ABSTRACT The use of war metaphors in COVID–19 crisis communication has prompted great metalinguistic attention and highlighted the role of conflict memory in crisis discourse. Still, discourses of collective memory are to date rarely integrated with the study of metaphor and crisis communication, though frequently observed in crisis metaphor analyses in post–conflict contexts. This study focuses on the relations between the war metaphor and war memory as seen specifically in post–conflict settings. Set across three post–Yugoslav states, it starts from an examination of WAR metaphor use and its relations to war memory discourses in early pandemic political leaders' announcements, and citizen responses to these. Second, it zooms in on the patterns of metaphor negotiation and contestation in citizen discourses in particular. The findings show how the early pandemic discourse drew on heavily militarized metaphoricity, which revived nationalist images of the country's violent breakup in the 1990s but also gave rise to ample contestation in public space, revealing differing positionings in politicians' and citizens' discourses. The analysis allows a discussion of some implications pertaining to the relations of metaphor, collective memory and crisis communication, as well as the increasingly laden affective potentials of war and history in times when ‘war is never far away’.

ABSTRACT In recent years, aging coal power plants, lack of maintenance, and issues of poor governance have resulted in a high frequency of rolling scheduled blackouts, throughout South Africa. This has led to greater urgency being placed on switching to renewable energy sources, which South Africa has great potential for. Despite this, and the current reality of the global climate crisis, South Africa continues to rely heavily on coal, not only as an energy source at home, but also as a key part of the country’s export economy. This paper utilises a corpus-assisted, ecolinguistically-informed critical discourse analysis framework to investigate the ways in which members of the South African national government construct the use of coal and other fossil fuels in light of a global climate crisis. The data for this paper consists of a variety of public-facing texts from the South African national government on the topic of climate change. Our analysis revealed that despite a stated commitment to prioritising renewable energy by the government, its implicit messaging normalises the continued use of fossil fuels and minimises their serious negative impacts.

ABSTRACT This paper examines discursive embodiment on the reality television show My Big Fat Fabulous Life. I ask how the tension between fat and fabulous is reconciled on the show, as two seemingly incongruous concepts in contemporary society, particularly within the genre of reality television, which is well known for makeovers, bodily transformations and other life interventions that compel disciplinary practices of neoliberal self-governmentality. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, I examine how Whitney’s body is discursively constructed through humorous talk. I argue that the way humor is recruited, paired with multimodal elements such as music and strategic camerawork, serve to undermine the message of ‘body positivity’ that is outwardly promoted on the show, in favor of a standard anti-fat narrative more readily acceptable to the viewing audience.

ABSTRACT Here I use aspects of Phil Graham’s discourse analytical work to examine forms of e/valuations and critically analyse the formulation of truths in the constitution of Artificial Intelligence (hereafter, AI). This paper focuses on two 2019 documents: Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, 2019a) and Policy and investment recommendations for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, 2019b). My aim here is to provide a timely contribution to contemporary philosophical–methodological innovations in documenting the constellation of values that are prefigured in human-centric constructions of AI. The analysis is informed primarily by principles from Graham’s distinctive approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which I take to be the philosophical study of valuation. In that approach, political economy is taken as a composite formulation of values whereby neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation. This paper presents a roadmap to demonstrate the usefulness of a philosophically grounded interdisciplinary piece of linguistic research through which evaluative semantic categories can be usefully synthesised with CDA to systematically expose the assumptions which underpin current truth claims and values – in this case, about and around the ethics of AI.

ABSTRACT Taking cognisance of the social and linguistic power of trap music and its song lyrics as crucial avenues for language use in society, this study set out to conduct a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of selected song lyrics of Black Sherif. The study synergised Wmatrix and a socio-cognitive approach to CDA to interpret the song lyrics. The analyses revealed three linguistic strategies: (a) pronouns; (b) Ghanaian Student Pidgin; and (c) metaphors in the song lyrics that served as a means of empowering the youth to survive and strive for success despite social and psychological aggressions in life. Also, the individualistic self-representation in the song lyrics included plural identities of people who share a common experience of struggle, pain, survival, and self-empowerment. Finally, the study highlighted crucial societal issues, such as economic hardship and social injustice, that may otherwise be overlooked or underrepresented in mainstream media or academia. Based on these findings, the study provides recommendations for practice and further research.