Critical Discourse Analysis - Science topic

لا

Critical Stylistics primarily focuses on the analysis of literary texts, delving into the aesthetic and linguistic choices within creative works. While it can address ideological themes within literature, its primary concern is with the artistic aspects of language use. In contrast, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) encompasses a broader range of discourse types, including politics, media, and everyday communication, with a central emphasis on how language constructs and reflects power relations and social ideologies. CDA's main goal is to uncover and critique the ideological dimensions of language in various social contexts, making it more directly concerned with ideology than Critical Stylistics.

Agreed Hsin-Yuan Chen .And for further understanding, you can read a few papers using these together Manolet Palma

Hi,

Yes, you can utilise corpus linguistics on its own to examine the representation of Christian identity in a text. Qualitative analysis can centre on keyword frequency, collocations, and concordance lines for insights. However, interpretation might be limited without supplementary CDA methods.

Hope this helps.

Critical discourse analysis is its own self-contained method. Textbooks which list a limited number of methods and strategies (e.g., case study, grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenology, etc.) do not have enough space to list every possible approach to qualitative research.

Hello,

I would advise you to use corpus linguistic analysis.

You can create your own corpus in a text file and download Lancsbox (Lancaster university). With respect to the analysis, you can use the keyword technique to explore the major themes (topoi) in your corpora.

For example, you need to compile a corpus of texts from different sources (corpus of the daily mail on Syrian conflic + corpus of CNN on Syrian conflict) and so on.

The keyword technique will allow you to extract the major themes from each corpus you analyse via Lancsbox.

I hope this answered your query.

Best regards,

You may use the Matadiscourse Markers to assess the level of conversational and conventional engagement in the Reportage

The wisest thing is to test several of them on your corpus, with patience !!

This project sounds wonderful. I hope you're enjoying working on it!

From my perspective, it is a good idea to write honestly about the challenges and realities of selecting films and why you did/didn't choose certain things, and it sounds like you have a good starting point for this already with your textual dialogue bit (though remember to define what you mean by textual dialogue). Some questions to reflect on: are they all from a specific country? Are they in different languages or one? Are they studio films, independent films, a mix? So you might say, for example, you are focusing on Anglophone studio films if you are, or a mix if you're not. Again remember to define, eg what is a studio film. Are they on streaming services or did you see at festivals, cinemas etc? You might be honest about what you've been exposed to/able to locate and recognise there will be more examples you've not come across or been able to see due to access challenges (not being available to watch or not subtitled in a language you speak, for example). Reflect on how you did actually identify them - did you ask around, or had you just seen these 30 films already? Did you Google search?

So basically, describe how you selected them and reflect critically on this process and you should be fine. It is likely to be a question that comes up in a viva if you're going to have one for this project so be prepared to chat about it too, and remember there isn't a 'right' way to select texts so reflecting on how/why you did what you did is key.

Best of luck with your project!

Thank you for your kind reply, sir..

The research sample is selected from three print media, with the following classification:

1. Right-wing party newspaper

2 . Left-leaning newspaper

3 . A private, non-partisan newspaper.

Or the sample is selected as follows:

1. partisan newspaper.

a. A party newspaper hostile to it.

p. Government newspaper.

My MA thesis applies a structural narrative theory to an author's text. I will update on this when the journal article is available. Watch the space!

Thankyou Sir. I will definitely try this

I would recommend Sarah Ahmed"s The Cultural Politics of Emotions, which casts light on the relationship among language, social structures and bodies. Combining queer, feminist, and Marxist theories Ahmed emphasizes how emotions move in the intersection of bodies and categories like of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. Emotions move through the circulation and materialization of bodies in repeated social discursive acts.

Thank you very much for the reading recommendation. I realize that social interactions within the scope of Discourse Analysis go in the same direction as understanding Symbolic Interactionism, which is very interesting for my research on social memory.

Hello,

In my opinion Van Dijk's Socio-cognitive model might be an effective method for your research.

I would go for one of the books below:

1. Critical Discourse Analysis (2020) by Michael Farrelly (Sage)

2. The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis: an Introduction (2013) by Meriel Bloor and Thomas Bloor (Routledge)

Hi dear friends,

Thank you very much for sharing the great information with me.

Hi, Fatin Ilia Ahmat ! To analyse the language behind their reasoning for not reporting, I suggest doing interviews/focus groups among people who have been sexually harassed. It might be difficult to conduct a data collection that requires going to a field work, but perhaps there is a way you can do this virtually?

You can perform discourse analysis, and as you analyse your data, some themes will emerge. You can decide which aspect of language and linguistics to focus on from there. Perhaps narrative analysis if you do interviews/focus group discussions? That way, you can particularly look at their experiences and examine the factors that may influence their decision in not reporting their sexual harassment encounters.

Hope this helps. :)

An interpretation is considered admissible if it's not in contradiction with the text, but since the text is open and polysemous, the return to the text is often insufficient to determine the validity of the interpretations, which are diverses and can be contradictory. Literary interpretation is both subjective and in part conditioned by interpretative communities (Fish). We cannot use a criterion of truth (true / false) but an intersubjective validation process (admissible / contestable), in other words to be admissible an interpretation must be recognized as such by other readers. We must then turn to the explanation by the readers of the sources of their interpretations. In my educational research, I have shown that teachers refer more to literary culture and students to the values ​​shared in their communities as well as to their personal experiences of the world. Thank you for the rich discussion!

I suggest Text World Theory and/or Menatl Space Theory. However, modality itself due to its categories and subcategories makes a very good theoretical framework for the analysis of any discourse.

Given that you have a corpus in the electronic version, I would definitely consider using some stylometric indexes and thematic concentration, or carrying out keyword and collocation analyses, etc. They could provide you with a solid springboard for further interpretations.

Its strength lies in that it delves into the underlying relations involved in discourse. Thus, it tries to provide an in-depth investigation of the power relations that can be unfolded in the discourse at hand.

Thank you - all very helpful.

Dear Dr Hashim, You can consult Paltridge's Discourse Analysis (2012) for a survey of the available models. Besides, the size and orientation of your dataare both influential in adopting or adapting a suitable model.

As far as I understand the articles, they are both about Iranian migrants attempting to cross The Channel. So, if may not be an "incident" in the strict sense, I would say that these articles are about the same topic and therefore comparable.

Best wishes, Marie

Does this help you -

https://www.academia.edu/3800430/Introduction_to_Critical_Discourse_Analysis_2010_

Actually, you have listed four items instead of three. For what I know, factor analysis is a statistical method. Descriptive and critical discourse analysis are analyses of texts with different foci. Not sure about the last one.

Thanks a lot for yout valuable advices Zouheir Maalej and Reza Biria

The decisions involved in combining any two methods within mixed methods depend on not only the purposes that each separate method will serve but also the ways in which you plan to integrate what you learn from each method.

One possible mixed method approach that you might consider is a sequential Explanatory design. (QUANT --> qual). In this case the qualitative method serves as a follow-up study to help explain the results of the original quantitative study. In particular, the role of the qual study is often to explain how and why the quant study produced the results that it did.

This is because you don't know how to write. How do you think writers create "fake" -what an absurd qualificative for creation- characters and emotions if not basing themselves on real life? Do you really think they have any other building material? From outer space, maybe? It comes from their own life or from friends' or even from the news. That's why at times novels express better a society at a certain time (Love in cholera times, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, f.e.), and then are more "real" than any scholar approach with statistics.

Can I recommend this vlog by Prof. Tara Brabazon. She speaks about grey literature in academic research. In ways that support this endeavor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRMkL4Fbc4

In short, yes, use grey literature.

I am currently drafting a journal article, using Fairclough's discourse analysis in a new an innovative way. Be brave. lead the world. show us your way. If I were you,

I would analyse the secondary texts in the same way i analysed the primary texts, to prove to the reader there is rigor in the analysis, to the degree that I was consistent with the analysis of both types of sources and can therefore compare / link analysis of the primary and secondary texts.

One popular criticism of CDA is that texts are not analyzed as rigourously and comprehensively as claimed in different CDA approaches (Faircloughian CDA included). This criticsm is problematic in that it is simply impossible do a "full" analysis of each text (i.e. analyze every single linguistic or semiotic feature in every single text) as this will result in a lack of analytical focus in one single paper/ project.

I am not familiar with corpus methodogies and how to code a corpus of texts for doing CDA. But to do a Faircloughian CDA, you must first identity the feature(s) you want to scrutinize. Perhaps you should first manually look at some of texts you have and see if there are any recurring patterns (can be at the lexical level, syntactic level or even the generic level - or all/some of them). This is a "pilot observational study". And if all the texts in your corpus come from the same source (e.g. the same newspaper/ the same instituion), then these recurring patterns may presumably be in more of your texts and you can start coding your texts according to these identified features. Based on these identified features, you will need to choose relevant analytical tools for your analysis. Some people also tend to test a parcular method of analysis and if that's your plan, then you need to already have an analytical tool in mind before identifying features. But this way of doing research may be more time-consuming as you never know whether the method of analysis fits your data.

Thank you very much for answering my question, Reza Biria, Ali Salman Hummadi

Check me on researchgate and you would hopefully find some articles addressing the issue.

Thank you so much for the suggestions. I really appreciate them. I'm still trying to understand how I can fit some of the suggestions into my research. It's a daunting task to say the least! Thanks again.

As a branch of critical social analysis, CDA tends to focus on discourse and on the relations between discourse and other social elements , particularly on the way discourse figures in ideologies and power relations. As such politicians and experts in advertising usually use a specific language that is intended to have an effect on its audience. Rhetorical devices such as repetition, metaphor, and irony are most frequent stylistic elements that public orators calling on targeted populations frequently employ. Among these, irony plays a pivotal role since it is the reflection of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for emphasizing an intended idea adorned with humor. In point of fact, ironical messages are conveyed through metaphor and leave a more profound trace in the mind of the addressee. Politicians are crowd pleasers and they use irony to achieve this end.

Oke ..

Hi Mark,

This is fantastic. Thank you massively.

So the coding is based on theory and obviously personal bias. Because Im studying text - and furthermore literary - I'm delayering the study.

So, to avoid bias in this situation, as much as possible, I'm considering the authorial intent within the wider parameters of rhetorical function and then against genre-specific function?

Do you think surmising against these wider frames of significance protect - as much as one can - against bias?

Again, thank you. You have really got me thinking.

Ill refer to these refs.

Best

Anja

Dear Jamal,

You have to have a good command of Systemic Functional Grammar by M. Halliday. The common denominator of Fairclough, van Dijk , Hodge and Kress and van Leeuwen is their employment of Systemic Functional Grammar. If you would like to focus on "who did what to whom, what is not said rather than what is said" concerning social power abuse, dominance and inequality, read Halliday.

Best,

N. Kansu-Yetkiner

Hi Regine,

I think it's rather difficult to answer your question without knowing a bit more about your research project. With CDA in mind for what? Ashkan's reply assumes (perhaps rightly) that you aim to carry out some kind of textual analysis. If so, which text or texts, and why?

I agree with the previous answer that evidence of power abuse may not always be linguistic in nature. The only suggestion I can make is that the power abuse may sometimes be marked by the use of either lexical items or propositions that can be interpreted as either patronising or explicitly insulting towards those who are perceived by the speaker/writer to be of lower rank or status in a given social environment.

I think it is better to design a new syllabus with chapters chosen from different sources .It will be more enriching

certainly, the role of teachers' power and control in classroom conversations is significant, they initiate and provide feedback and follow -up activities. critical discourse analysis should be done through classroom observations and recording to investigate this power critically.

Why not .....given .. you understand the interdisciplinary nature of CDA and you are aware of the criticisms against it,you can develop a proposal ...,employing mixed -methods approach which can enable tackle possible flaws could be useful

This depending on incubation period, increasing incubation period more than 72h Increase your chances of getting spores... good luck

As you know, according to CDA, language is a form of social practice. From this perspective, you can describe, interpret, analyze, or critique social and political life reflected in text by using critical discourse analysis (CDA). For the application of CDA specific research methodology in the analysis of political discourse, especially at the level of international relations, I recommend:

Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis edited by Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer (2001).

Chilton, P. and C. Schäffner (2002). Introduction: Themes and Principles in the Analysis of Political Discourse. In P. Chilton and C. Schäffner (eds.), Politics as Text and Talk. Approaches to Political Discourse. 1–41.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

If you refer to the strategies for analizing discourse from a CDA perspective, perhaps chapter 10 of my book "Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice" could be of help.

All best,

Laura Alba-Juez

 Thanks, Dr. Doyle, for interesting links related to my answer. The second link did not work, but I have found the correct link is as follows (comparison of the two shows that a spacing after "ioe-" was a problem):

I think such kind of work relates to a field study as identifying people avoiding doing their responsibility is somehow fuzzy. On what criteria can you pass a judgement on whether X is avoiding her/his responsibility or not? I could not get the point of doing an "historical" research, why historical?  

Dear Inayat,

First, I will situate this question within the UK state education system as I am not clear at which teaching position you are aiming.  There are very different practical elements and expectations on 'teacher' based on their organisation (nursery, primary, secondary, college, university). 

For example, in state schools, there is a much greater demand on marking and planning compared to university.  For example, as a secondary school teacher, my working life was teaching, marking, planning. This is similar for primary schools too.  If we take my wife, for example, she leaves home about 7am in the morning and returns about 6pm. By 730pm she is marking the students work so that she can plan her lessons for the next day and typically finishes about 11pm. My practical life at university focuses on other facets but can be equally as time demanding. 

There are many blogs on the internet which cover work-life balance (example attached). Also, within the Uk all teacher unions carry stress surveys which include work-life balance data (see attached). 

Hope this helps

Dear Reza Biria,

Thank you for your answer and your interesting comments and files, some of which I already knew, especially Hyland and Tse (2004), which I have largely used in my own research and in my master's classes (www.uv.es/maes). It is true that the issues concerning the inner weakness of the model have been pointed out in a number of ways, but it is also true that, as far as I know, there haven't been serious theoretical or methodological proposals on how to tackle this problem. This is why I have posed the question here. As I said before, some colleagues and myself will hold a round table at the next CILC 2017 in Paris, where we'll attempt to pinpoint the problem taking into account our own research difficulties and results from different variables (corpus, genre, domain and language). We'll also try to reach some conclusions/proposals that can help further research. I would also like to refer you to the following file, which is my humble contribution to this matter so far. Once the round table is approved by the CILC committee I will announce it in this platform.

Best,

Francisca Suau-Jiménez

Maybe you can find some more ideas in this journal (it is bilingual  - Porteguese and English):

 http://revistas.pucsp.br/bakhtiniana

Although I made my doctorate with Greimas, I would not recommend getting involved with his complicated theories, given the rather modest aim of you interest in narrativity. I think the best text on narrativity, with no particular epistemological presuppositions, in Logique de récit, by Claude Bremond from 1973. As far as I know, there is no English translation. The best overview in English may still be Narratology : the form and functioning of narrative, by Gerald Prince, from 1982. Both references are rather old, but Prince at least has an ongoing online handbook project here: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/users/gerald-prince

Best wishes

Göran Sonesson

Choosing your framwork depends very much on your goals. Joost Schilperoord and myself are preparing a chapter on editorial cartoons from an argument theoretical point of view, based on a lecture we gave in the Cognitive Linguistics conference

Schilperoord, J., & van den Hoven, P. J. (2011, July). Interpreting visual arguments in cartoons. Paper presented at the 11th ICLA Conference, Xian, China.

Joost published a very nice article on Iwo Jima cartoons:

Schilperoord, J. (2013), Raising the Issue: A Mental-Space Approach to Iwo Jima-Inspired Editorial Cartoons. Metaphor and Symbol, 28. 185-212.

 I think that a cognitive approach (mental space theory or some other conceptual framework) is very productive. Also look at the methods used in:

Schilperoord, J. & Maes, A. A. (2009), Visual metaphoric conceptualization in editorial cartoons. In C. J. Forceville & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.), Multimodal metaphor. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 213–243.

For a (cognitive) rhetorical approach you can take a look at my book (Gold mining, see here on RG).

References to more political appraoches are easy to find in for example Schilperoord 2013.

Hi! I am not an expert in CDA, What I have done is research with surveys + interviews. In that case, the results of the quantitative analysis helped me to design the sample for the qualitative part. The qualitative sample was designed following the lines of variation found with survey data.  If you found that tweets vary according to characteristics A, B and C, then you need to draw at least three samples of tweets for the qualitative part: one sample of those that comply with charact A, another sample that comply with charact B, etc.  This is just a suggestion, whilst someone with more expertise in CDA can answer. Warm regards,

Inés 

Hello! I have analysed 33 years of Singapore's education (neo-liberal) policies using various forms of CDA approaches and formulating my own theoretical-analytical framework in the process.

This is a link to my thesis: "Inequality as meritocracy: a critical discourse analysis of the metaphors of flexibility, diversity, and choice, and the value of truth in Singapore’s education policies, 1979 - 2012" http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:382530

I have also published an article from it: "INEQUALITY AS MERITOCRACY

The use of the metaphor of diversity and the value of inequality within Singapore's meritocratic education system" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405904.2015.1034740?journalCode=rcds20

Critical hermeneutic analysis is concerned with the analysis of ideas, treating statements as resources (e.g. Foucault, Derrida). As a result, this kind of analysis is rather abstract even thought the analysis attempts to reveal what is hidden in the text. Simply put, critical hermeneutic analysis lacks social analysis including intertextuality. CDA attempts to explain the opaque relationships between language and social world. Text is the evidence on which the analysis is based. The most fundamental difference between the two is that CDA is a political project in which the analysts take a position, usually of the dominated one.  

Which of Myers-Scotton's theories are you referring to? Since you mention 'diglossic' code-switching and this refers to high- and low-status languages or varieties, I would assume that you are referring to her social theories of markedness and rational actors, outlined in Myers-Scotton (1993), Social motivations for code switching. If so I would agree with the above reply suggesting Garcia's translanguaging, and would also recommend Pennycook and Makoni's (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages, and the state-of the-art overview of code switching research in Gardner-Chloros's 2009 book Code-switching.

Dear Onwu,

Widdowson's "Text, Context, Pretext" might be helpful for you insofar Widdowson's book provides a critical engagement with Critical Discourse Analysis. He discusses in depth various ways of understanding and defining "context".

Regards,

Ingmar

P.S. By way of advertising my own work, if I may, I like to point you to a paper in which I sketch an approach to ethnographic and postconstructivist discourse analysis which allows for studying text and context and their politics empirically, without the need to imagine some "normative conditions" that are actually out of scope of the study.

Interculturalism strengthens connections with other countries by accepting their immigrants into our society.As people come together different ideas are shared and others can learn things from cultures that can help make the community better. Pizza for example is a food loved around Canada but it was made by the Italians.

Hai Made,

Attahed abstract about leadership, you can contact me for more discussion. thanks

I will share them with you ,  inayat, 

these are my papers on CDA:

Dear Ali,

Unlike Wafa, I believe that cDA and CDA are not the same. Such a difference is best defined based on the level of analysis. Clearly, when you adopt a micro-level, pragmalinguistic approach, you simply focus on features of texture and surface level elements like discourse markers, diectic elements, thematic progression, and so on. However, on a more esoteric, macro-level involving a sociopragmatic analysis, the analyst tries to use discursive elements as a resource for fathoming out writers'/speakers world of ideation and cognition.

Best regards,

R. Biria

Small story analysis coupled with CDA sounds like a good combination! Here's a piece that you may find useful, both for mining references and for seeing small stories methodology applied.

Dear Akin Adetunji,

I'd suggest you the two following volumes:

- Duszak, Anna (ed.). 2002. Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

- Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula  (ed.) Constructing Collectivity: ‘We’ across Languages and Contexts, Benjamins.

Best wishes,

Carla Bazzanella

Dear Violetta Kopinska,

Following the guidelines provided by Halliday (1994); Fairclough (2003) and Kress, and van Leeuwen(2000), interdiscursivity in CDA involves a mediating level of analysis which is crucial to integrating social and linguistic analyses. I think you can see a clear example by reading may paper investigating G.W. Bush's and Obama's second term inaugural speeches published in Journal of Pragmatics . A prominent figure on this line of research is also  Alessandro Capone.

I hope this can help.

Good luck with your research.

Best regards,

R. Biria

Your question is very general, but most relevant. It is indeed essential to be aware of these differences.

The general tendency is a move away from language as structure towards language use with references to Wittgenstein (meaning as use) and speech act theory (speaking as acting; how to do things with words).

A first important publication was Foucaults "L'ordre du discours" (introductiry lecture at the Collège de France in 1970). Foucault's poststructuralist and postmodernist theory links discourse to implicit power structures.

The power perspective is not general in discourse analysis. Researchers coming from different disciplines take different angles. Sociologists put the emphasis on sense construction, whereas linguists stress the pragmatic aspect by opposing text and discourse. In both cases a reconstruction of social reality via text analysis is an important point. Norman Fairclogh "Discourse and Social Change" (1992) provides a practical overview.

The discourse concept of Habermas and Apel is different from the fore mentioned line. There focus is on communicative acting.

 Hello Umar and fellow scholars. This question is very relevant to my research interests on the topic of the representation of Islam and Muslims, especially in English-speaking countries. It would be great to have your thoughts on the attached questions.

I don't know exactly what Emma wants through the question. Even though I will not add something very different from what Christine and Jessica said, I will venture a few comments or points about CDA methods. "CDA methodologies" is van Dijk's favorite way of doing CDA; he denies the status of "theory" to CDA. Across the four "schools" of CDA (van Dijk, Wodak, Fairclough, and Gee), I find van Dijk's methods more in line with critical linguistics (a la Fowler and Halliday) and pedagogical for teaching and even research purposes. van Dijk proceeds methodologically in his socio-cognitive perspective through framing, lexical items, syntactic structures, semantic strategies, and rhetorical strategies. I think this confirms Emma's "dissecting and codifying texts and social patterns." However, CDA for van Dijk is more than that. He argues that:

“Indeed, if we want to explain what discourse is all about, it would be insufficient to merely analyse its internal structures, the actions being accomplished, or the cognitive operations involved in language use. We need to account for the fact that discourse as social action is being engaged in within a framework of understanding, communication and interaction which is in turn part of broader sociocultural structures and processes” (van Dijk, 1997: p. 21).

Van Dijk, Teun A. “Political Discourse and Political Cognition.” Proceedings on Congress on Political Discourse, Aston University, July 1997.

In line with van Dijk's socio-cognitive perspective and cognitive linguistics, I proposed to use the metaphoric processing of discourse as a rhetorical strategy:

Maalej, Z. (2007). Doing critical discourse analysis with the contemporary theory of metaphor: Towards a discourse model of metaphor. In C. Hart & D. Lukeš (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics in critical discourse studies: Application and theory (pp. 132-158). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Hi Isobel 

If I were in your shoes I would look at positive and negative emotions in the texts (Sentiment analysis). There are many approaches to examine this and my favorites would be estimating the changes overtime (before and after refugee case). There are many available online tools to text mining negative and positive emotions in the texts. One popualr software these days is LIWC, http://liwc.wpengine.com/. However, I always say that R is my best analysis choice. 

Examining these areas may tell something about the general trend of the media regarding the imposed type of emotions that they intend to spread among its audience (It is just a thought, nothing scientific here).

Best,

You should Know "Discourse in Society", http://www.discourses.org/,  It offers the work in critical discourse studies of Teun Van Dijk, one of the worl leaders in this field. Above all, it is essential to know his model to study representation on media. In this web yo can get for free his articles about ideology, racism, etc. related tu DCA.

Dear Sheeraz Ali,

Yes, you can apply CDA to poetry – I hope the following references/ links are of assistance

Kind regards

Paul Chaney

Dalia Gavriely-Nuri (2012) Cultural approach to CDA, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, February 2012, pages 77-85. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2011.636484

Snežana Dabić (2010) Discourse analysis versus philosophic reading of a literary text: The herne's egg, W.B. Yeats, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 7, Issue 2, May 2010, pages 113-125 DOI:10.1080/17405901003675414  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405901003675414

Arran Stibbe (2014) An Ecolinguistic Approach To Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Discourse StudiesVolume 11, Issue 1, January 2014, pages 117-128 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2013.845789

el-Malik, Shiera S. (2015) Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor, African Emotion and the poetry of politics, African Identities, Volume 13, Number 1, 2 January 2015, pp. 49-61. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.838368

Roberts; Brasel; Crawford (2014) Poetry as praxis: An exploration of poetry discourse as qualitative inquiry, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Volume 27, Number 4, 2 October 2014, pp. 167-181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.948262

Romanus, Aboh (2013) Proverbs and Euphemisms as Discourse Strategies in Joe Ushie's Poetry, African Studies, Volume 72, Number 1, 1 April 2013, pp. 107-120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2013.776199

So Musharraf's speech is given in Urdu and in English. Languages you both sufficiently speak.That is good. Do you also happen to have studied English and Urdu linguistics? If not it would be good to find someone to assist you to compare the linguistic features related to your research question (e.g. compare means to express something in one language as compared to the other)

Of course you write your analysis in English but the linguistic analysis has to be done based on Urdu linguistics for the Urdu part and based on English linguistic for the English part (if the languages differ with respect to the feature analysed). What specifically is your research question - the structure or phenomenon your interested in? Or is it just a descriptive analysis?

There are transcription rules for Urdu orthography to English (see file attached) to include readable transcriptions in your paper.

Best X.

It is important to define what we mean by "culture" and "identity." After a bit of reading and thought, I came up with this working definition of the first of these concepts:

"Culture. The collective ideas, values, and patterns of behavior of a group of people; culture consists of a set of intertwined subsystems, the generally blurry borders of which do not necessarily coincide; these cultural subsystems are transmitted and learned, and are constantly adapting to the changes in the geographic and social context of the group."

These cultural subsystems include things like economic strategies, social organization, material technologies, music, dance, visual symbolic systems, verbal symbolic systems, etc. Thus language is but one aspect of culture, intertwined (as Cameen says in the initial question) with these other aspects.

If you were to construct a three dimensional graphic model for plotting the distribution of cultural subsystems throughout space and time, then place within it data from groups of people living in some concrete geographic and chronological frame, you would probably find that each subsystem has distinct, blurry and overlapping boundaries. In some cases there may be no overlap at all. The complexity of the situation makes it difficult to make a clear association between language and other cultural subsystems, since these do not line up along neat boundaries, like those of political maps, which give us an extremely limited vision of human cultural complexity.

Ethnic identity is a separate but related matter. Language may be an important factor in defining ethnicity, but it is not the only one, nor is it a necessary component. Any cultural subsystem, or combination of these, may come into play. An individual's or a group's ethnicity is flexible and may change in a short span of time, as a response to a changing social and cultural context, and to internal processes of transformation. Nationalism may be thought of as a sort of macroethnicity, usually invented and imposed upon a population by a nation state.

In this framework, a bilingual person sometimes (but not always) learns to transcend his or her ethnocentricity, realizing that there are other equally valid ways of being and doing. This transcendental perspective permits one to have deeper interpersonal relationships with people from other cultural contexts, acquiring what I like to call a "horizontal gaze," that is, a healthy acceptance of their otherness.

Have a look on the Researchgate profile of Monnica Williams and colleagues. They published recently a few papers about this topic.

Hi Kady,

I think may textbooks hardly address the issues we come across. However, teachers need to pay attention towards publishing their own materials.