When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting CSOs contribution to public welfare and by transmitting state-led legitimacy discourse to the civil society sector. The analysis of applications submitted between 2013 and 2016 to the Presidential Grant Competition (PGC), the biggest public funding programme for CSOs in Russia, shows that the state is (1) supporting CSO activities above all in social, health and education-related fields, and (2) privileging projects that relate to a state-led conservative public discourse not only but foremost within those welfare-related fields. These results highlight the importance of investigating state support to CSOs in order to access the changing role of civil society under authoritarian regime conditions.

Basing his argumentation on an analysis of condition C effects, Bruening (2014) proposes to replace the familiar notion of c-command underlying dependency relations with a precede-and-command condition, which defines dependency relations as precedence relations within a local domain (phase). In this reply I argue that condition C effects cannot be used to show the relevance of phases for the definition of syntactic dependency, and I question the conceptual necessity of the notion phase as currently defined.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

This article addresses the problem of unclear usage of “coercion” and “repression” in literature concerning protest and repression in democratic and nondemocratic states. It questions the bases and conclusions of domestic democratic peace theory and discusses its consequences. The article proposes expanding definitions of coercion and repression in terms of timing, agency, and perceptiveness. Using vocabulary of poststructuralist discourse theory and the “logics” approach to analyzing social phenomena, it introduces the notion of hegemonic coercion and repression and describes their functioning. It argues that contemporary liberal democracies are not free from coercion and repression, but that the hegemony embodied in the state is able to sustain itself by means of hegemonic coercion with little use of direct violence. Consequently, the absence of state violence is not a criterion of a mature democracy, but can also be a characteristic of a totalitarian regime where ideological deviations are strictly and preemptively controlled.

This paper examines the effects of shifts in “development discourse” on the behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing upon detailed case histories of two well-established NGOs in western India, it is demonstrated that (1) the case NGOs have been profoundly influenced by discourses prevailing during their initial, formative stages; (2) NGO behavior is subject to changes in global development discourses that are transmitted to them via a range of mechanisms including consultants, conditions of funding, and reporting requirements; and (3) these NGOs have been able to challenge and adapt certain discourses to suit their own needs and circumstances, sometimes even sparking wider structural change.

In Germany, like in other countries, the notions of volunteering and civic action altogether describe a wide diversity of activities. Often, this wide spectre is put together under ‘civic engagement’, reaching from civic action that is sometimes overtly ‘political’ over to engagement as volunteering in areas like sports or culture. Yet in academic contributions that use such a wide concept, nothing much can be found about a convincing differentiation of the diverse forms of engagement that figure under such a wide cover. Is there a clear line separating voluntary and civic action? In line with the introduction to this special issue, the paper takes up these questions by proposing that a proper understanding of differentiations in the wide field of civic engagement calls for a historical approach that gives a key role to discourses and politics. Looking from such a perspective at historical constellations in German history, four decisive historical concepts get sketched. It shows that kinds of differentiation between voluntary and civic action are very much dependent on discourses and politics and not only the repercussions of socio-economic and cultural changes and megatrends. The kind of approach chosen shows as well that older concepts, notions and attitudes do not simply melt away in the light of new ones. The label ‘civic engagement’ appears as an umbrella notion in front of a diversity of forms and understandings of engagement. Understanding this diversity calls for tracing the historical roots, notably the ordering imaginaries and strategies wherein these forms and understandings took shape and function today.

What motivates a fluent bilingual speaker to switch languages within a single utterance? We propose a novel discourse-functional motivation: less predictable, high information-content meanings are encoded in one language, and more predictable, lower information-content meanings are encoded in another language. Switches to a speaker's less frequently used, and hence more salient, language offer a distinct encoding that highlights information-rich material that comprehenders should attend to especially carefully. Using a corpus of natural Czech-English bilingual discourse, we test this hypothesis against an extensive set of control factors from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse-functional lines of research using mixed-effects logistic regression, in the first such quantitative multifactorial investigation of code-switching in discourse. We find, using a Shannon guessing game to quantify predictability of meanings in conversation, that words with difficult-to-guess meanings are indeed more likely to be code-switch sites, and that this is in fact one of the most highly explanatory factors in predicting the occurrence of code-switching in our data. We argue that choice of language thus serves as a formal marker of information content in discourse, along with familiar means such as prosody and syntax. We further argue for the utility of rigorous, multifactorial approaches to sociolinguistic speaker-choice phenomena in natural conversation.

The recent financial and debt crisis has resuscitated the debate about European federalism – a theme that seemed not to have survived the painful constitutional adventure that ended with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. With the adoption of significant policy and institutional measures for tightening macroeconomic and budgetary coordination (including a constitutionally enshrined debt brake), the reforms of the monetary union have undisputedly brought the European Union further on the path towards an ever closer union. In an era where EU integration has been increasingly politicised, and Euroscepticism has been on the rise and exploited by anti‐system parties, national leaders have to face a political hiatus and respond to increased needs for symbolic and discursive legitimation of further federalisation. This is all the more crucial for French and German leaders who have brokered the main decisions during the crisis of the eurozone. Against this background, the purpose of this article is not to assess whether, or to what extent, the recent reforms of economic and monetary union have made the EU more federal. Rather, the purpose is to tackle the following puzzle: How have EU leaders legitimised the deepening of federal integration in a context where support for more European federalism is at its lowest? To elucidate this, a lexicographic discourse analysis is conducted based on all speeches held by the German Chancellor Merkel and the two French Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande, previous to, or after European summits from early 2010 until the spring of 2013. The findings indicate that federalism is both taboo and pervasive in French and German leaders' discourse. The paradox is barely apparent, though. While the ‘F‐word’ is rarely spoken aloud, two distinctive visions co‐exist in the French and German discourse. The coming of age of a political union through constitutional federalism is pictured as ineluctable, yet as a distant mirage out of reach of today's decision makers. At the same time, the deepening of functional federalism in order to cope with economic interdependence is a ubiquitous imperative that justifies further integration. The persisting gap between the constitutional and the functional vision of European federalism has crucial implications. Insofar as the Union is held responsible for not delivering successful economic policy, political leaders will fail to legitimise both functional and constitutional federalism.

An analysis of antecedent mismatch effects under ellipsis is proposed to explain why some cases of verb phrase ellipsis exhibit a sizeable penalty when the elided target is not structurally matched to its antecedent, while other cases show little or no penalty at all. The proposal attributes the penalty in the former case to an information-structural constraint governing contrastive topics, and it is argued that previous accounts have misattributed that penalty to a licensing constraint on ellipsis. Results from four experiments (three off-line acceptability, one on-line self-paced reading) confirm that the relative size of the mismatch penalty can be reliably predicted based on the information structure of the clause containing the ellipsis and that acceptability differences associated with information structure are observable even in the absence of ellipsis.

The principal concern in this study is to provide a detailed discussion of the pragmatic properties of ‘possible’ modal adverbs, mainly by comparing conceivably with perhaps. First, we identify two factors regarding the occurrence patterns of these modal adverbs: their cooccurrence with modal verbs and their position in the clause, both of which are pragmatic-related characteristics. Two techniques were employed: analysis of manually coded corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and analysis of questionnaire data (from a completion test). The combined results demonstrate that the two adverbs display opposite functional characteristics, and that the factors influencing the use of these adverbs are strongly associated with the contexts of modality and discourse.

This article examines elite European discourses during the Greek financial crisis from its pre‐history in September 2008 up to the arrival of the SYRIZA government in January 2015. The article employs the conceptual literature on Discursive Institutionalism (DI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI). Having coded 1,153 unique quotes drawn from a dataset of 15,354 news wires from Reuters, the authors argue that the communicative discourse of 63 senior European (and IMF) officials on the Greek crisis during that period demonstrates significant volatility. Four distinct narrative frames are identified: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’ and ‘reluctant redemption’, punctuated by three discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, which reflect the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis. The article's contribution is twofold: empirically, it is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the protagonists’ communication of the Greek crisis; and theoretically, it combines DI and HI in an effort to conceptualise an important part of our understanding of ‘bail‐out politics’ throughout the Eurozone crisis.

This article introduces the Corpus of Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI)—an open-access corpus of transcribed video data, capturing moments where individuals are policed in some way for the language they are speaking or otherwise endorsing while sharing public space (e.g. in stores, restaurants, parking lots, and parks). Despite having thus far largely evaded systematic inquiry, such interactions are illustrative of a particular genre of language policymaking and enforcement that takes place in everyday social life, which the CLDI aims to document and make available for ongoing empirical examination. After presenting the corpus itself, as an initial exploration into some of the practices and actions observable in these data, we describe the recurrent use of Speak English directives, accompanied by nation-state declarative accounts like This is America. Detailed analysis of such turns, and the responses they receive, throws into relief ways that language policies and ideologies can be instantiated, ratified, challenged, defended, and otherwise negotiated in and through the particulars of interactants' joint conduct. We conclude by describing some future avenues for research, teaching, and public engagement on the basis of the CLDI.

Increasingly, traditional notions of philanthropy are colonized by a market discourse that promotes consumption as an effective way to solve social ills, resulting in what scholars have termed “marketized philanthropy.” This paper examines the implications of marketized philanthropy through a discourse analysis of the (PRODUCT) RED campaign benefiting the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in Africa through consumption of (RED)-branded products. This paper explores the implications of a business-oriented model of philanthropy for bringing about social change, the repercussions of campaigns like (RED) that explicitly shed the label of philanthropy; and how they impact political engagement.

This paper describes the features of grassroots philanthropy as viewed by the participants. Using content analysis, we show that while the mainstream discourse focuses on efficiency, accountability, and professionalism, the grassroots discourse focuses on the individual aspects, viewing philanthropy as small good deeds, a personal spiritual journey, and something that brings happiness. To avoid making this personal journey impure or less happy, the grassroots philanthropists resist practices such as formalization and professionalization. They also distance themselves from corporates and bureaucracies which they view as corrupt and hypocritical. The grassroots’ discourse has its roots in the traditional Chinese culture, and is also shaped by the realities of the transitioning Chinese society, where citizens are searching for meaning, values, and support. Such a discourse has profound influence on the organizations that embrace the grassroots values and may also impact the development of the Chinese nonprofit sector.

The death of New Labour was announced very publicly in the autumn of 2010; its muse, or alter ego, the Third Way, on the other hand, seemed to have slipped away unnoticed. This article takes the form of an obituary of the Third Way – a partial biography and retrospective assessment of its provenance, influences and significance – which can also serve as an introduction to the Third Way in Britain.

Levinson 2013 (L13) argues against the idea that ‘recursion, and especially recursive center embedding, might be the core domain-specific property of language’ (p. 159), citing crosslinguistic grammatical data and specific corpus studies. L13 offers an alternative: language inherits its recursive properties ‘from the action domain’ (p. 159). We argue that L13's claims are at best unwarranted and can in many instances be shown to be false. L13's reasoning is similarly flawed— in particular, the presumption that center-embedding can stand proxy for embedding (and clausal embedding can stand proxy for recursion). Thus, no support remains for its conclusions. Furthermore, though these conclusions are pitched as relevant to specific claims that have been published about the role of syntactic recursion, L13 misrepresents these claims. Consequently, even an empirically supported, better-reasoned version of L13 would not bear on the questions it claims to address.