23.3618, Diss: Applied Linguistics: Eagleton: 'The “Ultimate Aim”...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-3618. Wed Aug 29 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.3618, Diss: Applied Linguistics: Eagleton: 'The “Ultimate Aim”...'

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Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:18:10
From: Jennifer Eagleton [jenny at asian-emphasis.com]
Subject: The “Ultimate Aim”: Discourses of future democratization in post-handover Hong Kong

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Institution: Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia 
Program: Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Jennifer Anne Eagleton

Dissertation Title: The “Ultimate Aim”: Discourses of future democratization in 
post-handover Hong Kong 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Christopher N. Candlin

Dissertation Abstract:

This critical discourse study deals with Hong Kong's unique position as 
a Special Administrative Region of China (SAR) with a constitution, The 
Basic Law, which promises full universal suffrage in the future. It 
explores how public media and other commentators discuss this future 
democratization through the use of metaphor and its connections 
across diverse discourse contexts both synchronically and 
diachronically (Cameron & Maslen 2010).
  

Drawing on Wodak's discourse-historical framework (Wodak 2001), this 
study integrates and triangulates knowledge from a variety of historical 
intertextual sources. Although metaphor as a persuasive tool in political 
discourse is its primary research focus (Charteris-Black 2005), a 
number of other analytic methods are used in order to more fully 
explore and explain the multiple perspectives involved. 


Preliminary chapters focus on Hong Kong's "historical realities", the 
research approach and methodology taken. Chapter 4 then analyses 
The Basic Law as framer and central text in this discourse. It seeks to 
display how events involved in its drafting led to a politically motivated 
ambiguity concerning the progress of Hong Kong's future 
democratization. How this progress was reflected in texts from the print 
media (both in English and in Chinese) evidences how such a progress 
was contested linguistically.


Central to understanding the arguments concerning Hong Kong's 
constitutional reform in the light of how it is framed in the Basic Law is 
an appreciation of the ideological stance taken by its framers and its 
interpreters. Chapter 5 focuses on the stance of Hong Kong political 
parties through an analysis of the factors shaping their habitus 
(Bourdieu 1991). Membership categorization analysis (Sacks 1972) is 
then used to show how these parties categorize themselves (through 
party logos and manifestos) and their opponents (through newspaper 
texts) metaphorically. 


The print media play a central role in mediating the discourse(s) about 
Hong Kong's future democratization. To understand this mediation, and 
given that its discourses represent an ongoing dialogue referencing 
past events, Chapter 6 provides  a necessary chronology, listing major 
political events from January 1998 to December 2007, illuminated by a 
critical account of the metaphors that each event gave rise to in the 
press. This parallel interlinking of events and metaphors indicates how 
metaphors are carried forward in the discourse through repetition, 
relexicalization or explication. 

   
Chapter 7, the penultimate chapter, offers, from a discourse 
perspective, a case study of the 2007 Green Paper on Constitutional 
Development. This document represents a summary of the decade-
long discourse of Hong Kong's democratization and seeks to 
incorporate, intertextually and interdiscursively, all the texts previously 
drawn upon in the thesis. Analysis of the layout and contents of this 
document, and how it was described in news metaphor, highlights the 
consistency in arguments and metaphors over the previous decade, 
and earlier. The Green Paper gave rise to further documents that led 
to Beijing announcing a possible date for Hong Kong to achieve the 
"ultimate aim" of universal suffrage.  


Finally, in Chapter 8, after discussing and classifying the metaphor 
topics and themes explored, a metaphorical "map" offers a 
summarizing portrait of Hong Kong's democratization process. 






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