Political Linguistics

Book excerpt: As of Volume 9 (1994/95) John Benjamins Publishing Company is the official publisher of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, the annual publication of the Linguistic Society of Belgium. Each volume is topical and includes selected papers from the international meetings organised by the LSB. After a programmatic introduction by Jan Blommaert, three sections can be discerned in this volume. The first section, with papers by van Dijk, Cushing, Wilson, Fairclough & Mauranen, Jucker and Gruber, concerns itself with the definition of political discourse, with particular linguistic aspects such as non-modal meaning, persuasive tactics or metalinguistic negation, and with recent trends of political discourse such as conversationalisation. The paper by Gruber on media coverage of right-wing extremism leads the way to the second section in which the media and political discourse on foreigners such as migrants and refugees is analysed (Kuusisto & Östman; Horvat, Verschueren & Zagar). Finally, the third section could be broadly labelled as concerned with 'self- and other-representation', with papers on intercultural discouse, gender, institutional discourse, varieties of English and political correctness (resp. Shi-xu, Rojo, Slembrouck & Sarangi, Begum & Kandiah, Janicki).