31.1132, Review: Slavic Subgroup; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Berrocal, Salamurović (2019)
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Subject: 31.1132, Review: Slavic Subgroup; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Berrocal, Salamurović (2019)
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Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2020 22:58:25
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3091.html
EDITOR: Martina Berrocal
EDITOR: Aleksandra Salamurović
TITLE: Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
SERIES TITLE: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 84
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb
SUMMARY
This edited volume originated from the workshop” Language in Politics in
Slavic Speaking Countries” held at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, in
May 2015. It provides insights into contemporary political discourses in
Slavic speaking countries by focusing on discursive and linguistic means
deployed in relevant genres, such as parliamentary discourse, commemorative
and presidential speeches, and mediated communication. The linguistic analysis
reflects a dialectic relationship between language and social practice
constituting the discourse. The theoretical and methodological approaches
include critical discourse analysis (CDA), cognitive pragmatics,
socio-pragmatics, interactional pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. The
chapters contain original language material in Russian, Polish, Czech,
Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian, and the authors address issues such as the
affiliation to different political and social groups within parliamentary
settings, national identity, as well as cultural memory and reconciliation.
The book is divided into nine chapters, with the Introduction included under
Chapter 1, providing an overview of the volume which pursues discourse-centred
approaches (Wodak & Forchtner 2018). The volume does not aim to demonstrate a
comparative typological approach but rather to offer an insight into a variety
of topics and methods which have proved analytically useful for the
contemporary political discourse in the countries under consideration. The
authors and editors pursue two objectives: to explore the relevant genres of
political discourse in Slavic speaking countries and to present the
application of different theoretical and methodological approaches within
linguistically oriented political discourse analysis. By following these
goals, the editors hope to provide new insights into the contemporary
production and dissemination of relevant socio-political discursive practices
in the countries under consideration. Generally, the question posed by case
studies included in the volume is whether the changes in the power system and
the “breakdown” in politics and economy during the transitional post-communist
period brings about changes in communication and discourse practice and in
what ways.
The relation between the past communist discourse and the current political
discourse in Russia is discussed in Chapter 2, entitled “Diffuse Messages as
Aggression and Violence in Political Discourse “ in which Holger Kusse applies
the principles of speech act theory in order to examine verbal violence and
aggression from a diachronic perspective. He differentiates between hate
speech and forms of aggressive communication which aim to overtly hurt and
humiliate others, and diffuse messages that relate to political correctness
and hidden violence. According to the author, diffuse messages are “one of the
instruments of violence in the form of seemingly friendly communication”.
They are characterized by an unclear illocutionary and/or axiological
direction and referential and semantic vagueness. The author shows that
diffuseness is aggressive when it is an instrument whose aim is to wield power
over the recipients, which characterizes totalitarian and authoritarian
discourse. The author corroborates his theoretical considerations with
instances from Russian political discourse and analyses speeches and
statements by Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and Putin, linking political discourses
of the Communist past with those characterizing present-day Russia.
Chapter 3: “The conflict about the 1940 Katyn’ massacre and the 2010
declaration of the Russian State Duma” by Daniel Weiss focuses on the
representation of the mass executions of 22,000 Polish prisoners, mostly
officers and intellectuals, carried out by the Soviet People’s Commission for
Internal Affairs (NKVD) in spring 1940 in the Katyn forest, Kalinin and
Kharkiv, and their repercussions in post-Soviet times. Although the
investigation conducted by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office (1991 –
2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the crime, Russia refused to
recognize the massacre as a war crime or genocide and was not willing to
declassify the Russian archival materials and to express a posthumous
rehabilitation of the victims. On March 22, 2005, the lower chamber of the
Polish parliament (Sejm) protested against this stance by requesting that the
Russian side provide access to the Katyn files. In April 2012, the European
Court of Human Rights recognized the Katyn massacre as a war crime. Meanwhile,
67 out of a total of 183 volumes of archival materials were transferred to
Poland. After the official expressions of regret by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and
Putin, the Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia) eventually
approved a resolution that blamed Stalin and the NKVD for the crime. Besides
the historical and legal background, the article analyses this debate, as well
as its Polish forerunners and subsequent reactions. Special attention is paid
to the position of the Communist fraction of the Duma, which kept denying any
Soviet guilt. Moreover, the role of historical (counter) arguments and
quotations is examined. This study is the first linguistic analysis of the
conflicting Polish and Russian discourses over Katyn. It focuses on the
linguistic characteristics of the debate in terms of speech act theory and
finally gives a negative answer to the question of whether the Russian
government and parliament have ever delivered a full apology for the Katyn
massacres.
Chapter 4: “Gay rights as a symbol of ideological struggles between Russia and
the West: A socio-cognitive discourse analysis” by Veronika Koller reports on
diverging representations of the issue of gay rights in Russia in two news
articles from The Guardian and Russia Today in the context of the 2014 Winter
Olympic Games in Sochi. The case study points to the ideological tensions
between the West and the East, represented in the metonymic use of the LGBT
population as a symbol of Western cultural and ideological “decline” and
“threat” from the Russian viewpoint, contrasted with Russian traditional
values. The study is based on the socio-cognitive approach to critical
discourse studies and focuses on the analysis of social categorization,
prejudice and discrimination at three mutually interconnected levels: the
social context, discourse procedures and concrete linguistic realization, such
as the representation of social actors and cohesion. At the level of discourse
practice, Koller focuses on intertextuality and audience design. The article
demonstrates the productivity of the socio-cognitive approaches when
investigating the mediation of ideologies.
Chapter 5: “More than keywords: Discourse prominence analysis of the Russian
Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic” by Václav Cvrček and Masako Fidler explores
the texts from a news and opinion portal “Sputnik Czech Republic” that brings
Russia-related topics and mediates Russia’s image to the Czech audience.
Methodologically, the authors develop a Multi-Level Discourse Prominence
Analysis (MDPA), which sets out from the principles of keyword analysis (KWA),
a widely used corpus linguistic method that helps identify key words as
possible carriers of prominent topics in a text. It identifies words with
significantly higher relative frequency in a target text when compared with a
reference corpus. Examining keywords alone, however, does not produce an
explicit account of discourse ideology. Focusing primarily on the image of
Russia as presented by the portal, the study not only demonstrates the
importance of a multi-level quantitative approach to the text, but also the
importance of discourse functions of morpho-syntactic units. The authors carry
out a prominence analysis of lemmas, groups of lemmas and inflectional
morphemes. They conclude that MDPA is a valid holistic method by which it is
possible to uncover covert discursive strategies.
Chapter 6: “Delegitimization strategies in Czech parliamentary discourse” by
Martina Berrocal examines discursive strategies used in the Czech
parliamentary debates. Her theoretical approach sets out from the findings of
interactional pragmatics, especially from Spencer-Oatey’s approach (2009),
which takes into account the distinction between the individual and group
face, as well as social rights and obligations, which play an essential role
in weakening an opponent’s position in the parliamentary context.
Methodologically, the analysis combines a qualitative and a quantitative
analysis. The quantitative results support the detailed qualitative
description of individual strategies and provide an interesting insight into
their use. The results show five main delegitimization strategies, the most
frequent of which is the negative positioning of one’s political opponents and
their actions.
Chapter 7: “Impoliteness in parliamentary questions” by Bartholomäus Nowak
provides an insight into the use of questions in the Polish Lower
Parliamentary Chamber (Sejm). He grounds his research in the findings of
interactional pragmatics, especially (im)politeness research. This approach
enables him to consider the relation between form and function and describe
the implications for face-threatening potential. The study corroborates the
existence of several faces which align with an affiliation to different
political and social groups. The results show that the right-wing opposition
is prone to use face-threatening questions much more often than the left-wing
opposition.
Chapter 8: “Discursive construction of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Analysis of
commemorative speeches (2004-2016) on the Croatian Homeland War” by Sonja
Riehn deals with the Croatian Homeland War (1991-1995) which set the
foundation of Croatian independence. Riehn analyses 13 commemorative speeches
delivered between 2004 and 2016 using the Discourse Historical Approach
focusing on the content, discursive strategies and means and forms of
linguistic realization. The emphasis is on the discursive presentation of the
Self and the Other. A double victimhood is identified in several speeches, as
Croatia is represented not only as victim of Serbian military aggression, but
also of indifferent international political actors. She concludes that
Croatian collective memory is still biased and does not allow a critical
debate on the past and victims from other ethnic groups.
Some critical comments regarding this chapter include the following:
p. 200
“(…) the EU (or the former European Community) is (…) presented negatively”
p. 201
“(…) the foreign policy of the international and European community* is
criticized (…)”:
In the examples provided, the EU is not mentioned at all; what is mentioned
is the international community, criticised for its indifference during the
1991-1995 war.
Therefore, the conclusion that “the EU is seen as an antagonist that endangers
Croatian national interests” is not corroborated by the selected examples.
p. 203
“By preposing the attribute “so-called” (takozvana) the seriousness of the
army is denied” – actually, “the so-called” refers to the army of the state
which had ceased to exist, so that in reality it was not “Yugoslav” any more.
Chapter 9: “Epistemes of contemporary nationhood: Narrations of the past,
legitimations of the future” by Danijela Majstorović investigates the dominant
epistemes of the current Serbhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina used to legitimize
the 1992-1995 war and the current political hegemony. She examines the
narration of the past and the legitimation of the future with respect to the
Serb role in the war and their identity afterwards. More specifically, she
focuses on the trope of “history repeating”, which realizes its argumentative
potential and becomes a topos of history, visible in the legitimation of the
Srebrenica genocide.
The text leaves a lot to be desired from the point of view of syntax, but
providing examples would take up too much space.
Chapter 10: “Under One Sun? Semiotic transformation of the cognitive model
NATION in the Republic of Macedonia on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of
Independence in 2011” by Aleksandra Salamurović examines the
communication-linguistic structures expressed in eleven commemorative and
jubilee speeches delivered on the 20th anniversary of independence and 10th
anniversary of the signing of the Ohrid Framework Agreement in 2011 in the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The study combines a corpus-based
approach with qualitative analysis based on the socio-cognitive approach to
collective identity within the framework of cognitively oriented Critical
Discourse Studies and cognitive pragmatics. It combines close reading of the
speeches and a detailed scrutiny of selected keywords and their collocations.
Special attention is paid to the function of the metonym Macedonia as the most
frequent term in the analysed speeches. Furthermore, ethnonyms, syntactic
structures and argumentation patterns are analysed in order to test the
hypothesis of discursively erased distinction between different ethnic groups.
EVALUATION
The contributions in the book are very heterogeneous, ranging from gay rights
to the Katyn massacre in 1941 and the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995,
and displaying a variety of theoretical approaches. The academic level of the
contributions, however, is rather uneven: most of the articles provide
valuable innovative methodological approaches and insights. Some
contributions, however, are less satisfactory for a number of reasons, one of
which is insufficient contextualization in some instances (Chapter 9), which
makes them hardly intelligible to readers who are not familiar with the region
under consideration (the Western Balkans). In Chapters 8 and 9 there are also
instances of erroneous translation of illustrative examples. Some translation
mistakes involve minor changes of meaning, but some are quite serious because
they convey a meaning which is different from the original, and this can
easily lead to misinterpretation. In the same chapters, there are also
numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes, which leaves a lot to be desired
from the viewpoint of language editing and proof-reading. Despite the
shortcomings of some of the chapters, the book as a whole is a valuable
contribution to studies of political discourse, especially because of the
wealth of theoretical approaches applied in the analysis of different genres
of political discourse. In this respect, the editors have achieved their main
goals. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in political
discourse, critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics, and it opens new
venues for future research.
As a “supplement” to this review I include a list of errata categorized
according to the type of mistakes:
MISTAKES IN CROATIAN EXAMPLES (MOSTLY INVOLVING A LACK OF CONGRUENCE):
(Chapter 8)
p. 188
građani Hrvatska* > građani Hrvatske ‘citizens of Croatia’
p. 189
naše* demokracija > naša demokracija ‘our democracy’
naši* ustav > naš ustav ‘our constitution’
naše* sloboda > naša sloboda ‘our freedom’
p. 190
naše cijl* > naš cilj ‘our aim’
naše svoj interese* > naše interese ‘our interests’
naše vremena* > naše vrijeme/ or: našeg vremena ‘our time’
naši branitelj* > naši branitelji ‘our defenders’
naši hrvatski branitelj!*> naši hrvatski branitelji ‘our Croatian defenders’
časno što su naši borci* > naši časni borci ‘our honourable fighters’
SPELLING MISTAKES IN CROATIAN EXAMPLES:
p. 191
nijhove* > njihove ‘their’
ERRONEOUS TRANSLATION
(Chapter 8)
p. 200, 203
vojni udar: military strike*> military coup
naked*>bare handed
Nasuprot svemu tome stajala je Hrvatska gotovo goloruka i razoružana “in
contrast, Croatia stood almost naked* and disarmed > (…) almost bare-handed
and disarmed
p. 201
Ratno pravo, ‘law of war’ is mistranslated as “the rule of law”:
Niti u jednom trenutku ne osporavamo potrebu da se pojedinačni slučajevi
kršenja ratnog prava adekvatno sankcioniraju (…)
At no time do we dispute the need to adequately sanction the individual cases
of violation of the rule of law* (…) > At no time do we dispute the need to
adequately sanction the individual cases of violation of the law of war (…)
p. 201
warlike power* (vojna sila) > military force
“devastation” (razarač*)> razaranje
p. 203
“former National* Army” (bivša savezna* vojska) > former federal army
(…) nesmiljenim granatiranjem gradova ‘with unhindered* bombing of cities’ >
with merciless bombing of cities
‘nation* state’ > state – the term used in the Croatian text is “state”, not
“nation state”:
Naše jedino oružje koje smo tada imali bilo je naša odlučnost i naša spremnost
da sačuvamo i obranimo tek rođenu demokraciju, slobodu i državu.
Our single weapon we had was our determination and our willingness to preserve
and to defend the just* born democracy, freedom and our nation* state > Our
only weapon was our determination and willingness to preserve and defend our
newly born democracy, our freedom and our state.
(Chapter 9):
p. 215
“the Serbs were not just to willingly lay their heads on the tree trunks* like
they did in the past war.” > The Serbs were not willing to put their heads on
the block as they did in the past war…
(literal translation of an idiomatic expression)
MISTAKES IN THE ENGLISH TEXT:
(Chapter 8)
p. 191
the fight for independency* > the fight for independence
p. 192
“our memory on* those historical moments” > our memory of those historical
moments
p. 196
if it were not for the Homeland War, lead* by Franjo Tuđman > led by Franjo
Tuđman
p. 201
The Republic of Croatia insist* > The Republic of Croatia insists
p. 203
It seems as if this part of the history was completely erased, or it shall*
not be connected to the ‘new chapter’ of the Croatian history > should not be
connected (?)
(…) it turned out to be our most powerful weapon that was* defeated* tanks,
guns* and airplanes > this turned out to be our most powerful weapon that
(has) defeated tanks, canons and airplanes
p. 204
The war was imposed on Croatia through the Serbian aggressions* > by the
Serbian aggression
p. 206
crimes committed on* the Serbs > crimes committed against the Serbs
(Chapter 9)
p. 215
The public discourse of ‘history repeating itself’ gained a lot of popular
traction* > attraction?
p. 217
(...) quests for purity the* involving destruction of others (…)? > quests
for purity involving the destruction of others (?)
Whether one but* several “genocides” happened or did not happen should not be
used to justify (…) > Whether one or several “genocides” (…)
p. 219
In addition from* circulating the narratives (…)” > In addition to (…)
p. 220
A tropes* or “commonplace” is (…) > A trope or “commonplace” is (…)
p. 224
It is* never been the task of poetry to represent (…) > It has never been the
task (…)
p. 231
For example, historically* events prior to Srebrenica are used (…) > For
example, historical events (…)
p. 234
(…) among other things and to* a great detail” > in great detail
REFERENCES
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. “Face, Identity and Interactional Goals.” In Face,
Communication and Social Interaction, ed. by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and
Michael Haugh, 137-1534. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.
Wodak, Ruth& Forchtner Bernhard (eds.) 2018. The Routledge handbook of
language and politics. Abington: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lelija Socanac is full professor at the Faculty of Law, University of
Zagreb,Croatia. She is the head of the Centre for Language and Law and the
Foreign Language Department. Her research interests include multilingualism,
contact<br />linguistics, (historical) sociolinguistics, critical discourse
analysis(discourse historical approach) and legal linguistics.
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