This thesis investigated the power of framing practices in the context of Australian refugee policies between 1999 and 2003. The analysis identified legal rationalism as an ideological projection by which the Howard government justified its refugee policies to the electorate. That is, legal rationalism manifested itself as an overriding concern with the rules and procedures of the law, without necessarily having concern for consistency or continuity. In its first form, legal rationalism emerged as a

This study was motivated by a variety of democratic experience in the world that interchangeably perplexes and inspires students of politics. To understand the processes by which democracies emerge, this study was launched to examine new democracies from a discursive perspective. Four main questions guided the inquiry: (1) Is there a rhetorical/discursive counterpart to the process of democratization? (2) If so, what are the rhetorical features and markers of democratic changes? (3) What specific discursive practices correlate with growth and/or decline of democracy? and (4) What practical value might there be to having a more sensitive measure of democratic growth and/or decline? To answer these questions, a critical discourse analysis was conducted on two genres of Russian public discourse juxtaposing lay (letters to the editor) and elite (editorials) voices in three national periodicals during four election seasons between 1996 and 2008. The analysis of lay discourse revealed (a) that ordinary Russians enjoy expressing their opinions, (b) that they are argumentative, (c) that their repertoire of political voices is rather small, and (d) that their discussions are gradually sliding toward trivial matters. These findings portrayed a public that is attentive to public affairs and speaks out in a forum. Elite voices, on the other hand, were found (e) to be mesmerized by politics, (f) to think of the political world as detached from ordinary life, and (g) to envision the audience of ironic bystanders. Together, these findings pointed to a conclusion that ordinary Russians are rarely summoned either to renew democracy or to improve upon it. Consequently, they rarely identify themselves as true democrats, although many of their discursive practices resemble those that are thought of as a staple of the democratic public sphere. / text

Ši disertacija – tai kontrastyvinio pobūdžio lingvistinis darbas, kurio tyrimų objektas yra viešasis anglų ir lietuvių kalbų diskursas politine tema. Darbo tikslas – nustatyti, kokiais moralės modeliais vadovaujamasi Didžiosios Britanijos ir Lietuvos viešajame diskurse politine tematika, remiantis metaforos analize. Moksliniam tyrimui buvo renkami analitiniai straipsniai, kuriuose aprašomi Lietuvos (www.politika.lt) ir Didžiosios Britanijos (www.economist.com) politiniai įvykiai ketverių (Britanijos atveju) ir dvejų (Lietuvos atveju) metų laikotarpiu. Visame sinchroniniame tyrime taikomas trianguliacijos metodas, leidžiantis ištirti metaforos raišką įvairiais aspektais, derinant kokybinius (aprašomąjį, analitinį ir kognityvinį) tyrimus su kiekybiniu tyrimu. Buvo nustatyta trylika universalių metaforų: JUDĖJIMAS, JĖGA, KARAS, GYVŪNAI, SANDARA, JUSLĖS, VISUMA, SPORTAS, SVEIKATA, SANTYKIAI, PURVAS, VERSLAS ir TEATRAS. Gretinamoji analizė rodo, kad anglų kalbos metaforos skiriasi nuo lietuvių kalbos metaforų savo epistemine sandara. Anglų kalbos metaforų analizė rodo vertinimą, grindžiamą kompleksiniu moralės modeliu. Toks politinių įvykių vertinimas byloja apie progresyvią demokratinę politinę sistemą, pasižyminčią dinamiškumu, vertinimų kaita ir įvairove. Lietuvių kalbos metaforų analizės metu nustatytas vyraujantis pragmatinis metaforos moralės modelis su labai nežymiai išreikštais kitais metaforos moralės modeliais. Toks Lietuvos politinių įvykių vertinimas rodo pragmatinės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The present study has attempted the analysis of public discourse and its moral expectations through metaphor at a contrastive level in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The study deals with the identification of morality models in public discourse in English and Lithuanian. The materials of the study consist of analytical political articles extracted from the online archives of two following websites: (1) www.economist.com, (2) www.politika.lt. The collected data amounts to 415, 670 words in total. Three methods of analysis were applied to the collected data: qualitative, quantitative and contrastive. The analysis reveals that political affairs in both cultures are framed by the same conceptual metaphors. The structural composition of the conceptual metaphors has been examined in terms of the following thirteen SOURCE domains: MOTION, RELATIONSHIP, STRENGTH, HEALTH, SPORTS, WAR, ESSENCE, BUSINESS, DIRT, SENSES, WHOLENESS, THEATRE, and ANIMALS. The cross-mapping between SOURCE domains and TARGET domains is held by different epistemic correspondences, which leads to the variability of MORALITY models across the two languages, i.e. English and Lithuanian. British politics tends to be more varied in its moral expectations, which derive from three types of Morality Systems: Pragmatic, Rational and Integrated. Thus, the moral expectations governing British political discourse are based on the Complex Morality Model. By contrast, Lithuanian politics is... [to full text]

The present study has attempted the analysis of public discourse and its moral expectations through metaphor at a contrastive level in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The study deals with the identification of morality models in public discourse in English and Lithuanian. The materials of the study consist of analytical political articles extracted from the online archives of two following websites: (1) www.economist.com, (2) www.politika.lt. The collected data amounts to 415, 670 words in total. Three methods of analysis were applied to the collected data: qualitative, quantitative and contrastive. The analysis reveals that political affairs in both cultures are framed by the same conceptual metaphors. The structural composition of the conceptual metaphors has been examined in terms of the following thirteen SOURCE domains: MOTION, RELATIONSHIP, STRENGTH, HEALTH, SPORTS, WAR, ESSENCE, BUSINESS, DIRT, SENSES, WHOLENESS, THEATRE, and ANIMALS. The cross-mapping between SOURCE domains and TARGET domains is held by different epistemic correspondences, which leads to the variability of MORALITY models across the two languages, i.e. English and Lithuanian. British politics tends to be more varied in its moral expectations, which derive from three types of Morality Systems: Pragmatic, Rational and Integrated. Thus, the moral expectations governing British political discourse are based on the Complex Morality Model. By contrast, Lithuanian politics is... [to full text] / Ši disertacija – tai kontrastyvinio pobūdžio lingvistinis darbas, kurio tyrimų objektas yra viešasis anglų ir lietuvių kalbų diskursas politine tema. Darbo tikslas – nustatyti, kokiais moralės modeliais vadovaujamasi Didžiosios Britanijos ir Lietuvos viešajame diskurse politine tematika, remiantis metaforos analize. Moksliniam tyrimui buvo renkami analitiniai straipsniai, kuriuose aprašomi Lietuvos (www.politika.lt) ir Didžiosios Britanijos (www.economist.com) politiniai įvykiai ketverių (Britanijos atveju) ir dvejų (Lietuvos atveju) metų laikotarpiu. Visame sinchroniniame tyrime taikomas trianguliacijos metodas, leidžiantis ištirti metaforos raišką įvairiais aspektais, derinant kokybinius (aprašomąjį, analitinį ir kognityvinį) tyrimus su kiekybiniu tyrimu. Buvo nustatyta trylika universalių metaforų: JUDĖJIMAS, JĖGA, KARAS, GYVŪNAI, SANDARA, JUSLĖS, VISUMA, SPORTAS, SVEIKATA, SANTYKIAI, PURVAS, VERSLAS ir TEATRAS. Gretinamoji analizė rodo, kad anglų kalbos metaforos skiriasi nuo lietuvių kalbos metaforų savo epistemine sandara. Anglų kalbos metaforų analizė rodo vertinimą, grindžiamą kompleksiniu moralės modeliu. Toks politinių įvykių vertinimas byloja apie progresyvią demokratinę politinę sistemą, pasižyminčią dinamiškumu, vertinimų kaita ir įvairove. Lietuvių kalbos metaforų analizės metu nustatytas vyraujantis pragmatinis metaforos moralės modelis su labai nežymiai išreikštais kitais metaforos moralės modeliais. Toks Lietuvos politinių įvykių vertinimas rodo pragmatinės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

For historians of twentieth-century British affairs, the decade of the 1930s is very significant. It was marked not only by a devastating economic crisis at the outset, but also by the rise of fascism in Europe and the onset of the Second World War at its close. These issues were problematic in themselves, but Britain’s response to them was complicated still further by the deep divisions between the Left and the Right over socialism and over the Soviet Union. The presence of the USSR in the East and its influence in Britain loomed over the internal debates that took place, affecting British responses to difficult situations in drastic and far-reaching ways. People of both anti-Soviet and pro-Soviet persuasions were forced to account for events that did not tally with their most strongly held beliefs, hopes or fears. This dissertation explores the ways in which British people of a variety of political leanings publicly processed and coped with the role of the Soviet Union in these debates. Using a range of sources including contemporary newspapers, books and pamphlets, I will trace the evolution of attitudes to the Soviet Union from 1929, the first year of the economic crisis, up until 1943, the high point of the Anglo-Soviet wartime alliance. My analysis will show how people with fundamentally different belief systems mirrored each other in their responses to intellectual challenges, and how interactions between different groups sustained or exaggerated each group’s response to the Soviet Union. I will also critique the analyses of some historians who have limited the parameters of their studies to take in only single groups or single events, and in so doing have become unfairly critical of individuals who struggled to process a large number of difficult and confusing events.

This dissertation analyses discourse on benefit fraud in Sweden between 1990 and 2010. First, it maps general trends in public discourse about benefit fraud. This is done through a content analysis of news reporting about benefit fraud in four Swedish newspapers. This part of the dissertation shows that the number of published news articles about benefit fraud have increased significantly since 1990. Particularly large numbers of articles were published during the middle of the 1990s, and between 2002 and 2006.  Second, a qualitative discourse analysis of talk about benefit fraud in news texts, political debates and government reports is conducted. During periods of intense news coverage about fraud, reporting is often clearly marked by traits generally associated with moral panics; constructing the phenomenon as seemingly more common than it in reality is, constructing cheaters as a threat to the moral fiber of society, and also claiming the need for counter-measures. The qualitative analysis furthermore focuses on how the relation-ships between different subject positions are constructed in the collected material. This part of the analysis shows that fraud discourse in Sweden during the past twenty years have shifted from a dominant focus on alleged cheating among immigrants in the early 1990s, to claims of abuse within the sickness insurance program after 2002. The analysis also shows that benefit fraud is constructed as a political problem using neoliberal discursive strategies that [1] reduce welfare policies to financial costs, [2] constitute benefit claimants as individually responsible for their inability to support themselves through regular work, and [3] articulate the welfare state as an instrument for the moral regulation of citizens.

This thesis examines who the Israel Defense Forces use their English languageTwitter account to construct an image of Hezbollah online during times without violent conflict. The goal is to understand how this behavior fits within Israel’sPublic Diplomacy strategy. Using Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze tweets concerning Hezbollah between May 2020 and May 2021, I identify one maindriver of the adaptation of social media into the military’s public diplomacy toolkit: mediatization. Results show that the Israel Defense Forces has adopted Twitter as a communication channel outside the gatekeeper function and control of traditional media outlets, to share their Public Diplomacy message directly with foreign audiences – including their enemies, such as Hezbollah. I identify five main categories or intentions with which the Israel Defense Forces address Hezbollah on Twitter: 1) Remembrance, 2) Current Developments and Information, 3) Iraian Proxies 4) tweets mentioning Hezbollah directly and 5)tweets Shaming, Blaming or Calling-out Hezbollah or the international community and media on their approach to the group.

The thesis 'The role of the Czech public media in the pension reform discourse' aims to provide a critical reflection on the role of the Czech Television and the Czech Radio in the debate over the changes in the pension scheme of the Czech Republic. The principal method used for that is the discourse analysis, which comprises quality and quantity analysis of the media output, interviews and personal observation. The research project focuses on the context the debate over the pension reform occurs and how it is presented in the public media. The theoretical part summarizes the theoretical concepts used in the research project, i.e. concepts from the field of public policy, social policy, mass communication and discourse analysis. The empirical part examines the institutional development of the pension reform, its variations in political, scholarly (Czech and international) and public discourse. The major part of the research project is based on the discourse analysis of the pension reform discourse in the Czech public media. The role of the public media in the pension reform discourse is deduced on the basis of the theoretical and empirical parts.

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