The representation of a religio-political identity by the 'civil society' of a country is a complex act intersecting multiple spheres such as the sociocultural, economic, and particularly partisan understanding of religion, politics, and culture dividing the society (and media houses) who inflect, invent, and articulate novel identity for the people of the republic. This study is about how the discursive field of 'Islamic militancy' is constructed in Bangladeshi news (print) media. The researchers analyzed 21 texts of editorials published in the month of December 2005 in six Bangladeshi newspapers (in Bangla and English). The analysis has been done following a hermeneutic interpretivist perspective, widely practised in discourse analytical studies. With the rise of militant Islam the faceless militants get their pictures published, and their names appear in national dailies Ϫ either through complete or vague identification of doers. The analysis shows that most of the editors produced a secular democratic response to the actions perpetrated by the militants. However, their attempt to occupy the contents of the empty signifier of Islam is heavily inflected by their religious predilections; hence, the fight perhaps is never going to be in favor of the secular-democratic politics that the editors aim to support.

For communication purposes, formulaic expressions can be an easy and efficient way to impart information. Very often campaign slogans are built on using such expressions. Because the context and implications are transparent to the listening public, further explanations are usually not required. But once people get used to such a paratactic mode of expression, orally oriented language users may be lulled into thinking that, when they use such a mode of expression, there is no need for further elaboration of an issue at hand. This study examines whether literate Malays (undergraduates) use formulaic expressions in the spoken texts they produce. And in the event that they do, the study also hopes to determine the nature of topics that draws the use of such expressions. The results of the study show categorically that urban students do not use formulaic expressions. However, there is a tendency among rural students to use such expressions especially when discussing topics which are context reduced, i. e. when topics are more abstract.

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Political speeches are a special kind of discourse that ‘produce and reproduce beliefs, opinions, and ideologies’ (Wodak 2004: 381). One way of studying such discourse would be to look into the use of the grammatical category of performatives. As analysts seek to interpret a text, they must not forget the reality that political discourses are more about beliefs, opinions and ideologies constructed from a partisan perspective than an individual choice. The variety of hegemonic power practised by the political leaders determines to a large extent their exploitation of performatives: in an explicit or implicit manner. In this study, the researchers examine the use of performatives produced by two different political leaders in two political settings. The analysis of the use of performatives by the current Prime Minister of Malaysia is the mainstay of the study. The performatives found in the speeches of the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh are also analyzed for comparative purposes. The differences in style as well as the level of exploitation of performatives by the two leaders are examined exhaustively using the discourse-historical approach (Wodak 2001; Wodak et al. 1999) as the theoretical framework.