Related Papers
6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference. CADAAD 2016. Book of abstracts
Image Repair or Self-Destruction? A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Restaurants’ Responses to Online Reviews
2016 •
Maria Cristina Aiezza
Customers are today becoming more and more reliant on online travel reviews for their buying decisions, such as where to stay on holiday or where to have dinner in a foreign town. In particular, TripAdvisor has become a first stop for travel planning. People are increasingly engaging in electronic word-of-mouth (Pollach 2006), thus potentially influencing a business’ economic performance. Firms cannot generally get negative reviews changed or removed, but the website grants a ‘right to reply’ function where owners can respond to criticism or thank customers for the compliments obtained (TripAdvisor 2014). The present study calls into question the way restaurants are exploiting this medium, taking the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their customers or, instead, trying to discredit the reliability of the feedback received. Complaint response represents a critical part of a business’ customer relationship management, being responsiveness, compensation and contact highly valued by customers (Avant 2013). The paper aims at investigating the owners’ replies to negative comments in UK and Italy. Our corpus collects a set of low score reviews left on TripAdvisor website for restaurants situated in the two countries. Zhang and Vásquez’s (2014) analysis of the generic structure of hotel responses to customer complaints represents a practical reference to classify the moves enacted in the texts. Our study investigates the argumentations exploited by managers and owners to try to defend and rebuild trust and reputation, letting diners know that their opinions matter or, instead, imposing the firm’s contrasting — and sometimes angry — point of view. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Baker 2006) constitutes a useful framework to help spot the characteristics typifying the owners’ attitudes towards criticism in the two different cultural contexts, by means of the interpretation of tendencies and discursive patterns.
[Book of Abstracts] 6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference (CADAAD 2016)
2016 •
Antonio Fruttaldo, Marco Venuti
Book of Abstracts of the 6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference (CADAAD 2016)
Editorial: Critical Perspectives on Ideology, Identity, and Interaction
2012 •
Monika Kopytowska
Interest in „language as social practice‟ and in the „context of its use‟ (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), which has been the defining feature of various frameworks and studies within the Critical Discourse Analysis programme, has generated continuous attempts to identify, analyse and describe various aspects and dimensions of the dialectics between discursive events and social structures, situations and institutions. One can get the idea of the scale of these attempts looking at the number of publications, conferences, and projects devoted to the discourse and society interface, aiming to address the complexity of the socially constituted nature of discourse and its socially constitutive function and to demonstrate how it both reflects and shapes (sustains, reproduces or transforms) social actions and relations, (self)identification of social actors and representations of the world. Critical research published regularly in Discourse, Dialogue and Discourse, Discourse and Society, Disco...
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines
The Criminalization of NGOs: Shifting the Blame (and the Gaze) from Immigrants to Rescuers
2023 •
Andrea Cerase
The 'Refugee crisis' has been accompanied by a radical shift of public attitudes toward NGOs operating in the southern Mediterranean, whose image has quickly turned from 'saviors of the sea' to 'sea taxis' by practices of re-contextualization of migration discourses. Less attention has been directed towards the ways such criminalization of solidarity affected migrant representation and identities in turn, especially on social media. This study aims to cast a new light on the discursive practices of criminalizing NGOs and their role in shaping the dichotomy 'Us vs Them'. The case study focuses on Twitter as a privileged arena, where different categories of users are involved in the criminalization of NGOs, fostering the normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, thus creating room for populist and sovereigntist ideologies. Based on a corpus composed of more than 800.000 tweets posted between 2017 and 2020, this study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including corpus linguistics and discursive strategies. Findings show that the NGO criminalization is part of the broader process of normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, legitimizing restrictive migration policies, fostering the building of a sovereigntist political identity and neglecting immigrants' and refugees' own identities and rights. Specifically, results highlight a new articulation of the Us vs Them dichotomy where 'Us' is represented by the in-group, a new 'Them' is represented by the NGO and 'Those' is represented by migrants. The research output as a whole seems to consolidate a present and future trajectory regarding the political discourse on migration that is based on a progressive redefinition of the attributes of illegality/crime that shifts from migrants to rescuers.
Disempowerment and Inspiration: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Immigrant Women in the Spanish and Australian Online Press
2017 •
Katina Zammit
The media frequently portray immigrants who arrive illegally in relation to political agendas, either supporting the dominant government discourse or a humanitarian discourse. African and Arabic immigrants who have arrived by boat in Spain and Australia are represented as being illegal, a threat (both potential and real), in need of assistance (medical and/or refuge), unhealthy, and culturally very different. The inclusion of images of African and Arabic female immigrants, are very limited in the media and include both hegemonic representations but also portrayals of them engaged in work. This article intends to be a contribution to the representation of immigrant women in the media drawing on a sample of texts from the Spanish and Australian press, online editions. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis and social semiotics to closely analyse four texts, we focus on the interpretation of visual representations in the images of these articles. The results show a similarity between...
Critical discourse studies: Introduction, critical discourse studies
Jay L Lemke
This refereed introduction is an overview of the field of critical discourse studies, written by its foundational scholars.
Critical Discourse Studies
•KhosraviNik M. Actor descriptions, action attributions, and argumentation: towards a systematization of CDA analytical categories in the representation of social groups. Critical Discourse Studies 2010, 7(1), 55-72.
2010 •
Majid KhosraviNik
Mediating identity ideology and values in the public sphere
Monika Kopytowska
Positive Self representation and Negative Other representation in Iranian and Western Media
Ali Rahimi
CADAAD (Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines) 2012
Developing Environmental Ethics: Discourse Analysis of Sustainability Reports
2012 •
Maria Cristina Aiezza
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the companiesʼ obligations towards the environment, the workers and the consumers. Two environmental disasters, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (April 2010) and the Fukushima nuclear accident (March 2011), have drawn even more attention to the problematic issue of 66 sustainability. Yet, it has been argued that developing countries could follow an alternative path of growth, with lower levels of environmental pressure. For this research, a corpus of annual sustainability reports issued between 2008 and 2011 by oil and energy companies operating in emerging and industrial countries has been collected and processed by means of corpus investigation software. A corpus-driven discourse analysis of sustainability reports, an evolving genre combining informative and promotional purposes, can reveal how linguistic and textual choices are used by firms to build trust and reputation and to pursue their business interests. The paper will examine the texts in order to identify possible common discourses arising within the groups of countries selected. Furthermore, it will study how the companies communicate risks and try to keep their corporate and sector image following the two environmental disasters.
