Annabelle Lukin

Grammar–The First Covert Operation of War

The cultural perturbations created by 11 September (9/11) have produced a layering of discourses. These layers offer a remarkable opportunity for interpreting ideology in relation to text construction. We examine two degrees of this textual dispersion: first, the motivated selection in the crafting of President Bush’s first speech after 9/11; and second, the speech by British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins as he exhorts his troops before engagement in the war against Iraq of 2003. The texts are remarkable for their similarities and their differences – two different contexts in which humans are called to enact policy which involves behaviour that should be abhorrent. Bush presents an asymmetrical world (in moral, not economic, terms); and this asymmetry is mainly expressed in the consistent allocation of grammatical roles. Collins presents the regiment’s task as a family mission, with dramatic switching between positive constructions of an Old Testament Iraq and the regiment (‘family’) on the one hand, and the ‘rightful destruction’ of the enemy, on the other hand. Again, but in more varied ways, it is the grammar which carries the burden of discriminating between those to be protected and those to be targeted. Ideology in language follows from the fact that we can construct multiple versions of the ‘same’ physical, biological, social and semiotic events.

Journalism, ideology, and linguistics: The paradox of Chomsky’s linguistic legacy and his 'propaganda model'

A central reason why news discourse is an object of academic research is its potential and actual role in establishing and maintaining ideology. News can do this because it is made of language and other semiotic modalities (Hasan, 1996a). This article considers the media coverage of the 2003 ‘Coalition’ invasion of Iraq, in light of the contradictions between the assumptions about discourse in the ‘propaganda model’ (Herman and Chomksy, 2002[1988]), and the nature of language in the Chomskyan tradition. The propaganda model is predicated on language being social and semiotic, two aspects of language absent in Chomsky’s linguistic theory. Paradoxically, linguistic description in the Chomskyan tradition cannot be recruited to analysing the news discourse identified by Chomsky and Herman, over 20 years ago, as the medium for the establishment and reinforcement of deep and consequential ideologies, which are as powerful today as they have ever been.

What do texts do? The context-construing work of news

Abstract Within the framework of Hallidays text and context relations, with key extensions of this model by Hasan, this paper presents an analysis of a TV news report by Australias public broadcaster (the ABC) concerning the 2003 “Coalition” invasion of Iraq, in order to present a thesis about the context-construing work done by the register (i.e., functional variety) known as “news.” Sociologists have argued that news is a symbolic commodity, in the business of purveying forms of consciousness. How does news do this? And what, more specifically, can be said about the social process which news texts realize? This paper considers these questions, drawing on the analysis of the texture of the ABC TV news report, based on Hasans “cohesive harmony” schema. The findings from the analysis are the basis on which I argue the news item relied for its continuity on the derived and abstract notion of “the Iraq war,” while failing to present a coherent picture of the actualized violence perpetrated by the “Coalition” as it rolled out its invasion of Iraq.

Language and Society, Context and Text: the Contributions of Ruqaiya Hasan

The principle that language is responsive to its context of situation is, to borrow an unfortunate metaphor, deep in the ‘DNA’ of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL). From Halliday’s early writings on grammar, the concept has been at work: first in a relatively non-technical sense, then in a mostly Firthian way, before Halliday articulated a conception of context much more his own, albeit with a very strong echo of Malinowski’s ideas (Halliday et al., 2007). From Malinowski came not only the crucial early conceptualization of ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture’ but also, and just as importantly, an intuitive feel that function must be encapsulated in the form and structure of language. For someone who was not actually a linguist, this was a remarkable observation; other later linguists have resolutely failed to notice the symbiosis between form, meaning and context that was, so to speak, right under their noses. For Halliday, Malinowski’s observation was the kernel of his metafunctional hypothesis, to which his conception of context is inextricably tied. What humans do with language in our social lives, and how language is itself organized, are two sides of the same social-semiotic coin. As Halliday is fond of saying, language is the way it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve.

The construction of a ‘narrative’ in Australian federal budget speeches, 1996–2013

Given the significance of annual budgetary decisions in both fiscal terms and policy reach, the annual federal budget speech has a distinctive place in Australias parliamentary cycle. The speeches afford a government a significant opportunity to articulate its economic policy agenda and to contrast its agenda with that of its predecessors or the Opposition. This article reviews the budget speeches of two Treasurers, Peter Costello (Liberal, 1996–2007) and Wayne Swan (Labor, 2008–13), and compares them with respect to how they used the budget speech to position their parties and their governments. Costellos speeches are singular, consistent and highly partisan. Swan eschewed the ‘ad hominem’ argument favoured by Costello, but failed to project an alternative, consistent narrative of his governments agenda and achievements. 年预算无论是财政上还是政策上都至关重要，因此年度联邦预算讲话在澳大利亚的国会程序中有着特殊的位置。这个讲话为政府提供了阐述其经济政策并比较其前任或反对党经济政策的机会。本文研究了两任财长即彼得考斯特罗（自由党，1996-2007）和怀恩斯万（工党，2008-13）的讲话，比较了两人如何利用预算讲话阐明其政党和政府的立场。考氏的讲话不同凡响、一以贯之，具有鲜明的党派倾向。斯万不像考氏那样个人风格，但他没能就其政府的议题和成就拿出一个别样、连贯的讲述。

What is Media ‘Bias'? A Case Study of Al Jazeera's Reporting of the Iraq War

ABSTRACT Despite a long history of debate, ‘bias’ and related terms like ‘objectivity’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ remain difficult to define and operationalise. Using a corpus of news stories from the Al Jazeera English language website coverage of the second assault on Falluja, in November 2004, compared with stories for the same period from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio Nationals AM current affairs program, this article argues for a method for analysing ‘bias’ that is empirical, probabilistic, contrastive and multidimensional. In the absence of such a method, the term ‘bias’ is more likely to remain a political weapon, than a tool for understanding how the media shapes our experience of crucial events.

Inner and outer worlds: speech and thought presentation in Mansfield’s Bliss

Abstract Despite renewed attention to Katherine Mansfield’s writing in recent years, her work continues to be read largely for “its political and emotional sensibilities and so seldom... for the controlled effects of stylistic detail” (New 1999. Reading Mansfield and metaphors of form. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP: viii). In this article we consider her story “Bliss” in relation to how Mansfield choreographs the interplay between the inner and outer worlds of the central character and the consequences of her textual crafting of this interplay for a reading of the theme of Mansfield’s story. We draw largely on what is now considered “classical” stylistics, that is, stylistics informed by a social-semiotic linguistics (e. g. Butt 1983. Semantic Drift in Verbal Art. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 61, 34–48; Halliday 2002. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse. Volume 2 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. London and New York: Continuum; Hasan 1985. Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art. Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press; Hasan 1996a. On Teaching Literature Across Cultural Differences. In J. James Ed., The Language-Culture Connection pp. 34–63. Singapore: SEAMEO; Leech and Short 2007. Style in Fiction. 2nd Edition. London. Longman; Semino and Short 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge; Sotirova 2013. Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. Palgrave Macmillan; Toolan 2001. Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. Second Edition. Routledge; Toolan 2007. Language. In D. Herman Ed., The Cambridge companion to narrative pp. 231–244. Cambridge University Press;). Given the extensive variety of contributions to “post-classical” or “cognitive narratology” e. g. (Herman 2007. Introduction. In D. Herman (ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; McHale 2014. Speech Representation. In P. Hühn, J. C. Meister, J. Pier, & W. Schmid Eds., living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Retrieved from http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/; Palmer 2004. Fictional minds. University of Nebraska Press) we briefly comment on why we have not taken this direction in our analysis.

5. Modelling proximity in a corpus of literary retranslations: A methodological proposal for clustering texts based on systemic-functional annotation of lexicogrammatical features

This chapter seeks to contribute to a model for quantitative exploration of translated texts by adopting clustering techniques to search for patterns of comparability in a corpus of retranslations. Drawing on systemic-functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) as a framework for text analysis, it reports on an exploratory study aimed at investigating source – target text relations as computed through statistical methods for a manually annotated representative text sample. Annotation built on the analytical framework used for comparing source and target texts, which is based on categories of grammatical functions common to both source and target language systems. The corpus was compiled from ten translations of a source text -- a short story written in English by Katherine Mansfield -- into Spanish and Portuguese by different translators over a period of six decades. The texts were explored in terms of the ‘retranslation hypothesis’ (Berman 1990), whereby retranslations tend to be more source-oriented than first translations, orientation being established in our study on the basis of the distance between source and target text as computed through cluster analysis. The results obtained point to similarities between texts computed on the basis of categories ascribed to the lexicogrammatical choices made by each author within the grammatical systems analyzed. They also corroborate the findings of other researchers who have used other approaches and methodologies to probe the ‘retranslation hypothesis’, in that they confirmed the relative distance of a first translation from the source text, while they also showed varied degrees of proximity of retranslations to the source text, the former being in some cases further away from the latter than first translations.

Exploring language in verbal art: a case study in K. Mansfield's 'Bliss'

Although all texts are born equal and are equally important as instances of meaningful language use, some texts acquire higher value than others in our society and some have a long-lived trajectory spanning decades and even centuries. Among the latter are no doubt the so-called ‘literary texts’, ranking high in the appreciation of both scholars and laypeople. To the linguist, texts that are labelled ‘literary’ and valued as such are as representative a sample of language as any other text in our everyday interaction. As Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) put it, linguists study texts in order to understand what kinds of meanings are made in the text and how those meanings are made. But linguists can choose to treat texts as artefacts or as specimens (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 4). When treated as specimens, then all texts are equal. When treated as artefact, a text is recognized for what makes it unique, for why it ‘constituted an important moment in modern human history, and may have left its imprint on the language in a way that only a very few highly-valued texts are destined to do’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 4).