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Are we in a new “Polanyian moment”? If we are, it is essential to examine how “spontaneous” and punctual expressions of discontent at the individual level may give rise to collective discourses driving social and political change. It is also important to examine whether and how the framing of these discourses may vary across political economies. This paper contributes to this endeavor with the analysis of anti-finance discourses on Twitter in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK between 2019 and 2020. This paper presents three main findings. First, the analysis shows that, more than ten years after the financial crisis, finance is still a strong catalyzer of political discontent. Second, it shows that there are important variations in the dominant framing of public anti-finance discourses on social media across European political economies. If the antagonistic “us versus them” is prominent in all the cases, the identification of who “us” and “them” are, vary significantly. Third, it shows that the presence of far-right tropes in the critique of finance varies greatly from virtually inexistent to a solid minority of statements.
This article inquires the relevancy of multiple temporalisations for the discourse analysis of testimonial interviews. Step by step and by help of a range of empirical cases, the author widens the analytical scope (from questions, lines of questions, to supported interrogation by help of files and archives). He does so in order to reconstruct the efficient resources and means of forensic and administrative interrogations. The interviews turn out to be most powerful once they establish duplicity, meaning a partial separation of speech-production and speech-reception. Conclusively the author argues for a symmetrical view on scientific (qualitative) interviews and forensic interrogation. The separation of production and reception is widely ignored in qualitative methods.
It has been noted (Perkins, 2009; Zwaan, 1999; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) that causality, character, location, and time are the four main aspects of narrative discourse, even if not attended to by listeners or readers in equal ways. For example, character is highly ranked, and the locational/spatial components have often been underestimated for English narratives (see Perkins, 2009, for a review). Relative to the ranking, there is no inherent reason why character needs to be highly ranked, and locational/spatial information is in fact important in English narrative discourse (Perkins, 2009). I instead suggest that there are linguistic and cultural factors in the ranking of these aspects of discourse. Specifically, I suggest that causality is (probably) the highest ranked component, in languages that have a ranking, with the other three elements being linked to causality more or less strongly, depending on linguistic and cultural factors; it is possible that some languages do not rank narrative elements or that some elements are ranked as highly as others. In English, the strongest link is between causality and character. However, this is not universal.
In a survey of fifty-eight languages from thirty language families, including an in-depth study of Hobongan, an Austronesian language spoken by approximately two thousand people on the island of Borneo that I am in the process of describing, it is found that there is a great deal of cross-linguistic variation, to the extent that it is possible that each logically possible combination of narrative elements is present in the world’s languages.