This book is aimed at researchers, students, and practitioners interested in how the voices of experts have been conveyed in the public sphere during the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond controversies over the selection of these experts by governments or the media, the book draws on methodologies from discourse analysis, media studies, political science, sociology, and social psychology to compare the role that experts played in justifying unpopular political decisions. Several configurations have emerged, including politically contested systems with medical heroes, bureaucratized systems with a super-reference expert, or more collegiate forms of committees tasked with providing political leaders with the necessary reports to justify political decisions.
Book DetailsThis volume studies emerging populism in Europe and Latin America, including Italy, France, Spain and Brazil. These countries share cultural similarities in terms of religion, language, and norms due to their Romance-speaking background. Being Mediterranean countries (with the exception of Brazil), some common political concerns such as overseas immigration, deindustrialization and globalization have given rise to populist movements, which motivates the study of their expressions in the politics and the media. Brazil, though outside Europe, shares many of the above-mentioned values and issues, offering a unique Lusophonic and Latin American perspective on populism, driven by disparities, strong leaders, and corruption. The chapters analyze the strategies of populist leaders and the role of social media in spreading information and disinformation and provide an overview of emerging populism and its interaction with social media.
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This volume deals with the pragmatic dimension of negations and is oriented towards empirical studies of negatives’ meanings and functions in media and public discourses.
By bringing together scholars from different countries, with studies on different languages this volume aims to shed light and contribute to new knowledge about the forms and functionality of negation as an universal phenomenon. Linguists and pragmaticiens generally agree that the use of negatives escapes logic and pure semantic description and is therefore best analysed with tools from cognitive and pragmatic theories.
Based on hypotheses within pragmatics, semantics and discourse analysis, the main assumption is here that forms of expressing negatives emerge and adjust constantly and in accordance with the cultural domain and the social setting of their appearance. This is why this volume focuses on the functions of negative expressions in specific domains and types of discourses.
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