Nonverbal Domination in George Orwell's Animal Farm: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to decipher the different nonverbal strategies of domination communicated by the visual and vocalic nonverbal codes in George Orwell's allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). The primary purpose of the paper is to investigate the use of nonverbal practices as mechanisms for manipulative and coercive domination in the selected novel. In so doing, the paper draws on two analytical strands: the first is the critical discourse analysis approach as discussed by Fairclough (1995), van Dijk (2015), Wodak and Meyer (2015), and Weiss and Wodak (2007), and the second is Andersen's (1999) categorization of nonverbal communication strategies. The paper has three main findings: first, four strategies are identified as indicative in the production of domination in Animal Farm: the use of violence and gestures at the visual level, and the use of threat and intimidation (manifested in the dogs' growls) and the use of confusion and distraction (represented by the sheep's bleating) at the vocalic level. Second, nonverbal practices in Animal Farm are employed manipulatively and/or coercively to shape, reshape, and/or change characters' attitudes and behaviors towards particular attitudinal positions that serve the benefits of those in power. Third, nonverbal practices contribute to the dynamics of power in the discourse of the selected novel and augment the rhetorical influence of discourse interlocutors at the intradiegetic level of communication, particularly in amalgamating the authority of the powerful over the powerless.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".