The present investigation is a mixed method study combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the use of "como" as a discourse marker in the Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona, based on a corpus of twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews of young male and female Spanish-English bilinguals. In a data set of 1148 occurrences of "como," 21.3% fulfill a focus discourse function, 2.2% fulfill a quotative discourse function, and 76.5% fulfill a lexical function. The analysis of young Spanish-English bilinguals using "como" in Spanish to fulfill discourse functions of "like" in English sheds light on how bilinguals structure discourse by drawing from both languages. The results of this study on the diffusion of the focus and quotative "como" to another Spanish-English bilingual community add to our knowledge of how discourse markers can travel both within and between communities and across languages.

This thesis is a discourse-analytical study of SELF and OTHER representations in contemporary Russian discourse on migration. The overall aim of this thesis is to explore how SELF and OTHER discourse participants are represented in pro-governmental discourse, to which extent the ideology of pro-governmental media discourse can be classified as discriminatory towards migrants and how it changes in the period between the years 2006 and 2009. The discussion is based on the results of the discourse analysis of the corpus of texts collected from three various sources. Firstly, the pro-governmental moderate corpus of media articles collected from the website of the Moscow City Council in August – November 2006 is compared to the corpus of texts collected from the website of the radical anti-migrant movement DPNI. The purpose of this comparative study is to establish the extent of commonalities through the analysis of referential-categorizing and evaluative strategies between thee two types of discourse. Moreover, in the instances of represented discourse, it is important to understand how journalists position themselves and the readers with respect to the evaluative force of the statements. The results received from the analysis of these strategies are used to construct discourse space ontology for SELF and OTHER representations. Secondly, the moderate corpus is extended to receive more data for the analysis of conceptual imagery, i.e. metaphors. The analysis of metaphors confirms tendencies typical of migration discourse but also has its special pattern which is attributed to sociocultural specifics explored through the examination of conceptual blends. The evaluative dimension constitutes an important aspect of the discourse analysis of conceptual imagery. Finally, a multimodal corpus of verbal and visual data representing a protest action by the pro-governmental youth movement “Molodaia Gvardiia” at the end of 2008 – beginning of 2009 is searched for specific strategies of SELF and OTHER representation. The analysis shows an extensive use of discursive strategies typical of racist ideology used for the representation of SELF and OTHER discourse participants in pro-governmental media discourse on migration.

Canada’s public immigration discourse is usually racialized in using an ideological framework to evaluate, select and make judgements of immigrants on whether they are culturally, socially, or economically desirable to Canada. Some social and economic affairs may present a discursive context for debates over immigration and the value of immigrants to Canada. By using a critical discourse analysis of news articles on immigration in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail in four historical phases after the end of the Second World War, this study examines how the contents of “desirable immigrants” were changed throughout history. This study questions whether some social political affairs in a country or an extreme economic situation such as high unemployment can change the social boundaries of exclusion for immigrants of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds and allow more direct and exclusionary racial messages to be expressed in the discourse. The findings indicate that during economic recessions, it is more acceptable for the media and the public to express more directly racist messages about non-white immigrants, and some political factors and major social events may also influence how different ethnic groups of immigrants can be socially constructed. While a liberal democratic country like Canada may not accept overt racial discrimination, I argue that a social crisis or economic recession can change the social boundaries of exclusion for immigrants of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds and justify using more blatant racial messages in discussing immigrants.

Discursive psychology was used to analyze constructions of Canadian Muslim identities in the Canadian mainstream daily press. News and opinion discourse from a six-month period (November 1, 2008 - April 30, 2009) was examined. Whereas previous research has typically focused on negative news coverage, I examined the full range of identity portrayals of Canadian Muslims available in the daily press. Not unexpectedly, the most overtly negative identity constructions of Canadian Muslims were found in coverage of terrorism trials. In that coverage, the accused were typically worked up as endorsing an extreme interpretation of Islam. These extreme descriptions of the accused may suggest a particularized and therefore non-representative Muslim identity. Negative identity was also constructed in articles that reported on Canadian Muslims’ interactions with the legal and immigration systems: the behaviours of some Canadian Muslims (e.g., polygamy) were formulated as a threat to mainstream Canadian social values. The coverage also dealt with the issue of discrimination against Canadian Muslims. The case for discrimination was accomplished via comparison (e.g., government treatment of Muslim versus non-Muslim Canadians). However, in some coverage, Canadian Muslims were indirectly and subtly portrayed as possibly deserving of discriminatory treatment. Canadian Muslims were favourably portrayed when they: 1) upheld mainstream Canadian social values, 2) had a sense of humour about their Muslim identity, and 3) educated non-Muslim Canadians about Islam. However, favourable identity constructions of Canadian Muslims were often accompanied by background information that negatively portrayed Muslims in general. This juxtaposition of positive representations of individual Canadian Muslims with negative general information about Muslims and Islam may have subtly suggested that good Muslims are an exception rather than the norm. Overall, it was found that Canadian press coverage offers a fuller picture of Canadian Muslim identity than elsewhere (e.g., the U.S. and the U.K.). However, Sampson’s (1993) distinction between accommodative and transformative voice suggests that this picture is still incomplete. Several possibilities for improvement are suggested; for example, the press’s reliance on ready-made news (e.g., staged events) may provide opportunities to increase favourable identity portrayals of Canadian Muslims.

No description available.

Discourse connectives are metatextual comments that signal discourse coherence relations. They can be realized by sentence adverbials that have their roots in verb phrase adverbials and have followed a path of development that is well attested both for English and cross-linguistically. This study investigates how and why it occurs. It claims that the development belongs to a wider phenomenon of unidirectional internal semantic change, that this change involves context-induced reinterpretation, and that both the immediate discourse context and the wider rhetorical context can be instrumental in bringing it about. Using diachronic and synchronic data in a corpus-linguistic approach, the frequency and distribution of the adverbials after all, in fact, at least and of course are investigated. These are found to follow similar paths of development at different rates and to varying extents. Each undergoes some increase in frequency, subjectification and abstraction, shift of discourse plane and categorial reanalysis. Each acquires at least one connective function to express rhetorical relations such as concession, contrast, justification or elaboration. These relations are defined using the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. The analysis identifies, in the history of the expressions, contexts of co-occurrence with particular relations that are argued to generate connective implicatures which later crystallize. During long periods the expressions may have stable but defeasible implicatures in the relevant contexts. These contexts include rhetorical structures spanning two or more clause complexes and often consisting of quasi-conventional sequences of rhetorical relations typical of argumentation. They may be described as incipient discourse constructions or rhetorical idioms. The emergence of new discourse connectives is seen to share many of the features attested in the grammaticalization of lexical material. It is argued that these phenomena are best accounted for in a single, usage-based theory of internal semantic change.

This study aims to critically analyse and explore how social workers (operating in the adult social work practice domain) draw on wider social (and social work) discourses in accounting for the work that they do. Utilising purposeful samples of students and qualified social work practitioners, this exploratory study of discourses analyses the implications this has on the construction of the social work identity, role and practice (action). Driven by a series of research questions, the objectives of this research were: 1) To critically analyse and explore the discourses on which students and social work practitioners draw on in their accounts of social work practice; 2) To identify and critically analyse the subject positions and discursive practices (collective ways of speaking) of social workers in respect of these discourses; 3) To critically analyse how and in what way social workers at different stages of the career trajectory draw differently upon these discourses; 4) To critically analyse and evaluate the implications for practice and service users of the respondents’ subject positioning and the discursive practices that they employ; 5) Develop a critically reflexive method (model) for social work education and research in order to make recommendations for research, education and critical social work practice (in the context of self-awareness). As this study involves several people in the exploration of adult social work (Community Care policy context), it will contribute to knowledge of the meaning given to contemporary social work. It does so by expanding the concept of discourse analysis to the wider social context in which the overall narrative (story) is ‘told’. This research aims to understand how respondents draw on discourses in particular ways and includes an analysis of the contradictions and gaps within the overall narrative of social work. Stemming from wider pre-determined narratives that are available in social work cultures, this study not only analyses the words themselves by utilising discourse analytic tools, but demonstrates new ways in which to apply critical discourse analysis in the exploration of accounts of social work. In this examination, this research critically analyses and evaluates the implications these discourses can have on identity construction (personal and professional self), as well as on those social work intends to benefit (service users).

No description available.

In this thesis, I study the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' (FAO) depiction of West African forests in its Forestry Outlook Study for Africa: Subregional Report, West Africa, which attempts to describe all of West Africa's forests simultaneously. The FAO is a large international development agency that produces agricultural and environmental information for individual states and other international agencies, such as the World Bank. The FAO's forestry studies pander to Western fears of environmental degradation, assumptions of African backwardness, and the assumed "rational" behavior of private investors in a free market by depicting West African forests as rapidly, uniformly, and irreparably degrading due to "irrational" resource management. The FAO presents privatization as a natural goal of international development, and requisite for "rational" land use. Unless private investors are given control of forests, the FAO implies, "irrational" deforestation will destroy West African forests. The FAO has thus incorporated Western fears about the environment into their neoliberal economic agenda. Academics have challenged the FAO's description of West African forests and have found that, in many cases, the FAO's attempts to provide generalizations and recommendations over large regions do not adequately reflect the economic and geographical diversity of the region. Current academic literature challenges the representation of West Africa, and the environmental discourse of international development. I find that even critics of environmental discourse do not adequately challenge the underlying neoliberal assumptions that motivate the FAO. I propose that critics must further distance themselves from the assumptions inherent to international development by incorporating economic philosophy into their critique. / Master of Arts

This thesis is a critique of Critical Social Theory from a post-structural perspective. It considers its contribution to the vision of Skinner, Pocock, Foucault and Derrida and argues against the juxtaposition of modern language and concepts with postmodern themes, as a proximity, which suggests an authentic postmodemity and so critical social theorists as 'better knowers'. It argues that critical social theory is a hermeneutic approach, which tears texts of the past apart to reveal what they were 'really saying'. This, it argues implies an objectivism which sustains that access. An objective theory which, permits, it argues, an indictment of a bad or wrong Realist approach in international relations in favour of a "more authentic" poststructural understanding of the discipline. The thesis then concludes that the problem is the 'instrumental' use of poststructural concepts to liberate the oppressed from a tradition, which constrains poststructuralism, but from which critical social theory must consequently 'step away'. So that critical social theory violates the tenets ofpoststructuralism. Finally, it observes how this approach appears little changed from its intellectual heritage in critical theory as the political determination of the approach, and how this common heritage has led to a common approach within the discipline.