Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/79583
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- Title
- The "Unseen engineer" : linguistic patterning in war discourse
- Related
- Linguistics and the human sciences, Vol. 2, Issue 1, p.59-87
- DOI
- 10.1558/lhs.v2i1.59
- Publisher
- Equinox Publishing
- Date
- 2008
- FoR/RFCD Code(s)
-
200400 Linguistics
- Author/Creator
- Lukin, Annabelle
- Description
- A number of linguistic studies in recent decades have sought to explain the nature of war discourses, and a number of recurring features have been identified (van Leeuwen, in press). Taking a corpus of press briefings by Coalition military spokesman from the beginning of the Iraq invasion, this paper combines detailed grammatical analysis (based on four days of briefings), with an excursus into prosodic motifs created through certain lexical tendencies (based on seven days of briefings), in order to explore the kind of ‘existential fabric’ (Butt, 1988) this discourse creates in its particular representation of the phenomenal realm of war. The grammatical method involves the analysis of the experiential function of language, using systemic functional grammar. An additional resource drawn on is Roget’s Thesaurus, against which particular elements of the discourse – such as the lexical verbs which construe material action – are mapped. The analysis reveals the lexical and grammatical patterns which function as resources for muting the intensely violent nature of war.
- Description
- 29 page(s)
- Subject Keyword
- 200400 Linguistics
- Subject Keyword
- systemic functional linguistics
- Subject Keyword
- war discourse
- Subject Keyword
- discourse analysis
- Subject Keyword
- Iraq war
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Organisation
- Macquarie University. Dept. of Linguistics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/79583
- Identifier
- ISSN:1743-1662
- Identifier
- mq-rm-2007010442
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
