Black-boxing and the politics of parliamentary oversight in South Africa

Siebörger, Ian; Adendorff, Ralph

doi:10.1075/dapsac.65.03sie

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…The two frameworks are particularly powerful in analysing political discourses, as shown in an earlier project in which we analysed communication difficulties in the South African parliament (Siebörger & Adendorff 2015a, b, 2017. While SFL provides an extremely comprehensive toolkit for analysing the language of political discourses, LCT allows analysts to schematize the knowledge built using this language so that it is possible to see why some political voices are heard and others are not, or how misunderstandings can be traced to competing conceptions of what it means to uphold democracy.…”

Section: Political Positioning and South African Media Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Eye on the big prize!”: Iconizing the Democratic Alliance in the Daily Sun

Siebörger,

Adendorff

2023

spilplus

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This article gives a snapshot view of how Mmusi Maimane’s rise to leadership in the Democratic Alliance (DA) in 2015 was reported on in the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest-selling national daily newspaper (South African Audience Research Foundation, 2016). Through analysis of a Daily Sun news article exemplifying trends in the positioning of the DA in the tabloid over the first half of 2015, the present study demonstrates how Maimane tried to align the DA around a new iconography (Tann 2010, 2013), centred on the values of “freedom”, “fairness” and “opportunity”. Moreover, the present study also shows how this purported transformation in the DA was treated with scepticism by the news article’s author, who iconizes the DA as incapable of transformation and effective governance. Fine-grained complementary Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) analyses were conducted on this news article. The LCT analysis shows how multiple voices in the news article create conflicting binary constellations, axiologically charged through various linguistic resources, including intertextual references. The analysis, using SFL’s Appraisal system (Martin & White 2005), shows how iconization is accomplished in the news article through evaluative language, coupled with intertextual references, grammatical metaphor and technicality to produce syndromes of meaning in the news article. Such iconization works, in this case, to reproduce an attitude of cynicism toward party politics in post-apartheid South Africa. This cynicism foreshadows Maimane’s ultimate lack of success in transforming the discourses of the DA.

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Section: Political Positioning and South African Media Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Eye on the big prize!”: Iconizing the Democratic Alliance in the Daily Sun

Siebörger,

Adendorff

2023

spilplus

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We’re talking about semantics here

Siebörger

Adendorff

2017

FOL

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This article describes how procedural knowledge is produced in a meeting of the South African parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Transport, using concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Members of this committee argue over whether or not to amend a draft committee report and in the process co-construct procedural norms for future committee meetings. Participants on both sides of the argument use axiological condensation, in which actions and ideas are associated with each other and charged with a particular moral or affective value (Maton 2014: 130) to portray their version of the procedure to be followed as morally superior to that of their opponents. They also use axiological rarefaction (Maton 2014: 130) to reinforce their positions by making apparent concessions to those on the other side of the argument. This is revealed through an analysis of the coupling of ideation and Appraisal (Martin 2000: 161) in the logogenetic unfolding of members’ talk, combined with elements of Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982). The analysis suggests that axiological condensation and rarefaction in this meeting reflect competing visions of what it means to be ‘pro-democracy’ in post-apartheid South Africa.

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Black-boxing and the politics of parliamentary oversight in South Africa

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

“Eye on the big prize!”: Iconizing the Democratic Alliance in the Daily Sun

“Eye on the big prize!”: Iconizing the Democratic Alliance in the Daily Sun

We’re talking about semantics here

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