No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Time tells a story: Temporality as a marker of ideology in the Palestinian political discourse
Abstract
This study provides a synthesized perspective on the functions and ideological orientation of time adverbials as (re)situated in their socio-political contexts in five speeches by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN. By analysing adverbials of truncated, extending, and fixed time references, the study reveals some systematic ideological formulations of conflict and resolution in the Palestinian political discourse. Adverbials of truncated and extending time are incongruous and generate a sense of interpretive dissonance. The truncated sense is embedded and more particular, thus counteracting the extending time which is established as more progressive, perseverant and consistent. This represents power asymmetries and different ideological orientations to conflict and resolution. Adverbials of fixed time, however, are transformative; they grant an end to a clash of ideologies due to the conflict between truncated and extending temporalities, and therefore resurrect a discourse that is based on equity and justice.
... 9 Periodisation always constitutes a privileging of a perspective, for example, in terms of making certain groups or conflicts visible while others fall out of sight. 10 Jörn Rüsen argues that different temporalities tend to sanction different identities. 11 Traditional division into epochs highlights specific narratives and social dynamics while excluding others. ...
Political discourse can be considered as consisting of conflictual discourse and cooperative discourse in view of the relationship between power entities. From the perspective of spatial conceptualization in cognitive discourse analysis, cooperative discourse is supposed to be different from conflictual one in terms of the spatial representation, with Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory, which mainly conceptualizes space as an inside/outside dichotomy, only accounting for the latter instead of the former. This paper attempts to further apply Chilton’s three-dimensional model to involve the alternative way of spatial conceptualization with different kind of construals and to compare the differences of the two types of political discourse in the construction of discourse space. Taking the speeches by two state leaders for the purposes of cooperation and accusation respectively as the cases in point, this paper concludes that cooperative discourse displays an outward-extensive discourse space representation as opposed to the inward-contractive discourse space representation of conflictual discourse. This study contributes to expand the scope of discourse space analysis, which is primarily for antagonistic relations only, to incorporate cooperative relations with an extended application of DST based on alternative ways of spatial conceptualization and an elaboration on the dynamics of its three dimensions, and hence to shed some lights on political discourse studies.
This section lists literature and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Theses and Dissertations.
A great deal of political and academic responses to the Israel/Palestine conflict have construed the Palestinians as an object of Western and Israeli discourses, rather than their own Palestinian discourse. This has hindered understanding of the internal mechanisms involved in the production of the Palestinian conditions. Palestinian Political Discourse presents an in-depth examination of Palestinian political discourse since an-Nakba in 1948 and stitches together the underlying mechanisms and rules that have shaped Palestinian politics, in turn synthesizing, interpreting and scrutinizing these rules. Studying the question of Palestine discursively offers new ways to rethink political agency, structures, identity, institutions and power relations while interpreting Palestinian actions. This book adds new understanding to Palestinian political agency by explaining how political actions were constructed. Discourse analysis methodology underlies the critical examination of the genealogy of concepts and frames that have oriented Palestinian political thought. Contrary to established views that ascribe shifts in Palestinian politics primarily to external factors and international changes, this book demonstrates how transformation has been a continuing inbuilt feature within the discursive regime and that dramatic shifts were only effects of much deeper, slowly evolving changes. Examining discourse, and thus language, offers an exceptional possibility to see from the Palestinian perspective. As such, this book provides material vital to the deeper interpretation of the Palestinian question. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Israel-Palestine studies, Middle East studies, and discourse analysis.
Critical discourse analysis In recent decades critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline with a relatively fixed set of research methods. Instead, we might best see CDA as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society. CDA is distinctive in a) its view of the relationship between language and society, and b) its critical approach to methodology. Let us take these in turn by first exploring the notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘critical’. The term ‘discourse’ is used in various ways across the social sciences and within the field of CDA. In the most abstract sense, ‘discourse’ ...
This article offers a framework for the analysis of temporal context, an analysis of synchronic context with diachronic relevance. It seeks to look at the way in which temporal context operates on a number of levels to help construct the ways in which individuals and groups understand their social worlds. Aspects considered include the immediate and medium-term sociopolitical contexts, the contemporary sociopolitical individuals, organizations and structures and the more long-term temporal context which includes the various assumptions of order, structures of inclusion and exclusion and generally how a society legitimates itself and achieves its social identity. In addition to the analytical tool considered, the article also posits some methodological implications for research in this area.
In this paper we examine the differences in use between distal and proximal demonstrative terms (e.g., singular “this” and “that”, and plural “these” and “those” in English). The proximal–distal distinction appears to be made in all languages and therefore promises to be an important window on the cognitive mechanisms underlying language production and comprehension. We address the problem of accounting for the distinction through a corpus-based quantitative study of the deictic use of demonstratives in Dutch. Our study suggests that the distal–proximal distinction corresponds with use of the proximal for intensive/strong indicating (i.e., directing of attention) and the distal for neutral indicating. We compare our findings with empirical findings on the use of English demonstratives and argue that, despite some apparent differences, Dutch and English demonstratives behave roughly similarly though not identically. Finally, we put our findings into context by pulling together evidence from a number of converging sources on the relationship between indicating and describing as alternative modes of reference in the use of distal and proximal demonstratives. This will also lead us to a new understanding of the folk-view on distals and proximals as distinguishing between nearby and faraway objects.
Ideology: A Very Brief Introduction is an examination of the major theories of ideology and the ways they have enriched our comprehension of ideology. Ideology is one of the most controversial terms in the political vocabulary. It creates both revulsion and inspiration. This VSI examines the reasons for this reaction and explains why ideologies deserve respect as a major form of political thinking. It explores the changing understandings of ideology as a concept and the arguments of the main ideologies. It draws on a range of disciplines in order to show the potency of ideology as a resource at the disposal of societies.
Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - Pragmatics - by Stephen C. Levinson
Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet's work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.
Now performs an array of discursive functions in political discourse. This study examined now in a number of political speeches that have global themes. It employed speech act theory and proximization theory to understand such functions in context. The main argument is that now provides a transition point to the hearer’s cognitive space. This transition is essential to perform the speech act of acknowledging, thus changing the hearer’s mental representation prior to performing the act of directing. Now can also change the hearer’s mental representation by aligning analogous/incompatible or non-complementary propositions to increase his unexpectedness of their similarity/difference and therefore decrease his likelihood of non-compliance to an issued directive, soliciting of approval or legitimization of a policy. Now as a marker of text coherence can help plan the discourse moves from the distribution of roles according to the speaker’s deictic center, through proximization of threat, to reaching legitimization of policy or calling for immediate action.
Coping with an imposed and painful marginality is the fate assigned to Palestinians living inside Israel’s border, most of whom (but not all), are nominal Israeli citizens. The question addressed here is that of the meaning of this kind of citizenship, and the place of Palestinians within Israeli citizenry. What psychological consequences could this imposed marginality have, except anger and frustration? Identity is tied to collective memory, and this connection, having been examined in earlier chapters, is now looked at from a fresh perspective. The analysis presented here is both historical and psychological, and is far from detached. Ramzi Suleiman is both a sophisticated social psychologist, at home with prevailing theories and experiments, and a Palestinian who has experienced this imposed marginality all his life. This chapter offers a unique perspective both theoretically and personally.
In this paper I use a Foucault-inspired framework to study the function and performance of temporality in the discourse of Palestinian-Israeli politics. I argue that Palestinians are constituted as being without time. They are not with time; not with a past, or a future. Phrased differently, temporality is performed in the discourse of Palestinian-Israeli politics such that Palestinians are denied a position in time, they are only ever of a time, and they are not for time. They have been made to be without time by a long line of peace initiatives, including but not limited to the Oslo agreements (1993-2000) and the Quartet Statement of 2011. The initiatives are ahistorical, their omnipresence makes the Palestinian condition temporary – of a time, and their privileging of Israeli ‘security’ denies Palestinians futurity. By isolating Palestinians from time and controlling their activities with time these performances are complicit in Israel’s regime of dispossession in Palestine.
With the originality and energy that have marked his earlier works, Eric Wolf now explores the historical relationship of ideas, power, and culture. Responding to anthropology's long reliance on a concept of culture that takes little account of power, Wolf argues that power is crucial in shaping the circumstances of cultural production. Responding to social-science notions of ideology that incorporate power but disregard the ways ideas respond to cultural promptings, he demonstrates how power and ideas connect through the medium of culture. Wolf advances his argument by examining three very different societies, each remarkable for its flamboyant ideological expressions: the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico, and National Socialist Germany. Tracing the history of each case, he shows how these societies faced tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises, prompting ideological responses that drew on distinctive, historically rooted cultural understandings. In each case study, Wolf analyzes how the regnant ideology intertwines with power around the pivotal relationships that govern social labor. Anyone interested in the history of anthropology or in how the social sciences make comparisons will want to join Wolf in Envisioning Power.
The central aim of this study is to elucidate the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony. The author proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality, and discusses the status of various types of meaning with respect to this definition. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized. The nature, paths, and mechanisms of diachronic sense changes of the relevant type, as well as the motivations for them, are discussed in some detail. The author combines insights from different sources, prominently frame-based semantics, historical pragmatics, and Peircean semiotics, to arrive at a model of linguistic meaning that is both synchronically and diachronically dynamic, hence capable of integrating structure and usage. As a case study, the synchronic uses and diachronic evolution of the exceptionally polyfunctional French phasal adverbs deja ('already'), encore ('still/yet'), toujours ('still'), and enfin ('finally') are analyzed in some detail, with particular attention being paid to the semantic vs pragmatic nature of the various uses of these items. The book will be of interest to lexical semanticists, pragmaticians, historical linguists, functional/cognitive linguists, discourse analysts, and semioticians.
http://www.brill.com/particles-semanticspragmatics-interface
This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and polit-ical developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year "Village Files" project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner "caucus" of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans cul-minating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. The article ends with a statement of one of the author's underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, vet-eran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 1 That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the sys-tematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. 2 The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to pre-vent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine. 3 The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. This fourth and ILAN PAPPÉ, an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Haifa University, is the author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (I.B. Tauris, 1994) and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The current article is extracted from early chapters of his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming in October 2006).
Causal inference and the logic of historical explanation are grounded in temporality. Yet the relationship between causal analysis and aspects of temporality, such as duration, tempo, acceleration, and timing, is often less clear. Using examples from analyses of institutional change and postcommunist regime transitions, the author argues that aspects of temporality allow us to predict which causal mechanisms can unfold and to differentiate causal sequences. Explicitly specifying the role of temporality can thus improve scholars’ understanding of political mechanisms, sequences, and the processes they constitute.
The failure of the Oslo Accords has been widely attributed to its exclusion of issues of truth and reconciliation from the political process. As a result, the period since the Accords has witnessed a resurgence of the status of memory in Palestinian discourse, manifested in increasing commemorations of the Palestinian nakba and oral history projects. The article examines this upsurge of memory and ‘truth and reconciliation’ as political idioms in the discourse of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and civil society organizations. It examines the key means whereby the public acknowledgement of Palestinian and Israeli collective memories of violence in 1948 have been increasingly cast as preconditions for the endurance of any political order. It argues that the most sustainable Palestinian truth and reconciliation discourse is that which calls both for Israel to acknowledge responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and for Palestinians to actively engage with the means whereby Israelis might be brought to recognize the necessity of an apology for it.
This paper outlines an approach to fieldwork on the semantics and pragmatics of deixis. Deictic expressions, such as English ‘this, that, here, there,’ are typically used to individuate referential objects in relation to the indexical ground of utterance context. Drawing on long-term research on Yucatec Maya, the paper argues that the basis of deixis is not the spatial contiguity of the referent, but rather the access (perceptual, cognitive, social) that participants have to the referent. In order to properly determine the conventional meanings of deictics in any language, fieldwork should focus on the paradigmatic oppositions among deictic expressions, on metalinguistic glosses of deictics by native speakers, and on ordinary usage under a variety of socially structured circumstances. It is argued that, like other kinds of ethnographic research, elicitation should be conducted in the target language in order to gain access to the contextual schemas through which speakers apprehend context. Properly analyzed, referential deixis proves to be highly systematic, tractable to fieldwork, and central to pragmatics.
This is an essential read for anyone interested in the way language is used in the world of politics. Based on Aristotle's premise that we are all political animals, able to use language to pursue our own ends, the book uses the theoretical framework of linguistics to explore the ways in which we think and behave politically. Contemporary and high profile case studies of politicians and other speakers are used, including an examination of the dangerous influence of a politician's words on the defendants in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. International in its perspective, Analysing Political Discourse also considers the changing landscape of political language post-September 11, including the increasing use of religious imagery in the political discourse of, amongst others, George Bush. Written in a lively and engaging style, this book provides an essential introduction to political discourse analysis.
In this book, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice, a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations, such as topical structures, storytelling, argumentation, local semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover, it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.
Discourse Studies is the largest, most complete, most diverse and only multidisciplinary introduction to the field. Now combined into a single volume, this essential handbook: Is fully updated from start to finish to cover contemporary debates and research literature; covers everything from grammar, narrative, argumentation, cognition and pragmatics to social, political and critical approaches; adds two new chapters on ideology and identity; puts the student at the center, offering brand new features such as worked examples, sample analyses and recommended further reading Written and edited by world-class scholars in their fields, it is the essential, one-stop companion for any student of discourse analysis and discourse studies.
What happens to linguistic deixis theory if co-speech gestures are considered? In this paper I will argue for a redefined concept of
origo
. It allows us to eliminate a contradiction inherent in the
origo
instantiation of local deixis between the verbal and gestural levels. The contradiction demonstrated in my example is that, for the same conceptual relation, the
origo
of the verbal level is allocated to the addressee, whereas the
origo
of the gestural level is allocated to the speaker himself.
The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.
Indexicality in Communication and ThoughtThe Challenge of IndexicalityDeictic Expressions in Semantic TheoryThe Role of Pragmatics in the Resolution of Deictic Expressions: a Close Look at Demonstrative SystemsThe Fields of DeixisConclusion
Notes
There are two traditionally rival views about the nature of time: substantivalism that takes time to be a substance that exists independently of events located in it, and relationism that takes time to be constructed out of events. In this paper, first, I want to make some progress with respect to the debate between these two views, and I do this mainly by examining the strategies they use to face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’. As we shall see, the two allegedly very different rival views are much less different than has been thought: their structure is extremely similar, their strategies are extremely similar, and they can both face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’ in the same way. Thus, I argue in favour of a certain kind of equivalence between the two views; I discuss a Strong and a Weak version of this claim; and I provide reasons for endorsing the former. I also discuss the parallel between this pair of views about the nature of time and another analogous pair of views: the bundle theory and the substratum theory about the nature of material objects, with respect to the problem with Identity of Indiscernibles.
This chapter deals with the problem of power and the issues it poses for anthropology. It reveals that there are different modes of power, each pertaining to a different level of social relations: from power attributed to the endowment of the individual person, to power produced in interpersonal relations, to tactical or organizational power set in motion to direct or limit the action of others, to structural power that informs the thrusts of society. The relation between tactical (or organizational) power and structural power helps to explain the world one inhabits. It aids in understanding anthropology as a cumulative undertaking, as well as a collective quest that moves in ever-expanding circles, a quest that depends upon the contributions of everyone, and for which all are responsible.