Chapter 4 examines social protocols in public discourse, representing the realm of ‘overly’ ordinary language use. The term ‘public discourse’ means both monologues and dialogues that take place in public, often through mediatised events or written (online) pieces which are available for, or even addressed to, members of the public. ‘Social protocols’ describe forms of language use associated with ‘politeness’ in public discourse specifically, where ‘politeness’ in the interpersonal sense is hardly needed, i.e., such forms at first sight may seem to be entirely ‘superfluous’ if not ‘redundant’. Because if this, while social protocols and mediatised public aggression (studied in Chapter 3) may appear to have little in common at first sight, interestingly both of them have an ‘unreasonable’ element. This sense of unreasonableness however dissolves once one looks at such forms of language use through the ritual perspective. As a case study, Chapter 4 examines the ritual conventions of social protocols in a corpus of Chinese public announcements made in the wake of a major social crisis.

This chapter explores the social, political, and legal implications of irony use. People do not simply employ irony for the sake of expressing ironical meanings alone, but use irony, especially in public spheres, to communicate a variety of pragmatic, or perlocutionary, messages. Many verbal ironies convey meanings that are strategically negotiated to affect different social, political, and legal outcomes. Irony often has significant, concrete consequences in real-life discourse contexts. Simpson presents various attested examples to exemplify how irony may be differently enacted in private and public spheres of communication, but can also be readily transferred, and sometimes transformed, from private conversations to larger public discussions. He appeals to critical discourse analysis as one possible approach to uncovering the social work that irony often accomplishes (e.g., power and ideology), and outlines some of the perils and pitfalls of irony in different discourse contexts (e.g., public sports conversations, legal discourse, politics, twitter). Simpson ends with a fascinating exploration of whether irony may be “the last refuge of the scoundrel,” a place inhabited by some politicians who appear to use irony as an option in any difficult situation where they must “apologize-or-deny-or-ironize.”

Chapter 15 begins with a general discussion of cultural adaptation the development of complex networks of conversation based on increasingly complex social organization, and the eventual fragmentation of discourse based on separate and often competing interests.The chapter discusses how the development of media first consolidated audiences then facilitated the fragmentation of audiences and the proliferation of incommensurable and conflicting narratives.The recent fragmentation of the US “national story,” centered around the Civil War and the issue of slavery, is used as a case study to illustrate the fragmentation of discourse and narratives, along with associated group and individual identities.The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the interaction of public discourse with politeness, facework, and homeostasis.

Athens represents a special case in the history of Greek public benefactions. It is probably the polis that most resisted the emergence of civic euergetism, that is, the establishment of an organized exchange of benefactions for honors between polis and citizens. At the same time, no other classical polis contributed so much to the development of the practice and to its transformation into a defining institution of the Hellenistic age. This chapter examines these two sides of the history of Athenian euergetism in order to explain the widespread integration of citizens into an institution born before the classical period to regulate the relationship between poleis and foreigners. It deals with the reasons for the opposition to donations and honors for citizens, the factors that contributed to overcoming resistance to euergetism, and the elitist content of classical civic euergetism. Finally, it discusses some developments that counterbalanced this elitist component: the ‘democratization’ of euergetism through grants of honors to non-wealthy citizens, the organization of epidoseis, and other measures that served to prevent the rise of a class of great financial benefactors, along with the relaxation of this policy in the time of Lycurgus.

After detailing the tensions created by the lawsuit in US–Paraguayan relations, this chapter reveals that in the late 1970s and early 1980s the commercial Paraguayan press used the case to challenge the Stroessner regime. Where the US courts emphasized the responsibility of a cruel individual torturer, the Paraguayan commercial press insisted that the case also implicated the police and the judicial system; the defendant was presented as an ordinary, not demonized, individual; and the victims were construed as agents. Documents from the Paraguayan police’s secret police archive further reveal that high-ranking officials perceived the commercial press coverage of the case as threatening. The chapter offers overlapping explanations for the divergence between the representations of the case produced by US courts and the press in Paraguay, and draws particular attention to the opportunities created by features of tort litigation as well as processes of local reinterpretation.

This chapter explores how the US court judgments and narratives in the Marcos case were mobilized in the Philippines. In the decade following the judgment on liability, victim organizations, elected officials, and the leftist press used the judgment to clarify the historical record and provide evidence of the extent of abuses under Marcos.In addition, when discussing the case, two leading Philippine newspapers offered a narrative about the Marcos regime much more challenging to both the US and to Filipino elites than that offered in US courts. The chapter also explores post-liability proceedings, and their conflict with the Philippine Republic’s policy of agrarian reform in the post-Marcos era. This conflict was resolved in 2013 through the enactment of a law providing reparations and recognition to victims of the Martial Law regime. Though the reparations law was initially conceived as a way to enforce the ATS judgment and was accordingly limited to narrow categories of abuse, following parliamentary debates its scope was extended to cover a broader range of victims whose stories are being recorded for the first time. In addition, the reparations legislation has triggered and strengthened various governmental and nongovernmental memory and official history projects. The chapter thus traces how in the move from the United States to the Philippines the meaning of the lawsuit was transformed to produce richer public narratives of repression under Marcos.

This chapter deals with the unsaid as a discursive strategy in antipolitical correctness discourse, where the unsaid is framed as something that can be said and needs to be said but is prevented from being said through silencing and taboos. Antipolitical correctness discourse is described as a language ideological debate. This metadiscursive debate involves notions of language taboos, denial of voice and representation, accessibility, and limitations of public discourse. It thereby negotiates issues not so much of language use, but of national identity, democratic representation, and purported cultural hegemony with the aim of changing public discourse. The strategy of claiming to be silenced to increase the acceptability of contested propositions rests on the extent to which silence is at odds with public discourse in modern mass democracies. Its functions will be exemplified using the example of the antipolitical correctness discourse perpetuated by Germany’s New Right. The chapter also aims to show how analyzing metadiscourse can on the one hand be a fruitful way for empirical textual analysis of the unsaid and on the other hand also provides scope for studying the language ideology of silence.

compares cosmopolitan versus communitarian issue positions by mass publics and elites across our study. We investigate whether there is an attitude gap between elites, who tend to adhere to cosmopolitan positions, and mass publics with more communitarian leanings. Contrasting mass opinion surveys with results from our own elite survey, we show that the mass-elite divide on globalization issues is indeed pervasive and found in all five countries of study. We consider both economic causes in the shape of diverging material interests and cultural ones, the latter pointing towards cultural capital and symbolic boundaries defining transnational cosmopolitan class consciousness. The results align more with the cultural than with the economic explanation. Political elites in the five countries display convergent cosmopolitan positions across issues as varied as international trade, climate change, migration and supranational integration. Mass publics are much more divided on these issues. Also, education alone does not explain the mass-elite gap because the elites are still significantly more cosmopolitan than highly educated members of mass publics, even within the same country.

maps issue linkage in the public sphere as key component of cleavage formation. Cleavage coalitions in public debates about globalization are mapped using inductive methods. Multidimensional scaling reveals a powerful globalist coalition in all five countries under study - Germany, Poland, Mexico, Turkey and USA - which links various globalization-related issues in a general call for open borders. It is opposed by a protectionist coalition arguing against free trade, a nationalist coalition arguing against immigration and a neoliberal coalition that only champions free trade. This confirms that globalization-related conflict is two dimensional, with conflict over cultural and economic globalization distinct from each other.