Papers by Dana Shalash
In-between, or Neither-nor: The representation of Arab women by Arab women filmmakers
The disaffiliative use of ‘did you know’ questions in Arabic news interviews: The case of Aljazeera’s ‘The Opposite Direction’
Discourse Studies, 2020
This article studies the use of ‘hal taʔlaam’ (‘did you know’, hereafter) questions by the interv... more This article studies the use of ‘hal taʔlaam’ (‘did you know’, hereafter) questions by the interviewer (IR) as a discursive strategy to block the interviewees’ (IEs’) agenda and stance in Aljazeera’s ‘The Opposite Direction’, a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show has been on the air since Aljazeera’s inception, in the mid 1990s. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views, who are pitted against each other in a heated discussion as they represent and defend their own political and institutional affiliation. This article shows how IR uses ‘did you know’ questions to express adversarialness with his interviewees. The article argues that IR uses this type of questioning as an agenda blocking practice that the IR orients to as confrontational. The dataset examined in this article shows that ‘did you know’ questions do not provide any new information, nor does it seem to expect a response from the addressee. In fact, they are re...
A conversation analytic study of practices of affiliation and disaffiliation in Arabic in Aljazeera’s “The Opposite Direction”
ii The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interviewers ... more ii The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interviewers and interviewees display political alignment or disalignment with each other in news interviews. It looks at interviewers ’ use and design of questions: negated questions; prefaced questions; disjunctive and prefaced questions. It, then, examines both interviewers ’ and interviewees ’ use of membership categorization devices as a means of displaying even stronger alignment and disalignment. Use of ethnic and religious categories such as ‘brother ’ and ‘friend ’ are examined as well as the use of attributes such as ‘terrorist. ’ The final section of this thesis examines instances of code-switching to display alignment. Data used in this thesis are taken from video-taped interviews with ambassadors concerned with the ‘Question of Palestine ’ and were collected from the United Nations web archive. Taken as a whole, this thesis could be used to compare political discourse in one culture/lang...
Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs) in Arabic broadcast news interviews: The case of Aljazeera's “The Opposite Direction”
Journal of Pragmatics
Abstract This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees'... more Abstract This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees' (IEs') prior turns to further their (IEs') agenda and stance in Aljazeera's al-itijaah al-mu'akis (‘The Opposite Direction’, hereafter). ‘The Opposite Direction’ is a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views. Twenty, 50 min episodes were studied and transcribed following Conversation Analysis as my analytic method. This paper argues that the IR uses a specific questioning practice with those interviewees whom he favors, I refer to them as interviewees in the favorable position (IEFs), allowing them to further their agenda against the other's. The paper shows how the IR's actions of agenda furthering is achieved by repeating his IEFs' previous turns in a question format which allows IEFs an opportunity to confirm and highlight a previous turn for the overhearing audience. I refer to this IR practice as the Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs). This study has implications that are multidisciplinary for Conversation Analysis, Arabic linguistics, cross cultural studies, and Arabic media studies.
Variations on the same theme
The main aim of this paper is to provide both synchronic and diachronic evidence that Standard Ar... more The main aim of this paper is to provide both synchronic and diachronic evidence that Standard Arabic and the spoken dialects pattern the same way with regard to the syntactic mechanisms that govern the relationship between lexical categories and functional categories. The focus is on sentential negation and more specifically the so-called negative copula in verbless sentences – as demonstrated by laysa in Standard Arabic and negative pronouns in the modern dialects. Despite the surface differences between Arabic varieties, the underlying syntax is the same, particularly with regard to clause structure and the interaction between tense, negation and the predicate. This interaction that is governed by the same mechanisms and the options they allow helps explain why the same system keeps getting reproduced over time.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2020
This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees' (IEs')prior... more This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees' (IEs')prior turns to further their (IEs') agenda and stance in Aljazeera's al-itijaah al-mu'akis (‘The Opposite Direction’, hereafter).‘The Opposite Direction’is a weekly news interview pro-gram that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views. Twenty, 50 min episodes were studied and transcribed following Conversation Analysis as my analytic method. This paper argues that the IR uses a specific questioning practice with those interviewees whom he favors, I refer to them as interviewees in the favorable position (IEFs), allowing them to further their agenda against the other's. The paper shows how the IR's actions of agenda furthering is achieved by repeating his IEFs' previous turns in a question format which allows IEFs an opportunity to confirm and highlight a previous turn for the overhearing audience. I refer to this IR practice as the Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs). This study has implications that are multidisciplinary for Conversation Analysis, Arabic linguistics, cross cultural studies,and Arabic media studies.
Discourse Studies, 2020
This article studies the use of 'hal taʔlaam' ('did you know', hereafter) questions by the interv... more This article studies the use of 'hal taʔlaam' ('did you know', hereafter) questions by the interviewer (IR) as a discursive strategy to block the interviewees' (IEs') agenda and stance in Aljazeera's 'The Opposite Direction', a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show has been on the air since Aljazeera's inception, in the mid 1990s. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views, who are pitted against each other in a heated discussion as they represent and defend their own political and institutional affiliation. This article shows how IR uses 'did you know' questions to express adversarialness with his interviewees. The article argues that IR uses this type of questioning as an agenda blocking practice that the IR orients to as confrontational. The dataset examined in this article shows that 'did you know' questions do not provide any new information, nor does it seem to expect a response from the addressee. In fact, they are regularly used by the IR in this specific program to provide an account for previous turns that did not receive the desired response from the IE. They are lengthy, said in clear, loud Standard Arabic, and they typically embed 'hostile presuppositions' and confrontational messages. For the analysis presented here, 20, 50-minute episodes from 'The Opposite Direction' are examined following Conversation Analysis as the analytic method.
Variations on the same theme
Studies in Arabic Linguistics, 2014
The Location of Sentential Negation in Arabic Varieties
Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics, 2013
A conversation analytic examination of alignment and disalignment in broadcast political news interviews
Abstract: The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interv... more Abstract: The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interviewers and interviewees display political alignment or disalignment with each other in news interviews. It looks at interviewers' use and design of questions: negated questions; ...
Drafts by Dana Shalash
This paper investigates the employment and recontextualization of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) mo... more This paper investigates the employment and recontextualization of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement’s symbols and jargon in the Palestinian context as a means to express solidarity with the BLM movement in the US on the one hand and on the other hand to shed light on the Palestinian fight against hegemonic and systematic racism by Israel. By combining both a critical discourse analytic framework with a multimodal discourse analytic framework as outlined by Kress and van Leeuwen, the paper explores the recontextualization of anti-racism movement from one socio-political and ethnic space to another. First, the paper will overview and discuss some of the slogans and rhetoric used by the BLM movement in the US. Then, it studies how those multimodal resources are reproduced and recontextualized in the Palestinian context. The article will discuss data from the Palestinian context that includes murals, paintings, caricatures, social media posts, as well as qualitative interviews with the artists and activists. The study attempts to show parallels between both spaces and argues that the concept of “black” and “blackness” goes beyond race and political borders.
Work In Progress by Dana Shalash
Uploads
Papers by Dana Shalash
Drafts by Dana Shalash
Work In Progress by Dana Shalash