The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict

Matthew Evans, Lesley Jeffries, Jim O'Driscoll, Matthew Evans, Lesley Jeffries, Jim O'Driscoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138643840
• eBook ISBN: 9780429603556
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict presents a range of linguistic approaches as a means for examining the nature of communication related to conflict. Divided into four sections, the Handbook critically examines text, interaction, languages and applications of linguistics in situations of conflict. Spanning 30 chapters by a variety of international scholars, this Handbook:

• includes real-life case studies of conflict and covers conflicts from a wide range of geographical locations at every scale of involvement (from the personal to the international), of every timespan (from the fleeting to the decades-long) and of varying levels of intensity (from the barely articulated to the overtly hostile)
• sets out the textual and interactional ways in which conflict is engendered and in which people and groups of people can be set against each other
• considers what linguistic research has brought, and can bring, to the universal aim of minimising the negative effects of outbreaks of conflict wherever and whenever they occur.

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict is an essential reference book for students and researchers of language and communication, linguistics, peace studies, international relations and conflict studies.

Section I

Text in conflict

1

Introduction

Textual choice and communication in conflict

Lesley Jeffries

1.1 Why textual choices matter in conflict

This opening part of the Handbook concerns aspects of language which can be seen as both most and least obviously related to conflict. While the words we choose to use may appear to the lay-person as the most obvious way to offend or pacify those we find ourselves in conflict with, this section concerns not how we threaten (or find agreement with) others, but how we create a view of the world that may exacerbate – or ameliorate – situations of unacceptable conflict. We will consider the more direct interpersonal aspects of linguistic choices in Section II, but for now we will see how the effects of what we say/write – and how we say/write it – may feed into the fundamental structures of our worldview with the consequence of putting us at odds with those holding a different or an opposing worldview. While the worldview we create by our textual choices often directly impinges on our audience(s), it is convenient to separate out the textual choices from their (interpersonal) effects in order to make some progress in understanding each strand of communication.

1.1.1 Textual choices create an ideational/ideological worldview

The way in which we express ourselves includes many choices which together build up a worldview which our texts (whether spoken or written) present to the audience. This worldview makes assumptions about how the world is, particularly the human world. It delineates the shape, size, timescale and social structure of the world in the text and may imply or state how the participants, human and other, typically behave, or what typical characteristics they may have as well as the specific behaviours and characteristics the text is concerned with at any one point. A text may, for example, present people with certain characteristics (race, colour, gender, sexuality, age) as essentially good or bad, on the basis of those characteristics. A place or an institution may be painted in glowing or dark colours with little or no evidence and as part of the background of the text. These processes are not in themselves wrong or harmful. They are an inevitable consequence of describing (a version of) the world in texts.

After Halliday (1985), we may label this worldview, using one of his “metafunctions”, as ideational, by contrast with the interpersonal metafunction of language which we will consider in Section II. Thus, any text (e.g. “I’m boiling”) is likely, at one and the same time, to be presenting a particular (ideational) view of the world (e.g. the room is very warm) and may also be aiming for some interpersonal effect (e.g. for your hearer to open the door to cool the room down). The way in which both of these aims are achieved at once varies in relation to textual choices and context (and it provides linguistic scholarship with a great proportion of its more difficult subject matter).

When we consider texts relating to conflict situations at any level, from personal to international, we often encounter not only a worldview but a worldview with certain implied values. Thus, we can see that some texts may provide relatively benign (though nevertheless possibly contested) views of the world (e.g. whether or not the room is actually too warm can be a subjectively contested view) and others may provide not only ideational information on what the world is like, but also ideological information on the values espoused, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the producer of the text. Thus, a comment that the restaurant you are going to provides vegan food may demonstrate either the ideology of the speaker (that s/he does not think human beings should exploit the animal world for food/clothing and therefore approves of this option) or an ideology whereby the speaker thinks it right to demonstrate respect for such views in their hearer(s), whatever their own views. Whichever of these options is true in the situational/interpersonal context, the very text of an utterance like “We can go to Hansa’s – they have vegan food there” itself embodies the value that on some level, vegan food is a good thing. Textual meaning, then, may carry the consciously-intended ideological outlook of the producer, but it may also simply reflect the subconscious ideological assumptions of the society or group in which the text is produced. We cannot necessarily know which of these is true of any text and in a way, the point is moot since it is how the text propagates ideation – and ideology – that we are concerned with here. Much communication in conflict appears to centre on the intended meanings of the participants in what they say or write, but this could be a red herring when what we need to discuss is the effects of their texts, irrespective of conscious intention.

Clearly, the values or ideologies embedded in texts produced during communication in a conflict situation may be precisely those which are contested by the conflict itself. As we will see below, this may be during a particular episode between parties to a well-defined conflict or it may be part of a longer, slower, debate across society and through history about what is acceptable and unacceptable. All such debate to the extent that it is respectful and open is preferable to physical combat. More often, though, there is no debate at all about the most important of the disagreements. These are the ones that are embedded at a level of textual meaning that is least accessible to challenges and may not even be clear to the text producers. The following section discusses the nature of such hidden meanings.

1.1.2 Textual choices are not only propositional but also hidden

Texts, however long or short, are the combination of fundamental linguistic meaning (i.e. structures/words/semantics) with particular contexts of use. We will discuss the wider situational and social context later, but here we will address the particular issue of what makes textual meaning different from basic linguistic meaning. We can visualise the textual layer of meaning as being added to the basic propositional meaning by the choices made between alternatives on a particular occasion of use. This is the reason that it can justifiably be linked to stylistics, which is the study of textual choices. Thus, if we aim to produce a text describing a dog eating a bone, it may be that we decide to characterise the dog as an active participant in this text (“The dog ate the bone”) or we may decide to background the dynamism of the dog in favour of a focus on the bone (“The bone was eaten by the dog”). This kind of active-passive relationship between alternative sentence pairs has been much-discussed by linguistics, including in syntactic theory (e.g. Chomsky, 1957) and in critical linguistics (e.g. Fowler, 1991, pp.77–9; Hodge and Kress, 1988), but there are many other features of textual meaning where the effects of choices can also alter the way a scene or event is presented (Jeffries, 2013).

Although they do not always explicitly present themselves in this way, the various approaches to discourse analysis (DA) that developed after the rise of Linguistics as a discipline in the early 20th century can be characterised as aiming to capture the kinds of meaning that are neither fully contextual (pragmatic) nor completely context-free (i.e. semantico-structural). With the possible exception of early versions of DA (see, for example, Brown and Yule, 1983; Coulthard, 1985), whereby the main concern is with the formal links between sentences, all other developments in describing “discourse” appear to be attempting to explain how language usage makes meaning over and above the basic propositional content but stopping short in many cases of characterising the full interpersonal and situational context.

While DA has produced a wealth of different frameworks with which to analyse text (see Alba-Juez and Juez, 2009 for an overview of some of them), none of these has so far become the default approach, though one strand of development of particular interest in the context of this handbook, usually known as CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) developed from an explicitly Marxist position specifically with the aim of exposing the fostering of unacceptable ideologies by certain textual practices (see Bloor and Bloor, 2007; Fairclough, 1995). This may be the most obviously relevant development of discourse analysis in relation to conflict communication, but it too has produced many different terminologies and a range of approaches (see, for illustration, Machin and Mayr, 2012; Wodak and Myer, 2015) which over time have become increasingly concerned with context (of production and reception) and only a few of which remain primarily text-based. My own contribution to this field comes in the form of Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010, 2015a, 2015b) whose aim has been to separate the analysis of text from the views of the analyst (i.e. it is not Marxist in essence) and also from the intended and received meaning by producer and recipient respectively. The other aim was to provide a coherent framework of textual features for researchers to employ.

There will be more discussion of the approaches used by authors of chapters in Section I of the Handbook but for now, we can note that many of the features examined by such approaches do not occur at the propositional level of lexico-grammar (plus associated context...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of eResources
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The origins of The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict
• SECTION I Text in conflict
• SECTION II Interaction in conflict
• SECTION III Languages in conflict
• SECTION IV Linguistics in conflict
• Afterword: Connecting linguistics and conflict research
• Index