Projects / Programmes
The Linguistic Pragmatics of Nationalist Ideologies and their Relation to Nation-Building Process in Slovenia
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.06.00 |
Humanities |
Culturology |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H360 |
Humanities |
Applied linguistics, foreign languages teaching, sociolinguistics |
| S265 |
Social sciences |
Press and communication sciences |
Communication, linguistic pragmatics, presuppositions, implicatures, argumentation, rhetoric, interpretation, ideology, national, nationalist
Researchers (1)
| no. |
Code |
Name and surname |
Research area |
Role |
Period |
No. of publicationsNo. of publications |
| 1. |
05737 |
PhD Igor Žagar Žnidaršič |
Culturology |
Head |
1998 - 2000 |
952 |
Organisations (1)
| no. |
Code |
Research organisation |
City |
Registration number |
No. of publicationsNo. of publications |
| 1. |
0553 |
Educational Research Institute |
Ljubljana |
5051614000 |
7,057 |
Abstract
Recent history has shown that processes of democratization do not automatically result in peace and stability. They result, however, in higher dependence of political options on popular ideologies related to nation-building and the living together of different ethnic or cultural groups, both intranationally and internationally. In other words, the success or failure of political solutions proposed in the search for a new, and hopefully more productive, equilibrium after the disappearance of a relatively stable bipolar conflict model, depends to a significant extent on whether the proposals take into account the dominant ideas and aspirations (either by adapting political models to them, or by rendering their rejection acceptable).
In order to take into account the societal ideologies which people live by, they have to be subject to close and continuous analysis. It is precisely there that we find a serious research gap in the social and political sciences, leading to under-informed decision making at the political and diplomatic level. Namely, the traditional social and political sciences are confronted with a virtually unsurmontable problem. The research instrumentarium at their disposal is suitable mostly for the interpretation of EXPLICITLY professed attitudes and positions, either voiced spontaneously (as in political rhetoric and debates) or elicited by means of questionnaires. The more fundamental ideological processes, however, are to be found at the less conscious or IMPLICIT level of models of interpretation which every form of explicit communication is anchored into.
In principle, any type of publicly accessible discourse on interethnic and international issues, focusing in particular on the printed and audiovisual media, serves as object of investigation. Though the media are often instruments of intranational or even intragroup communication, their reporting on interethnic and international problems constitutes the clearest clue available to widespread ideologies related to the management of intergroup and international differences and disputes. This claim is based on the observed inevitability of anchoring mass communication into a world of implicit assumptions, either widely shared or constructed through discourse (a process which, at a smaller scale, is parallelled by the way in which background assumptions and presuppositions are handled in face-to-face communication).
