‘Breast is Best’ or ‘Fed is Best’?: A Study of Concessive Relations in the Debate on Methods of Infant Feeding
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2022.i19.1156Keywords:
concessive relations, discourse analysis, dialogism, parenthood discourse, newspaper discourseAbstract
The ongoing ‘Breast is best’ vs. ‘Fed is best’ dispute represents an interesting object of study: it lies at the crossroads of multiple topical discourses and provides the opportunity to explore the ways in which contrasting constructions of reality interact and compete. Against this backdrop, this paper sets out to identify and investigate central markers of dialogism in the press coverage of the discussion around breastfeeding and bottle feeding. More specifically, the research focuses on concessive relations, a phenomenon typical of “interlocutive dialogism” (“dialogisme interlocutif”) which, while allowing the speaker to offer a multi-voiced perspective, also provides her/him with the possibility to artfully reduce the impact of opposing viewpoints and foreground her/his own.
A corpus composed of news stories, editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor appearing in newspapers within the last thirty years was built specifically for this chapter. More precisely, a dataset consisting of approximately 450 texts published in the last thirty-five years was gathered and examined through the use of automated interrogation routines (Sketch Engine). The approach adopted in the research is therefore corpus-based and enables the identification of recurrent patterns indicative of concessive relations. The quantitative information obtained from the software is interpreted in a discourse-analytical perspective; this last step is instrumental in uncovering tacit beliefs about motherhood and breastfeeding characterizing the ‘Breast is best’ and ‘Fed is best’ approach.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Du discours romanesque.” Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. 83-233.
---. “Les genres du discours.” Esthétique de la création verbale. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. 265-308.
Binns, Colin, Lee Mi Kyung and Kagawa Masaharu. “Ethical Challenges in Infant Feeding Research.” Nutrients 9.1 (2017): 59.
Brès, Jacques. “Dialogisme.” Termes et concepts pour l’analyse du discours. Une approche praxématique. Edited by Catherine Détrie, Pierre Siblot and Bernard Verine. Paris: Champion, 2001. 86-89.
Brès, Jacques and Aleksandra Nowakowska. “Dis-moi avec qui tu “dialogues,” je te dirai qui tu es… De la pertinence de la notion de dialogisme pour l’analyse du discours.” Marques Linguistiques 9 (2005): 137-153.
Degano, Chiara. Discorsi di guerra. Il prologo del conflitto iracheno nella stampa britannica e italiana. Milano: LED, 2008.
Fallon, Victoria, et al. “The Emotional and Practical Experiences of Formula-feeding Mothers.” Maternal & Child Nutrition (2016): 1-14.
Fewtrell, Mary, et al. “Six Months of Exclusive Breast Feeding: How Good Is the Evidence?” British Medical Journal (2011): 342.
Garzone, Giuliana. “Polyphony and Dialogism in Legal Discourse: Focus on Syntactic Negation.” Constructing Legal Discourses and Social Practices: Issues and Perspectives. Edited by Girolamo Tessuto, Vijai K. Bathia, Giuliana Garzone, Rita Salvi and Christopher Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2016. 2-27.
---. “Pragmatic and Discoursal Features of Annual Executive Letters: Observations on the Rhetorical and Evaluative Function of Concessive Constructions.” Cross-cultural Encounters: Linguistic Perspectives. Edited by Marina Bondi and Nick Maxwell. Roma: Officina Edizioni, 2005. 130-143.
Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale: Yale University Press, 1996.
Iten, Corinne. “The Meaning of Although: A Relevance Theoretic Account.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 10 (1998): 1-17.
Jacobson, Malia. “The Rise of the “Fed Is Best” Campaign.” Parent Map 30 May 2019. https://www.parentmap.com/article/rise-fed-best-campaign. Last visited 2/06/2022.
Knaak, Stephanie J. “Contextualising Risk, Constructing Choice: Breastfeeding and Good Mothering in Risk Society.” Health, Risk & Society 12.4 (2010): 345-355.
---. “The Problem with Breastfeeding Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 97.5 (2007): 412-414.
König, Ekkehard. “Concessive Connectives and Concessive Sentences: Cross-linguistic Regularities and Pragmatic Principles.’’ Explaining Language Universals. Edited by John A. Hawkins. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 145-166.
---. “Conditionals, Concessive Conditionals and Concessives: Areas of Contrast, Overlap and Neutralization.” On Conditionals. Edited by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Alice Ter Meulen, Judith Snitzer Reilly and Charles A. Ferguson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 229-246.
---. “On the History of Concessive Connectives in English. Diachronic and Synchronic Evidence.” Lingua 66.1 (1985): 1-19.
Lee, Ellie. “Health, Morality, and Infant Feeding: British Mothers’ Experiences of Formula Milk Use in the Early Weeks.” Sociology of Health & Illness 29 (2007): 1075-1090.
Moss-Racusin, Corinne A., et al. “Brest is (Viewed as) Best: Demonstrating Formula Feeding Stigma.” Psychology of Women Quarterly (2020): 1-18.
Murphy, Elizabeth. “‘Breast is Best’: Infant Feeding Decisions and Maternal Deviance.” Social Health Illness 21.2 (1999): 187-208.
Quirk, Randolph, et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Harlow Longman, 1985.
Rudolph, Elisabeth. Contrast: Adversative and Concessive Relations and their Expression in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese on Sentence Level and Text Level. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996.
Santulli, Francesca and Chiara Degano. Agreement in Argumentation: A Discursive Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer. Forthcoming.
Símonardóttir, Sunna and Ingólfur V. Gíslason. “When Breast is not Best: Opposing Dominant Discourses on Breastfeeding.” The Sociological Review (2018): 1-17.
Stanway, Penny and Andrew Stanway. Breast Is Best. A Common Sense Approach to Breastfeeding. London: Pan MacMillan, 1978.
Thomson, Geoff and Jianglin Zhou. “Evaluation and Organization in Text: The Structuring Role of Evalutative Disjuncts.” Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and Construction of Discourse. Edited by Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 121-141.
Vergaro, Carla. “Concessive Constructions in English Business Letter Discourse.” Text & Talk 28.1 (2008): 97-118.
Wolf, Jacqueline H. Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001.
Wolf, Joan B. Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Wright, Anne L. and Richard J. Schanler. “The Resurgence of Breastfeeding at the End of the Second Millennium.” The Journal of Nutrition 131.2 (2001): 421S-425S.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Giorgia Riboni
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.
