A technique for processing of political language

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011

This paper presents a computational method based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the interpretation of the political discourse. The application considers the 2009 presidential campaign in Romania. The software package, AnaDiP-2010, allows for a rapid and robust interpretation of the political language. The concept behind this method is that the manner in which individuals speak and write is an opened window towards their emotional and cognitive worlds. In other words, the vocabulary betrays the author's sensibility. By emphasizing the emotional component at the level of discourse, voters identify with the speaker, who becomes the personification of their common ideals. Our investigation is intended to give support to researchers, specialists in political sciences, to political analysts and election's staff, being helpful mainly in their social exploration of the electoral campaigns, as well as to the media, in their intend to measure reactions with respect to the developments in the political arena.

LiNGUA: Jurnal Ilmu Bahasa dan Sastra

A reliable newspaper should accommodate heterogeneity regarding geographical and psychological readers. The wider the coverage area of a newspaper, the more heterogeneous its readers will be. By putting more concerns on these two dimensions, a newspaper is expected to be in a neutral position. This impartiality or neutrality of the mass media becomes a more intriguing topic when it is associated with the theory arguing that language cannot be neutral since it is a form of social practice, as Halliday has always emphasized. This study aims to describe (1) the use of language (speech acts, speech targets, and speech objectives) in the political discourse contained in the editorials of Republika and Kompas newspapers and (2) the objectivity of the two newspapers. This study used a qualitative-critical approach. This type of research is descriptive-interpretative research and, more specifically, is a type of critical pragmatic analysis research. The analysis of the use of language in th...

Armenian folia anglistika, 2022

There are different research methods, techniques and strategies that are used to study the text. One of such methods is the method of textual analysis, a variety of study approaches used to analyze and comprehend a piece of writing. Understanding media-political texts and avoiding manipulation and information bias requires not only linguistic and extra-linguistic competence, but also awareness of different strategies. In the present paper, we are aimed to provide an overview of textual analysis as a research tool for studying incidents of manipulation in media news broadcasts from a textological perspective.

Vilniaus universiteto Kauno humanitarinis fakultetas Muitinės g. 8, Kaunas, Lietuva El. p. [email protected] Ab stract T he article investigates functions of the language and anal ys es ho w evaluation is maintained in ne ws paper headlines. Language gathers it s o wn emotional and cultural el ements that depend on sub-cult ures in which the languag e exists. Written text has a graphological level, and all texts have a lexical level and structur al level. Evaluation concerns evaluative vocabulary. "Good-bad" denotes the qualitative evaluation of facts, "true-fals e" reflects this parameter and evalu ates facts, events, and people from the point of vie w of conformity with the commonl y accepted norm.

Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska, sectio K – Politologia, 2016

After 2008, Romania faced a difficult economic crisis manifested in the increase of unemployement rate, high migratory flows in the EU and a drop in the national GDP. As existing literature showed, in the period of economic crisis, media exposure strongly affected expectations regarding the future development of the national economic situation. The present article presents the ways in which media frames were used to represent different occupations within the Romanian mass media. Using a content analysis as the main method applied to a sample made up of 944 news published in the online newspapers in Romania, the results of the study pinpoint the fact that each type of media presents the same occupation in a specific way. Another important result of the study is that the reader's perception of the occupations presented in the Romanian mass media-expressed in the form of comments to the online articles-is similar to the presentation of these occupations in the news published by Romanian mass media.

This article represents a CDA account for the different realizations of Speech Reportage instances in written media articles. It is a case study of nine (09) articles selected from The New York Times (Oct, Nov, and Dec 2014). These articles share the same source and topic which is the Syrian political impasse with its details and possible outcomes. The aim has been to unveil the importance of preferences made at the discursive level for the societal role ascribed to written media articles. Media producers tend to manage structural entities in accordance with the preset social objective of the mediated text. The CDA framework has been qualified most adequate for bringing different practices accompanying text production and consumption to the fore (van Dijk 2006). Critical analysis of mediated texts is geared to study the different workings of ideological investment of political discourse in the media. Key words: Media discourse, Speech Reportage, Critical Discourse Analysis, manipulation, ideology

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series IV: Philology. Cultural Studies, 2020

The paper analyses the way in which evaluative language in used in two regional newspapers – a US and a Romanian one. It starts from two articles that cover a similar topic, namely the mining disasters that took place in the two areas, and studies the way in which the disaster and the people responsible for it are presented. The analytical framework for the analysis is based on Martin and White’s definition of appraisal in terms of attitude, engagement and graduation and the analysis focuses on the similarities and differences between the two articles in terms of evaluation and its linguistic realizations.

Revista Romana De Sociologie, 2013

This study aims at emphasizing the institutional transformations that occurred in the public environment following the events in December 1989 in Romania, focusing on the dismantling of mechanisms that marked the transition from the national-communist propaganda discourse to the informative discourse, which laid the foundation of the public sphere in post-totalitarian Romania. The hypothesis is that Romanian media was slow in abandoning the communist press model, which explains the manichaeist discourse of nowadays media, the involvement of politics in media business and, last but not least, the extremely poor market-the poorest in Eastern Europe, as showed by the latest studies. The analysis has two components: the context analysis (historical, political, and ideological) and the media discourse analysis, in line with the view of certain authors (C. Sparks) with respect to the transitions in Eastern Europe and the role the media played in these processes. The discourse procedures of the totalitarian language were emphasized by investigating a corpus formed of the main publications of the printed press before and after 1989.

ALUSTATH JOURNAL FOR HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2018

The paper tries to study the Linguistic phenomenon of intertextuality in general and in press discourse in special . In this study we try to show the nature of the term and the reason behind the wide interest in it . The study begins with a simple introduction as a preliminary for the subject . Some definitions and ideas of different authors to show the nature of the term are introduced .The types and dimensions of intertextuality are also mentioned . The work introduces the analysis of certain press samples according to an ecletic model to end with the conclusions then the bibliography.

The Power of Speech. A Critical Reading of Media and Political Texts, 2020

The present monograph documents and analyses the contemporary trends in public communication over the last decades which the general public, i.e., speakers outside the field of linguistics and cultural studies, has interpreted intuitively as “worsening” and “lowering of standards”. It focuses on expressivity in public discourse in Czech and Polish, monitored for the period between the end of the World War II and the present. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in public communication has been studied in an extensive corpus of both written and spoken texts and analysed from quantitative as well as qualitative perspective. The researchers’ main intention was to characterize the linguistic means of expressivity and to learn which linguistic planes are employed most frequently for these communicative purposes. The essential part of the monograph discusses the texts produced after 1989 during the restoration of democracy in Central Europe that record political discourse in the media. Besides, these studies examine the cases when media give floor to non-professional speakers who do not have any contract to the particular medium. The research in political discourse points out to quite a strong tendency of the speakers in political debates to avoid relevant arguments (ad rem ideas) and replace them with false statements threatening or damaging the hearer’s face (ad hominem fallacies). Another typical feature of the political discourse (and public discourse in general) after 1989 is personalizing. Politicians utilise social network sites to create the illusion of intimacy by addressing every elector seemingly “in person”. Their communicative pseudo-strategies include discussing the topics which are normally excluded from TV channels discourses (ostracization of ethnic, religious or sexual minorities, etc.) and typically associated with stylistically marked expressions. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in present-day public discourse is confronted with the recent history: in particular with Communist newspeak and 1960s/70s media discourse reflecting on some high-profile social and political issues, e.g., men’s long haircuts or the role of religion and church in the society. The analyses of the newspaper texts, echoing the official ideology, indicate that the regime was reluctant to admit the lack of control over such social phenomena and, consequently, label them as an “import” from behind the Iron Curtain. Two studies on expressivity and verbal aggressiveness in present-day Polish public communication set the topic into the international frame. They primarily test the assumption that the intellectual horizons of interlocutors are limited by the medium, i.e., the online environment. The research focuses on two events: first, the burning of books by J. K. Rowling and S. Meyer and of other pop-culture items organized by Polish priests that was widely discussed on Facebook; second, the anti-government protest in Prague described in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza in June 2019 that was commented by over 500 readers on the magazine website. The identification of specific communicative strategies confirmed that the mode of communication (the internet) influences the quality of discourse.

Transylvanian Review, 2019

Not many people are specialists in economics, but everyone tends to have the impression of knowing something about economic crises—and, above all, they are eager to talk about it. The economic crisis seems to have been the dominant topic of the last decade at least in Romania, generating a plurality of parallel or even contradictory discourses. This paper explores, through an automated analysis using the ReaderBench Framework, Romanian media discourses on the economic crisis spanning the years between 2008 and 2018. We start by delineating four categories of discourse relevant for the selected topic: specialized academic publications (SA), specialized non-academic publications (SN), non-specialized non-academic publications (NN), and informal debate platforms (ID). For each of these categories, we selected 50 texts, which were then analyzed using the ReaderBench Framework. The 13 statistically significant textual complexity indices that resulted from this automated analysis show that the first three categories of discourse follow a downward progression pattern, while the fourth category (ID) appears to exhibit an eccentric behavior. The central thesis of our article is that this behavior stems from the ID’s attempt to replace the specialized non-academic discourse, currently under threat of being devoured by the tabloid press in Romania.

Quaderns de Psicologia

Normative regulations and the use of language in describing political events: an analysis of the pragmatic use of language on newspapers Regulaciones normativas y uso del lenguaje en la descripción de eventos políticos: Un análisis del uso pragmático del lenguaje en los periódicos