语篇分析在司法语境中的应用

法律语篇分析是从法学语言的视角研究与法学有关的种种语言现象,并运用语篇学的研究方法分析法学语言,包括立法语言、司法语言、法律科学语言、法学翻译以及法学古文等一切有关法律规则和法学研究的口语和书面语。司法语境中的语篇分析,是从微观的角度分析司法人员、律师和涉案当事人的各种语言现象,旨在解决司法过程中的语言证据收集、话语标记识别、语言环境分析、控辩双方对同一语言证据材料的不同理解可能导致不同审判结果等可能存在的一系列问题,促使我国司法实践部门对法律语言的更多关注,以拓宽我国法学语言界的研究视野,进一步提高工作效率。     

论"话语的秩序"--福柯话语理论的一次重要转折

《话语的秩序》是福柯话语理论中具有重要过渡意义的一个文本。其中,福柯不仅深入分析了话语的内部结构及其特征,而且分析了话语外部的控制因素,将话语与权力、社会机制联系在一起,从而开拓了话语的外部空间。这既是福柯对自己研究的一次总结,也昭示了福柯话语研究中新方法论的出现。     

Don’t let them kill you on some dirty roadway: survival,entitled violence,and the culture of modern American policing

The police subculture serves as a means for police officers to cope with the perceived stresses associated with police work, including the belief that their lives are constantly threatened by dangerous ‘others’. As a result, the police subculture is peppered with racialized survivability discourse that reminds police of the possibility of their own mortality, mobilizes them through fear, and facilitates an entitlement to violence in the name of guardianship. Drawing from the author’s past experiences as a police officer, this paper offers insight into how, through this racialized police survivability discourse, police officers come to believe that their lives are more valuable than others, particularly when compared to Black lives. This has not only been demonstrated by the disproportionate killing of unarmed Black men but also by the emergence of the Blue Lives Matter ‘movement’ that arose in direct oppositional response to the subculture’s perceived threat of the Black Lives Matter movement.     

法学语体研究——基于法学期刊编辑学的视角

经过20多年的发展,作为边缘法学的法律语言学的学科地位在事实上得以确立,法言法语渐被纳入学科研究对象。此外,作为现代语言学的分支,语体学已相对成熟,但法学语体问题却少有人问津。这也许与修辞学泰斗王德春教授主张语体种类之一的科学语体不再细分有关,也与自古以来文术多门,各适所好、明者弗授,学者弗师有关。然而,法学语体具有科学语体与政论语体甚至公文语体交叉的特点,可以视为语言分化的结果。法学语体研究滞后对我国法学研究与报刊编辑出版中的语言质量已造成消极影响。法学语体逐渐形成一些典型的语言手段及表达方式,如:词汇上庄重、严谨、文雅;句式完整,但具扩展性;语篇上具连贯性、充分性。我们应当恰当使用带语体色彩的词汇体现法学气派,并且合理使用长句、复合句反映法学风格。灵活运用的多种修辞表达方式充分体现了学术语境的科学理性与思维美感。法学语篇不妨在行文上流光溢彩,活泼多姿。与此同时,要防止不当话语修辞对交际和传播带来的负面影响。     

权力修辞向法律话语的转变——展开法治思维与实施法治方式的前提

在人们日常思维和言语表达中,权力修辞占据主导地位。权力场成了影响决策的最主要因素,这既不符合法治的原则要求,也难以成就管理国家与社会的法治方式。从思维方式决定行为方式的角度看,权力修辞向法律话语的转变是展开法治建设的思想条件。权力修辞与政法思维相匹配,重点维护的是管理秩序;法律话语与法治思维相适应,要限制权力,捍卫权利,是与法治建设相适应的法治意识形态,维护的是法律秩序。法律话语与权力修辞的冲突是我国法治建设中的重要问题,从西方法治的经验和中国法治建设的需求看,法律话语能否平衡权力修辞关系到中国法治建设的成败。     

`Subjects' of Regulation/Resistance? Postmodern Feminism and Agency in Abortion-Decision-Making

This article explores the epistemological and strategic issues facing feminists embarking upon narrative explorations into women's experiences. It considers the implications for feminist epistemology of acknowledging women's participation in dominant ideologies about their social role. Focusing upon questions of women's agency, it asks how this `conforming knowledge' might complicate postmodernist feminist notions of resisting and reconstructing law's categorisation of `Woman'. It also represents an attempt to clarify, in advance of my own analysis of women's agency in abortion decision-making, why postmodern feminists might talk to women – the `subjects' of law's constructive power. It seeks additionally to open a discussion among a wider audience of feminists about what we might do with the information uncovered through listening to women's own stories in an area pronounced upon authoritatively by a multitude of discourses. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Social policy for inclusive development in Africa

The paper revisits the discourse on development in Africa, following in the footsteps of leading development thinkers and focusing on social policy. Some of the thinkers and scholars have specifically and directly discussed development discourse in Africa. Others have made insightful points regarding inclusive development in Africa even though not directly engaging with development discourse. The paper also acknowledges earlier thinking regarding development in Africa, including perspectives that deal with underdevelopment. The paper concerns itself with the critical role that social policy can play in ensuring inclusive development in Africa. The interface between economic and social policy is emphasised. Although Africa faces many intractable challenges, most of which are externally imposed, robust social policies will go a long way in bringing about effective social and economic development. In the main, though, Africa needs a comprehensive socio-economic development approach that can ensure lasting inclusive development. Social policies are critical for any development endeavour in African countries. Another main point that the paper makes is that economic transformation is not enough to fully advance wellbeing in Africa (and probably the world at large). By restructuring economies in Africa, not much would be achieved though some gains would be made.     

The sounds of silence: American history textbook representations of non-violence and the Abolition Movement

In this paper we examine how the Abolition Movement’s approach to non-violent resistance has been silenced in four American history textbooks. Despite extensive research that reveals an extensive network of groups dedicated to the peaceful abolishment of slavery little of this historical record is included in the textbooks. Instead, a skewed representation of the movement is conveyed to the reader, one that conveys an image of a movement that contributes to a climate of social violence. Through a critical discourse analytical approach to the data we carefully deconstruct how this process of misrepresentation occurs. By employing the discursive tools of narrative framing, positioning, and stance we lift up what is often hidden from the reader and demonstrate how language use communicates powerful social messaging to the reader. We argue that student readers are left with an impoverished sense of how non-violent democratic change has occurred when presented with a limited portrayal of the Abolition Movement. We therefore emphasize the importance of equipping students with the skills needed to critically interrogate both historical and contemporary sources that purports to convey the inevitability of war to resolve complex social problems; we maintain this is both an educational imperative and a civic obligation.     

‘Legislative frame representation’: towards an empirical account of the deliberative systems approach

The systemic approach to deliberative democracy is an empirically underexplored topic. Since ‘classic’ micro indicators for deliberation are at loggerheads with the idea of distributed deliberation, appropriate assessment techniques for large-scale public deliberation are few and far between. This paper aims at exploring a novel pathway into the empirical translations of the deliberative systems approach, using discourse content and the representation of policy frames in the legislature. I argue that legislative frame representation (LFR) is a crucial indicator for the level of sub-systemic deliberative uptake and policy responsiveness. Next to the necessary theoretical and methodological work, the results of an explorative case study for the immigration discourse in the US and Canada are presented. The results indicate that there are considerable differences in the systems’ capacities to take up discourses from civil society and that LFR can be an important tool to explore deliberative systems empirically.     

Who speaks for the European border security industry? A network analysis

This article contributes to the literature on the European border security industry with a network analysis of a new bipartite data set. The network is composed of speakers and their speech topics at a European border security conference taking place from 2008 to 2015. Speakers are linked to conferences by year of attendance and to speech topics to identify key actors and discourses using measures of centrality. A multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MR-QAP) is used to explain the continuity of conference speech topics. The centrality analysis reveals a number of “hubs” and the discourse analysis reveals a consistent focus on social control and surveillance over human rights. The MR-QAP regression suggests that shared discourses are driven by organisations which act as key speakers at many events, and whose discourses are prioritised over those of other actors. The article concludes with notes on the critical implications of the findings.