A country’s international reputation has profound implications for its citizens; given that national image or reputation is built and circulated using language on a global scale, translation is necessarily involved. This project draws on bilingual corpora of government and media texts to examine how Canada was framed in the discourses and narratives in circulation in its two official languages at the time of the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits, using concepts and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, narrative theory, and corpus linguistics. Examining some aspects of language in use such as collocation, semantic relations, and metaphor, several of the ways in which Canada was framed in the two contexts and languages were compared. The project concludes that discourses and narratives may differ between sources and languages, thereby highlighting the importance of recognizing the impact of translation on the variety of national representations within discourses and narratives.

Kan Prateepjinda Terrorism in Popular Culture: A Discourse Analysis of the Portrayal of IRA Terrorism in Films Abstract The paper begins by asserting that -terrorism‖ is a social construct based on discourse from a particular historical context, and that our understanding of terrorism is fashioned by that discourse. It goes on to argue that film, as a powerful medium of popular culture, generates meaning of social events and gives filmgoers a feeling of reality; film functions as a second view on the world, guiding audiences from reel to real. The study shows how the forty-year long (1968-2008) history of IRA terrorism is portrayed through a selection of eight films, and the -articulation‖ and -interpellation‖ are studied empirically through the portrayal of terrorism in these films. The discourse on terrorism is analyzed in terms of discourse productivity, and the study uses Foucault's genealogy to trace the -history of present-day IRA terrorism.‖ The findings show that discursive formations are displayed as four different features of IRA terrorism constructed by film language and textual language. These different features reveal the discontinuity of the discourse that is framed by particular time periods. The paper concludes that IRA terrorism (and the acts of IRA terrorists), as portrayed in the eight...

This paper aims to show how people use and understand metaphorical language in conversational discourse. Specifically, I examine how metaphorical language has the potential to be either effective or ineffective in its usage, and how they are bound to the contextual environment of the conversation. This particular setting is a conversation between a researcher and a participant involved in a therapeutic program. Metaphorical language is shown to be helpful for understanding difficult subjects; however, I found most metaphorical occurrences ineffective in meaning-making. Often these ineffective metaphors are elaborated or repeated throughout the discourse event, creating problems with cohesion and understanding. Metaphor use in conversation is an effective rhetorical tool for creating meaning, but it is also a problematic device when it comes to aligning participants' conversational goal.

Building on existing research on self-referencing persuasion and narrative health communication, this study examined the persuasive effects of a linguistic message strategy-narrative point of view-and assessed the effects of first-person point of view as compared to third-person point of view. Web-based experimental results (N = 222) showed that the first-person point of view brought about higher levels of character identification and perceived susceptibility than third-person point of view, while the two points of view were equally effective in evoking transportation, self- referencing, and perceived severity. The results also indicated that self-referencing fully mediated the positive relationship between transportation/identification and perceived susceptibility. Yet self-referencing showed no significant impact on perceived severity, whereas more transportation/identification directly led to more perceived severity. Theoretical and practical recommendations are provided for health practitioners, and social media health campaigns

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Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This paper analyzes the relationship between the global discourse on the environment and the discourse occurring in Nahuel Huapi, Argentina over the 20th century through the year 2007. This paper applies discourse analysis theory as used by Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to the history of environmental discourse on a global, national, and local level. It assesses the institution of language and dialog through personal narrative , metaphor, rhetorical devices, and formal documentation in order to interpret the ways in which global environmental discourse has reached Nahuel Huapi. The primary examples of global discourse used are historical accounts by environmental sociologists , histories of the United Nations' incorporation of environmental discourse , and anthropological accounts of the global indigenous discourse. National linkages are made through studies of international treaties ratified by the Argentine government and laws implemented throughout the state. Local linkages are further made through anthropological assessments of local discourse as well as personal interviews . I analyze the global, national and local discourses in that order with a chronological focus throughout. Existing analyses of environmental institutions and their effectiveness tend to focus on the formal proceedings of international organizations, private citizens , or community actors but most fail to assess the informal mechanisms by which these global institutions can affect action at the local level. By arguing that language and dialog are indeed socialand political institutions, I conclude that through discourse, the international environmental regime has strongly affected local environmental discourse in Nahuel Huapi Argentina through two channels: 1) the National Parks System, which the international regime has impacted mainly through United Nations forums such as conferences and summits on the environment and development. 2) The Mapuche community , which the international regime has impacted mainly through the inclusion of indigenous communities in the international forum and the legitimization that the United Nations provides these communities with regard to environmental stewardship and selfdetermination. The study shows that early in the 20th century, when the Mapuche community and the government of Argentina were isolated from any global discourse , the dialog between them was virtually non-existent. [TRUNCATED] / 2999-01-01

This present study examines the structural impact of language contact on discourse information marking in narrative. It focuses on the surface patterns and underlying linguistic principles used to describe the foregrounding events in traditional and modem short stories, written in Indonesian (the official language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native language of West Java province). These two languages have been in an intensive contact since 1945.The data indicate that aspect sets apart background from foreground, whereas tense distinguishes ordinary from significant within the background and foreground levels. Cross-linguistically, the ordinary background information appears in existential, stative, and progressive constructions, marked by the underlying past-tense and imperfective aspect; the significant background and significant foreground types occur in a direct speech and/or direct quote, with the underlying Historical Present. Besides signaling a switch from the past-tense to the HP, the direct speech or direct quote also marks a shift in deixis, distal to proximal. The ordinary foreground information, containing events that advance the story, appears in the underlying past-tense and perfective aspect.The surface markings of the ordinary foreground events, however, are different. In the traditional and modern Indonesian data, these events are dominantly depicted in the active-voice structure. The traditional and modern Sundanese texts, on the other hand, show two different dominant surface marking patterns: the KA (particle) and the active-voice constructions respectively. This appears as a shift in the surface marking strategy attributed to the Indonesian structural influence. The KA- to active voice surface-marking strategy shift indicates the change from the KA + Topic – Comment pattern to the Subject – Predicate structure, suggesting the adoption of the SVX word-order pattern. This affects not only the pragmatic relations of the constituents in an utterance, but also the marking of given-new information distinction.The study demonstrates that the KA to active-voice marking shift in the modern Sundanese data is mitigated by the long-term language contact with Indonesian. Follow-up investigations with varied narrative themes and oral speech data are warranted. Since the shift also appears to indicate the authors' unbalanced bilingual skills, it raises an issue pertinent to the current teaching of Sundanese in the West-Javanese provincial curriculum. / Department of English

abstract: This study tests the hypothesis and assumption of much critical scholarship that the discourse of mass media news transmits prejudicial ideologies to news consumers, influencing the way they think about social justice issues and non-dominant groups in American society, including immigrants, women, and African-Americans. Taking off from the motivations and premises of Critical Discourse Analysis concerning language, power, and ideology, this study aims to extend that paradigm in several ways by applying the analytic techniques of cognitive and critical linguistics to uncover implicit representations in biased discourse. This study also goes beyond previous work by examining the reader comments on media texts to understand how the media’s discourse was received and interpreted, with a focus on the covert transmission of ideological messages. The results reveal how ideologies of prejudice are communicated implicitly through media discourse and how readers’ own ideologies influence that process, as evidenced by their comments. As a study in Critical Discourse Analysis, this study uncovers abuses of power impacting social justice – in this case, the power of writing for the mass media to mold American minds, and therefore influence Americans’ behavior, including elections. Specific news articles from the American networks CNN and Fox were chosen on each of two topics for their relevance to current sociopolitical issues of prejudice and social justice: the US Supreme Court June 2018 decision to uphold the Trump administration “travel ban” and the January 2019 Gillette advertisement, considered controversial for its seemingly feminist criticism of male behavior. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

How do the Swedish police get represented in news media and how does that representation differentiate from other media channels where the police have full control over what is said? Through a discourse analysis of news texts and extracts from the police own webpage and Facebook page, we claim that the discourse in newspapers and the discourse on the webpage and Facebook page is pretty much the same, only packaged differently.