CONSECUENCIAS URBANAS Y SOCIALES DEL PROCESO DE

The DHA was initially developed, in 1986, to examine anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes that permeated Austrian public discourse and was gradually modified to analyse structures of discrimination, control, and domination promulgated in European institutional discourse. The DHA seeks to make explicit these structural relations of power abuse, a direct manifestation of which is the discursive construction of a binary opposition between in-groups and out-groups. To this end, the DHA attempts to identify the discursive strategies and the linguistic means through which the dichotomous ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ is realized. To demystify discriminatory practices, the DHA integrates “available knowledge about the historical sources and the background of the social and political fields in which discursive ‘events’ are embedded” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 35).

The DHA adheres to a complex concept of social critique, the socio-philosophical

orientation of Critical Theory (discussed below), and integrates three interrelated aspects: a) text-immanent critique, aims to discover inconsistencies or paradoxes in text-internal structure; b) socio-diagnostic critique, aims to demystify the latent persuasive or

manipulative character of discursive practices; c) prospective critique, aims to contribute to the improvement of communication or, simply put, it is the practical or applied

dimension of the DHA (|ibid., p. 32–34). In the DHA, the principle of triangulation seems a priori to account for the multifarious functions of discourse, where discourse is defined as (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, 89):

a) A cluster of context-dependent semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of social action;

52 c) Related to a macro-topic;

d) Linked to argumentation about validity claims, such as truth and normative validity.

The topic-relatedness of discourse entails that discourse is not a closed unit but rather a fluid, dynamic, and semiotic entity that incorporates and is linked to other discourses. This topic-relatedness or interdiscursivity accentuates the historicity of discourses whereby temporal and spatial connections among discourses are accounted for. For example, in the speeches analysed, Nasrallah’s anti-Zionist discourse incorporates elements of discourses on occupied Palestine, social justice, and national unity. From a DHA perspective, a text is a product of linguistic action, a part of discourse and assigned to a specific genre. Reisigl and Wodak (2016) define genre as a “socially

conventionalized pattern of communication that fulfils a specific social purpose in a specific social context” (p. 27). Texts are either directly or indirectly linked to other texts (i.e. intertextuality) via, for example, references, allusions to a topic, event or social actor, or the transfer of an argument from one text to another. The latter is the process of

recontextualization whereby elements of previous texts are transferred or taken out of specific contexts (de-contextualization) and inserted into a new context to serve political goals.22

The interconnectedness of texts, discourses and genres underscores the role of

‘historicity’ in the production and interpretation of discourse and provides a means to

22_{In pragma-dialectical terms, the straw man fallacy is an example of recontextualization, whereby}

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explore the ways in which genres or discourses are subject to diachronic change. This complex bundle of relations would be impossible to pin down without a multi-

dimensional approach to context, such as the one adopted by the DHA. According to Reisigl and Wodak (2016, p. 30–31), four levels of context are integrated to account for the mediation between discursive practices and sociopolitical structures. These are:

1) The immediate language or text internal co-text;

2) The intertextual and interdiscursive relationships between utterances, texts, genres and discourses;

3) The social variables and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’;

4) The broader sociopolitical and historical context in which discursive practices are embedded.

This study adopts the four-level model of context developed by the DHA. As such, it takes into account: the historical development of Hizbollah as a Resistance movement (sociopolitical/ historical context), specific political events which gave rise to the

speeches as well as related criticisms and debates (situational context), selected speeches (text-internal or co-texts) and, finally, other texts, discourses, events, arguments and counter-arguments that (might) have influenced the speeches (intertextual and

interdiscursive relations). Such an in-depth analysis that takes into account situational frames and knowledge about the historical and sociopolitical background of political agents/ institutions makes it possible to identify and trace the discursive mechanisms that Nasrallah exploits to defend, justify, and promote his (and his political party’s)

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hegemonic practices. This is the main reason for selecting the DHA as one of the analytical tools in this study.

In the DHA, five discursive strategies are involved in the construction and perpetuation of hegemonic discourses. These strategies are: nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, and intensification or mitigation (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 44–84). What unites these strategies and dictates their linguistic realization is the overall unifying macro-strategy of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation, or what van Dijk calls the Ideological Square (van Dijk, 1998).23Nomination (or referential)

strategies represent and construct social actors (in-/out-groups) via references to

biological, naturalizing and/or other personal/ group characteristics. Referential strategies are enacted via, for example, depersonalising metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches. The main function of these rhetorical and linguistic means is to assign membership categorizations. Predication strategies assign (positive or negative) evaluations and attributions to the constructed groups, actors, events or actions. Predication strategies can be realized linguistically via, for example, stereotypes and evaluative adjectives.

Argumentation strategies encompass a fund of topoi and fallacies, the aim of which is to justify and legitimise the adoption of exclusionary actions or policies directed towards the out-group. DHA scholars (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 75–80; Wodak, 2011, p. 44) present a list of the most common topoi used in justifying discriminatory actions. Some of these

23 _{Van Dijk (1998, p. 267) proposes four parameters that constitute the Ideological Square: emphasize the}

positive information about Us and the negative about ‘Them’, at the same time, de-emphasize the negative information about ‘Us’ and the positive information about Them. Typically, in such a polarized discourse the negative information about the behaviours, actions or policies related to the out-group are topicalized while the negative behaviours, actions, or policies of the in-group are de-topicalized (ibid.).

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are: topos of burdening, topos of reality, topos of history, topos of numbers, topos of the people, topos of authority, topos of threat or danger, topos of definition, topos of justice, topos of urgency, topos of advantage or disadvantage, topos of humanitarianism, topos of culture, topos of abuse.

Perspectivization strategies (framing or discourse representation) reveal speakers’ involvement and the way they position their points of view, e.g. through narrating,

describing, reporting etc. Finally, intensification or mitigation strategies are strategies via which actors modify and qualify the epistemic status of a proposition. These strategies serve either to capitalize on and magnify the negative attributions and actions of an out- group or downplay and trivialize the negative actions of an in-group. These strategies can be linguistically realized through adjectives, quantifiers, modals, euphemisms, vague expressions etc. (see Chapter 4, section 2). In the following section, I elaborate on the reasons for choosing pragma-dialectics as an overarching analytical tool to examine Nasrallah’s speeches.