33.56, Review: Discourse Analysis: Crespo-Fernández (2021)

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Subject: 33.56, Review: Discourse Analysis: Crespo-Fernández (2021)

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Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2022 05:48:19
From: Mashael Althobiti [mashael.aied at gmail.com]
Subject: Discourse Studies in Public Communication

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1632.html

EDITOR: Eliecer  Crespo-Fernández
TITLE: Discourse Studies in Public Communication
SERIES TITLE: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 92
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Mashael Ayed Althobiti, University of Reading

SUMMARY

The edited volume “Discourse Studies in Public Communication”, edited by
Eliecer Crespo-Fernandez, consists of a collection of articles on the subject.
Research on the field of public discourse thrives, as can be seen in the mass
of academic journals and book series such as CADAAD (Critical Approaches to
Discourse Analysis across Disciplines) discourse and critical discourse
studies. It is a good reference for discourse studies that are grounded on
evidence. This book contributes to the fields of political communication,
gender and sexuality, and business and academic communication, by providing an
indication of current social structure and social issues. This contribution
covers the cultural and cognitive elements of public communication, in
addition to the linguistic features in the text, which represent various kinds
of real-life contexts and discourses. Although it could also be beneficial to
academics in non-linguistic disciplines such as communication studies, social
theory, political science or psychology, the book is primarily aimed at
readers with broad interests in the field of English linguistics. The studies
in this volume are divided into three parts, each of which has a main topic
that the studies cover. 

Part One focuses on topics related to political discourse studies and consists
of six chapters. These chapters represent political rhetoric from various
perspectives and in different contexts. Chapter One (“Imagining the nations in
British politics”, by Ruth Breeze) explores the portrayals of the country and
its people in the six UK parties at the time of the election in June 2017.
These parties are the Conservative and Unionist Party (commonly known as the
Conservative Party), the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish
National Party, Plaid Cymru, and the United Kingdom Independence Party. The
author adopts a combined methodology by using a corpus tool and qualitative
analysis methods. In the same vein, the topic of the second chapter
(“Political and journalistic discourse regarding the Catalan declaration of
independence: A critical analysis”, by Luis Escoriza Morera) is nationalism.
His aim is to study the linguistic features (mechanisms) used in seven Spanish
newspapers published on 28 October 2017 (the day after the Catalan
Parliament’s unilateral declaration of independence). All these newspapers are
different in terms of their ideological stance and are in different languages,
four in Spanish and three in Catalan. He focuses on comparing the content of
these newspapers and how the same information is treated from different
ideological perspectives. 

Chapter Three is also about the journalistic representation of the news of
independence in Catalonia (“National vs. international cartoons depicting
Catalonia’s independence process in the press: A critical multimodal metaphor
approach”, by Maria Muelas-Gil). This chapter studies journalistic
representation from a different perspective by examining the use of political
metaphor in a corpus of cartoons portraying Catalonia’s independence process
that were issued nationally (in the Spanish press) and internationally. She
uses the approach of Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal critical discourse
analysis (1996) in addition to Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis
(2004). Muelas-Gil uses these approaches to examine the ideological role of
metaphors and how these metaphors affect the global perception of Spain. 

Both Chapters Four and Five focus on persuasion discourse in political
communication. In Chapter Four (“A corpus-assisted qualitative approach to
political discourse in Spanish print and digital press”, by Gerard Fernadez
Smith), the author studies suppressed patterns of the use of persuasion
discourse in data taken from the Spanish media. Fernadez Smith focuses on some
keywords (e.g. “sustainability”, “empowerment”, etc.) that are recurrently
used by politicians in the media. In Chapter Five (“Persuasive discourse in
Daniel Defoe’s political essays: Boosting and hedging”, by Rosa Maria
Lopez-Campillo), the author studies two rhetorical methods employed by Daniel
Defoe as a political journalist in early eighteenth-century Britain: boosting
and hedging. She focuses on analysing the writer’s use of these two different
persuasive verbal tactics in a sample of Defoe’s political writings written in
1709 and excerpted from “The Review” (1704–1713). The author learns that Defoe
applied these tactics as linguistic weapons to express his political writings,
by using boosting strategies to clarify his stance and emphasise his opinions
and by hedging to mitigate prospective conflicts caused by his statements, to
connect with readers and reach persuasion.

Like previous chapters, the last chapter in Part One is also about political
discourse. However, “Politics beyond death? An analysis of the obituaries of
Belgian politicians”, by Priscilla Heynderickx and Sylvain Dieltjens, examines
obituaries. They look at 100 obituaries of politicians from six different
political parties in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium that were published in
the mass media, including those issued by the political party in which the
deceased politician was a member. This study exemplifies two major levels.
First, by examining content, it assesses the presence of the dead politician's
political ideology in the text. The second level is a linguistic one, in which
the authors try to establish whether the metaphors utilised are based on
political grounds. 

Part Two is about gender and sexuality in discourse studies and comprises four
chapters. These chapters are about topics related to gender and sexuality in
the public domain, such as discrimination, identity, and stereotypes. They
cover different types of discourse (e.g. musical, social media, visual, and TV
series discourse), but they share the focus of gender and sexuality. In
Chapter Seven (“It all comes down to sex: Metaphorical animalisation in
reggaeton discourse”, by Maria Jose Hellin), the author examines the cultural
and ideological significant of metaphors in musical discourse in 118 songs
produced by 25 male singers of reggaeton music. The author looks at how sex
functions as a conductive thread in reggaeton musical discourse. The findings
reveal that the representation of women in these songs is related to women
being an object of sex and suffering from mental and physical abuse. 

In Chapter Eight (“Cyberbullying and gender exploring socially deviant
behavioural practices among teenagers on Twitter”, by Antonio García-Gómez),
the author examines the conversational strategies which teenagers (both male
and female) use to express themselves, as well as the impressions they give
when they use Twitter to verbally harass and victimise others. The data used
to achieve the aim of this research are 415 Twitter threads, which consist of
54,000 tweets posted by 113 female and 106 male teenagers. Finally,
García-Gómez emphasises that this study not only gives answers to the issues
of why gender is an important aspect in exploring cyberbullying, but also
reflects the gender-sensitive construction that is used in verbal
cyberbullying. 

In Chapter Nine (“A visual critical discourse analysis of women’s
representation in Dolce & Gabbana advertising”, by María Martínez Lirola), the
author explores the visual discursive depiction of women. The sample of this
study was collected from online adverts (233 in total) by Dolce & Gabbana,
which covers the period from January 2016 to December 2018. By applying van
Leeuwen’s (2008) model of critical discourse analysis and Kress and van
Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar, Lirola examines these data to see if the
visual choices the company used to depict women have gender stereotypes. She
finds that women in these ads are portrayed as a stereotype in that they
adhere to traditional beauty standards and their bodies are emphasised as
objects of desire. 

Chapter Ten explores the topic of sex in a TV series (“Let us talk about sex
in high school: The TV series Sex Education”, by Raquel Sánchez Ruiz). In this
study, Sánchez Ruiz investigates the discursive representation of sexual taboo
in a British TV series called “Sex Education”. This TV series is a comedy
drama that covers some sexual issues of teenagers in the context of sex
therapy sessions. The major aim of this study is to examine how high school
students talk and conceptualise sexual issues throughout the course of eight
episodes. Her research is based on the pragmatic-based theories of politeness
(Brown and Levinson, 1987) and appraisal (Martin and White, 2005). Finally,
her findings show that the X-phemistic (i.e., euphemistic and dysphemistic)
units that teens use to discuss the topic of sex present solid evidence of
their sexuality interpretations.

The last part of this volume covers the topics of business (Chapters Eleven
and Twelve) and academic (Chapter Thirteen) discourse studies. Chapter Eleven
(“Paralinguistic resources in persuasive business communication in English and
Spanish”, by Ana M. Cestero Mancera and Mercedes Díez Prados), investigates
the significant function of non-verbal paralinguistic signs in two equivalent
corpora (Spanish and British) of television business pitches. Many devices
were found in these data, such as tone and speed; however, the most copiously
used are pauses. Furthermore, the findings show that first language
differences and gender have an influence on the socio-communicative variances
of the paralinguistic devices.

In Chapter Twelve (“Business discourse from a psycholinguistic approach”, by
Carmen Varo), the author has also focused on business communication. She
aspires to achieve a full wording of the business speech as a modality for
communication and define the primary cognitive processes seen in various
textual expressions. In the linguistic field, the examination of this
communication practice and the design of the linguistic model, appropriate to
its contextual, social and cultural determinants, have been supported by
disciplines such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.
The data used in this research are extracted from texts related and produced
by three Spanish businesses. Varo uses the newest achievements in the field of
psycholinguistics by applying a neuro-semantic approach to the discourses of
business in commercial texts. Varo aims to reach a wider formulation of
commercial texts as a modality of communication and to describe the major
cognitive tactics found in its various textual expressions.

The last chapter in this volume (“Comparatory discourse strategies in the
bilingual university classroom”, by Mary Griffith) is about academic
discourses. Griffith aims to analyse errors in the spoken performance that are
produced in the bilingual university classroom and to examine the influence of
these errors on intelligibility. Her research is based on an action research
approach in order to comprehend all the factors related to the issue. The data
were taken from a university classroom and included 34 hours of verbal
discourse. These 34 hours were in the classes of eight Spanish teachers who
taught computer science in English. The results demonstrate that compensatory
discourse tactics, including listeners’ understanding, had a considerably
greater influence on communication than the errors did.

EVALUATION

This edited volume introduces a wide range of discourse studies in public
communication, many of which cover contentious topics (e.g., political
discourse, gender and sexuality, and business and academic discourses). All
studies presented in this book are regarded as a useful resource for people
who have an interest in linguistics, in addition to those who are interested
in communication research, social and political studies, or psychology. 

These 13 studies would help researchers in these fields to examine more
analytical and theoretical methods in discourse studies (e.g., in Chapter
Three, a critical multimodal metaphor approach and in Chapter Thirteen, a
multi-methodological approach to classroom instructional discourse) and more
types of data sources (e.g., in Chapter Nine, the ads of Dolce & Gabbana, and
in Chapter Ten, a TV series). 

Each chapter makes a contribution to the field of discourse in public
communication, employing different analytical frameworks. The division of this
book into three parts helps to improve the flow of the volume. Together, these
studies are presented in a thematically cohesive way. For example, all six
chapters of Part One are thematically connected on the subject of political
discourse studies. This cohesion in themes and topics can be seen overall in
most of the chapters, and the link between the studies is clear. These links
make reading the book smoother and help the reader to understand more than one
theoretical method and conceptualise terms in the field of public
communication. 

However, the last part combines two different topics: business and academic
discourse. This was probably due to the limited number of studies in these two
domains (only three studies were provided). As such, including more studies
and introducing each domain in different parts would have helped readers to
understand the studies presented in the same way as the previous connected
parts. Furthermore, while these studies provide a rationale for choosing the
data sources and analytical framework, one weakness in this context is found
in Chapter Six, where the authors miss justifying methodological decisions
such as giving a rationale for the data source chosen (why these specific 100
obituaries?). In the same vein, one more suggestion for improving the
structure of this book would be to provide a summary at the end of each part.
These summaries would open a critical comparison between studies and show how
the studies fit together as well as how they contribute differently to the
field. 

Not all the authors provide a future direction in their chapters. Most of them
do state future directions clearly in the conclusion or further steps section
(Chapters One to Seven and Chapter Twelve), but some just conclude their
research (Chapters Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Thirteen).

Unquestionably, this edited volume has achieved the primary stated aim of
exploring discourse studies in public communication. It is also well organised
and easy to read by people who are interested in this field. Using a diverse
range of theoretical and methodological frameworks, as well as various types
of datasets, it provides in-depth analysis of public discourse. In brief,
these articles shed light on more recent topics of research in discourse
study, which will be expected to be a significant research area for years to
come. 

REFERENCES

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). “Politeness: Some universals in language
usage” (Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press.
Charteris-Black, J. (2004). “Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis”.
Springer.

Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). “Reading images: The grammar of visual
design”. Routledge.

Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). “Reading images: The grammar of visual
design”. Routledge.

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). Attitude: Ways of feeling. In “The
Language of Evaluation” (pp. 42–91). Palgrave Macmillan.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). “Discourse and practice: New tools for critical
discourse analysis”. Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mashael Althobiti is a lecturer in English language and literature department
at the Taibah University in Saudi Arabia. Her main research interests are
Syntax, Discourse Analysis, Corpus linguistics, and Media discourse. She
finished her Master degree in University of Reading 2019 in the field of
syntax. Now, she is working on her PhD. research, which carried a combination
of her research interest in the field of CDA and corpus linguistics.





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