Bringing Temporality into Political Discourse Analysis

语言与政治密切相关，语言的变化对政治和政策制定产生了巨大的、往往未被察觉的影响。对语言的仔细分析表明，语言的某些方面会随着时间的推移而逐渐改变。这些变化并不总是有意的，但可能会产生戏剧性的影响。我以前探讨过的一个例子是，“极端主义”的出现如何导致了越来越多的压制性反恐政策，这些政策不仅反民主，而且实际上可能会通过促进而不是防止政治暴力而产生适得其反的效果。该研究金将使我能够开发和发布一种方法，用于分析随着时间的推移而出现的话语变化，目的是为未来更好的决策提供信息。在发表了对极端主义随时间的变化的分析后，该奖学金将使我能够继续对我之前的研究表明可能对政策制定产生不利影响的语言的其他方面进行分析。我在博士论文中发展的批评性话语分析(CDA)方法是由费尔克劳夫的辩证关系方法启发的。由于一个主要的发展是在分析中增加了一个时间维度，它被称为时态辩证关系方法或TDRA。要认识到语言本身存在着对世界有切实影响的内在机制，就必须研究语言的本体论，因此，TDRA也受到了批判现实主义的启发。在此之前，巴斯卡尔在死后发表了关于批评性现实主义如何为CDA提供信息的建议。这是巴斯卡尔典型的有先见之明的观点，为我在攻读博士期间在论文和出版物中提出的进一步分析提供了可能性。研究话语随时间的变化对于理解我们目前所处的政治气候是必要的，尤其是因为我的研究表明，语言对我们现在生活的新自由主义的政治霸权做出了重大贡献。继拉克劳和穆夫之后，这种霸权对蓬勃发展的政治领域和民主是适得其反的。通过使用TDRA来分析政治话语，人们希望对造成这种霸权的话语的各个方面进行批评，并希望这将有助于我们的政治、学术和更广泛的民主的繁殖力增加。由于没有意识到语言的变化，我们成为了它的受害者，在我的博士研究中，我发现了一些可能的研究途径。举三个例子，在过去的半个世纪里，‘the market’，‘change’和‘GLOBIZATION’的使用都呈指数级增长，同时它们也趋于名词化。这就是说，它们的用法已经从过程变成了实体。这不仅使它们去政治化，还使我们受制于它们。这一点的深远影响可以从2008年的信贷紧缩和随后的紧缩计划中看出。尽管拥有丰富的资源，但市场一直拒绝人们使用这些资源--这一过程只有在市场被用语言表示为我们受制于的实体，而不是我们控制的政治过程的情况下才可能实现。通过将对精选政治文本的仔细阅读与对数十亿字词的计算机辅助分析相结合，该奖学金将使我能够检验一个可行的假设，即某些词的名词化导致我们变得受制于一种破坏性的政治逻辑。揭示这一逻辑的某些方面是我们所使用的语言的内在方面，这是将我们从它的掌握中解放出来并朝着更解放的政治格局和更好地运作的民主迈出的第一步。

Language and politics are intimately connected, with changes to language having dramatic and often unobserved impacts on politics and policymaking. Careful analysis of language reveals that some aspects of language are progressively changed over time. These changes are not always intentional but can have dramatic impacts. An example of this that I have previously explored is how the emergence of'extremism' has resulted in evermore repressive counter-terrorism policies that are not only antidemocratic but may actually be counterproductive by promoting rather than preventing political violence.The Fellowship will allow me to develop and publish a methodology for analysing discursive change over time, with the intention that this will inform better policymaking in the future. Having already published analysis of changes to 'extremism' over time, the Fellowship will enable me to continue this analysis for other aspects of language that my earlier research has indicated may be having an adverse effect on policymaking.The approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) that I developed in my PhD thesis is informed by Fairclough's Dialectical Relational Approach. As a major development is the addition of a temporal dimension to the analysis, it is referred to as the Temporal Dialectical Relational Approach or TDRA. Understanding that there are mechanisms internal to language itself that have tangible impacts on the world necessitates the study of the ontology of language, so the TDRA is also informed by critical realism. This follows posthumously published proposals made by Bhaskar on how CDA might be informed by critical realism. This was a characteristically prescient observation by Bhaskar and offers the possibility of further analysis that I proposed in my thesis and in publications that I made while I was carrying out my PhD.Studying discursive change over time is necessary to understanding the current political climate that we inhabit, not least as my research has indicated that language has made a major contribution to the political hegemony of neoliberalism under which we now live.Following Laclau and Mouffe, this hegemony is counterproductive to a flourishing political sphere and democracy. By using the TDRA to analyse political discourse, it is hoped that aspects of the discourse that have contributed to this hegemony will be critiqued and that this will contribute to the increased fecundity of our politics, the academy, and democracy more generally.By not being aware of how language has changed we become subject to it and in my PhD research I identified a number of possible avenues for investigation. To name three, 'the market', 'change' and 'globalisation' have all seen an exponential increase in usage over the last half century while they have also tended to become nominalised. That is to say that they have changed their usage from being processes to being entities. This not only depoliticises them but also makes us subject to them. A profound impact of this can be seen in the 2008 credit crunch and subsequent programmes of austerity. Despite an abundance of resources, people have been denied access to them by the market - a process that is only made possible by the market being represented in language as an entity that we are subject to rather than a political process that we control.By combining the close reading of selected political texts with the computer aided analysis of billions of words, the Fellowship will enable me to test the working hypothesis that the nominalisation of certain words has resulted in us becoming subject to a destructive political logic. The act of revealing aspects of this logic that are internal to the language that we use is the first step in releasing us from its grasp and towards a more emancipatory political landscape and a better functioning democracy.