Symbol and Language in Action Public Discourse in Poland in the Context of Uncertainty and Unrest (original) (raw)

Polish Media About 9/11: The Rhetoric and Metaphors of the Discourse

plc.psychologia.pl

Media discourse functions in a dual system of reference: it describes events that have actually taken place, but at the same time creates them in a certain way, presenting them in accordance with the genre conventions of writing for the press. In media reports and political commentaries about 9/11, Polish media and the public figures appearing in them most often use a figure of speech that one could call the trick of forced rectification, as well as metaphors taken from the vocabulary of mass culture (film, television, press commentaries on recent history). These kinds of stylistic measures are a means of psychologically taming the unprecedented historic events of 9/11, making them more comprehensible in cognitive terms belonging to the common image of the world, preserved in language among other things.

CONTEMPORARY POLISH POLITICAL RHETORIC. RETÓRICA POLÍTICA POLACA CONTEMPORÁNEA

The article discusses three dimensions of political rhetoric in Poland. The language used by politicians is the first one. Social and historic factors which conditioned contemporary styles of political communication result in the fact that political rhetoric in Poland is typical of countries which experienced authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. The second dimension of political rhetoric is found in media discourse. Mediatization of politics, technological changes in the media created a new rhetorical situation, new strategies of the persuasion used by politicians and journalists. The third dimension of political rhetoric is found in the rhetorical research concerning the ways of expression of both politicians and journalists. The article discusses major tendencies in research: propaganda language analysis, research on the new media, visual persuasion as well as use of rhetoric as a tool of civic education.

Two narratives about Poland and society. Analysis of news programmes: Fakty TV and Wiadomości TVP

Władza Sądzenia

The media landscape in Poland is increasingly polarised, with broadcasters promoting biased narratives that conveniently omit certain issues that do not align with their agenda. These narratives use rhetorical devices and symbolism to manipulate people’s perception of social reality and cultivate a shared worldview that legitimises their stance. This polarisation is linked to political parallelism, where media outlets align themselves with specific political factions and abandon their impartiality. In Poland, identity media is prevalent, with broadcasters providing pre-packaged interpretations of news stories that further fuel the polarisation. It creates echo chambers, also known as epistemic bubbles. The study examined news coverage from Wiadomości TVP and Fakty TVN, analysing the narratives presented and the values and topics covered. Broadcasters promoted different narratives, contributing to social divisions and strengthening dichotomy, with fixed topics dominating the coverage...

Mediated Europes: Discourse and Power in Ukraine, Russia and Poland during Euromaidan

Södertörn University, 2017

This study focuses on mediated representations of Europe during Euromaidan and the subsequent Ukraine–Russia crisis, analysing empirical material from Ukraine, Poland and Russia. The material includes articles from nine newspapers, diverse in terms of political and journalistic orientation, as well as interviews with journalists, foreign policymakers and experts, drawing also on relevant policy documents as well as online and historical sources. The material is examined from the following vantage points: Michel Foucault’s discursive theory of power, postcolonial theory, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier. The methods of analysis include conceptual history (Reinhart Koselleck), critical linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis (a discourse-historical approach inspired by the Vienna school) and quantitative content analysis (in Klaus Krippendorff’s interpretation). Historically, the national narratives of Europe in the aforementioned three countries are characterised by dependence on the West that also sparks periods of its rejection. These narratives vacillate between three major poles: idealising admiration, materialist pragmatics and geopolitical demonising. They are not exclusively endemic to one country and have been present in each to some extent. However, weaker actors have tended to lean towards the idealist side because Europe is perceived as a source of important technological and social know-how. Authors in all three countries struggled with defining Europe’s limits, and whilst this problem be- came intertwined with their own identification, Europeanness is typically constructed as a shock wave fading as it travels eastward from an epicentre located somewhere in north-western Europe. These discourses were reactivated and developed in 2013–2014. In the analysed newspapers, Europe is often understood as a continent (most often in Poland) or identified with the EU (Russia and Ukraine), but there is also a strong pattern of using Europe in reference to values which is weakest in Poland and strongest in Ukraine. Ideologically, the liberal publications in all three countries focus on positive values, whereas the conservative and business newspapers are preoccupied with negative values. Among the posi- tive values, the humanistic ones dominate the Ukrainian newspapers, and the rationalist-technocratic are typical in the Russian sample. The Ukrainian press account for most of the positive coverage of a successful Europe, whereas the Russian press provide most of the negative coverage (Europe as a failing entity and an enemy). Ukrainian and Russian discourses differ sharply on whether the country should adopt European reforms (Ukraine) or not (Russia). The Polish coverage is polarised between positive and negative values. During and after Euromaidan, Ukrainian journalists used the powerful Europe-as-values concept to actively intervene in the political field and re- contextualise this narrative of Europe as the official foreign policy narrative. This was enabled, paradoxically, by weak professionalism that made a wavering from a neutral stance possible. Compared to this, in Russia the strong discourse on journalist objectivity constrained journalists in their social practice; rather, it is the official discourse that is recontextualised by the media. Polish journalists, ambiguous about their own influence, work in a loop that recontextualises discourses from the media sphere to the political field and vice versa.

Front-Page Coverage of the First Day of the Russian Invasion on Ukraine in 2022. The Ethnographic-Discourse Analysis Based on the Polish Press Reportage

2022

This article explores the discursive patterns of communicative events during the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Studied through an ethnographic discourse analysis lens (e.g., Hymes 1972b, Saville-Troike [1982] 2003), Polish front-page news articles are shown to be artefact-filled language environment anchored in culture (Duranti [1997] 1999, Hoijer 1953) that can be studied by means of communicational grammar (Chruszczewski 2002) consisting of well-entrenched conceptualisations in the form of keywords and collocations as concomitants of cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014, Baker 2006, Wierzbicka 1997). It agues that legitimation of patterned representations is based on a threefold conceptual typology: (1) the axiological (valuational) dimension (Romanyshyn 2020, Pomeroy 2004, Krzeszowski 1997), (2) the metaphorical account of spatial/territorial reference (proximization) (Cap 2013), (3) us vs. them dichotomy (Van Dijk 1992a). It demonstrates how Polish press manufactures and discursively creates ideological attachments which underlie Poland's cultural legacy.

Poland and its neighbours – in the context of online media narrative

Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, 2018

The purpose of the article is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of media reports on the subject of the relations of the Polish state with its neighbours, drawn from two prestigious Internet websites (Wyborcza.pl and Rp.pl). The authors confirmed that when reporting on the relations of Poland with its neighbouring countries, online media are subject to the phenomenon of politicization of media, and mediatization of politics. This thesis itself is the main subject of interest to the analyzed media coverage. Taking into consideration the tone of expression, it can be assumed that some websites, mostly Wyborcza.pl, may become emotional and hence recede from equal presentation of all parties' statements. This in turn may indicate that nowadays we are all exposed to a large extent to significant (Wyborcza.pl) or moderate (Rp.pl in certain themes, such as the image of Poland) politicization of media.

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

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.

Symbolic Representations of Maidan in the Ukrainian and Polish Press: Comparative Analysis

2016

This research proposes the comparative analysis of the symbolic representations of Maidan in the Ukrainian and Polish media outlets that comprise tabloid and quality publications. Different types of symbols are identified in the news analysis, reports, and feature stories on Maidan. The typology of symbols is worked out on the basis of the Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and Langer’s symbol theory. The coded types of symbols include symbol-products, symbol-concepts, symbol-slogans, symbol-situations, symbol-processes, and symbolic actions. With the help of the content analysis it is found that some most visible symbols in the media coverage of Maidan coincide in the Ukrainian and Polish print media. These are the symbol-concept “barricade”, the symbol-concept “Berkut”, and the symbol-process “dispersal of Maidan”. However, there are symbols that have either quantitative or qualitative significance in the Polish press and are absent in the Ukrainian media at all, namely, the ...