Thulfiqar H M Altahmazi | Mustansiriyah University Iraq - Baghdad (original) (raw)
Papers by Thulfiqar H M Altahmazi
PRAGMATICS: The Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 2025
Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-makin... more Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-making in creative multimodal texts, taking advocacy campaign posters as its case study. The analysis shows that in each poster semiotic resources are employed to create a micro-narrative exemplifying actors affected by a sociopolitical problem, whose function is to create assumptions against which a higher-order intention is recognized. The text-internal relevance within the micro-narrative is optimized by combining verbal and visual elements to communicate multimodal explicatures and implicatures. The visual elements are employed to invoke non-propositional effects that activate perceptual mechanisms to maximize emotional attachment with the issue advocated for. These non-propositional effects communicated by visual connotation carriers are essential, rather than extra, elements, contributing to the understanding of the propositional meaning communicated at the text-external level. The analysis shows that an inferential approach to multimodality is indispensable to account for (non)propositional content across different modes.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2025
Drawing mainly on cognitive pragmatics, supplemented by insights from positioning theory, the pap... more Drawing mainly on cognitive pragmatics, supplemented by insights from positioning theory, the paper aims to identify the pragmatic features and highlight the argumentative potential of the victimhood narratives propagated online. The paper analyzes a corpus of approximately 130,000 user-generated comments discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conceptualizing frames as relevance establishers priming tendentious implicated premises, various corpus linguistic techniques are used to identify the frame-evoking elements of the storyline advanced by commenters. The analysis shows that frames can license conclusions potentially influencing the audience's epistemic attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making a particular victimhood narrative looks more relevant and more coherent. The argumentative potential of a given victimhood narrative lies in its ability to prime cognitive and affective effects that optimize relevance and activate emotional procedures making the audience more epistemically vulnerable to manipulation. The paper provides fresh insights as to how cognitive pragmatics can account for manipulative political discourse in online public sphere. The paper also demonstrates the efficacy of corpus linguistic techniques in identifying frame-evoking elements in large corpora.
Internet Pragmatics, 2024
The paper explores the interplay of impoliteness, ethnic/religious humor and multimodality in onl... more The paper explores the interplay of impoliteness, ethnic/religious humor and multimodality in online contexts. The argument advanced in the paper is that anti-Muslim memes are instantiations of ethno-religious humor that creatively incorporate linguistic impoliteness and visual dysphemism in manners that potentially propagate Islamophobia online. The analysis of a specialized corpus of memes suggests that multimodal impoliteness in these memes is mainly triggered by marked implicitness, reinforced by visual reference to targets. The humor-generating incongruity in these memes is often based on anomalous juxtaposition of verbal and visual cues expressing ethnic and religious stereotypes, in ways that made the values expressed in these stereotypes easily acceptable. Such multimodal impoliteness creatively incorporates entertainment with emotional coercion, aiming at like-minded participants in the potential presence of targets. This constitutes a form of plausibly deniable incitement, meant to instigate attitude change and intimidate the victims, which consequently blurs the conceptual distinction between jocular abuse, impoliteness and hate speech.
Keywords: anti-Muslim memes, humor, linguistic impoliteness, multimodality, visual dysphemism
Discourse and Socieity, 2023
The paper explores the interplay of offence, (de)normalization and moral conflict triggered by me... more The paper explores the interplay of offence, (de)normalization and moral conflict triggered by media racism. The paper is premised on the assumption that public interventions to moral transgressions occasion moral conflicts in which transgressions can be (de)normalized through impoliteness, more specifically the acts of offence taking and causing. A YouTube video discussing the racist media coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis was analyzed along with a sizable amount of related usergenerated comments. The analysis showed that offence taking and offence causing have morally restorative and (de)normalizing functions in moral conflict. This highlights the fact that the relationship between morality and impoliteness is much more complex than is usually theorized, wherein impoliteness is often perceived as a morally norm-disruptive behavior or a negatively valenced evaluation thereof. Not only can impoliteness be morally justified in moral conflicts, it can also be a necessary form of restorative public intervention. This necessitates greater attention to (de)normalization in (im)politeness theorizing.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. ... more Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. They concisely and figuratively summarize everyday experiences and common observations (Borowska, 2014, p. 22). The use of proverbs often gives rise to interesting pragmatic processes, including, most notably, recontextualization. Recontextualization is intimately connected to two distinctive features of proverbs, namely, traditionality, and self-containedness. Pragmatically, the meanings and functions of the love proverbs, the focus of this paper, are not totally fixed because the conventionalized meanings and functions associated with these proverbs should be modulated in light of the new context of use. This study will examine 50 proverbs of love (25 in each language) from a pragmatic perspective. The analytical framework employed in the analysis will draw on the concept of implicature and the distinction between utterance-type implicature and utterance-token implicature. In this part...
Journal of Politeness Research
Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Dipl... more Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Diplomacy in the Middle East, explicating how Twitter affordances shape the context in which offence can be employed strategically in diplomatic communication. The dataset includes all the tweets posted by the Iranian Foreign Minister over a period of 10 years (totaling 659 tweets). The argument expounded in this paper is based on two assumptions. First, impoliteness notions can be effective in analyzing and theorizing diplomatic Tweeting in the times of crisis. Second, diplomatic offence can be employed to manage conflicts and legitimize foreign policies. The results show that diplomatic offence is characteristically explicit, which is vital to index the offender’s disaffiliation from the target’s values. Offence giving is used to present self-image through attacking the adversary’s identity or values, whereas offence taking is utilized to moralize international politics through foregroundi...
When Politicians Talk
This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab cultu... more This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab culture, and Qur’anic rhetoric influence public political discourse in the Arab world. It specifically examines the influence of Qur’anic themes, stylistic techniques and discursive practices on public speaking in three Arab countries. To that end, it analyzes how six political leaders in Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia strategically employ Qur’anic rhetoric to legitimize their public policies and advance their political agendas. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter draws on the concept of linguaculture (Risager, 2006; 2012a) which focuses on the cultural dimension of language use, namely the semantic-pragmatic dimension, poetic dimension and identity dimension. From a methodological perspective, the study employs both analytical and stylistic frameworks to elucidate how public speaking in the Arab world is heavily influenced by Qur’anic elements. The corpus is composed of public speeches delivered by six heads of state (Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia) during times of crisis across pre- and post-Arab Spring eras. When supplemented with empirical evidence and insights on Islamic values and Qur’anic rhetoric, the three-tiered conceptualization of linguaculture proved adequate to identify striking similarities between the Qur’anic text and the political speeches analyzed.
Discourse, Context & Media
Abstract This paper conceptualizes the recent translation practices in online news sites as cross... more Abstract This paper conceptualizes the recent translation practices in online news sites as cross-lingual and multimodal recontextualization, examining their roles in creating coherent narratives with manipulative potentials. Drawing on the sociocognitive approach to context (van Dijk, 2008) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Ledin and Machin, 2018a), the paper analyzes a corpus of 30 Arabic and English translated news reports covering ISIS news. Four strategies of multimodal recontextualization were identified; each results in different types of meaning transformation. The analysis shows that recontextualization serves different communicative functions, ranging from epistemic fine-tuning, whose aim is to provide background information necessary for inference-making; cultural adaptability, which optimizes cultural resonance for the targeted readership and enhances text authenticity; and finally normalization of ideological stances across the source and the target texts. The findings suggest that multimodal recontextualization gives rise to different contextual assumptions across source and target texts, embedding each in a different ideological narrative. Conceptualizing these texts as “meaningful wholes” with different semiotic affordances (Ledin and Machin, 2018b) elucidates how recontextualization creates manipulative narratives across languages and modalities. These narratives are created through ideological appropriation made coherent by maintaining referential, spatiotemporal and action continuity along different semiotic levels.
Lingua
Abstract This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag... more Abstract This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users’ sense of agency in networked spaces.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2012
Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language.... more Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. They concisely and figuratively summarize everyday experiences and common observations (Borowska, 2014: 22). The use of proverbs often gives rise to interesting pragmatic processes, including, most notably, recontextualization. Recontextualization is intimately connected to two distinctive features of proverbs, i.e. traditionality, and self-containedness. Pragmatically, the meanings and functions of the love proverbs, the focus of this paper, are not totally fixed, because the conventionalized meanings and functions associated with these proverbs should be modulated in light of the new context of use.
This study will examine 50 proverbs of love (25 in each language) from pragmatic perspective. The analytical framework employed in the analysis will draw on the concept of implicature, and more specifically, the distinction between utterance-type implicature and utterance-token implicature. In this part, the study will draw on Culpeper and Haugh’s (2014) neo-Gricean model. At a higher contextual level, the analysis will follow Linell’s (1998) conceptualization of the pragmatic process of recontextualization.
The analysis showed that upon using a proverb in a new context, the proverb could go through a recontextualization process that might serve two pragmatic functions: illocution shift and foregrounding of didactic content.
Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture. , 2022
Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Dipl... more Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Diplomacy in the Middle East, explicating how Twitter affordances shape the context in which offence can be employed strategically in diplomatic communication. The dataset includes all the tweets posted by the Iranian Foreign Minister over a period of 10 years (totaling 659 tweets). The argument expounded in this paper is based on two assumptions. First, impoliteness notions can be effective in analyzing and theorizing diplomatic tweeting in the times of crisis. Second, diplomatic offence can be employed to manage conflicts and legitimize foreign policies. The results show that diplomatic offence is characteristically explicit, which is vital to index the offender"s disaffiliation from the target"s values. Offence giving is used to present self-image through attacking the adversary"s identity or values, whereas offence taking is utilized to moralize international politics through foregrounding the adversary"s moral idiosyncrasies or legal violations. In effect, diplomatic offence is used to do impression management that aims at gaining moral capital. Twitter affordances allow the affective and moral stances associated with offence giving and taking to be publicized to online and offline audience, encouraging them to align with the producer"s values and political standing.
Lingua, 2020
This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism... more This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users' sense of agency in networked spaces. Highlights: Hashtagged political tweeting is a complex pragmatic act. It involves communing affiliation and legitimizing political claims. Hashtags with political claims allow meaning to be negotiated collaboratively. Clusters of hashtagged political tweets constitute macro collective pragmatic acts. These collective acts are performed by collectivities of politically active agents.
Discourse, Context and Media, 2020
Creating Realities across Languages and Modalities: Multimodal recontextualization in the transl... more Creating Realities across Languages and Modalities: Multimodal recontextualization in the translation of online news reports
شيعة العراق بعد 2003 الرؤى والمسارات, 2019
The paper examines micro-argumentative patterns in twelve debate-like political interactions to a... more The paper examines micro-argumentative patterns in twelve debate-like political interactions to account for the discursive construction of victimhood and disenfranchisements used to legitimize ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in Iraqi media interactions across traditional and new media. The analysis found that the interlocutors employed a limited number of argumentative patterns to voice their (dis)agreement and legitimize their viewpoints; these argumentative patterns were either action-oriented or actor-oriented. Action-oriented (de)legitimizing patterns tended to be short-ranged in nature focusing on the efficiency of the actions (de)legitimized. Alternatively, actor-oriented argumentative patterns were used to legitimize the long-rooted ideological biases about self and others and, therefore, seemed to have a panoramic focus on the ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in the country. The analysis showed that even the interactions that focused on discussing the efficiency of specific political actions and agendas tended to evolve into ideological debates about ethno-sectarian identities and communally biased interpretations of the political scene. This kind of identity politics seems to be motivated by, and concurrently enhance, the sentiments of disenfranchisement and victimhood, which may further deepen inter-communal rifts in the country.
The paper investigates how (de)legitimization and impoliteness are interconnected in the ethno-se... more The paper investigates how (de)legitimization and impoliteness are interconnected in the ethno-sectarian conflicts that take place in online news response threads. (De)legitimization is conceptualized as a micro argumentative practice that can index the interlocutors’ sociopolitical stances and positions them in relation to each other in inter-group contestations. Using multi-tiered positioning analysis, a distinction was made between exogenous and endogenous impoliteness assessments each of which occurred at a different spatiotemporal level of the interactions. This distinction elucidates how impoliteness assessments can trigger and be triggered by (de)legitimization. To understand how (de)legitimization might trigger impoliteness assessments, I differentiate between face-related and identity-related impoliteness, which were both used strategically to deepen the ethno-sectarian divisions in this online context. In the online conflicts in question, collective impoliteness was sometimes motivated by legitimization, rather than delegitimization, even though legitimization involves no violation of the genre-sanctioned interactional norms or the moral order. That was because legitimization functioned in binary oppositions, and, as such, was perceived by out-group members as provocative impingement on their ethno-sectarian communities’ sociopolitical rights.
The paper aims to show how the pursuit of power polarizes political discussions on Facebook and c... more The paper aims to show how the pursuit of power polarizes political discussions on Facebook and consequently constructs online sociopolitical communities. Drawing on political discourse analysis and Bamberg's (1997) tripartite positioning analysis, the present paper investigates how the pursuit of power, by means of de/legitimization, is produced and perceived in the Iraqi political discourses produced in social media as discourses of ethnosectarian and cultural contestations. The results show that recontextualizing political actions and actors to de/legitimize particular interpretations of political reality based on differentiation and exclusion polarizes the discussions on Facebook. The delegitimization process that is based on differentiation and exclusion emphasizes the distinction between ingroups and out-groups and motivates the commentators to categorize themselves in oppositional sociopolitical communities that are discursively constructed. These sociopolitical communities range from completely imagined communities to the online recreation of actual ethno-sectarian groups.
The paper examines the de/legitimization of ethno-sectarian struggles for power in the Iraqi poli... more The paper examines the de/legitimization of ethno-sectarian struggles for power in the Iraqi political context. Drawing on van Leeuwen's (2008) social actors and action model and Membership Categorization Analysis, I argue that the analysis of
This paper explores how de/legitimization affects identity and rapport management in political di... more This paper explores how de/legitimization affects identity and rapport management in political discourse. Drawing on the analysis of Iraqi political discourse produced in mainstream and social media, I argue that the evaluation of im/politeness can function as a social indicator to gauge the extent to which the struggle for power in political discourse is deemed permissible, sanctioned, or tolerable. This analysis sheds light on how the sectarian and social divisions in Iraq are reflected in mainstream and social media, and how these divisions are perceived, responded to and perpetuated by means of the very same discourse produced in these two types of media. The paper draws on various discourse analytic approaches to analyze how political identity is constructed and evaluated in nine contrasting debates taken place in mainstream and social media.
PRAGMATICS: The Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 2025
Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-makin... more Drawing on Relevance Theory, the paper sketches out a framework that accounts for inference-making in creative multimodal texts, taking advocacy campaign posters as its case study. The analysis shows that in each poster semiotic resources are employed to create a micro-narrative exemplifying actors affected by a sociopolitical problem, whose function is to create assumptions against which a higher-order intention is recognized. The text-internal relevance within the micro-narrative is optimized by combining verbal and visual elements to communicate multimodal explicatures and implicatures. The visual elements are employed to invoke non-propositional effects that activate perceptual mechanisms to maximize emotional attachment with the issue advocated for. These non-propositional effects communicated by visual connotation carriers are essential, rather than extra, elements, contributing to the understanding of the propositional meaning communicated at the text-external level. The analysis shows that an inferential approach to multimodality is indispensable to account for (non)propositional content across different modes.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2025
Drawing mainly on cognitive pragmatics, supplemented by insights from positioning theory, the pap... more Drawing mainly on cognitive pragmatics, supplemented by insights from positioning theory, the paper aims to identify the pragmatic features and highlight the argumentative potential of the victimhood narratives propagated online. The paper analyzes a corpus of approximately 130,000 user-generated comments discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conceptualizing frames as relevance establishers priming tendentious implicated premises, various corpus linguistic techniques are used to identify the frame-evoking elements of the storyline advanced by commenters. The analysis shows that frames can license conclusions potentially influencing the audience's epistemic attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making a particular victimhood narrative looks more relevant and more coherent. The argumentative potential of a given victimhood narrative lies in its ability to prime cognitive and affective effects that optimize relevance and activate emotional procedures making the audience more epistemically vulnerable to manipulation. The paper provides fresh insights as to how cognitive pragmatics can account for manipulative political discourse in online public sphere. The paper also demonstrates the efficacy of corpus linguistic techniques in identifying frame-evoking elements in large corpora.
Internet Pragmatics, 2024
The paper explores the interplay of impoliteness, ethnic/religious humor and multimodality in onl... more The paper explores the interplay of impoliteness, ethnic/religious humor and multimodality in online contexts. The argument advanced in the paper is that anti-Muslim memes are instantiations of ethno-religious humor that creatively incorporate linguistic impoliteness and visual dysphemism in manners that potentially propagate Islamophobia online. The analysis of a specialized corpus of memes suggests that multimodal impoliteness in these memes is mainly triggered by marked implicitness, reinforced by visual reference to targets. The humor-generating incongruity in these memes is often based on anomalous juxtaposition of verbal and visual cues expressing ethnic and religious stereotypes, in ways that made the values expressed in these stereotypes easily acceptable. Such multimodal impoliteness creatively incorporates entertainment with emotional coercion, aiming at like-minded participants in the potential presence of targets. This constitutes a form of plausibly deniable incitement, meant to instigate attitude change and intimidate the victims, which consequently blurs the conceptual distinction between jocular abuse, impoliteness and hate speech.
Keywords: anti-Muslim memes, humor, linguistic impoliteness, multimodality, visual dysphemism
Discourse and Socieity, 2023
The paper explores the interplay of offence, (de)normalization and moral conflict triggered by me... more The paper explores the interplay of offence, (de)normalization and moral conflict triggered by media racism. The paper is premised on the assumption that public interventions to moral transgressions occasion moral conflicts in which transgressions can be (de)normalized through impoliteness, more specifically the acts of offence taking and causing. A YouTube video discussing the racist media coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis was analyzed along with a sizable amount of related usergenerated comments. The analysis showed that offence taking and offence causing have morally restorative and (de)normalizing functions in moral conflict. This highlights the fact that the relationship between morality and impoliteness is much more complex than is usually theorized, wherein impoliteness is often perceived as a morally norm-disruptive behavior or a negatively valenced evaluation thereof. Not only can impoliteness be morally justified in moral conflicts, it can also be a necessary form of restorative public intervention. This necessitates greater attention to (de)normalization in (im)politeness theorizing.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. ... more Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. They concisely and figuratively summarize everyday experiences and common observations (Borowska, 2014, p. 22). The use of proverbs often gives rise to interesting pragmatic processes, including, most notably, recontextualization. Recontextualization is intimately connected to two distinctive features of proverbs, namely, traditionality, and self-containedness. Pragmatically, the meanings and functions of the love proverbs, the focus of this paper, are not totally fixed because the conventionalized meanings and functions associated with these proverbs should be modulated in light of the new context of use. This study will examine 50 proverbs of love (25 in each language) from a pragmatic perspective. The analytical framework employed in the analysis will draw on the concept of implicature and the distinction between utterance-type implicature and utterance-token implicature. In this part...
Journal of Politeness Research
Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Dipl... more Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Diplomacy in the Middle East, explicating how Twitter affordances shape the context in which offence can be employed strategically in diplomatic communication. The dataset includes all the tweets posted by the Iranian Foreign Minister over a period of 10 years (totaling 659 tweets). The argument expounded in this paper is based on two assumptions. First, impoliteness notions can be effective in analyzing and theorizing diplomatic Tweeting in the times of crisis. Second, diplomatic offence can be employed to manage conflicts and legitimize foreign policies. The results show that diplomatic offence is characteristically explicit, which is vital to index the offender’s disaffiliation from the target’s values. Offence giving is used to present self-image through attacking the adversary’s identity or values, whereas offence taking is utilized to moralize international politics through foregroundi...
When Politicians Talk
This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab cultu... more This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab culture, and Qur’anic rhetoric influence public political discourse in the Arab world. It specifically examines the influence of Qur’anic themes, stylistic techniques and discursive practices on public speaking in three Arab countries. To that end, it analyzes how six political leaders in Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia strategically employ Qur’anic rhetoric to legitimize their public policies and advance their political agendas. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter draws on the concept of linguaculture (Risager, 2006; 2012a) which focuses on the cultural dimension of language use, namely the semantic-pragmatic dimension, poetic dimension and identity dimension. From a methodological perspective, the study employs both analytical and stylistic frameworks to elucidate how public speaking in the Arab world is heavily influenced by Qur’anic elements. The corpus is composed of public speeches delivered by six heads of state (Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia) during times of crisis across pre- and post-Arab Spring eras. When supplemented with empirical evidence and insights on Islamic values and Qur’anic rhetoric, the three-tiered conceptualization of linguaculture proved adequate to identify striking similarities between the Qur’anic text and the political speeches analyzed.
Discourse, Context & Media
Abstract This paper conceptualizes the recent translation practices in online news sites as cross... more Abstract This paper conceptualizes the recent translation practices in online news sites as cross-lingual and multimodal recontextualization, examining their roles in creating coherent narratives with manipulative potentials. Drawing on the sociocognitive approach to context (van Dijk, 2008) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Ledin and Machin, 2018a), the paper analyzes a corpus of 30 Arabic and English translated news reports covering ISIS news. Four strategies of multimodal recontextualization were identified; each results in different types of meaning transformation. The analysis shows that recontextualization serves different communicative functions, ranging from epistemic fine-tuning, whose aim is to provide background information necessary for inference-making; cultural adaptability, which optimizes cultural resonance for the targeted readership and enhances text authenticity; and finally normalization of ideological stances across the source and the target texts. The findings suggest that multimodal recontextualization gives rise to different contextual assumptions across source and target texts, embedding each in a different ideological narrative. Conceptualizing these texts as “meaningful wholes” with different semiotic affordances (Ledin and Machin, 2018b) elucidates how recontextualization creates manipulative narratives across languages and modalities. These narratives are created through ideological appropriation made coherent by maintaining referential, spatiotemporal and action continuity along different semiotic levels.
Lingua
Abstract This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag... more Abstract This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users’ sense of agency in networked spaces.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2012
Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language.... more Proverbs are a type of idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in everyday spoken language. They concisely and figuratively summarize everyday experiences and common observations (Borowska, 2014: 22). The use of proverbs often gives rise to interesting pragmatic processes, including, most notably, recontextualization. Recontextualization is intimately connected to two distinctive features of proverbs, i.e. traditionality, and self-containedness. Pragmatically, the meanings and functions of the love proverbs, the focus of this paper, are not totally fixed, because the conventionalized meanings and functions associated with these proverbs should be modulated in light of the new context of use.
This study will examine 50 proverbs of love (25 in each language) from pragmatic perspective. The analytical framework employed in the analysis will draw on the concept of implicature, and more specifically, the distinction between utterance-type implicature and utterance-token implicature. In this part, the study will draw on Culpeper and Haugh’s (2014) neo-Gricean model. At a higher contextual level, the analysis will follow Linell’s (1998) conceptualization of the pragmatic process of recontextualization.
The analysis showed that upon using a proverb in a new context, the proverb could go through a recontextualization process that might serve two pragmatic functions: illocution shift and foregrounding of didactic content.
Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture. , 2022
Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Dipl... more Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Diplomacy in the Middle East, explicating how Twitter affordances shape the context in which offence can be employed strategically in diplomatic communication. The dataset includes all the tweets posted by the Iranian Foreign Minister over a period of 10 years (totaling 659 tweets). The argument expounded in this paper is based on two assumptions. First, impoliteness notions can be effective in analyzing and theorizing diplomatic tweeting in the times of crisis. Second, diplomatic offence can be employed to manage conflicts and legitimize foreign policies. The results show that diplomatic offence is characteristically explicit, which is vital to index the offender"s disaffiliation from the target"s values. Offence giving is used to present self-image through attacking the adversary"s identity or values, whereas offence taking is utilized to moralize international politics through foregrounding the adversary"s moral idiosyncrasies or legal violations. In effect, diplomatic offence is used to do impression management that aims at gaining moral capital. Twitter affordances allow the affective and moral stances associated with offence giving and taking to be publicized to online and offline audience, encouraging them to align with the producer"s values and political standing.
Lingua, 2020
This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism... more This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users' sense of agency in networked spaces. Highlights: Hashtagged political tweeting is a complex pragmatic act. It involves communing affiliation and legitimizing political claims. Hashtags with political claims allow meaning to be negotiated collaboratively. Clusters of hashtagged political tweets constitute macro collective pragmatic acts. These collective acts are performed by collectivities of politically active agents.
Discourse, Context and Media, 2020
Creating Realities across Languages and Modalities: Multimodal recontextualization in the transl... more Creating Realities across Languages and Modalities: Multimodal recontextualization in the translation of online news reports
شيعة العراق بعد 2003 الرؤى والمسارات, 2019
The paper examines micro-argumentative patterns in twelve debate-like political interactions to a... more The paper examines micro-argumentative patterns in twelve debate-like political interactions to account for the discursive construction of victimhood and disenfranchisements used to legitimize ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in Iraqi media interactions across traditional and new media. The analysis found that the interlocutors employed a limited number of argumentative patterns to voice their (dis)agreement and legitimize their viewpoints; these argumentative patterns were either action-oriented or actor-oriented. Action-oriented (de)legitimizing patterns tended to be short-ranged in nature focusing on the efficiency of the actions (de)legitimized. Alternatively, actor-oriented argumentative patterns were used to legitimize the long-rooted ideological biases about self and others and, therefore, seemed to have a panoramic focus on the ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in the country. The analysis showed that even the interactions that focused on discussing the efficiency of specific political actions and agendas tended to evolve into ideological debates about ethno-sectarian identities and communally biased interpretations of the political scene. This kind of identity politics seems to be motivated by, and concurrently enhance, the sentiments of disenfranchisement and victimhood, which may further deepen inter-communal rifts in the country.
The paper investigates how (de)legitimization and impoliteness are interconnected in the ethno-se... more The paper investigates how (de)legitimization and impoliteness are interconnected in the ethno-sectarian conflicts that take place in online news response threads. (De)legitimization is conceptualized as a micro argumentative practice that can index the interlocutors’ sociopolitical stances and positions them in relation to each other in inter-group contestations. Using multi-tiered positioning analysis, a distinction was made between exogenous and endogenous impoliteness assessments each of which occurred at a different spatiotemporal level of the interactions. This distinction elucidates how impoliteness assessments can trigger and be triggered by (de)legitimization. To understand how (de)legitimization might trigger impoliteness assessments, I differentiate between face-related and identity-related impoliteness, which were both used strategically to deepen the ethno-sectarian divisions in this online context. In the online conflicts in question, collective impoliteness was sometimes motivated by legitimization, rather than delegitimization, even though legitimization involves no violation of the genre-sanctioned interactional norms or the moral order. That was because legitimization functioned in binary oppositions, and, as such, was perceived by out-group members as provocative impingement on their ethno-sectarian communities’ sociopolitical rights.
The paper aims to show how the pursuit of power polarizes political discussions on Facebook and c... more The paper aims to show how the pursuit of power polarizes political discussions on Facebook and consequently constructs online sociopolitical communities. Drawing on political discourse analysis and Bamberg's (1997) tripartite positioning analysis, the present paper investigates how the pursuit of power, by means of de/legitimization, is produced and perceived in the Iraqi political discourses produced in social media as discourses of ethnosectarian and cultural contestations. The results show that recontextualizing political actions and actors to de/legitimize particular interpretations of political reality based on differentiation and exclusion polarizes the discussions on Facebook. The delegitimization process that is based on differentiation and exclusion emphasizes the distinction between ingroups and out-groups and motivates the commentators to categorize themselves in oppositional sociopolitical communities that are discursively constructed. These sociopolitical communities range from completely imagined communities to the online recreation of actual ethno-sectarian groups.
The paper examines the de/legitimization of ethno-sectarian struggles for power in the Iraqi poli... more The paper examines the de/legitimization of ethno-sectarian struggles for power in the Iraqi political context. Drawing on van Leeuwen's (2008) social actors and action model and Membership Categorization Analysis, I argue that the analysis of
This paper explores how de/legitimization affects identity and rapport management in political di... more This paper explores how de/legitimization affects identity and rapport management in political discourse. Drawing on the analysis of Iraqi political discourse produced in mainstream and social media, I argue that the evaluation of im/politeness can function as a social indicator to gauge the extent to which the struggle for power in political discourse is deemed permissible, sanctioned, or tolerable. This analysis sheds light on how the sectarian and social divisions in Iraq are reflected in mainstream and social media, and how these divisions are perceived, responded to and perpetuated by means of the very same discourse produced in these two types of media. The paper draws on various discourse analytic approaches to analyze how political identity is constructed and evaluated in nine contrasting debates taken place in mainstream and social media.
When Politicians Talk: The Cultural Dynamics of Public Speaking, 2021
This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab cultu... more This chapter explores the extent to which Islamic values, which represent the core of Arab culture, and Qur’anic rhetoric influence public political discourse in the Arab world. It specifically examines the influence of Qur’anic themes, stylistic techniques and discursive practices on public speaking in three Arab countries. To that end, it analyzes how six political leaders in Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia strategically employ Qur’anic rhetoric to legitimize their public policies and advance their political agendas. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter draws on the concept of linguaculture (Risager, 2006; 2012a) which focuses on the cultural dimension of language use, namely the semantic-pragmatic dimension, poetic dimension and identity dimension. From a methodological perspective, the study employs both analytical and stylistic frameworks to elucidate how public speaking in the Arab world is heavily influenced by Qur’anic elements. The corpus is composed of public speeches delivered by six heads of state (Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia) during times of crisis across pre- and post-Arab Spring eras. When supplemented with empirical evidence and insights on Islamic values and Qur’anic rhetoric, the three-tiered conceptualization of linguaculture proved adequate to identify striking similarities between the Qur’anic text and the political speeches analyzed.