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ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Athens News Agency – Macedonian Press Agency (ANA-MPA), Greece, for kindly permitting us to reproduce the press photographs that appear in the newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea, for the purposes of this study. We are also grateful to Judy Nagle who kindly checked the English language. Dimitris Serafis would like to thank the Sophie Afenduli Foundation for funding the project “Discursive representations, emotive constructions and (new) endoxa of argumentation: A critical study of media institutions discourses during the migratory crisis in Greece and Italy”. Sara Greco and Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for financing the project RefraMe (“The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediators’ argumentation”, SNF 10001C_17004/1, 2017-2020; applicant: Sara Greco, collaborator: Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria). Although the data analyzed in this paper are different, the current development of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) is tightly related to this project. Finally, we are indebted to our colleagues at IALS-USI and to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive observations on a previous version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Dimitris Serafis is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated at the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics, Faculty of Communication Sciences, USI – Università della Svizzera italiana. He is a fellow of the Sophie Afenduli Foundation (Lausanne, Switzerland). His research interests lie at the intersection of Critical Discourse Analysis and Argumentation/Rhetoric under the lens of a Systemic Functional (and Multimodal) analytical perspective, with his current focus being on media discourse and media construction, migration and racism, protest discourse and the construction of collective identity/ies, and communication in periods of crisis. Via Buffi 13, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland.
Sara Greco (PhD 2009) is Senior Assistant Professor of argumentation at USI – Università della Svizzera italiana, where she leads a research team working on argumentation and teaches argumentation and verbal communication. Her main research area is argumentation in conflict resolution (see the monograph Argumentation in dispute mediation: A reasonable way to handle conflict, John Benjamins 2011), both at the interpersonal level and at a broader societal level. She has also been working and argumentation in delicate situations such as adult-children interactions in family and educational settings, considering how discussions spaces are created and how arguments are inferentially constructed (see E. Rigotti & S. Greco, Inference in argumentation: A topics-based approach to argument schemes, Springer 2019). Finally, she has developed research in the area of inner argumentation, in particular in the case of international migrants’ decision-making processes. In all these areas, Greco is directing and participating in research projects, often in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines. Greco has extensive expertise in the empirical analysis of spoken and written argumentation, based on methodologies from argumentation, Discourse Analysis and linguistics.
Chiara Pollaroli is a Post-doc fellow at the Institute of Argumentation Linguistics and Semiotics at Università della Svizzera italiana. She teaches Multimodal Rhetoric at the Master level and Discourse Analysis at the Bachelor level. She has conducted and published research on metaphor and argumentation, on multimodal argumentation, and on advertising.
Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria is a PhD student and teaching assistant at USI – Università della Svizzera italiana, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics. She is currently working on the SNSF funded research project “The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediator’s argumentation”. Her research interests include dispute mediation and conflict resolution, discourse analysis, pragmatics and applied linguistics.
Notes
1 For example, the discourse in late 2012 that revolved around Greece’s expulsion from the EU, labeled as ‘Grexit’ (Angouri & Wodak, Citation2014, p. 541).
2 A synergy of Hallidayan views and cognitive perspectives (see metaphor analysis), although favored in recent critical discourse studies (Hart, Citation2014), lies beyond the scope of this article.
3 As Rigotti and Greco (Citation2019, pp. xii–xiii) argue, it is possible to see standpoint and conclusion as coinciding from a perspective of inference: “In this sense, as we believe, the two terms – standpoint and conclusion – are not incompatible, but represent two different directions of reading of the same phenomenon: When a standpoint is defended by an argument, we may say that it is the conclusion of that argument (the conclusion, however, being external to the argument itself). This is possible because inference is a connection or transfer of acceptability, so even though standpoint/conclusion and argument are separated as theoretical objects, they remain connected in the perspective of inference”.
4 See though e.g. Pollaroli and Rocci (Citation2015) where the AMT has been applied to the argumentative analysis of multimodal discourse.
5 Other discursive strategies include: (a) ‘nomination strategies’ which show how the social actors are portrayed in a text (realized by e.g. metaphors), (b) ‘predication strategies’ by which negative or positive characteristics are attributed to participants, (c) ‘perspectivation strategies’ which reveal the speaker’s ‘point of view’ and his/her ‘involvement or distance’ in a specific discourse and (d) ‘intensification or mitigation strategies’ (see Reisigl & Wodak, Citation2016; p. 33 see also Reisigl & Wodak, Citation2001, pp. 44–84).
6 The article can be found at: http://www.kathimerini.gr/822961/article/epikairothta/ellada/kyma-eisrown-sto-anatoliko-aigaio (last accessed: 10.06.2019), giving us also a general impression of how the original multimodal text appears online.
7 In respect of this framing choice, we must underline the possibility that this has resulted from the fact that the photographer may have wanted to capture as many migrants as possible in the photo and consequently he/she had to stand on higher ground than them in order to achieve this. We are grateful to one of our anonymous reviewers for his/her comments on this possible interpretation.
8 The metaphor ‘Wave of inflows’ hints at the presence of a generic schema between migrant inflows and potentially dangerous natural phenomena (big waves, in this case) and activates an inference that these phenomena should be stopped, but the reference to natural phenomena in speech about immigration is so lexicalized that the inferential potential of metaphor is lowered (cf. Pollaroli, Citation2016). Thus, we think that the prominent inferential principle (topos/locus) activated here is that of termination and setting up, because both the headline and the photo push the emergency to the forefront, inviting action against this emergency in order to stop it. The metaphor, which – as already mentioned – is a widely used dehumanizing metaphor employed to describe migrants (see also the discussion in Martin, Citation2015, p. 314), is not as foregrounded as the call for action to stop a negative phenomenon.
9 Within the discourse-historical approach, Wodak (Citation2015, p. 53) distinguishes between topoi and principles. For example, the topos from opposites is associated with the following principle: ‘if the contrary of a predicate belongs to the contrary of a subject, then this predicate belongs to this subject’ (ibid.; this is a topos taken from Aristotle). The principles are labeled as ‘maxims’ in the Argumentum Model of Topics, following a tradition initiated by Boethius and pursued throughout and after medieval studies on logic and argumentation (Rigotti & Greco, Citation2019). There are at least two theoretical advantages of a clear-cut distinction between locus (topos) and maxims. First, the locus (topos) is the source of an argument, while the maxim is an implicit premise that works within the argument itself, i.e. it is a major premise in the argumentative inference. Second, the locus-maxim relation is not bijective: different maxims correspond to one and the same locus (topos). This allows the list of topoi to remain within a reasonable number, while allowing for as many maxims as the analysts discover during the analysis of real texts.
10 The article can be found at: https://www.tanea.gr/2016/03/30/greece/panw-apo-5-700-prosfyges-sto-limani-toy-peiraia/ (last accessed: 10.06.2019).
11 With respect to this issue, it is worth mentioning that the privatization agreement relating to the Piraeus port was signed by the left-wing Greek government (SYRIZA/European Left). As the leading party of the opposition during 2012-2014, SYRIZA had raised serious objections against programs of private investment implemented by previous Greek governments. However, upon signing the third MoU in summer 2015 SYRIZA’s government was committed to a substantial privatization strategy/program, thus, loading discourses regarding privatizations with a positive meaning, and making them dominant in the Greek public sphere. See e.g. https://www.news247.gr/oikonomia/stin-cosco-to-67-toy-olp-epesan-oi-ypografes-tis-symfonias.6419714.html and https://www.protothema.gr/economy/article/568170/proti-fora-polisi-ellinikou-limaniou/
12 This numeration is adopted by the pragma-dialectical representation of complex argumentation (Van Eemeren & Snoeck Henkemans, Citation2017).
13 Notably, in this case, the final conclusion and the endoxon coincide (i.e. ‘The refugees at Piraeus port are an obstacle to Greece’s economic recovery’) because argument 1.1.1 supports the endoxical premise.
14 For a detailed account of the complementarity between an argumentative reconstruction of standpoint and argument following the principles of Pragma-Dialectics and a reconstruction of the inferential path that links an argument and a standpoint following the Argumentum Model of Topics, see also Palmieri (Citation2014, pp. 30–42).
15 A view that has been heavily criticized by some argumentation scholars (see Žagar, Citation2010).