Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Lexical Choices In War Headlines: A Case Study, Jesse T. Harrington

Dissertations and Theses

Since most of our knowledge about current events such as wars in foreign countries comes via news reports, the ability to recognize bias in news media is an important skill. Linguistic discourse analysis is one way in which one can identify the unconscious biases evident in otherwise objective news. Patterns in positive and negative word choices can show which news actors a news organization identifies with and which an organization assumes to be suspect or ill-motivated.

The purpose of this study was to find such patterns in word choices from the war in Iraq. To this end, headlines were gathered …

If Your God Has Really Spoken To You… Then All The World Must Hear It: The Discourses Of Revelation And Satire In Salman Rushdie’S The Satanic Verses, Conrad William

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, Salman Rushdie lays out a place for literature as an arena in which various perspectives may interact. He thereby provides a context for the controversy regarding his books, most particularly The Satanic Verses. Despite his claims, however, literature, as Rushdie conceives it, operates not simply as an arena for discourse but similarly as a rule-maker, controlling the discourse which operates within its bounds. The Satanic Verses, in particular, suggests that revelation as it passes through unstable and hybrid human language loses its authority and power to speak purely or dogmatically. In so …

Derrida’S Deconstruction Of Logocentrism: Implications For Trauma Studies, Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article examines Derrida’s conception of logocentrism as it is discussed throughout the entirety of his seminal work Of Grammatology, as well as in his collected interviews, Points...: 1974-1994. Systematically refuting logocentrism, Derrida’s deconstruction enables exposure of the mechanisms, such as binary constructions, that exert a dominant—and domineering—influence over marginalized people, places, and concepts. Specifically, presence and the (falsehood of the) totality of the sign define logocentrism, and these terms cannot productively contribute to trauma studies because it is precisely in texts and textuality that embodied states can be studied. Texts are themselves material embodiments that display …

A Comparative Study Of Book Reviews In Thai And English, Prach Aowsakorn

Theses Digitization Project

For this study, thirty book reviews in two fields, sixteen in history and sixteen in economics, written in Thai and English (eight in each discipline) were randomly collected from Thai and US academic journals in order to examine the moves in the overall structures of the reviews and reviewers' politeness strategies, and to consider the extend to which the texts vary across the two languages and whether the variation is present in both disciplines.

Geeks At Play: Doing Masculinity In An Online Gaming Site, Natasha Chen Christensen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in …