Ruth Wodak ve Söylem-Tarihsel Yaklaşım: Uygulama Örnekleri Üzerinden Bir Değerlendirme
Gülistan ElmacıoğluSöylem Tarihsel Yaklaşım, söylemsel pratiklerin tarihsel bağlamda ve politik alanda art zamanlı değişimini incelemektedir. Bu inceleme ırkçı, ayrımcı, antisemitist, göçmenkarşıtı, cinsiyetçi ve etnik kimlikleri dışlayıcı söylemlerin tarihsel ve sosyo-politik bağlamda ilişkili olduğu alt başlıklarla birlikte, çoklu metin türleri üzerinden analiz edilmesine dayanmaktadır. Söylemin bileşenleri olarak metinler ideolojik anlamı söylemsel stratejilerle dilbilimsel düzeyde kurmaktadır. Bu stratejilerle inşa edilen söylem dilin anti-demokratik yapısını örgütlemektedir. Bu nedenle dilin demokratik, eşit, adil ve özgürleştirici iletişimsel eylemi kurması için Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımı eleştirel söylem analizlerinde kullanmak önem taşımaktadır. Buradan hareketle bu çalışmada amaç, Eleştirel Söylem Analizi içinde yer alan Ruth Wodak’ın “Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımı”nın temellerini, metodolojisini ve söylemsel stratejilerini öncelikle kuramsal boyutlarıyla anlatmak, analiz yönteminin nasıl uygulandığını açıklamak ve uygulama örnekleri üzerinden değerlendirmektir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda çalışmada Wodak’ın analiz yönteminin nasıl uygulandığı anlatılmış ve aynı zamanda ulusal literatürde Ruth Wodak’ın Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımını ve analiz yöntemini uygulayan araştırma makaleleri ile yaklaşımın ele alındığı derleme makaleler ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Tarama sonucunda 10 araştırma makalesinin Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımın analiz yöntemini söylemsel stratejiler üzerinden uyguladığı ve yaklaşımı betimsel tarzda ele alan derleme niteliğinde 4 makalenin olduğu bulgulanmıştır. Böylelikle Ruth Wodak’ın Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımının analiz yöntemini hem kuramsal olarak hem de pratik olarak nasıl uygulandığını anlatan bu çalışmanın ulusal literatüre katkı sunması hedeflenmiştir.
Ruth Wodak and the Discourse-Historical Approach: An Assessment Based on Application Examples
Gülistan ElmacıoğluThe discourse-historical approach (DHA) looks at how discursive practices have changed throughout time in political and historical contexts. This analysis is based on analyzing racist, discriminatory, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, sexist, and ethnically exclusionary discourses across multiple text types, alongside their subheadings in the historical and sociopolitical context. Texts use discursive tactics to establish ideological meaning at the linguistic level as components of discourse. The discourse constructed using these techniques arranges the language’s anti-democratic framework. For this reason, applying DHA in critical discourse analysis is crucial for language to establish democratic, equal, fair, and liberating communicative activity. The purpose of this study is to clarify the theoretical underpinnings, methodology, and discursive strategies of Ruth Wodak’s DHA, which is a component of critical discourse analysis. The study also aims to explain how analytical method is applied and to provide examples of this. With this objective in mind, the study elucidates the application of Wodak’s analytical method while simultaneously revealing research papers that have utilized her DHA and analytical method in the Turkish national literature, as well as compilation pieces deliberating on the approach. In accordance with the scan results, the study presents 10 research articles that have used discursive strategies to apply the DHA analytical method four compilation pieces that have provided a descriptive treatment of the approach. In order to add to the national literature, this study describes the theoretical and practical applications of Wodak’s analytical method.
Critical discourse analysis is a set of approaches and methods that focus on the relationships among text, meaning, and social reality. Meanings vary across such units as social classes, minority groups, governments, and interest groups. Messages, dialogues, and discourses systematically woven with speeches that construct social reality negotiate and transform series of texts (e.g., newspaper articles, news, photographs, novels, interviews, poems, field notes, social media posts) in which the ongoing asymmetric struggles between them continue.
The discourse-historical approach (DHA) is included in critical discourse analyses. The first study to use this approach was based on the analysis of antisemitic stereotypical linguistic expressions of former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim during the Austrian Presidential campaign in 1986, where his national-socialist ideas were revealed in public discourse. Ruth Wodak has talked about the four features of DHA, the foundations of which were laid with this research project, and according to her, linguistic analyses are combined through historical, political, sociological, theoretical, and methodological approaches thanks to these features. These features describe DHA as interdisciplinary, focused on social problems, based on research practice. and involving ethnography methodologically. Wodak et al. (2009) analyzed the European Union’s (EU) anti-immigrant discourses, the decision-making processes based on identity politics in EU institutions, Austria’s post-war discursive construction of the antiRomanian national identity, and its right-wing political discourses.
By using DHA to analyze the relevance and relationship of texts and discourses with the historical and sociopolitical contexts, Ruth Wodak has shown the anti-democratic nature of language, the ideological pattern of equal and unjust discourse, and how it turns into a racist, discriminatory, and exclusionary oppression device to be used against certain social groups. According to Ruth Wodak (2001), the practice of racism, discrimination, and exclusion reveals itself discursively. Racist ideas and beliefs are constantly reproduced through discursive genres. In this way, discriminatory and exclusionary practices are prepared and published through discourse, and these discourses are legitimized. Political discourses in which the other is negated are established through the strategic use of certain linguistic stigmas. The implications, implicit causalities, assumptions, allusions, and syntactic linguistic distortions revealed in the rhetoric of right-wing populist politicians contain hidden meanings.
The questions DHA aims to answer in written, visual, or speech-based texts as parts and components of discourse involve how social actors; social problems, events, facts, and issues; processes; and stigmatized groups presented as negative others are named, as well as what positive or negative qualities are attributed to these groups; how the claims, assumptions, or propositions established when approaching these groups, subjects, actors, and events are legitimized; and what ways of intensifying or mitigating the implicit or explicit expressions in linguistic or extra-linguistic indicators occur. Considering these questions, DHA has determined five strategies for analyzing the nominative, predicative, argumentative, framing, and intensifying or mitigating expressions of discursive practices in linguistic structure. Language tools (e.g., metaphorical expressions, stereotyped judgments, analogies, clichés) are used in discourse to develop these methods. Language tools are what make up the practice of inclusion and exclusion and how a discourse represents a positive us and negative other. Both Wodak’s anti-immigrant writings and sample studies from the national literature have been used to describe and assess how discursive techniques and linguistic tools are used in historical and political analyses regarding a given problem. This evaluation is significant because it highlights language’s anti-democratic nature, the ideological underpinnings of unfair and unequal discourse, and how it evolves into a racist, discriminatory, and exclusionary tool of oppression against particular social groups. DHA and its analytical method should be widely used to arrange the fair and equitable use of language. One of the limitations of this study is its focus on articles from the Turkish national literature that explain the DHA methodology or employ its analytical method. Consequently, examining the use of DHA in these theses will add to the Turkish national literature.
