The discursive construction of the people in European political discourse: Semantics and pragmatics of a contested concept in German, French, and British parliamentary debates

International audienceWho are the people? As a semantically underspecified noun, the lexeme “people” and related terms such as “citizen(s)” or “constituent(s)” lead to various representations and are filled with competing meanings. By undertaking a cross-linguistic analysis of the semantic value of nouns denoting human referents in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this paper investigates how the “people” (people in English, Volk in German, peuple in French) and related linguistic expressions (notably Mensch, Bürger, citoyen) are discursively staged in national parliamentary debates on Europe.The people represent the entity Members of Parliament (MPs) speak to, about, and on behalf of. In political sciences, mentioning the people immediately raises concerns about a populist message or stance. To which extent, then, does the reference to “the people” or “a people” pertain to a populist stance?Based on an annotated corpus of forty-four national parliamentary debates between 1998 and 2015, this paper uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to assess how the “people” are referred to across the political spectrum in the British House of Commons, the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée nationale. By taking into account a large amount of speakers across different times and cultures, the analysis shows that the reference to “the people” – partly in opposition to “a people” – is a basic component of political discourse, thus indicating that the mere mention of the “people” cannot be regarded as a feature of populist rhetoric

Review of: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.) (2015), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then

Discourse & Societ

Avoiding the Next Napster: Copyright Infringement and Investor Liability in the Age of User Generated Content

Rapid developments in digital technology over the past quarter century have made it easier than ever for people to create and instantly share content. These developments have served as the basis for countless innovations and have spawned some of today’s largest and most profitable companies. As content creation and distribution continues to evolve, businesses seek new ways to profit from these technological innovations. But while businesses continue to develop around new methods of content distribution, the law of copyright, which generally aims to encourage the creation of content, has been slow to adapt. This era of modern technological innovation thus operates in a legal environment developed primarily in the 1970s. Consequently, many innovative and groundbreaking ideas are stymied by legal conceptions that seem out of date in cyberspace. The result is excessive legal liability and disproportionate ramifications on innovation

Interview with Mary Truan

An interview with Mary Truan regarding her experiences in a one-room school house.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1079/thumbnail.jp

Interview with Helen Truan

An interview with Helen Truan regarding her experiences in a one-room school house.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1196/thumbnail.jp

"I am a real cat": French-speaking cats on Twitter as an enregistered variety and community of practice

This paper is an exploration of the variety of French-speaking cats on Twitter. Among the many creative phenomena that the internet has produced, animal-related language varieties, the language used by pets, have been explored as early as the 2000s, yet with a strong and almost exclusive focus on English. I first describe the shared repertoire of lexical, semantic, phonographic, and syntactic features used by French-speaking cats, and show how the simultaneous use of a childlike code and a formal register constructs the sociolinguistic persona of cats as ambivalent animals. I argue that the French variety has become "enregistered" (Squires 2010) insofar as it is perceived and ideologically constructed as a variety of its own while promoting a welcoming culture towards new members. In doing so, cats show that the belonging to a community of practice, notably by drawing on a common repertoire of resources, does not need to be linked with processes of exclusion.Language Use in Past and Presen

Introduction: The sociolinguistics of exclusion – Indexing (non)belonging in mobile communities

The special issue on ‘The sociolinguistics of exclusion: Indexing (non)belonging in mobile communities’ delves into the phenomenon of exclusion as a means and outcome of social positioning within diverse communities undergoing continual transformation due to social, demographic, political, and technological changes. Through empirical studies that critically engage with exclusionary discourse practices, this issue analyzes the semiotic means that social actors employ to presuppose and/or entail exclusion. Additionally, it explores the underlying ideological assumptions on which these choices are perceived, rationalized, justified, and/or contested as exclusionary