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War and Its Ideologies

A Social-Semiotic Theory and Description

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Annabelle Lukin

    1. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

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  • First fully Hallidayan account of the relations of language and ideology
  • Unique in its combination of theory and empirical demonstration of a specific ideology
  • Synthesises a sociological account of war with a social-semiotic theory of ideology
  • Combines corpus linguistic methods with detailed text analysis
  • Draws on both multi-register and register-specific corpora

Part of the book series: The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series (TMAKHLFLS)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxiii
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  2. Language, Linguistics and Ideology

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 1-31

  3. The Quest for Meaning in Twentieth Century Linguistics

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 33-54

  4. Ideology in a Socio-semiotic Linguistic Theory

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 55-80

  5. War and Violence: Etymology, Definitions, Frequencies, Collocations

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 81-106

  6. Ideology in the Act of Meaning

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 107-140

  7. A Counter-Ideology: War as Violence

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 141-159

  8. Configurative Rapport: The “Existential Fabric” of War

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 161-195

  9. Language in the Legitimation of War

    • Annabelle Lukin
    Pages 197-201

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 203-283
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Keywords

About this book

Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday’s linguistic theory – in particular, his account of the “semiotic big-bang” - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.

Reviews

“War and its ideologies: A social-semiotic theory and description represents a significant new contribution to both the theoretical and practical work in Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). … This book is not only a very timely and compelling addition to the SFL canon, but a worthy tribute to her friends and mentors in combining a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of the SFL conceptualisation of semiosis and ideology with a thoroughly-worked illustration of the theory in practice.” (Tom Bartlett, Functions of Language, Vol. 28 (2), 2021)

“A key strength is in the thought-provoking analytical walk-throughs of the texts under consideration (which could be seen as model analyses for students interested in carrying out corpus-based discourse analysis and/or Hallidayan analysis), and Lukin does an excellent job of laying out a range of hiding-in-plain-sight linguistic techniques that are used to justify war.” (Paul Baker, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Vol.25 (3), 2020)

“Given the innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this book is a great start into new discussions on the relation of language with conflict (and peace) and ideology.” (Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić, Journal of Language and Politics, Vol. 19 (5), 2020)



Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Annabelle Lukin

About the author

​Annabelle Lukin is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She teaches grammar and meaning, as well as general linguistic theory. She has lectured in China and Latin America, and is a regular commentator on language matters in the Australian media.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: War and Its Ideologies

  • Book Subtitle: A Social-Semiotic Theory and Description

  • Authors: Annabelle Lukin

  • Series Title: The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0996-0

  • Publisher: Springer Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-0994-6Published: 20 October 2018

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-4546-3Published: 01 February 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-0996-0Published: 09 October 2018

  • Series ISSN: 2198-9869

  • Series E-ISSN: 2198-9877

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXIII, 283

  • Number of Illustrations: 16 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Theoretical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics

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