Douglas Mark Ponton

Moving the generic goalposts? The ‘poetry’ of Stuart Hall

Whereas other BBC Five Live reporters’ football match reports conform to fairly predictable generic patterns, those of veteran commentator and television personality Stuart Hall blend classical and Shakespearean allusions together with a plethora of other rhetorical tropes, in a highly personal take on the genre. The study explores the degree to which such apparent variations from typical generic patterns could constitute an instance of genre bending, blending or hybridity; or whether they should be accounted for under stylistics, or seen as poetry.

Movements and meanings: towards an integrated approach to political discourse analysis

This chapter has two principal focuses; firstly backwards in time, across some of the high points in the development of political discourse analysis, in order to assess the current state of the field. It also has a future focus, as it attempts to integrate insights from some emerging fields, such as Multimodality, with more consolidated approaches. It has been argued, in many accounts (e.g. Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), that persuasion is the most pervasive function of all political discourse, and most authors agree that the processes involved encompass both textual and non-textual features. An influential early attempt, for example, to describe some non-verbal aspects of persuasive rhetoric was Atkinson (1984), who identified features like the speaker’s voice quality, intonation, posture, body language, eye movements, and so on, as well as some other non-linguistic ‘tricks’. As influential as this work was, however, these features have tended to be omitted from many subsequent accounts of persuasion in political rhetoric, which have concentrated on features of argumentation operating at a strictly textual level.The overall aim of this work is to suggest pathways towards the ambitious goal of developing a usable, integrated model for analysing political discourse. Instead of analysing a single feature such as metaphor (Charteris-Black 2006), parliamentary insults (Ilie 2004), evaluative language or humour (Swain 1999, 2002), the model attempts to combine descriptions of textual and non-verbal/multimodal features of political discourse, in order to provide a practical tool for analytical purposes, and a coherent account of their possible pragmatic effects.

The Montalbano effect: re-branding Sicily as a tourist destination?

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to focus on movie tourism, specifically on the “Montalbano effect”, which has seen increments in tourist visits to Sicilian sites featuring in the episodes of the popular TV series. It explores the concepts of genre and evaluative language in websites offering Montalbano tours in Sicily in an interdisciplinary perspective, aiming to combine insights from Tourism and Linguistics to analyse the phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach – The language of two corpora, one consisting of sites offering traditional Sicilian tours and another of sites devoted to Montalbano, is analysed in terms of genre and evaluative language. Findings – The study shows an emerging genre and genre hybridity that, it is suggested, are in response to market trends and may represent beginnings of a re-branding of Sicily as a tourist destination, away from past negative stereotypes associating the island with organised crime. Originality/value – The interdisciplinary aspect of the study represent...

Paying the penalty for dishonesty: evaluative language in Scottish football

Scottish soccer has frequently been a mirror reflecting sectarian tensions at play in society at large, tensions which can make ‘Old Firm’ matches between the Glasgow teams of Celtic and Rangers something more serious than a game of football. This study explores an incident during which a referee told a trivial lie to the Celtic manager and, because of the ensuing media storm, was eventually forced to resign. During a radio programme discussing the incident various views are put forward, both for and against the referee. I suggest that, in order to account for the evaluative patterns used by the studio pundits and some of the participants in the incident, it is necessary to have some understanding of the underlying social context. The suggestion is that the underlying social features may be responsible for local discursive effects such as graduation, lexical choices and judgemental patterns. An attempt is thus made to connect broad notions of context such as those of Malinowski (1923), and more particularly Hyatt (2005), with more specific effects at the level of discourse. The Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005) is used to explore the evaluative representations in the data, particularly those in the area of Judgement.

Getting past the gatekeepers : membership and identity in 5-Live's "World Football Phone-in"

This study explores identity construction in the context of a popular radio programme (5-Live’s ‘World Football Phone-in’), which offers long-term contributors the possibility of achieving membership of a virtual community (Fox 2004) established by the programme, via the award of a ‘Brazilian shirt name’. In particular, it focuses on the discursive strategies involved in gaining entry, especially on interactions involving the principle gatekeepers, and their role in the construction of an acceptable ‘identity’ (Widdicombe 1998). The role of nicknaming (Liao 2006) in constructing and maintaining group boundaries is also highlighted. In general the conclusion is that, although interactions show refer ences to membership ‘rules’, and would-be members are seen to conform to these, a successful application depends on more subtle factors, and especially on the personal whims of the principle gatekeeper.