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Part of
Representing the Other in European Media Discourses
Edited by Jan Chovanec and Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74] 2017
► pp. 121–134

Chapter 5
Construing the Other

On the ideology-laden construals of Europeans in the Guardian

The chapter focuses on the discursive operation of othering as underlying ideological practice in representing Europeans in the British daily the Guardian. The research takes its underpinnings from the cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis frameworks. The concept of othering has been operationalized in terms of Langacker’s conception of construal and van Dijk’s theory of ideology reproduction in discourse. The chapter focuses on two ideology-laden construals of Europeans whose aim is to establish a discursive Us – Them polarization. It is claimed that construing the citizens of the EU as east/eastern or central Europeans is ideology-driven. The chapter presents the findings of a study of 400 instances of the lexical item Europeans, which amounts to the total corpus occurrence of this lexical item in an approximately 930,000 word corpus of news articles retrieved from the Guardian between May 2004 and December 2009.

Keywords: othering, ideology, construal, Europeans
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Operationalizing the concept of othering
  • 3.Data and procedure
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.74.06wil
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