The Pragmatics Of Governmental Discourse
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The Pragmatics of Governmental Discourse
This book presents a novel methodological framework for analysing governmental discourse. It involves combining pragmatist perspectives on language with computational sociolinguistics and large language models (LLMs). The first half discusses traditional critical approaches to investigating discursive practices, principally those employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and those based on methods developed by Michel Foucault. These are critiqued in terms of pragmatist views on meaning, which are rarely taken up in this area. It is argued that to understand the grounding of social structures and power relations in discourse, we must begin with a systematic account of how meaning is contextually fixed. It is proposed that a pragmatist reading of Foucault’s arguments about governmentality offers a productive framework for discourse analysis. To illustrate the advantages of this framework, the book presents a case study of the British government’s adoption of resilience, sustainability, and wellbeing discourses in the period 2000-2020. A dataset of 179 million tokens sampled from approximately 170,000 government documents is used to illustrate how this framework can be combined with natural language processing (NLP) to make robust inferences. This study will be of interest to both sociologists interested in language and in the methodological potential of recent developments in NLP. Importantly, the book demonstrates how LLMs can be harnessed to bring new perspectives to long-standing sociological questions.
The Pragmatics of Governmental Discourse
"This book presents a novel methodological framework for analysing governmental discourse that combines pragmatist perspectives on language with computational sociolinguistics and large language models. The first half engages with critical traditions of discourse analysis such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis. Drawing upon pragmatist views on meaning - views rarely considered in sociological discourse analysis - the book critiques these critical traditions, arguing that understanding how discourse grounds social structures and power relations must begin with a systematic understanding of how meaning is contextually fixed. A pragmatist reading of Foucault's arguments about governmentality that incorporates David Lewis' scorekeeping framework and relevance theory is advocated for as a framework for discourse analysis. Using a dataset of 92 million tokens sampled from approximately 170,000 government documents, this book illustrates how this framework can be used in combination with natural language processing through a case study of the British government's adoption of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing discourses during 2000-2020. This book will be of interest to both theoretically-oriented sociologists interested in language to those interested in how the power of recent developments in natural language processing, particularly pre-trained neural language models, can be harnessed to bring new perspectives to long-standing sociological questions"--
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse
Author: Anita Fetzer
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 2013-01-29
The volume promotes a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of political discourse as multilayered mediated discourse. The chapters cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of speech act theory, social positioning theory, and argumentation theory and rhetorics. They address the strategic use of address terms and irony, the form and function of questions, and the expression of certainty in the contexts of parliamentary discourse, interview, talkshow, phone-in programme and motion of support across different discourse domains. Different cultural contexts are represented, including Africa, the Middle East, different parts of Europe and the United States.