Managerial processes in the constitutions in serbian and english: a quantitative (critical) analysis
Abstract: Striving to overcome some of the methodological deficiencies of (critical) discourse analysis, this paper provides an exhaustive framework for quantitative (critical) analysis of processes in the highest written laws in Serbian and English (including: the constitutions of Yugoslavia [1946-1992], Serbia [of 1990 and 2006], the United States, and the European Union [2004], and the European Convention on Human Rights), with a view to accounting for the representation of the “managerial” subgroup of dispositive processes in this highly mystified, yet unexplored genre. We have subdivided the analysed managerial processes, important in normative construction of power, into four types, termed: determinative, governing, developmental and cognitive managerial processes. The identified recurrent processes are sorted in tables according to their core verbs and analysed with regard to the following parameters: polarity, modality (including modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs and nouns), transitivity (active, passive, reflexive), (de)activation, participant roles, accompanied by conceptual metaphor analysis. Such an integral analysis gives extensive results. The non-agentive processes are more frequent than the agentive ones, with the determinative processes being the most numerous. Modalisation is predominantly low-degreed (permission), whereas exclusively high- degreed in the negative processes (prohibition). The conceptual metaphor analysis reveals long-standing patterns of bureaucratic thought. The most recurrent agents are the legislatures, in accordance with the (democratic) representative ideology. The people themselves are backgrounded, with the exception of “the working people”, which are prominent agents in the socialist constitutions of 1963/1974, reflecting/ constructing the socialist self-government ideology
engleski
2014
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Keywords: Process, (de)activation, modality, metaphor, quantitative analysis.