In this article we examine some discursive aspects of political legitimation by analyzing the speech of the Spanish Secretary of the Interior, Mayor Oreja; on the occasion of a military-style expulsion of a group of African `illegal' migrants from Melilla—the Spanish enclave in Morocco—in the summer of 1996. After a theoretical analysis of legitimation, we study three levels of legitimation: (a) pragmatic: various strategies of the justification of controversial official actions; (b) semantic: the ways a discourse represents its partisan view of the events or properties of actors as `true' or as the `facts'; and (c) sociopolitical: the way official discourse self-legitimates itself as authoritative and delegitimates alternative discourses. For these various aspects of legitimation, several levels of discursive structure (style, grammar, rhetoric, semantic moves, etc.) are examined in some detail.

No abstract

This chapter examines the role of language policies, ideologies, knowledge, and practices in the expansion and consolidation of neoliberalism and the forms of governance that emerge from it. It explores the current context of neoliberalism, explaining how it becomes a practice of governance of individuals and social groups. Adopting Foucault’s concept of governmentality, the chapter traces the main features of neoliberal governmentality, including its linguistic components. The chapter examines how neoliberalism is transforming language policies, educational programmes, and practices through the discourses of personal enterprise and language as profit. The impact of these discourses on speakers’ experiences and trajectories, particularly in the processes of linguistic self-training and capitalisation, are examined, as well as new forms of subjectivity that emerge from these processes. The final section discusses how the effects of neoliberalism as a practice of governance provide a window to a better understanding of the changes and challenges of language policies.

No abstract

No abstract