Chapter 13. Cross-talk in political discourse: Strategies for bridging issue movements on Democracy Now!*

Amoshaun Toft (University of Washington Bothell)

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways that speakers connect movements through language use as they build support for their cause, and position it in a broader understanding of the political terrain. Using a corpus of spoken word transcripts aired between 2003-2013 from U.S. broadcast news program Democracy Now!, we developed a dictionary of named issue movements using corpus linguistics techniques. Semantic network analysis of issue-movement co-mentions revealed that the Civil Rights movement occupied a central role in facilitating cross-movement talk, and a purposive sub-sample of those stories was examined using qualitative discourse analysis tools to understand how and why. Several language strategies are explored that participants used to make relational connections between issue movements, and I offer some suggestions on how to approach the mixed methods analysis of cross-issue movement talk as political discourse.

Toft, A. (2018).  Chapter 13. Cross-talk in political discourse: Strategies for bridging issue movements on Democracy Now!. In M. Kranert & G. Horan (Eds.) ‘Doing Politics’: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse (pp. 301-329). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pre-publication copy