Elda Weizman

Elda Weizman is professor emerita at Bar Ilan University, Israel, where she acted as Chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting and Dean of the Interdisciplinary Studies. Her research interests, anchored in socio-pragmatics, focus on the negotiations of positionings in mediated political discourse, with special interest in indirectness as it is manifest in political interviews, online commenting, the construction of ordinariness, and the negotiations of ironic meanings, in a cross-cultural perspective.  In the last few years she has conducted (1) a comparative corpus-based research on irony and reservations in French, Arabic and Hebrew, informed by previous work on indirectness, supplemented by the notion of semantic prosody (2) an experimental study of training an automatic classifier to identify irony conveyed through the use of single words in quotation-marks.

Elda Weizman is the author of Positioning in Media Dialogue: The Case of News Interviews on Israeli Television (2008), and co-editor of The Dynamics of Political Discourse (2015, with Anita Fetzer and Lawrence Berlin), The Construction of Ordinariness in Media Genres (2019) and Follow-Ups in Political Discourse (2015) with Anita Fetzer. She has published and edited special issues in English, Hebrew, and French. e.g. in Journal of Pragmatics,  Language Sciences, Argumentation et Analyse du Discours, Questions de Communication, Pragmatics and Society,  Contrastive Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics and  Balshanut Ivrit. She is associate editor of the journal Pragmatics, and member of the editorial board of Language and Dialogue series (Benjamins), The Israeli Journal of Humor Studies: An International Journal, Hebrew Linguistics, Helakt Lashon.

The project

Title: Forms and functions of irony: A cross-cultural exploration of big corpora in French, Arabic and Hebrew online political journalism

"A comparative study of indirectness in French, Arabic and Hebrew. At this stage we focus on irony in online political articles and readers' responses, focusing on meta-pragmatic comments pertaining to its forms, functions and perceptions in French, Arabic and Hebrew. The analysis draws on big corpora retrieved from news sites and tagged by Sketch Engine. Utterances are drawn based on keywords belonging to the semantic field of irony, including irony, sarcasm, cyncism, wit etc. in big corpora in each of the three languages. Large contexts are retrieved. So far, important differences and similarities have been found between lexical choices and their use in context. These are being interpreted in terms of cultural specificity."

Hosting institution: INALCO-Paris

Selective Bibliography

• Weizman, E. 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue: The Case of News Interviews on Israeli Television, Amsterdam/Phildaelphia John Benjamins.
• Weizman, Elda and Anita Fetzer (eds.), 2015. Follow-Ups in Political Discourse: Explorations Across Contexts and Discourse Domains. Amsterdam/Phildaelphia: Benjamins.
• Fetzer, Anita, Elda Weizman and Lawrence Berlin (eds.), 2015. The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-Ups.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
• Fetzer, Anita and Elda Weizman (eds.), 2019. The Construction of Ordinariness in Media Genres. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Weizman, E. (ed.), 2006. Rôles et Identités dans le Discours Conflictuel. Questions de Communication 9, pp. 7-150  (dossier coordonné et commenté par E. Weizman). 
• Weizman, E. and Z. Livnat (eds.),  2009.   Perspectives in the Study of Spoken Hebrew.  Hebrew Linguistics 62-63 (special issue, in Hebrew).