{"title":"Black humour as official slogan: The CDA from Chinese anti-epidemic discourse","authors":"Yifan Chen, Qian Gong, Sender Dovchin","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2024.12.002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Black humour is associated with illness, death, and crisis and is frequently used as grassroots resistance to hegemonic power. However, black humour has received little attention concerning how it is appropriated by the state. Thus, this study contributes to reconceptualise black humour as the anti-epidemic slogans of the Chinese Communist Party by combining Bakhtin's carnivalesque and Van Leeuwen's (2007) legitimation strategies within Critical Discourse Analysis paradigm to investigate how inhumane slogans are legitimised. Our findings reveal that the CCP employs three legitimation strategies–authorisation, moral evaluation, and rationalisation–to maintain its power status through official slogans. This study offers a new perspective on how power relations are sustained and renegotiated through the official language in China.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"100 ","pages":"Pages 166-175"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530924000922","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Black humour is associated with illness, death, and crisis and is frequently used as grassroots resistance to hegemonic power. However, black humour has received little attention concerning how it is appropriated by the state. Thus, this study contributes to reconceptualise black humour as the anti-epidemic slogans of the Chinese Communist Party by combining Bakhtin's carnivalesque and Van Leeuwen's (2007) legitimation strategies within Critical Discourse Analysis paradigm to investigate how inhumane slogans are legitimised. Our findings reveal that the CCP employs three legitimation strategies–authorisation, moral evaluation, and rationalisation–to maintain its power status through official slogans. This study offers a new perspective on how power relations are sustained and renegotiated through the official language in China.
期刊介绍:
This journal is unique in that it provides a forum devoted to the interdisciplinary study of language and communication. The investigation of language and its communicational functions is treated as a concern shared in common by those working in applied linguistics, child development, cultural studies, discourse analysis, intellectual history, legal studies, language evolution, linguistic anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, the politics of language, pragmatics, psychology, rhetoric, semiotics, and sociolinguistics. The journal invites contributions which explore the implications of current research for establishing common theoretical frameworks within which findings from different areas of study may be accommodated and interrelated. By focusing attention on the many ways in which language is integrated with other forms of communicational activity and interactional behaviour, it is intended to encourage approaches to the study of language and communication which are not restricted by existing disciplinary boundaries.