Ralph Adendorff
Biographic Data
| ID | 174846 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ralph Adendorff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ralph |
| FAMILY NAME | Adendorff |
| SIGNATURE | ADENDORFF R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7733-1244 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
ANC and DA clash!” Conflicting political constellations in South Africa’s Daily Sun and implications for public sphere discussions
We report on an analysis of how language is used to position South Africa’s two largest political parties in the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper. The concepts of constellations and cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT; Maton, 2014) are used to show how political positioning is accomplished. Negative characteristics of South Africa’s two largest parties, the African National Congress (ANC) and Democratic Allia…
Exploring the ecosystem of meaning
As children age and learn to read words, so the pictures in storybooks decrease in frequency and readers rely less on their meaning. However, South African children are more likely to rely on pictures as a result of low verbal literacy levels, but how much meaning is construed by the pictures? In a multimodal investigation of local picture books, the authors used Painter et al.’s ( Reading Visual Narratives , 2013) visual analysis framework to co…
Constellations, technicality, iconisation and Eskom
This article uses Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to explore interactions between various resources for building economic and political knowledge in a 2015 article from Business Day, a South African newspaper, concerning the country’s energy crisis. We use LCT to observe how three constellations are built in the article: a ‘developmental state’ constellation; a ‘neo-liberal’ constellation; and another unde…
Development of a translation device for axiological-semantic density in political news articles
The concept of axiological-semantic density from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is extremely helpful in analysing political knowledge-building, as it describes the strength of relations between various people, political stances and moral judgements, enabling these to be positioned in relation to each other. We present a multi-level translation device designed to identify strengths of axiological-semantic density in political news articles from th…
Reading parents
We’re talking about semantics here
This article describes how procedural knowledge is produced in a meeting of the South African parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Transport, using concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Members of this committee argue over whether or not to amend a draft committee report and in the process co-construct procedural norms for future committee meetings. Participants on both sides of the argument use ax…
Re-thinking Engagement
This article uses an APPRAISAL analysis of 40 letters to the Daily Sun and The Times newspapers in South Africa to illustrate a reconceptualisation of the Engagement system. It discusses dialogism (Bakhtin 1981), which inspired the creation of the Engagement framework by White (2003), who classified attempts to either align or disalign readers with a writer's stance. Contrary to the options for dialogic Engagement proposed by Martin and White (20…
Forward with the people
In an attempt to obtain linguistic evidence for the ‘imagined community’, this article investigates the bonds that are created in twenty letters to the editor of the Daily Sun, a popular South African tabloid. A concordancer is used to establish shared concerns across the corpus, following which an appraisal analysis of these letters shows how the imagined community attempts to align its audience around common evaluations of their experiences. Th…
The creation of an “imagined community” in readers' letters to the Daily Sun
Despite its reputation for sensationalism and championing of superstition, the Daily Sun is South Africa's most-read newspaper, with over five million readers. The tabloid targets English-literate, predominantly black, first-time newspaper readers. The Daily Sun's publisher, Deon du Plessis, called the potential reader "the guy in the blue overall [...] who lived in the township [...] owned his own house [...] worried about his kids, rather than …
For the people
The influence of the post-apartheid context on appraisal choices in Clem Sunter's transformational leadership discourse
Transformational leadership was first identified as a distinct leadership style in the fields of business and organizational research in the 1970s. Transformational leaders motivate followers by appealing to their higher-order needs, offering incentives for compliance such as feelings of personal empowerment, a sense of moral self-actualization, and an emphasis on the individual's contribution to the community at large (Harvey, Charismatic busine…
The expression of affect in discussions about HIV/Aids
We report on preliminary analysis of data drawn from a corpus of the spoken English of Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Aimed to reveal the evaluative language used by Xhosa English speakers in the discourse of AIDS, with particular focus on affect, it was conducted using the analytical tools associated with appraisal analysis. Attitude-related expressions were classified as expressing affect, judgment, and appreciation, and grou…
Educated mother-tongue South African English
South Africa is anecdotally known for its complex system of speech varieties correlating with variables such as ethnicity, first language, class and education. These intuitions (e.g. Lass 1990) require further investigation, especially in the context of a changing South Africa where language variety plays a key role in identifying social, economic and ethnic group membership. Thus, in this research, the extent to which these variables play a role…
Science books for children as a preparation for textbook literacy
This article examines science books for children, a genre that has been neglected both in studies of science discourse and in studies of literature for children. It compares this genre to two other science genres, textbooks and popular science articles, and finds great similarities between science textbooks and science books for children, both in terms of register and cultural values. As a result of these similarities, it suggests that science bo…
Literacy and middle-class privilege in post-apartheid South Africa
Article Literacy and middle-class privilege in post-apartheid South Africa: Evidence from planning time sessions at Church Pre-school was published on January 1, 1998 in the journal Multilingua (volume 17, issue 2-3)
Ethnographic Evidence of the Social Meaning of Fanakalo in South Africa
The social meaning of Fanakalo (F) and the social motivation for using it in South Africa are the focus of this article. Ethnographic evidence assembled from a range of written sources reveals that largely unfavorable connotations are associated with F. On the strength of this data, the contextual characteristics of the use of F as an unmarked (or preferred) choice are described. It is shown that F is restricted to work (that is, to non-affective…
The creation of an “imagined community” in readers' letters to the Daily Sun
Despite its reputation for sensationalism and championing of superstition, the Daily Sun is South Africa's most-read newspaper, with over five million readers. The tabloid targets English-literate, predominantly black, first-time newspaper readers. The Daily Sun's publisher, Deon du Plessis, called the potential reader "the guy in the blue overall [...] who lived in the township [...] owned his own house [...] worried about his kids, rather than …
Ethnographic Evidence of the Social Meaning of Fanakalo in South Africa
The social meaning of Fanakalo (F) and the social motivation for using it in South Africa are the focus of this article. Ethnographic evidence assembled from a range of written sources reveals that largely unfavorable connotations are associated with F. On the strength of this data, the contextual characteristics of the use of F as an unmarked (or preferred) choice are described. It is shown that F is restricted to work (that is, to non-affective…
Literacy and middle-class privilege in post-apartheid South Africa
Article Literacy and middle-class privilege in post-apartheid South Africa: Evidence from planning time sessions at Church Pre-school was published on January 1, 1998 in the journal Multilingua (volume 17, issue 2-3)
Science books for children as a preparation for textbook literacy
This article examines science books for children, a genre that has been neglected both in studies of science discourse and in studies of literature for children. It compares this genre to two other science genres, textbooks and popular science articles, and finds great similarities between science textbooks and science books for children, both in terms of register and cultural values. As a result of these similarities, it suggests that science bo…
Educated mother-tongue South African English
South Africa is anecdotally known for its complex system of speech varieties correlating with variables such as ethnicity, first language, class and education. These intuitions (e.g. Lass 1990) require further investigation, especially in the context of a changing South Africa where language variety plays a key role in identifying social, economic and ethnic group membership. Thus, in this research, the extent to which these variables play a role…
The expression of affect in discussions about HIV/Aids
We report on preliminary analysis of data drawn from a corpus of the spoken English of Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Aimed to reveal the evaluative language used by Xhosa English speakers in the discourse of AIDS, with particular focus on affect, it was conducted using the analytical tools associated with appraisal analysis. Attitude-related expressions were classified as expressing affect, judgment, and appreciation, and grou…
The influence of the post-apartheid context on appraisal choices in Clem Sunter's transformational leadership discourse
Transformational leadership was first identified as a distinct leadership style in the fields of business and organizational research in the 1970s. Transformational leaders motivate followers by appealing to their higher-order needs, offering incentives for compliance such as feelings of personal empowerment, a sense of moral self-actualization, and an emphasis on the individual's contribution to the community at large (Harvey, Charismatic busine…
For the people
Re-thinking Engagement
This article uses an APPRAISAL analysis of 40 letters to the Daily Sun and The Times newspapers in South Africa to illustrate a reconceptualisation of the Engagement system. It discusses dialogism (Bakhtin 1981), which inspired the creation of the Engagement framework by White (2003), who classified attempts to either align or disalign readers with a writer's stance. Contrary to the options for dialogic Engagement proposed by Martin and White (20…
Forward with the people
In an attempt to obtain linguistic evidence for the ‘imagined community’, this article investigates the bonds that are created in twenty letters to the editor of the Daily Sun, a popular South African tabloid. A concordancer is used to establish shared concerns across the corpus, following which an appraisal analysis of these letters shows how the imagined community attempts to align its audience around common evaluations of their experiences. Th…
The creation of an “imagined community” in readers' letters to the Daily Sun
Despite its reputation for sensationalism and championing of superstition, the Daily Sun is South Africa's most-read newspaper, with over five million readers. The tabloid targets English-literate, predominantly black, first-time newspaper readers. The Daily Sun's publisher, Deon du Plessis, called the potential reader "the guy in the blue overall [...] who lived in the township [...] owned his own house [...] worried about his kids, rather than …
We’re talking about semantics here
This article describes how procedural knowledge is produced in a meeting of the South African parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Transport, using concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Members of this committee argue over whether or not to amend a draft committee report and in the process co-construct procedural norms for future committee meetings. Participants on both sides of the argument use ax…
Reading parents
Constellations, technicality, iconisation and Eskom
This article uses Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to explore interactions between various resources for building economic and political knowledge in a 2015 article from Business Day, a South African newspaper, concerning the country’s energy crisis. We use LCT to observe how three constellations are built in the article: a ‘developmental state’ constellation; a ‘neo-liberal’ constellation; and another unde…
Development of a translation device for axiological-semantic density in political news articles
The concept of axiological-semantic density from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is extremely helpful in analysing political knowledge-building, as it describes the strength of relations between various people, political stances and moral judgements, enabling these to be positioned in relation to each other. We present a multi-level translation device designed to identify strengths of axiological-semantic density in political news articles from th…
Exploring the ecosystem of meaning
As children age and learn to read words, so the pictures in storybooks decrease in frequency and readers rely less on their meaning. However, South African children are more likely to rely on pictures as a result of low verbal literacy levels, but how much meaning is construed by the pictures? In a multimodal investigation of local picture books, the authors used Painter et al.’s ( Reading Visual Narratives , 2013) visual analysis framework to co…
ANC and DA clash!” Conflicting political constellations in South Africa’s Daily Sun and implications for public sphere discussions
We report on an analysis of how language is used to position South Africa’s two largest political parties in the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper. The concepts of constellations and cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT; Maton, 2014) are used to show how political positioning is accomplished. Negative characteristics of South Africa’s two largest parties, the African National Congress (ANC) and Democratic Allia…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works)