Ruth Wodak
The present issue of the Journal of Language and Politics provides an excel-
lent example of interdisciplinary research into the many subjects of the field of
‘politics and political institutions’. Contributions by political scientists (Gün-
ther Sandner, Florian Oberhuber, Christoph Bärenreuter), sociologists (Heinz
Schönbauer) and linguists from different schools and paradigms in Linguistics
(Functional Pragmatics — Michael Warner; Sociolinguistics — Michael Clyne;
Corpus Linguistics — Paul Baker, Tony McEnery; Critical Discourse Analysis
(Discourse-Historical Approach) — Michał Krzyżanowski, Ruth Wodak; and
Creolists — Nicholas Faraclas) are all contained in one issue. Viewing such
an extraordinary assemble of traditional academic disciplines and even more
complex theoretical frameworks, one could certainly pose the question: what
relates all these papers with each other?
This question is even more salient if the diverse topics would be taken into
account: racist immigration rhetoric in Australia and in the UK; debates on
European identities and on the Draft Constitutional Treaty; conflict resolu-
tion in Northern Ireland; the influence of Austro-Marxism on discourses of
nationalism; and the development of pidgins and creoles in times of ‘linguistic
imperialism’.
The most trivial answer would be to suggest that in our globalized world,
all the listed phenomena are related in complex ways: studying immigration
issues and racist argumentation patterns is not far removed from the analysis
of resistance and struggles against dominance and power through nationalistic
and globalizing ideologies. All these phenomena take place in old and new
public spaces, in the media as well as in virtual spaces, thus transcending tradi-
tional boundaries of time and space, as well as local, regional and national pub-
lic spheres. Moreover, such developments manifest themselves in various and
References
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Wodak, Ruth and Chilton, Paul (eds). 2005. A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis.
Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.