laymen, on the other hand, seem to be aimed at conveying lack of necessity referred to concepts they are discussing rather than at reinforcing interaction with the audience. In short, diversity of speakers could be here represented by a stronger focus on certainty concerning knowledge and emphasis on the interactional dimension by expert speakers but less importance given to interaction and uncertainty concerning knowledge by laymen.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas University Press, 1981. Bhatia, Vijay K. Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre–Based View. London: Continuum, 2004. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman, 1999. Biber, Douglas, Conrad Susan and Leech Geoffrey. Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. England: Pearson Education Limited, 2002. Caliendo, Giuditta. “The popularisation of science in web-based genre”. In The Language of Popularization: Theoretical and Descriptive Models / Die Sprache der Popularisierung: Theoretische und deskriptive Modelle, edited by Giuditta Caliendo and Giancarmine Bongo. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Ciapuscio, Guiomar E. “Formulation and reformulation procedures in verbal interactions between experts and (semi-)laypersons.” Discourse Studies 5(2) (2003): 207-233. Coulthard, Malcom and Montgomery Martin. Studies in Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979.



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Hamilton, Heidi H. “Intratextuality, Intertextuality and the construction of Identity as Patient in Alzheimer’s disease”. Text 16(1) (1996): 61-91. Hilgartner, Stephen. “The dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519539. Hyland, Ken. Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. —. Disciplinary Discourse. Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Longman, 2000. —. “Bringing in the Reader. Addressee Features in Academic Articles”. Written Communication, 18(4) (2001): 549-574. —. “Directives: Power and Engagement in Academic Writing.” Applied Linguistics, 23(2) (2002a): 215-39. —. “What do they mean? Questions in Academic Writing.” Text 22(4) (2002b): 529-57. —. “Stance and Engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse.” Discourse Studies 7(2) (2005): 173-192. —. “Constructing proximity: Relating to readers in popular and professional science.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (2010): 116-127. Linell, Per. “Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse.” Text 18(2) (1998): 143157. Martin, James R., Christie, Frances and Rothery, Joan. “Social processes in education: A reply to Sawyer and Watson (and others)”. In The place of genre in learning, edited by Ian Reid, 55-82. Geelong, Centre for Studies in Literacy Education, Deakin: University (Typereader Publication1), 1987. Pagano, Adriana S. and de Oliveira Janaina M.. “The research article and the science popularization article: a probabilistic functional grammar perspective on direct discourse representation.” Discourse Studies 8(5) (2006): 627-646. Polese Vanda and D’Avanzo Stefania.“Popularization and dissemination of Legal knowledge in EU Summaries of Directives on Immigration and Asylum.” In The Language of Popularization: Theoretical and Descriptive Models. Edited by Giuditta Caliendo and Giancarmine Bongo, 191-222. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Rendle Short, J. The Academic Presentation. Situated Talk in Action. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006. Sarangi, Srikant. “Rethinking recontextualization in professional discourse studies. An epilogue.” Text (2) (1998): 301-318.



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Whitley, Richard. “Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Acquirers: Popularisation as a Relation between Scientific Fields and Their Publics”. In Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, edited by Shinn, Terry and Whitley Richard, 3-28. Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1985.



METADISCOURSE DIVERSIFICATION IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN SCIENTIFIC MAGAZINES SILVIA MASI

1. Introduction This contribution proposes a comparative exploration of the use of some metadiscourse resources in a small corpus of texts from popular scientific magazines in English and Italian, namely Scientific American (henceforth SA) and Le Scienze (henceforth LS). Scientific popularization is a meeting point of different discourse communities with their own needs, intentions and modes of communication (see Calsamiglia 2003; Myers 2003; Gotti 2005, 2013). Metadiscourse (see, among others, Crismore and Farnsworth 1990; Crismore, Markkanen, Steffensen 1993; Hyland 1998, 2005) can be modulated and can modulate communication in different ways, as it covers a variety of linguistic elements which are aimed at organizing the text for its readers – the interactive dimension – and at engaging them in exposition and argumentation – the interactional dimension (see Hyland 2005). Recent research (e.g. Neff and Dafouz 2008; Musacchio and Ahmad 2009; Musacchio and Palumbo 2010; Suau 2010; Masi 2013) has indeed pursued comparisons of metadiscourse devices associated with scientific discourse domains and genres of popularisation in different languages to appraise the extent of cross-linguistic correspondence and avoid, for example, inappropriate translations. Special attention is here devoted to both interactive and interactional devices of metadiscourse, i.e. the representation of scientific and nonscientific ‘actors’ (Calsamiglia 2003; Calsamiglia and López Ferrero 2003) through a range of acts of reporting as evidentials, i.e. the most explicit form of inclusion of other-discourse/voice in one’s discourse, as well as through a selection of self-mention and engagement markers lending themselves to quantitative along with qualitative evaluation. Altogether, the variety of items under analysis can be viewed as representing the three axes (third person reference vs. I/we vs. you) for the

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construction and evaluation of the roles of different identities (including text producer and implied target receiver) in scientific popularisation. Language diversification, then, is here tackled both from the intralinguistic standpoint of the different construction of identities within a form of media discourse, and from a cross-linguistic viewpoint, i.e. the extent to which such constructions differ in the two language samples in question in the attempt to ultimately detect possible preferential metadiscourse strategies that are specific to each language represented in the corpus. The macro-analytical background presupposed by the works here referred to (in particular Calsamiglia and López Ferrero 2003) is that of Critical Discourse Analysis, although the implications of the present research are also relevant for the perspective of Language Variation (and, to some extent, for Translation too). The article is organised as follows: the next section focuses on scientific popularisation, the specific research hypotheses and the aims underlying the research; section three introduces the main criteria and methodology for data collection; section four, five and six present the main results of the exploration, their discussion and some concluding remarks, respectively.

2. Investigating scientific popularisation: research hypotheses and questions Scientific popularisation is far from being a unitary phenomenon confined to a binary type of expert – non-expert communication with purely informative goals, and can in fact be accounted for in terms of a recontextualisation process (Calsamiglia and Van Dijk 2004; Gotti 2013: 16-21), requiring an adaptation, through creative re-elaboration, of scientific knowledge to new communicative events and media, with their own constraints and socio-argumentative functions. Scientific popularisation is also regarded as a cyclic process in which discourses on science interact in a dynamic way and crucially influence one another, with mass media as active participants in the production and evaluation of information about science (ibid.). Myers (2003), in particular, conceives popularisation as an important branch of journalism which belongs to a complex system, a continuum of highly hybrid forms where the traditional boundaries between science and society have disappeared. Indeed popularisation is a matter of degree (Hilgartner 1990: 528), a scale roughly ranging from the pole of fully specialised texts to the opposite pole of ‘pure’ popularisation (also see Vicentini 2013 in this connection), thus



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presupposing (at least partially) different readership and strategies. Myers (2003: 270-271) also warns, The continuum is not just a matter of a range of genres: within each genre there may be a range of registers or repertoires, different ways of speaking for different rhetorical purposes […] Textual analysts, like practicing scientific writers, need to be prepared for hybridity.

This premise leads to a first hypothesis at the basis of the research, namely that some degree of hybridity or diversification may obtain in my data on an intra-linguistic level of analysis, as far as the items focused on are concerned. The more specific research questions are: - How much space is devoted to the implied reader and to the text producer in each text and language sample? - How much to third-person voices? - How much to scientific vs. non-scientific voices? - Which modes of representation of sources are employed? - Which verbs of communication are used? Preceding research has also addressed issues concerning various types of diversification on a cross-linguistic English-Italian level (see, inter alia, Giannossa 2013; Masi 2013; Musacchio and Ahmad 2009; also Musacchio and Palumbo 2010 for translational considerations), and a second hypothesis especially concerns this level of analysis. Moreover, a third hypothesis is advanced here about the possibility of employing metadiscourse resources as ‘categorizing devices’ for discriminating better among modes of communication within the hybrid continuum of popularisation in each language.

3. The corpus Hybridity especially emerges in the process of text selection, as the level of specialisation of magazines may differ significantly (see Vicentini 2013), while different sections within them include substantially distinct kinds of articles. The main criteria for the selection of comparable texts in the corpus of the present study were - same kind of articles within same section of magazines, i.e. feature articles by academics and science writers; - similar and interrelated issues revolving around the environment, health, medicine, biotechnology, etc., which catalyse public interest and debate; - same time period, namely a selection from 2010–2013; - almost same quantity of data, i.e. around 48,000 words in each language sample of the corpus (15 articles in English and 16 in Italian);



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- the Italian articles were not translations from English. Given the multifaceted object of enquiry, the analysis and categorisation of data were carried out manually, which inevitably involves some degree of approximation.

4. Data categorisation and findings Evidentials are text-organising items which distinguish who is responsible for a position (Hyland 2005). However, the choices of sources and of verbs of communication in the reporting frames make them powerful signals of interactional meanings too, as they reveal the argumentative orientation of the text by shaping the reliability of the reported information. The selected types of evidentials included1 - instances of direct forms of reporting with inverted commas. Instances with no reporting frame and in an adjacent position to a preceding report with source were considered as separate occurrences (see 1 below, where a slash is used to underline this distinction): 1. “These were business decisions,” Carlson says. / “If we could provide a cheaper solution, it would help us and Calpine” (SA, July 2010: 46). - E.g. 2 illustrates a case of partial report, 2. […] NOAA called for a national dialogue on how to build a “weather-ready nation” (SA, May 2012: 57). - indirect reports followed by complementisers (typically a that clause) introducing information as a proposition within the same sentence boundaries. Instances such as the following were considered as involving indirectness too, as inverted commas are missing: 3. But in certain cases involving KPC, there is no question as to the cause, says John Quale […] (SA, April 2011: 32). As for source categorisation, in this first stage of the exploration I distinguished between scientific vs. non-scientific actors in a fairly stringent and selective manner, with scientific ones including only highly specialised agents and organisms clearly linked to research activities (National Institution of Mental Health, World Health Association, the



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hospital discovered…, il Gruppo di G. Martino a Milano, etc.), whereas non-scientific actors also covered occurrences of specialised institutions whose involvement in research acts was more undetermined or indirect (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies, UE, Londra, governo giapponese, agenzia che gestisce impianto nucleare, etc.), along with less specialised to non-specialised actors (e.g. Siemens, residents, la proprietà della tonnara, etc.). Following a simplified version of Calsamiglia and López Ferrero (2003) (and Van Leeuwen 1996 therein), I then classified the sources in my data into the following four modes of representation: - Genericisation, whereby sources are represented as generic identities, 4. Scientists have long known that […] (SA, July 2010, p. 49). 5. […] come qualcuno erroneamente sostiene […] (LS, dicembre 2012, p. 80). - Collectivisation, i.e. sources are referred to in a more definite way, as collective categories or communities, 6. Scientists who recently modeled a similarly relentless storm that lasted only 23 days concluded that […] (SA, January 2013: 60). 7. In November 2010 our team reported in Nature that […] (SA, March 2012: 31)2. - Individualisation, through which sources are foregrounded to the maximum degree of specificity, as individuals often accompanied by information about institutional affiliation, 8. NOAA research meteorologist Pam Heinselman believes […] (SA, May 2012: 56). 9. Juan Carlos Belmonte, del Salk Institute for Biological Studies a Wan Diego, ha dimostrato che […] (LS, aprile 2013: 34). - Objectivisation, whereby sources become impersonalised and tend to be represented by means of a metonymical reference to research objects such as research products or acts, in e.g. 10 and 11, or their contents, in 12 and 133, 10. […] according to recent investigations (SA, January 2013: 61). 11. Infatti una serie di studi, alcuni pubblicati nel febbraio 2011, indicano che […] (LS, ottobre 2011, p. 49).



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12. […] all the historical evidence suggests that […] (SA, January 2013: 64). 13. Questi dati sono impressionanti e testimoniano che […] (LS, gennaio 2011: 72). Verbs of communication (or reporting signals, see Thompson 1994) were categorised on the basis of an integrated version of various classifications available in the literature (Thompson 1994; Caldas-Coulthard 1994; Hyland 2000, 2005; Masi 2007, 2013) 4 and placed along a boosting (emphasising certainty)/hedging (emphasising uncertainty) cline (see Masi 2013). In more detail, one extreme (i.e. boosting) is represented by FACTIVE verbs, which presuppose the truth of the proposition they introduce. In the present account, research act verbs such as demonstrate, show, illustrate, discover, find, reveal, etc. have been regarded as scoring high in terms of “factive” value/having a boosting quality, because they tend to present information as a fact (see also Hyland 2005). The opposite extreme (i.e. hedging) is that of COUNTER-FACTIVE or TENTATIVE verbs, e.g. believe, suggest, also covering research act verbs like hypothesise, which tend to present information as subjective and controversial, hence open to doubt. Other categories are more NEUTRAL (say, write, for, according to, etc.), and could be aligned with subcategories such as popularisation act verbs (describe, explain, etc.)5, verbs which indicate how the proposition ‘fits in’ with the text (add, conclude, etc.), as well as interaction-oriented verbs (advise, require, charge, etc.), whose members sometimes merge into one of the other major categories (such as charge, which contributes tentativeness through the idea of background controversy). Tables 1 and 2 below report some quantitative data about evidentials and verbs of communication from the analysis:







Silvia Masi

Total occurrences of evidentials: % of non-scientific sources % of scientific sources (self-mention in the past) Reporting styles (%): Direct Indirect Modes of representation of sources (%): Generic (G) Collective (C) Individual (I) Objective (O) Self-mention (S-m) Source type distribution across scientific voices Source type distribution across non-scientific voices

English section of the corpus 327

Italian section of the corpus 123

14%

27%

86% (12%)

73% (2%)

22% 78%

27% 73%

12.5% 17% 20% 43% 7% I 43%, O 23%, G 14%, C 12%, S-m 8% C 50%, I 41%, G 4%, O 4%

17% 11% 30% 40% 2% I 53%, O 31%, G 8%, C 6%, S-m 2% G 42%, C 27%, O 27%, I 3%

Table 1. Evidentials – some quantitative data





303



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Verbs of communication (Totals, %): Factive (research act) (F) Tentative (T) Neutral (N) Other categories: Interaction-oriented Popularising Fit-in Verb type distribution across scientific voices (figures below 20% have not been reported) Verb type distribution across non-scientific voices (figures below 20% have not been reported) Verb type distribution within each source category (figures below 20% have not been reported) G C I O S-m

33%

22%

29% 28%

20% 31%

6% 3% 2% F 37%, T 31%, N 26%

7% 14% 2% N 30%, F 29%

N 45%, T 21%

N 30%, T 30%

T49%, F46% N 31%, F 25% N 47%, T 22%, F 21% T 42%, F 41%

T 48%, N 33% N 49%, Inter. 29% F 33%, N 22% N 35%, Pop 24%, F 22%

F 59%, T 21%

Table 2. Verbs of communication – some quantitative data

Self-mention markers are interactional devices that indicate the degree of explicit author presence in the text, chiefly by means of first person pronouns (cf. exclusive uses of first person plurals), adjectives and relevant verb forms in Italian, some examples of which are proposed below: 14. A flu vaccine our research group developed […] (SA, July 2010: 33). 15. Yet every test I conducted on him or his stored samples […] (SA, July 2012, p. 32).



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16. Per finire, voglio fare un paragone […] (LS, giugno 2013, p. 61). Also notice the more impersonal and indirect forms in the Italian examples that follow: 17.Questo articolo vuole quindi fornire […] (LS, dicembre 2012, p. 76). 18. Un atto eticamente legittimo per coloro, come chi scrive […] (LS, ottobre 2011, p. 48). Finally, engagement markers are interactional resources par excellence, as they explicitly address readers through the use of elements such as - direct questions (sometimes aimed at creating a dialogic style, as in 19, other times having the role of rhetorical questions, see 20): 19. How will greenhouse gases change the far future? (SA, September 2012, p. 64). 20. Se si aggiungono clima torrido, promiscuità alloggiativa e animali sacrificali, che cosa potrebbe chiedere di meglio un’infezione per prosperare? (LS, agosto 2012, p. 80). - imperative/exhortative forms (cf. the more impersonal/indirect forms in the Italian examples 22 and 23), 21. Still, suppose that at some point scientists find that… (SA, August 2012, p. 61). 22. Si noti come […] (LS, giugno 2013, p. 46). 23. Non si dimentichi che […] (LS, maggio 2013, p. 56). - second person pronouns and adjectives, 24. You might assume, then, that scientists looking for new antidepressants would investigate ways to inactivate acetylcholine (SA, March 2012, p. 69). - inclusive first person plural pronouns and adjectives (and verb forms in Italian), often referring generically to ‘we’ as human beings sharing properties and experiences,



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25. These differences, in turn, lead to variances in the ways we think, learn and behave and in our propensity for mental illness (SA, March 2012, p. 28). 26. Acqua di casa nostra (LS, dicembre 2010, p. 76). The distinction between inclusive and exclusive uses was not always simple to make. In ex. 27, for instance, the author is talking about research acts but is also ‘retracing’ the research steps as a way of involving the receiver into the research process: 27. Se consideriamo che le variabili atmosferiche da calcolare per […], arriviamo a valutare che […]. Se aggiungiamo che […], scopriamo che […] (LS, giugno 2013, p. 46). Table 3 below reports some quantitative data about self-mention and engagement markers from the analysis:

Total occurrences of selfmention markers: Exclusive we/us/our I/me/my/mine Total occurrences of engagement markers Questions Imperative/exhortative forms You/your Inclusive we/us/our

English section of the corpus 271

Italian section of the corpus 70

234 37 119

60 13 100

28 18

40 3

23 50

Ø 57

Table 3. Self-mention and engagement markers – some quantitative data

5. Discussion Among the most noticeable findings, the cross-linguistic level of the analysis has highlighted a substantially stronger emphasis on evidentials in the English corpus (which confirms a trend already detected in Masi 2013, albeit in web-mediated texts). A higher prominence of self-mention markers has emerged too, despite the more varied authorship of the English section, including both academics and science writers (vs. the Italian one, mainly written by academics). Indeed, the English ‘surplus’ of



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evidentials is especially represented by reports in the form of self-mention in the past. As for engagement markers, the overall figures do not display outstanding asymmetry, but while all the subcategories are represented in the English data, items of only some of them were found in the Italian section, thus evidencing a trend towards a less direct style, with the exception of a higher incidence of questions (obviously in need of further exploration)6. Intra-linguistically, each language sample privileges indirect reporting styles (see also Masi 2013 for a similar result) and a more significant role is assigned to scientific voices, despite the quite selective categorisation mentioned above (see § 4). Furthermore, scientific voices are given perceptual prominence through Individualisation and credibility through Objectivisation, i.e. the two most frequent modes of source representation in both sections of the corpus. Non-scientific voices, instead, tend to be represented as Collective categories and Individuals in the English data, and as more ‘backgrounded’ Generic categories (also cf. Collectives and Objects, but very few Individuals) in the Italian ones. In both sections of the corpus, factive verbs tend to be used to introduce the discourse of scientific actors, while the same verb category scores low in percentages in connection with non-scientific voices. On a more specific level, the English section is characterised by a balanced distribution of source categories and verb groups, with tentative verbs being used, overall, more prominently than in the Italian section (also see Masi 2013 for a closely-related finding). In the Italian sample, in contrast, both of them are distributed more unevenly, and tentative verbs are especially used in connection with generic non-scientific voices. These findings may help ‘locate’ the text samples close to the scientific pole of the popularisation scale: what is especially foregrounded is the discourse of scientists and scientific research through determined and reliable patterns of source reference construction, rather than the discourses of other social instances. Although more research is needed for corroboration, this seems to be designed for a target audience which is primarily interested in scientific data rather than in political/administrative issues (and potentially including the scientific community itself).

6. Some concluding remarks The analysis has actually underscored metadiscourse diversification both intra- and cross-linguistically, thus bearing out both hypotheses one and two (see § 2). Some metadiscursive resources (e.g. quantity of selfmention markers, quantity and quality of sources and verb choice



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distribution) have proven to be useful indices of the dominant role played by scientific actors vis-à-vis other social identities, thus providing insights for a clearer positioning of the text sample under analysis within the manifold modes of expression of scientific popularisation (see hypothesis three, § 2). The present findings are obviously provisional and much work lies ahead, especially requiring corpus expansion (covering, e.g., other genres from the same and other magazines and text varieties), along with categories’ expansion and refinements. This would help to come to terms with the challenging aspect of hybridity, so pervasive in scientific popularisation. Further relevant metadiscursive resources need to be taken into account too, such as, for example, more varieties of evidentials, impersonal and passive structures, which are found in the Italian data especially. This line of research may be useful for the development of a general alertness to the underlying argumentative orientations and correlated construction of the reliability of information which are often at play in the media coverage of scientific news, as well as for the training of science writers (in a broad sense) and translators. As confirmed by the analysis, the added value of attempting to explore multiple resources and their manifold interrelations at the same time rests on the awareness that the final textual configuration, in each case, depends on a dynamic interplay of different items. Hence it is important to identify typical patterns of such an interplay in order to avoid disruptive local effects, for example in translation, where they may alter the global configuration. This was evident, for example, in the balanced distribution of verb choices across source types in the English data, in particular across the scientific/nonscientific divide, in contrast to the different distribution in the Italian data, which would not have emerged from the simple totals for verbs of communication. A further relevant hypothesis to be tested at a future stage of the research concerns the verification of the existence of possible forms of language variation through contact with, and possible consequent contamination from, English, as the Lingua Franca of international scientific communication, in Italian, to be further investigated by adding a translational and a diachronic perspective to the current analysis (along the lines suggested by, e.g., Kranich, House, Becher 2007).



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References Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen R. “On reporting reporting: the representation of speech in factual and factional narratives.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, edited by Malcolm Coulthard, 295-308. London: Routledge, 1994. Calsamiglia, Helena. “Popularization Discourse.” Discourse Studies 5(2), 2003: 139-46. Calsamiglia, Helena and Teun A. van Dijk. “Popularization discourse and knowledge about the genome.” Discourse Society 15 (2004): 369-89. Calsamiglia, Helena and Carmen López Ferrero. “Role and position of scientific voices: reported speech in the media.” Discourse Studies 5(2) (2003):147-73. Crismore, Avon, and Rodney Farnsworth. “Metadiscourse in popular and professional science discourse.” In The Writing Scholar: Studies in Academic Discourse, edited by Walter Nash, 118-36. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990. Crismore, Avon, Raija Markkanen, Margaret Steffensen. “Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students.” Written Communication 10(1) (1993): 3971. Giannossa, Leonardo. “A Corpus-Based Investigation of Lexical Cohesion in English and Italian Non-Translated Texts and in Italian Translated Texts”, PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2013. Gotti, Maurizio. Investigating Specialized Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. —. “The analysis of popularization discourse: conceptual changes and methodological evolution.” In The Popularization of Specialized Discourse and Knowledge Across Communities and Cultures, edited by Susan Kermas, and Thomas W. Christiansen, 9-32. Bari: Edipuglia, 2013. Hilgartner, Stephen. “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519– 29. Hyland, Ken. Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. —. “Academic attribution: interaction through citation.” In Disciplinary Discourses. Social Interaction in Academic Writing, 20-40. London: Longman, 2000. —. Metadiscourse. Exploring Interaction in Writing. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.



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Kranich, Svenja, Juliane House, Viktor Becher. “Changing conventions in English-German translations of popular scientific texts.” In Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies, edited by Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel, 315-34. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. Leeuwen-van, Theo. “The representation of social actors.” In Carmen R. Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, Texts and Practice. Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, 32-70. London: Routledge, 1996. Masi, Silvia. “The Dynamics of Intersubjectivity as a Stance-shaping Device: English vs. Italian verbs of report in Argumentative Texts.” Textus XX/1 (2007): 181-203. —. “Metadiscourse in English and Italian: an analysis of popular scientific discourse online.” In The Popularization of Specialized Discourse and Knowledge Across Communities and Cultures, edited by Susan Kermas and Thomas W. Christiansen, 315-29. Bari: Edipuglia, 2013. Musacchio, Maria T. and Khurshid Ahmad. “Variation and variability of economics metaphors in an English-Italian corpus of reports, newspaper and magazine articles.” In Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language, edited by Alan Wallington, John Barnden, Mark Lee, Rosamund Moon, Gill Philip, and Jeanette Littlemore, 115–22. Birmingham: Cognitive Science Research Papers, 2009. Musacchio, Maria T. and Giuseppe Palumbo. “Following Norms, Taking Risks: A Study of the Use of Connectives in a Corpus of Translated Economics Articles in Italian.” In Reconceptualizing LSP. Online Proceedings of XVII European LSP Symposium 2009, edited by Carmen Heine, and Jan Engberg. Aarhus: Aarhus School of Business, 2010. Accessed 2013.09.03. http://bcom.au.dk/research/publications/conferencepublications/extend edcontributions/. Myers, Greg. “Discourse studies of scientific popularization: questioning the boundaries.” Discourse Studies 5(2) (2003): 265-79. Neff-van Aertselaer, Joanne, and Emma Dafouz-Milne. “Argumentation patterns in different languages: An analysis of metadiscourse markers in English and Spanish texts.” In Developing Contrastive Pragmatics: Interlanguage and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Joanne Neff-van Aertselaer, and Martin Pütz, 87-102. Berlin and New York: Mouton, 2008. Suau-Jiménez, Francisca. “Metadiscursive elements in the translation of scientific texts.” In Linguistic and Translation Studies in Scientific



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Communication, edited by Maria-Lluisa Gea-Valor, Isabel GarcíaIzquierdo, and Maria-José Esteve, 243-76. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Thompson, Geoff. Reporting: Collins Cobuild English Guides 5. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Vicentini, Alessandra. “The Fukushima nuclear crisis e-coverage: a linguistic analysis of Sciencemag.org and ScientificAmerican.com”. In The Popularization of Specialized Discourse and Knowledge Across Communities and Cultures, edited by Susan Kermas, and Thomas W. Christiansen, 297-314. Bari: Edipuglia, 2013.

Notes 1

This first stage of the exploration has covered only those cases that actually ‘give voice’ to the content of others’ discourse, excluding, for example, indirect forms that involve more variation and a higher degree of summarising of the original discourse. 2 This is an instance of collective self-mention in the past accompanied by a reference to a publication, cf. the pattern Collective as Self-mention + Objectivisation (see further on). Different patterns of modes of presentation in the classification of sources is in fact another interesting aspect worth exploring. 3 The distinction between research products and research products’ contents (as Objectivised sources) is a subtle one which surely deserves more investigation. The latter type or source, in particular, seems to downplay the objective quality of the information, as it may often become the object of evaluation of the researcher (cf. the match of the underlined source and the verb suggest in 12, and of the underlined source and the adjective impressionanti [striking] in 13). 4 Also see Battaner et al. cited in Calsamiglia and López Ferrero (2003). 5 The verb indicate is included in the category of hedges in Hyland (2005), while it was considered as a synonym of show (i.e. a booster) in Masi (2013). In the present account, it has been inserted into the category of more neutral popularising act verbs, as its indexical function certainly makes it stronger than other hedges, but weaker than the evidential strength of show or demonstrate. 6 The finding would comply with one of the typical features of Anglo-American academic English (Hyland 2005, 116ff.): compared with other writing cultures, it tends to use fewer rhetorical questions. As far as the occurrences of inclusive engagement markers are concerned, they are almost equal in the two sections of the corpus, whereas the category was underrepresented in the English sample in Masi (2013), an aspect which surely deserves further research as well.



DIVERSIFYING LANGUAGE ACCORDING TO THE CONTEXT: POPULARIZING LEGAL LANGUAGE IN TV SERIES ADRIANO LAUDISIO

Introduction: methodology, corpora and research questions This paper is based on a comparison of two corpora with the aim of investigating the genre of legal drama. The first corpus includes the scripts of all the episodes of the first four series of the American legal drama The Good Wife, and is a sub-corpus of a larger one, made up of the ten legal dramas and collected to investigate the genre. The reference corpus is the Supreme Court Dialogue Corpus, which features the transcriptions of the Supreme Court. It has been collected by the Cornell University and is available online. The aim of this research is to investigate the genre of legal drama from a linguistic and contrastive point of view in a preliminary attempt to define it as a genre, as well as to find out whether legal dramas can ease the process of popularization of specialised contents (in this case legal ones). In particular, the comparison between legal dramas and the reference corpus will try to give an answer to the following questions: 1. Why and how can Special Languages be modified in legal dramas? 2. What popularization strategies are used in legal dramas? Along with the investigation of the ‘legal drama’ genre, this study aims at discovering the language choices made by the (fictional) speakers of the legal drama The Good Wife and the differences between the specialised language used by experts of law and popularized legal language when an expert addresses a non expert interlocutor. As power relationships and aspects related to belonging to a discourse community are involved, this

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research appeals to Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the relationships between speakers. For this first phase of the research, a qualitative approach to the The Good Wife sub-corpus has been chosen, featuring the use of a critical text analysis applied to a selection of samples. In a future phase of the research, excerpts from the ‘legal drama corpus’ will be compared to similar situations in the reference corpus, and the study will be integrated with a quantitative approach, including the comparison of wordlists of the two corpora, and the analysis of clusters, collocates and typical morphosyntactic structures of the legal drama corpus. The Good Wife is a legal drama created in 2009 in the United States by Robert and Michelle King, airing on CBS, whose fifth series is currently being broadcast1. The protagonist is Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), a lawyer who had left her job as a litigator to take care of her two children, Grace and Zach. Her husband, the Cook County State attorney, is suddenly involved in a scandal involving prostitutes and corruption; he is jailed and has to face a long trial. This is why she chooses to go back to her job and is hired in the legal office of Diane Lockhart and Will Gardner, her ex boyfriend and University colleague. Alicia and her husband Peter gradually separate and their relationship seems definitely destroyed when she finds out that he had also slept with Kalinda Sharma, Lockhart and Gardner’s detective, who had meanwhile become her best friend. The story continues in the following series, during which Alicia has a sexual affair with Will, Kalinda’s real identity and past are discovered, Peter Florrick becomes the State Governor and the Lockhart & Gardner office faces a financial crisis. The structure of the series allows it to stage the events involving the characters’ private lives and to contemporarily ‘tell’ a story of customers being defended by Lockhart and Gardner or being investigated by the State Prosecution.

1. Legal drama: a hybrid genre In order to get a better understanding of the selected scenes and to narrow the focus of the research on the linguistic aspect, a preliminary introduction to television genres, and in particular to the genre called ‘legal drama’, is required. In their study of the fictional television genre, Akass and McCabe (2007) explore the concept of genre trying to apply generic norms to the grouping of TV programmes in the light of the progressive hybridisation of TV genres. They analyse it from different perspectives, considering the



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concept of ‘genre’ in television as ideal forms and formats (Feuer 1992), as a set of expectations and recognition from the audience/readers, as a form of popular culture (Neale 2003; Jauss 1982; Altman 1996), and finally as defined by the appeal to the audience, commercial stakes and competition rules (Creeber 2001). Making reference to the aforesaid categories, Feuer (1992) summarizes an approach to the study of genre including: a) an “aesthetic” approach, which focuses on the structural features of genres and tries to define them according to systems of conventions b) a “ritual” approach, which sees genre as an exchange between industry and audience c) an “ideological” approach, which views genre as an instrument of control and therefore relates to institutional and commercial aspects. However, though Feuer’s suggestion for the analysis of television genres seems to allow for a complete analysis of all the main aspects, critics have long identified the difficulties involved in demarcating one generic form from another: growing hybridization makes it “pointless to insist on generic purity in relation to television”, as acknowledged by Feuer herself (1992, in Akass and McKabe 2007: 290). Television genres are notoriously hybridized and often take their inspiration from previous formats, by changing some elements and substituting them with new and more audience-attractive ones. As a matter of fact, Nelson (in Akass and McCabe 2007) develops his concept of hybridity in relation to intertextuality (seen as a more or less direct reference to any other already existing text), identifying the “hybrid mix of serial and series” as ‘flexi-narrative’, and taking into account that the audience is more and more media-savvy. Nelson notices that audience pleasure comes from intertextual references and that this is the reason why series generally ‘build on’ audience knowledge of popular culture, past media and generic forms. Neale (2003) states that all genres are built on a system of repetition and difference, but it is the work of the narrative element to regulate such logic. It can be said that genre emerges through the way in which the narrative organizes and handles specific structural components of TV products. In TV genres, “generic hybridization” functions to exploit repetitions and regulate difference in the same product according to the audience response. However, the phenomenon of hybridization is not specifically



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connected to TV genres exclusively. Hybridity has been widely explored in linguistics, in particular with reference to language variation. Bhatia (2012: 24) focused on hybridity in specialised genres, stating that Within the concept of genre and professional practice, one can see expert professional writers constantly operating within and across generic boundaries, creating new but essentially related and/or hybrid forms, both mixed and embedded, to give expression to their ‘private intentions’ within the socially accepted communicative practices and shared generic norms

and stressing the “mutual influence” of discourse practices and features. He also exemplifies the appropriation of generic resources with recontextualization, reframing, resemiotisation and reformulation and explains that hybridity is generated by such phenomena: [discourse appropriations] whether text-internal or text-external, discursively operate simultaneously at all levels of discourse to realise the intended meaning, and have been widely used in the recontextualization, reframing, resemiotisation or reformulations of existing discourses and genres into novel or hybrid forms (Bhatia 2012: 25).

According to Bhatia, genre hybridity can be expressed as genre-mixing, genre-bending and genre-embedding. Legal dramas display the formal features of a text with entertainment purposes, but as most scenes take place either in courts or in legal offices and as the protagonists are mostly lawyers, the use of legal English is of paramount relevance to understanding the way the plot is developed. In this sense, they can be considered an example of an embedded genre. According to Bhatia (1997), an embedded genre is a genre that is altered when imported into a new context: In genre embedding, for example, one often finds a particular generic form, it may be a poem, a story or an article, used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form (Bhatia 1997: 191).

This is what happens in legal dramas, where some domain-specific genres happen to be recontextualised and ‘embedded’ into a fictional/narrative frame. In legal dramas most scenes stage some parts of the trial, including questioning, speeches to the jury and especially arguments between lawyers and between lawyers and the judge. Scenes are often set in legal



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offices as well, where lawyers discuss the process strategies and explain them to their customers. Obviously, courtroom scenes of the legal process staging conflict between the parties such as oral arguments, can be portrayed more dramatically, thus generating much more interest in the audience.

2. Analysis of the scenes Some samples drawn from The Good Wife will show the features of ‘fictional’ legal language and the variations of this Special Language 2 according to the communicative situation.

2.1 From expert to non expert: explanation The first example is drawn from episode 20 of the third series, ‘Pants on fire’. The protagonist Alicia Florrick, and three other lawyers (among which there is the associate partner of her legal office, Diane Lockhart) are trying to explain to their customers what an Alford Plea is. The three women have been jailed for five years, as they had been found guilty of a murder. The three defendants claim to be innocent and one of them is being bullied in prison and the trial is voided for lack of evidence because of a malfeasance of the Illinois Crime Lab. The trial is re-opened and the counterpart (the State’s prosecutor Cary Agos) makes the proposal that they sign an Alford plea to close the lawsuit, so that they can be released from prison. Below is a definition of “Alford Plea” taken from the Cornell University website. I quote it here because most readers (just as almost the whole of the audience watching The Good Wife) probably have no clue of what an Alford Plea is and, though quite technical, it might be helpful to understand its meaning. Also known as a “best-interests plea”, an Alford plea registers a formal claim neither of guilt nor innocence toward charges brought against a defendant in criminal court. Like a “nolo contendere plea”, an Alford plea arrests the full process of criminal trial because the defendant - typically, only with the court's permission - accepts all the ramifications of a guilty verdict (i.e. punishment) without first attesting to having committed the crime3.



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In the following lines, instead, are the words used by the lawyers to define an Alford plea and the difference between these words and the definition above is evident: Lindsey: A what? Diane: An Alford plea. It's a form of a... a guilty plea. Lindsey: - No. Alicia: Wait, just... just hear us. Lindsey: I already said... Alicia: Lindsey, listen. We'll do whatever you want, but with an Alford plea, you get out. You acknowledge to the prosecution that they have enough evidence to convict, but you get out. Lindsey: Do they? Alicia: Have enough evidence to convict? Without the DNA, normally we would say no, but you never know for sure what a jury will do. Megan: …So if I take this... plea... Lawyer: The state's attorney agrees to a sentence of time served. You go free. Now. Immediately. Megan: Really? Lawyer: Yeah, Megan, but there are drawbacks. You won't be able to clear your name. You'll be a convicted felon for the rest of your life. And one parole violation, and you're right back here. Megan: But if I don't take it, I have to stay here? Lawyer 2: Yes. At least until you get a new trial. Megan: And that's how long? Lawyer 2: I don't know. I want you to have a complete picture here, Pamela. The state's attorney offers this plea because they're afraid of being sued. As part of the plea agreement, you have to promise not to sue. Pamela: But I get out? Lawyer 2: Yes. That's why they do it. They dangle freedom in front of your eyes to get a guilty plea. Pamela: …And if I turned it down and sued? Diane: The last crime lab lawsuit against Cook County resulted in a $10 million reward. Pamela: $10 million? Alicia: That's... - Not a guarantee. And any award you would get, you would have to split three ways.

What can be immediately noticed by reading these lines is that the lawyers tend to adapt their language to their non expert interlocutors, who are their clients, and to focus their attention on what the consequences of choosing an Alford plea would be. Alicia explains to Lindsey that she can “get out” as do the other lawyers while talking to Megan and to Pamela (“You go free. Now. Immediately”). At the same time, the lawyers explain the consequences of the plea, but they do it with quite ‘accessible’ words.



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Even the technical terms which are employed by the lawyers are quite common ones (“acknowledge”, “prosecution”, “evidence”, “convict”, “violation”), as in most cases they are loans from everyday language connoted with legal meaning. In some other cases, simpler words are used instead of technical terms, such as “get out” instead of “found innocent”, “to be released/acquitted/absolved”, or “to promise” instead of “to agree to”. Apart from the analysis of the lexical and morpho-syntactic choices from a micro-linguistic point of view, at a macro-level, the strategy generally used by the expert speakers (in this case, the lawyers) is that of explanation. This strategy consists in formulating technical contents in simpler words, in order to convey their meanings to non-experts. From a discourse-analytical point of view, the distance created by the factor of belonging (or not belonging) to a discourse community is eliminated by means of a ‘renunciation’ of the use of a professional and discursive practice which is typical (and restricted to) the legal community, such as the use of legal terminology.

2.2 From expert to non expert: contextualization Similarly, the following examples, drawn from three different episodes of The Good Wife (episodes 17 and 21 of the second season, respectively ‘Ham sandwich’ and ‘In sickness’, and episode 03 of the third season, ‘Get a room’), show how some forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution, such as mediation or arbitration, are explained to the contending parties: 1. Welcome to mediation, everybody. I'm your mutually agreed upon mediator. My name is Frederick Medkiff (please call me Fred), and I wanna assure both sides that I'm here to help you reach a yes. (...) We have no subpoena power here, Mr. Lee. No court reporter. No transcripts. This is purely a mediation. This input will help me determine a fair settlement. 2. Welcome to arbitration. I'm retired-Judge Loni Goslin. This is an automatic process intended to encourage the free exchange of grievances, and a presentation of witnesses and exhibits. 3. This is court-ordered mediation. It’s not opt-out mediation or I-don’t-feellike-it mediation (…). Look, the judge doesn’t want to clutter up his



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docket. That’s why he empowered me to keep you here as long as I want to reach a compromise.

These three excerpts have been drawn from three different episodes but have some features in common. At a first sight, introductory formulas are immediately evident: in the first two cases, the person speaking is the mediator or the arbitrator, i.e. the person to whom the dispute resolution has been assigned, and they both introduce the situation with “welcome to”. By doing so, they address the non expert speakers and involve them directly in the communicative situation. A quantitative corpus based analysis of these and other introductory formulas will help us determine whether they can be considered a peculiarity of legal SLAP which distinguishes it from ‘real’ legal discourse. The attempt to make reference to the actual situation is also underlined by the use of “this is” in both examples 1 and 3, and by the particularly high occurrence of deixis and personal pronouns (“I’m your mediator, we have no subpoena power here, he empowered me to keep you here” etc.). Shifting to the syntactic aspect, the use of a ‘definition pattern’ can be remarked. The definition pattern is represented by the juxtaposition of (more or less technical) words to a technical term in order to define its meaning. This can be recognised in example 1 (“A mediator […]: I wanna assure both sides that I'm here to help you reach a yes”) and more significantly, in example 2: Welcome to arbitration. This is an automatic process intended to encourage the free exchange of grievances, and a presentation of witnesses and exhibits).

In example 3, instead, the popularisation of legal terms is not enacted by means of an abstract definition, nor of a simple explanation, but by means of a reference to the concrete situation, i.e. a contextualisation: Look, the judge doesn't want to clutter up his docket. That's why he empowered me to keep you here as long as I want to reach a compromise.

The same strategy is used in example 1, where the mediator does use legal language (“we have no subpoena power”), but only because he is speaking to a lawyer (Mr. Lee) who was behaving as if they were in a ‘normal’ court process. This is why he needs to specify that the situation they are in is one of a mediation, and that everything can help him “determine a fair settlement”. The use of definition pattern and the contextualization by means of exemplification fulfill two purposes: they serve the aim of the fictional



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speaker to convey a message to the non expert interlocutor, and, above all, they serve to ‘fill the gap’ between the technical aspect of the legal drama and the non expert general audience. By means of such devices, the authors of legal dramas manage to ‘involve’ the audience watching the TV series and to ‘disentangle’ the plot.

2.3 From expert to expert: special language and narrative proximity At this point it might be argued that there are several scenes in which there are no clients nor any other lay interlocutor, and the conversation is held exclusively between lawyers (for example when they discuss forensic strategies) or between lawyers and the judge. How are specialized contents conveyed to a non expert public whenever the communication takes place between experts? In the following scene, drawn from episode 11 of the third season of The Good Wife, ‘What went wrong’, Alicia, Diane and their colleague Coyne are trying to show the judge that there are valid reasons to invalidate the process, as the verdict of the jury did not match their expectations: Judge: The defense claims to have evidence of jury misconduct. (…) What do you have, Ms. Lockhart? Diane: Improper contact between a juror and nonparticipant is considered jury misconduct, Your Honor. Discussing a case with friends, relatives during the trial or deliberations. One of our jurors has done just that. Judge: Which juror? Diane: Juror number five. Juror: Uh, yes Your Honor. I'm sorry, I should have said this before. This note was given to me in the jury room. Cary: Oh, come on, Your Honor, this is ridiculous. Coyne: 5324a, Your Honor: jury tampering, or bullying, falls well within the judge's right to declare a mistrial. Diane: The Illinois Code of Judicial Conduct: "Judges should refrain from all individual contact with a juror outside the presence of court during a trial and deliberations." Judge: Yes. Have you detected some contact I made with jurors? Diane: You friended one. Juror number five, Lisa Banner, the blogger of Lisa's World of Buttons. (…) Your Honor, this is... Judge: I know this is.



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Diane: Your Honor, this is serious grounds for a mistrial. Unknowingly or not, you made contact with a juror during the trial. This is a serious ethical breach.

As possibly expected, the register of these conversations held between the lawyers and the judge is appreciably higher: the presence of typical morpho-syntactic constructions (“to fall in the judge’s right to”), of formulaic expressions (“the defense claims”, “Your Honour”) and of several technical terms (“ethical breach”, “jury misconduct”, “bullying and tampering”, “mistrial” and so on) are clear signals of a particularly ‘dense’ legal discourse. Also, an instance of a definition can be spotted, even though the structure is reversed (the definition comes partially before the technical term, “jury misconduct”). Further on the conversation features two quotations of laws and regulations of the United States. The lawyer Coyne quotes the number of the law he is making reference to (“5324a”) and recites it by heart. Then the other lawyer, Diane, quotes the Illinois Code of Judicial Court Conduct in order to provoke a reaction of the judge and to demonstrate that that law refers to the specific situation. So, by means of references to practices, regulations and the language of the discourse community to which both lawyers and the judge belong, the speakers manage to create a mental and communicative proximity with their interlocutor. The quotation of laws and regulations helps the lawyers not only to establish their own credentials in the eyes of the judge, who is therefore ‘forced’ to admit their arguments, but also to achieve their professional purposes (i.e. invalidating the process). At the same time, the authors of the legal drama find a good compromise between a certain level of technicality and the specificity required by the ‘legal drama’ genre itself, and the accessibility of the audiovisual product The Good Wife to an audience which is not made up of law experts, but mostly includes individuals not belonging to that particular discourse community. Moreover, though very technical (due to the previously mentioned formal features), the content is somehow conveyed to the audience. Even if only partially, just enough technical information reaches the audience for them to understand the development of the plot. In this case, it can be claimed that specialised language can have not only an instrumental role in the narrative element, but also an educational and popularising one.



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3. Concluding remarks After analysing the excerpts from the fictional TV legal drama, the difference between the legal English used and that of real courts can be traced. Legal drama, as a genre embedding the discourse of law, becomes an indirect means of transmitting specialised knowledge, even though its primary purpose is not to instruct the audience, but to entertain it. The most common strategies used to ‘popularise’ specialised contents and keep the audience’s level of attention high are, as we saw, explanations, definition patterns, contextualization and exemplification, as well as quotations of reliable sources and use of standardized and formulaic expressions. They manage to obviate the problem of the ‘gap’ between the technical nature of the legal language required in such TV series and the fictional/narrative element. In comparison with real court communication, an extra element has to be taken into account in fictional court communication. The conversation does not take place in a context where only two individuals (more or less expert) are involved, but includes another ‘indirect’ participant, which is the audience. Consequently, the interactional structure of all forms of communication taking place in TV series is different from that of ‘real life’ communication. In legal dramas, the communication between two speakers ‘takes place’ in front of an audience, which listens to it from an external angle and cannot intervene. The audience represents an additional ‘passive’ and ‘opaque’ participant, who is necessarily external to the (fictional) frame of events, time and space of the legal drama and the discourse community staged in it. However, the audience listens to the communication and ‘absorbs’ the specialised contents featured in such communications. It can be said that whereas ‘real life’ shows a linear interactional structure, where the transfer of information occurs between two people or groups of people alone, legal dramas (just as all other types of TV fiction) are characterised by a ‘triangular’ structure, where the third element is represented by the audience and has only a role of ‘receiver’ and not of interlocutor.

References Akass, Kim and Janet McCabe. “Analyzing Fictional Television Genres.” In Media Studies: Key Issues & Debates, edited by E. Devereux, 283301. Los Angeles: Sage, 2007. Alcáraz Varó, Enrique and Brian Hughes. Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002.



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Altman, Rick. Genre: The Musical, A Reader. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1996. Bhatia, Vijay K. Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London: Continuum International, 2004. —. “Interdiscursivity in critical genre analysis.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Genre Studies. Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil: University of Southern Santa Catarina, 2007. —. “Critical reflections on genre analysis.” Iberica 24 (2012): 17-28. Candlin, Christopher N., Vijay K. Bhatia and Maurizio Gotti (eds). The Discourses of Dispute Resolution. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Cavagnoli, Stefania and Elena Ioriatti Ferrari (eds). Tradurre il diritto. Padua: CEDAM, 2009. Ciapuscio, Guiomar Elena. “Formulation and reformulation procedures in verbal interactions between experts and (semi-)laypersons”. Discourse Studies 5(2) (2003): 207-234. Creeber, Glen (ed.). The Television Genre Book. London: Bfi Publishing, 2001. Creeber, Glen (ed.). Tele-visions: An Introduction to Studying Television. London: Bfi Publishing, 2006. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang, Jon Kleinberg. “Echoes of Power: Language Effects and Power Differences in Social Interaction.” In Proceedings of the 21st International World Wide Web Conference, 699-708. New York: ACM, 2012. Feuer, Jane. “Genre Study and Television.” In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, edited by R.C. Allen, 138-59. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Gambier, Yves. “Multimodality and AudioVisual Translation.” In MuTra 2006 – Audiovisual Translation Scenarios: Conference Proceedings. Copenhagen: MuTra, 2007. Garzone, Giuliana, Franco Miglioli and Rita Salvi. Legal English. Milan: EGEA, 1995. Gee, James P. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 1991. Gottlieb, Henrik. “Subtitling: Diagonal Translation”. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 2 (1994): 101-12. Jauss, Hans Robert. Towards an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Neale, Steve. “Studying Genre.” In The Television Genre Book, edited by Glen Creeber, 3-4. London: Bfi Publishing, 2003.



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Gülich, Elisabeth. “Conversational techniques used in transferring knowledge between medical experts and non experts.” Discourse and Society 5(2) 2003: 235-262. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leuween. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 2006. Swales, John M. “Definitions in Science and Law: Evidence for subjectspecific course components?” Fachsprache 3 (1981): 106-112. —. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Van Leeuwen, Theo. “Legitimation in Discourse and Communication”. Discourse and Society 1(1) (2007): 91-112.

Notes 1

This information refers to the date of submission of this paper: December, 15th 2013. 2 I refer to the fictional linguistic variety generated by the artificial reproduction of special languages for entertainment purposes, such as those used in TV series (medical dramas, legal dramas), often characterised by over-simplification and particularly high occurrence of descriptions and explanations, as SLAP (‘Special Languages in Audiovisual Products’). 3 Available online at http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/alford_plea (last accessed February 2014).



LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND DIVERSITY: AN EPILOGUE? GIUSEPPE BALIRANO

“Language not only expresses ideas and concepts but actually shapes thought.” (Moore, 2008: 166)

Our initial aim, when assembling this volume, was to bring a small contribution to the investigation of the far-reaching concepts of diversity1 and identity in emerging discourse(s) on Otherness. As we see it, one of the main and most difficult tasks of linguistic research today is to understand and describe the nature of these concepts and the theoretical speculations which gravitate around them. We thus planned to investigate ‘diversity’ and ‘identity’ in discourse and in any form of linguistic and semiotic representation, in other words, we set out to effectively examine the way we ‘language’ them. Overall, previous linguistic research in the vast field of diversity, or more recently ‘super-diversity’, and identity presents a significant backdrop for tackling multifaceted issues in the area of social justice and injustice, representation and/or discrimination within contemporary societies, institutions and organisations. However, although several discourses on immigration, racism, ethnicity, (post)nationalism and gender are increasingly debated topics in our Western societies and in the academic world, we believe that the wide domain(s) of diversity studies seem to be inevitably informed by contradictory theoretical, political and academic speculations, to the point that the very term diversity often presents diverse acceptations (see Vincent’s Prologue; and Zanca, in this volume). It is also, however, widely employed to variously express an idea, a classification, or a whole apparatus for ‘disciplining’ identities (Ahmed 2012; Foldy 2002; Nkomo and Stewart 2006). While some of the main concepts which diversity and identity generally include, such as class, ‘race’ and gender, stem from pre-existing historical studies, these categories are still considered salient, and are increasingly enhanced by other more or less specific differences, such as

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sexual orientation, disability, age, culture, religion, and so on. Academic research has, in fact, explored several aspects of diversity including the marginalisation of women and other minority groups, with influential studies on gender, ethnicity, disability and class. This volume centres on the investigation of several complex dynamics generated by the unstable connection between identity and diversity in linguistic research through different media discourses. And, even when we were still collating ideas as to how this book ought to be structured, we already posited that although language has always been considered to play an essential role in both individual and group-identity construction, it has hardly ever been tackled as a diversity dimension per se (Tietze 2010: 197). All the articles included in this volume undertake to envisage the relationship between language, diversity and identity as a powerful one, on the basis that numerous theories of language can be considered to be as questionable and uncertain as theories of identity. Although some linguists may be inspired by those approaches which maintain that issues of identity are not pivotal to theories of language, our present collective work set out to consider this relationship more critically. One of the first objectives of this collection of essays, was to state unequivocally that the relationship between diversity and identity cannot be alienated from the factual distribution of material resources in society. It is undeniable that those who have access to a broad array of resources in society, will also have a more direct access to power and privilege, which will in turn influence the way they both identify with, and differentiate from, their own world and their future perspectives in it. Thus, the main identity question: “Who am I?”, cannot prescind from the question: “Who am I not?” In this view, our endeavor has been to demonstrate that a person’s identity may alter in accordance with changing social, cultural and in particular economic relations. The study of identity and diversity in social practice should then also tackle concepts such as the language, dialects and accents which can be deemed the object of mental representations, as is clearly stated in Bourdieu’s words2: acts of perception and appreciation, of cognition and recognition, in which social actors bring in their interests and their presuppositions, and of objectified representations, in things (emblems, flags, badges, etc.) or acts, self-interested strategies of symbolic manipulation which aim at determining the (mental) representation that other people may form of these properties and their bearers. […] Struggles over ethnic or regional identity – in other words, over the properties (stigmata or emblems) linked with the origin through the place of origin and its associated durable



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marks, such as accent – are a particular case of the different struggles over classifications, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups (1994: 220-221).

In our linguistic analyses, we could not discard those features and criteria recorded by anthropologists and objectivist sociologists, since the way people ‘make and unmake groups’ needs to be perceived and evaluated as it presents itself in practice, as this constitutes a true form of power. Another important area of investigation which needs to be taken into account in current studies on diversity, and that we actively solicited when assembling this volume, lies within the field of contemporary multimodal studies. Multimodality can be identified with discourses which communicate their messages by means of more than one semiotic mode, or channel of communication such as magazine articles and advertising, websites, or films which integrate words, music, sound effects and moving images. In a sense, all human communication is intrinsically multimodal. The study of multimodality within an identity/diversity framework of reference engages with the examination of different semiotic resources and the ways in which they communicate meaning, construe identity/diversity, both separately and in combination. Overall, the linguistic research methods and tools employed throughout this volume have drawn upon the analytical framework(s) of critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and translation studies. The book was devised around six thematically interrelated but selfcontained sections. Our first part is dedicated to studies on diversity connected to the written word as articulated In the Press. This section, by exploiting the tools offered by corpus linguistics, focuses mainly on the investigation of British newspapers and the way they aptly succeed in languaging diversity. The analysis of concordances, clusters and collocates in the different corpora under scrutiny serves to illustrate that the languaging of diversity in the press, while introducing a greater and more varied use of the very word diversity, works to construe linguistic discourses. All discourses deal with a variety of topics, policies and social actors, and contribute to the shaping of socio-cultural contexts. The analyses in this section clearly show that the way in which the printed press construes diversity is paramount in conveying racial, social and/or age connotations. The thorny relationship between language and power has been extensively explored in our second section. ‘It is a truth universally



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acknowledged’ that language plays some important part in producing and reproducing simultaneously both social exclusion and social inclusion. On this theoretical setting, the main contributions, in this appropriately denominated In Politics section, evolve around the idea that the way in which institutions ‘language’ diversity in politics is deeply influenced by the relationships between discourses and their socio-political situations, ideologies and power-relations (see Wodak 1996: 20). The articles in this section, while embarking upon very diverse geographical areas, move from the multimodal analysis of representations of post-apartheid South Africa to the analysis of the Indo-Trinidadian female leader PersadBissessar. Finally, the analysis of a small multimodal corpus of Black American contemporary songs reveals the strong relationship which exists between rap music and politics. The novel genre Obama rap which accompanied the election of the 44th President of the USA appears to have ‘languaged’ a new and powerful portrayal of Black American identity. The intricate practices of Constructing Identities inspired our third outlook which, while focusing on vague concepts and buzz words such as assimilation, inclusion, intercultural and/or social integration, and globalization, also proffers an original representation of identity linked to the topic of biodiversity. All the reported construal practices connected to different identities are seen here as a response to the role that legitimacy plays within the hegemonic discourses of our modern capitalist societies. Online identities, which represent a digital extension of real-life discursive practices, have also been tackled in this section. Indeed, by offering a specific set of multimodal representations to online communities, Facebook users succeed in codifying their own novel online identities. Finally, this part draws to a close with a look at so-called “glottic identity”, which rather than engaging with a real person’s identity representation, refers to the translator’s intervention within a text which inevitably influences the very act of translation. The fourth section aims to introduce the linguistic and socio-cultural analyses of two prominent categories in the field of diversity studies: age and gender. Linguistic studies Across Generations and Genders, in media and social networking contexts, entail the analysis of linguistic variation which inevitably ties in with and reflects social, political, historical and cultural change. Age and gender belong to blurred categories which are typically used to construct diverse representations of inclusion and exclusion of self and others, and to their identification with typical societal activities and routines. Diversity, in terms of age, is examined here discursively in the press which appears to employ several ways of ‘languaging’ age diversity and its changing evaluations. The construction



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of age identity is also tackled in an area of research that has received little empirical attention in linguistic studies: text-based online interactions in elderly online communities. Finally, the focus on gender and diversity in this section concentrates extensively on ideology and the typical stereotypes of gay representations. Gay discourses are tackled in both audiovisual translation and, again, in the written language of newspapers, with the aim of tracing and describing how two different cultures, namely the British and Italian semiotic systems, deal with specific social phenomena and sexual preferences. The fifth section is dedicated to the question of Ethnicities. The three papers in this part examine the difficult issue of identity representation with reference to three different and geographically distant ethnic groups: Kazan Tatar young generation, the Roma minority – known as ‘rrom/rom’ or ‘Gypsy’, and the in-group creation of slurs and dysphemisms in contemporary Maghrebi Arabic dialects. Ethnicities and diversity are studied here from a linguistic perspective through the analysis of corpora collected in different media such as the printed press and in online social community forums. The arguments provided by the authors contribute to the discursive construction of national identities, while illustrating how language plays a strategic role in the process of preserving and/or redimensioning identities and how languaging diversity is, ultimately, a social and political instrument to conceive and express the identities of diverse ethnic groups. The last section of the volume, Popularising Ideas, reveals a rather ground-breaking connection between the conveying of specialised discourses to a lay public and identity representation. Significantly, the contributions to this sixth section constitute a small step forward in the field of popularisation studies. The analysis of popularisation introduces different discourse communities and the dominant role played by scientific actors, or rather experts, as opposed to other social identities. In particular, studies on TED talks in this section seem to convincingly provide an innovative platform that could propel ideas forward through the popularisation process which brings thoughts and theories to massive audiences of non-experts in a wide range of topics and fields. The way TED talks succeed in aligning speaker identity and speaker diversity ties in neatly with our original plan to ‘language’ diversity. In this section on Popularising Ideas we also decided to include the investigation of a particular specialised genre, legal discourse, in its popularised form in socalled legal dramas. The aim here was to see whether legal dramas can effectively lead to a process of popularisation of specialised contents.



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We may not always have been able to comprehensively identify what language, identity and diversity can indeed entail, but since the goal we set ourselves was to confront the terms and discourses under scrutiny, this volume should be seen as an innovative attempt to challenge the presentday underpinnings of diversity studies.

References Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Benschop, Yvonne. “The dubious power of diversity management”. In Diversity in the Workplace: Multi-disciplinary and International Perspectives, edited by Gröschl S., 15–28, Farnham: Gower, 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994. Kelly, Erin and Frank Dobbin “How affirmative action became diversity management: Employer response to antidiscrimination law”, 1961 to 1996. American Behavioral Scientist 41(7) (1998): 960–984. Litvin, Deborah R. “The discourse of diversity: From biology to management”. Organization 4(2) (1997): 187–209. Foldy, Erica Gabrielle. “‘Managing’ diversity: Identity and power in organizations.” In Gender, Identity And The Culture of Organizations, edited by Mills Albert J. and Iiris Aaltio, 92–112. London: Routledge, 2002. Moore, B. Robert. “Racism in the English language.” In Beyond Heroes and Holidays, edited by Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart, and Margo Okazawa-Rey, 166-169. Boston: Teaching for Change, 2008. Nkomo, Stella and Stewart, Marcus Maharg. “Diverse identities in organizations.” In The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies, edited by Stewart Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Thomas Lawrence and Walter R. Nord, 520–540. London: SAGE, 2006. Tietze, Susanne. “International Managers as Translation.” European Journal of International Management 4(1/1) (2010): 184–199. Wodak, Ruth. Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman, 1996.

Notes 1

We refer to the notion of diversity which can be traced back to labour, anti-racist and feminist movements, that is the major social justice movements of the 20th century (Benschop 2011; Kelly and Dobbin 1998; Litvin 1997).



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A more detailed insight into sociolinguistic approaches to languaging diversity will be found in a twin volume subsequent to our first international conference on “Languaging Diversity” which was held at the University of Naples L’Orientale in October 2013. The forthcoming volume, which comprises articles more strictly related to issues pertaining to linguistic variation and language change, is currently being edited by Siria Guzzo and Peter L. Patrick and published by Cambridge Scholar Publishing.