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Novels as cultural products are the representatives of a society which has been configured with a variety of discourses. Being involved in perpetual discursive practices, these discourses are constantly attempting to hegemonize their desired meanings via utilizing discursive strategies to marginalize the competing discourses. With Philida, André Brink makes a strong statement on the formation of the identity and power of indigenous African women. He sheds lights on the discursive practices that a female black African slave depicts to not only to gain voice, but also to construct a solid identity and power. Pertaining to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's notions in discourse theories, the authors of this paper analyze Philida to provide a new reading of the construction of a woman's identity. Thereby, first we are going to discover the conflicting sub-discourses which have had impacts on the formation of the characters' identity and power. Subsequently, since novels are the reflections of societies, we explore the major conflicting discourses in the actual society of South Africa. Finally, not only will we discuss Brink's views on the identities of Afrikaners and the indigenous Africans, but also we argue women's lower discourse has initiated to elevate during the timespan from slavery to post-apartheid era.

Discourses concerned with the perceived global environmental crisis have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. This review consists of an ethnographic analysis of the principal components of environmental discourses as well as a discussion of the approaches employed to analyze them. These include linguistic discourses (ecolinguistics, ecocritical linguistics, discourse analysis) as well as approaches developed within other disciplines (anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology). Over the years, the structural properties of environmental discourses have developed into a distinct discourse category. It remains unclear to what extent the numerous environmental discourses and metadiscourses significantly contribute to improving the health of the natural environment.

This article presents a thorough investigation of the five Russian deictic words that correspond to the English meanings ‘here’ and ‘now’: zdes’ , tut , sejčas , teper’ and vot . We analyze data from the Russian National Corpus and data from Russian TV news broadcasts. On the basis of the corpus data, we propose a radial category network consisting of nine subcategories, which encompass all five words, and show that although the deictic words have overlapping distributions, they all have distinct ‘radial category profiles’ in the sense that they display different centers of gravity in the network. We advance the ‘Minimal Adaptation Hypothesis’, according to which language makes adaptations that are as small as possible, when applied to a new setting, such as the one created by TV.

Drawing upon Paul Chilton’s (2005) approach to manipulative discourse analysis, this paper looks into how the ideas of risk and blame, as shifted from Yeltsin and his team of ‘reformers’ in the pursuit of restoring Yeltsin’s political credibility, were propagated through the media news management during the presidential election of 1996. By applying the Conceptual Integration or Blending framework (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) to a case study of the Russian news story about an airport strike, the paper reveals how the mass media was manipulated at an almost invisible level, which has not been explored so far. The paper argues that conceptual integration can be successfully used as a core cognitive linguistic research method for elucidating culturally specific and historically changing cognitive frames and analysis of counter-factuality in manipulative news discourse.

This article examines how two alternative lifestyles – LOHAS (= Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) and Emos (= youth lifestyle stressing negative emotionality and social withdrawal) – try to construct their Otherness, i.e. their deviance from a postulated mainstream, in their discourses. Starting from a Critical Discourse Analytical perspective, we analyse two small corpora representing the respective discourses, trying to demonstrate in the process how modern means of computer-assisted and quantitatively oriented corpus analysis can fruitfully be applied to the investigation of cultural issues. Sample analyses of word lists, keywords and the collocations of select linguistic structures reveal that Emos define their status as outsiders less via reference to a mainstream culture but rather by solipsistically focusing on their inner and emotional selves. LOHAS, on the other hand, seems to be pushing a reformist agenda, concentrating on our – human and non-human nature – collective well-being. This agenda, however, seems to be defined as achievable through economic measures, which creates the impression that LOHAS has partly become part of the capitalist mainstream culture rather than being a real alternative.

In recent years, sleep has become an increasingly popular topic in medicine, sociology and the media, and there has been an immense proliferation of self-help books and seminars providing expert advice on the proper ‘management’ of sleep. The construction of sleep as a resource to be maximally exploited by means of a positively valued lifestyle on the one hand and as a potential health threat on the other is problematic: it suggests that the last non-productive third of our lives is being turned into a regulated, output-oriented activity and that health is the result of proper sleep (cf. Baxter/Kroll-Smith 2005: 52, cit. in Williams 2005: 120). Drawing on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper critically examines the reconceptualization of sleep as a tool in achieving better health and productivity by quantitatively examining a corpus of 103 texts from the Internet and extracts from 6 self-help books.