Understanding political discourses about Europe: A multilevel contextual approach to discourse

Abstract

This article contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion on textual-contextual analysis in political communication and media research. It argues that taking into consideration both text and context throughout an analysis of the process of production enables the observation of the relation between the social and the linguistic. It opens up a non-deterministic perspective for the analysis of the above relation. The article rests upon an empirical study on the production of discourses for the campaign of European Parliament elections. The use of such a multilevel approach adds important elements to the research findings, particularly in terms of showing on the one hand how power relations within 'Europarties' results in the construction of common European identities in different European Union (EU) states, and on the other hand how professionalization of political communication reinforces discursive dissimilarities between parties of the same ideological family in different EU states.

Friends or foes? Europe and ‘the people’ in the representations of populist parties

“…As the Table 1 shows, the selection of speeches is adapted to the different stages of the parties and the various party leadership shifts. The synergy between corpus linguistic (CL) techniques and (critical) discourse analysis has demonstrated to be extremely productive (see (Baker and McEnery, 2015; Germond et al, 2016; Trimithiotis, 2018). CL facilitates computer-mediated entry points into discourse and permits to compute large bodies of text to find relevant semantic relations.…”

Presidents’ discourses: Lags, leads or mere words?

“…IRAMUTEQ se ha utilizado a menudo para procedimientos estadísticos con texto de diferentes bases de datos en una variedad de campos y géneros. El programa se puede utilizar en la evaluación y análisis textual de programas de políticas públicas o partidistas, en el análisis comparativo del discurso y el análisis de ideologías políticas en diferentes contextos (Beauguitte et al, 2015;Borriello & Brack, 2019;Trimithiotis, 2018). Además, su capacidad de análisis léxico para clasificar palabras, clases y segmentos de texto permite un estudio más rápido y efectivo del contenido, especialmente como parte del análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo de los elementos lingüísticos utilizados, incluso en discursos pronunciados por políticos, candidatos políticos, y presidentes durante las campañas electorales (Curbelo, 2017; J. da S. G. Fernandes et al, 2014;Junior et al, 2018;Trimithiotis, 2018).…”

The Image of Germany in Social Media: Political and Social Aspects of Public Service Media in Poland

“…Such a perspective takes into consideration simultaneously the text (the linguistic), and their socio-political, historical, and social context of news. Moreover, context interpretation is always marked by subjectivity (Van Dijk, 2006;Trimithiotis, 2017). Overall, 54% of mentions were classifi ed as negative, while only 9% had positive connections.…”