'Discourse Power Address' identifies the existence of 'directive' address, a form of strategic communication which is employed in a number of dominant practices, including Advertising, Politics, Public Relations and Corporate representation. Stuart Price argues that the simulation of intimacy in authoritarian address masks a drive to power, in which the creation of propositions by powerful social actors is based on the 'timeliness' of utterance rather than any real adherence to truth or genuine explanation. Election broadcasts, political speeches, TV commercials and corporate advertisements are all scrutinised in order to evaluate competing perspectives on the creation and circulation of meaning; particular reference is made to theories of discourse, ideology and address. In the course of his argument, the author proposes an original method for determining how authoritarian address attempts to make an impact on audiences. Providing a cross-disciplinary contribution to the fields of Communication, Language, Media and Political Studies, this book provides an original, clear-sighted contribution to the debate on language and power, and will provide an essential resource for lecturers, researchers, students, activists and policy-makers.

In Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World the discourse of politicians and policy-makers in Britain links languages other than English, and therefore speakers of these languages, with civil disorder and threats to democracy, citizenship and nationhood. These powerful arguments travel along 'chains of discourse' until they gain the legitimacy of the state, and are inscribed in law. The particular focus of this volume is on discourse linking 'race riots' in England in 2001 with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which extended legislation to test the English language proficiency of British citizenship applicants. Adrian Blackledge develops a theoretical and methodological framework which draws on critical discourse analysis to reveal the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures; on Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic nature of discourse to demonstrate how voices progressively gain authority; and on Bourdieu's model of symbolic domination to illuminate the way in which linguistic-minority speakers may be complicit in the misrecognition, or valorisation, of the dominant language.

DPR Down Under Volume 2 draws together a spirited collection of papers presented at the Australian Discourse Power and Resistance conference held in Darwin 2012. The volume of work addresses and seeks to contextualise the problematic question “What counts as ‘good’ research and who decides?” Each chapter in this volume, written from differing theoretical and methodological positions articulates a notion of what could be considered as being ‘good’ research and is, in some way involved in speaking a truth back to power. The chapters invite the reader to rethink and reconsider the inherently political, critical and subversive nature of research from a range of critical investigations.

This volume addresses the role played by translation in international political communication and news reporting and brings to light the usually invisible link between politics, media, and translation. The contributors explore the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation, with a focus on political texts, institutional contexts, and translation policies. These topics are explored from a Translation Studies perspective, thus bringing a new disciplinary view to the investigation of political discourse and the language of the media. The first part of the volume focuses on textual analysis, investigating transformations that occur in translation processes, and the second part examines institutional contexts and policies, and their effects on translation production and reception.

From its creation in the early twentieth century, policymakers used the discourse of international law to legitimate Japan’s empire. Although the Japanese state aggrandizers’ reliance on this discourse did not create the imperial nation Japan would become, their fluent use of its terms inscribed Japan’s claims as legal practice within Japan and abroad. Focusing on Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, Alexis Dudden gives long-needed attention to the intellectual history of the empire and brings to light presumptions of the twentieth century’s so-called international system by describing its most powerful—and most often overlooked—member’s engagement with that system. Early chapters describe the global atmosphere that declared Japan the legal ruler of Korea and frame the significance of the discourse of early twentieth-century international law and how its terms became Japanese. Dudden then brings together these discussions in her analysis of how Meiji leaders embedded this discourse into legal precedent for Japan, particularly in its relations with Korea. Remaining chapters explore the limits of these ‘universal’ ideas and consider how the international arena measured Japan’s use of its terms. Dudden squares her examination of the legality of Japan’s imperialist designs by discussing the place of colonial policy studies in Japan at the time, demonstrating how this new discipline further created a common sense that Japan’s empire accorded to knowledgeable practice. This landmark study greatly enhances our understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of Japan’s imperial aspirations. In this carefully researched and cogently argued work, Dudden makes clear that, even before Japan annexed Korea, it had embarked on a legal and often legislating mission to make its colonization legitimate in the eyes of the world.

The collection of articles in Discourse Studies in Public Communication illustrates that public communication is a fascinating, evidence-based storehouse for research in discourse analysis. The contributions to this volume — in the spheres of political rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and corporate and academic communication — provide good evidence of contemporary social structure, social phenomena, and social issues. In this way, following the parameters of different analytical frameworks (critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory, appraisal theory, multimodality, etc.), the contributors address not only the linguistic aspects of texts but also, and more importantly, the cultural and cognitive dimensions of public communication in a range of real life communicative contexts and kinds of discourse. Although the volume is addressed, first and foremost, to readers with diverse interests in English linguistics, it may also prove valuable to scholars in other non-linguistic research fields like communication studies, social theory, political science, or psychology.

The present volume draws on the experience of the Workshop held in Germany in late 2018 to combine the specialisations of the two linguistic research teams of the two partner universities, Sun Yat-sen University in China and Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. It combines more theoretical approaches by experienced scholars and case studies by young researchers on topics and texts on current Chinese developments. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse.