This article examines reports about massacres in eight Israeli secondary school history books, published between 1998 and 2009.¹ It aims to show that massacres, or rather their outcome, are legitimated in these books through a complex rhetoric that involves both verbal and visual means.

The article uses theories and analytical tools of Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics and Multimodal Analysis to examine the linguistic, discursive, generic and multimodal strategies of legitimation employed in these school books. The analysis is based primarily on the works of Van Dijk (1997), Martin Rojo and Van Dijk (1997),Van Leeuwen (2000, 2007, 2008), Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), Hodge and Kress (1993) and Coffin (1997, 2006). The article argues that Israeli mainstream school books implicitly legitimate the killing of Palestinians as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and suggests that this legitimation prepares Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry on the practices of occupation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

This article presents a qualitative and quantitative corpus study based on a collection of new Labour texts (1994 to 2007), as an analysis of the party’s discourse on globalization. In addition to providing a detailed description of the multi-faceted concept of globalization, I show that new Labour discourse on globalization is an instance of globalist discourse with a twist. An analysis of the conceptual metaphors related to globalization confirms that it is understood as an inevitable phenomenon, whose causes are unknown and which is almost impossible to predict or stop. However, the link between globalization and progress is more complex: the promise of progress often includes a threat which aims at rendering unpopular policies palatable. I relate this argumentative technique to the emergence of Mouffe’s (1998) ‘politics without adversary’, and argue that it is a characteristic of new Labour discourse beyond the single topic of globalization.

To date, studies of social attitudes towards Scottish independence tend to have been of the structured survey or interview variety. This study seeks to support and build upon the findings of recent social attitude surveys on Scottish independence using what is, as far as the author is aware, a novel methodology. This involves combining the corpus linguistic technique of automated semantic tagging with a discourse-historical Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework.Applying this to a three-million-word corpus built from a pro-independence internet discussion forum, the analysis shows, firstly, a view that independence will strengthen, consolidate or transform Scottish identity in a positive way and, secondly, a distinct lack of strategies that seek to dismantle British identity or refer to historical disputes. Thus, an evaluation of this methodology suggests that it successfully manages to produce findings that support previous research, challenge existing stereotypes, and allow new insight into Scottish nationalist ideology.

Whilst many hypotheses have been formulated on why audiences remain passive in response to distant suffering, very little empirical research has been carried out to verify these hypotheses. This article discusses audience denial in response to information about human rights abuses¹, paying attention to both content and strategies used in accounts of denial, i.e. what these accounts say and by which means they effectively neutralize appeals for action. Three repertoires are identified as specific targets for neutralization: (1) The message itself (‘the medium is the message’); (2) Campaigners and, in particular, Amnesty International (AI) (‘shoot the messenger’); (3) The action recommended in the appeal (‘babies and bathwater’). These repertoires are analysed in terms of the discursive techniques — e.g. argumentation, rhetorical and semantic moves and speech acts — used to neutralize the moral claims made by Amnesty International’s appeals. The article suggests that audience denial is an operation of power and production of knowledge in so far as it plays a role in sustaining and colluding with more systemic and official operations of passivity and denial. The normative implication of audiences’ justifications for their passivity is illustrated in their banal, everyday contribution to a morality of unresponsiveness. The discussion aims to contribute to current debates on the ‘Politics of Pity’, social responsibility and distant suffering. It also contributes to psychological work on pro-social behaviour and, in particular, to research on audiences’ responses to humanitarian appeals and mediation in general.

The major focus of this article is on the transformative effects of the positioning of feminine identities of tennis players within the adversarial framework of the genre of a post-match press conference. What is investigated is how female tennis players discursively construct their identities through continual face work and a multitude of persuasive strategies of self-presentation. Furthermore, articulations of a variety of discourses are foregrounded as contributing to the construction of players’ communicative styles. Preponderant emphasis in the characterization of players’ identities is on the dimension of power. The article draws upon the tools of pragmatic analysis coupled with critical discourse analysis. The major strategies of positive self-presentation are discursively realized in a variety of ways which encompass semantic, formal and interactional structures (Van Dijk, 2000), each comprising multifarious analytical categories pertinent for the present study.