Between Myth and Fantasy: On the Application of Psychoanalytic Tools to the Analysis of Political Discourse

The present chapter proposes to build bridges between political discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. We intend to bring to light methodological benefits arising from the synergy of (political) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, pointing to fruitful contribution from French text statistics. Taking the discourses of Nicolas Sarkozy as an example, we show how political discourse analysis can benefit from a reflection on corpora (their constitution, their role in the research process); on linguistic analysis and processing methods (particularly the computer-assisted methods of text statistics); and finally on the interpretative paths at a time of establishment of a numerical hermeneutics.

Isabela and Norman Fairclough have written a very important book whose full significance is perhaps in danger of being missed if we view it simply, in their own self-depiction, as a text for advanced students. Indeed, in what follows I want to argue that their book is much better seen as the occasion for a debate that we desperately need to be having about how to conduct political discourse analysis rather than as the elucidation of an agreed, almost official, methodology for the conduct of such a form of discourse analysis. At times their book reads like the definitive statement of the only credible approach to the analysis of political discourse as both political and as discourse, derived logically and forensically from a consideration of the specificity of the political itself. While I have considerable sympathy for the attempt to reflect and preserve the specificity of the political in an avowedly political discourse analysis, I have rather more problem, as will become clear in what follows, in the methodological absolutism that leads the Faircloughs to present their approach as, in effect, the only way to do political discourse analysis properly. At this stage in its development political discourse analysis needs a proliferation, not a narrowing, of methods and acknowledgement that there is more than one way to analyse political discourse politically. I will argue for a certain methodological pluralism in political discourse analysis, pointing to problems both with the approach to political discourse analysis that the Faircloughs espouse and with their attempt to foreground such an approach in an essentially Aristotelian account of the specificity of the political.

Systemic Functional Political Discourse Analysis: A Text-based Study is the first book which takes a comprehensive systemic functional perspective on political discourse to provide a complete, integrated, exhaustive, systemic and functional description and analysis. Based on the political discourses of the Umbrella Movement – the largest public protest in the history of Hong Kong, which occupies a unique political situation in the world: a post-colonial society like many other Asian societies and yet unlike the others, it is a Special Administrative Region of China. Though it enjoys a high degree of autonomy under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, it is still confined to being part of the ‘One Country’. The book demonstrates how a systemic functional approach can provide a comprehensive, thorough, and insightful analysis of the political discourse from four co-related and complementary approaches: contextual, discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and historical. Apart from a thorough discussion of various systemic functional conceptions, it provides examples of various analyses from a SF perspective, including contextual parameters, registerial analysis, semantic discourse analysis, appraisal analysis, and discusses important issues in political discourse, including negotiation of self-identity, association of language, power and institutional role, and expression of ‘evidentiality’ and ‘subjectivity’. It is written not only for those who are interested in Hong Kong politics in general and political discourse in Hong Kong in particular, but also for those who work on political discourse analysis, and those who apply SFL to various other discourses such as mass media discourse, medical discourse, teaching discourse, etc. Last but not least, this book is also intended to provide a theoretical framework in discourse analysis from the systemic functional perspective for those who work in Cantonese and in other languages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the forms that the discourse of politics and policies of education assumes in Spain and the European Union, in correlation to the tendencies in the United States (Pini, 2003) and the recommendations of international agencies. This is a qualitative study that includes a description and documental analysis. The perspective is critical discourse analysis (ACD), complemented with political discourse analysis, critical theory, sociological theory and some postmodern authors. The corpus includes the current main law and official relevant documents related to national education policies which involve education.

Introduction. The article compares the methods of researching political discourse with special attention to linguistic methods, in particular, to discourse analysis and cognitive and rhetorical approaches. These methods are widely used to study political speeches, statements, texts. Increasingly, political discourse is seen as a social phenomenon, not only at the discursive but also on the cognitive and rhetorical levels. The object of this study is methods of analysis of political discourse allowing to study the position of a politician in the discursive sphere and to identify the character of his audience. The subject of the analysis are examples from Joe Biden's political speeches, seen as an instrument of influence, persuasion in the process of speaking to the electorate. The relevance of the work is determined by the need to develop arguments to choose a particular approach to political discourse, especially cognitive and rhetorical, as well as discourse analysis, which allow to reveal veiled meanings of political statements and consider the methods of persuasion of the electorate.Methodology and data sources. The subject of the analysis are examples of Joe Biden’s political speeches, seen as an instrument of influence, persuasion in the process of speaking to the electorate. To compare approaches the study of political discourse, descriptive and comparative methods are used, the effectiveness of different approaches and methods is illustrated by specific examples of linguistic interpretation of discursive features of publications and speeches, revealing the ambitions of the politician most fully. A method of quantitative counting is also used.Results and discussion. The use of descriptive and comparative methods makes it possible to compare different approaches to the study of political texts and speeches, to discuss the relationship of heterogeneous methods, to identify the most effective methods of studying discourse. The result of the article was the conclusions about the effectiveness of different approaches to the study of the language of politicians at discursive, cognitive and rhetorical levels. Comparison of methods of research of political discourse distinguishes discourse-analysis among other methods of analysis. The use of discourse analysis to study political discourse reveals the functions of discourse, for example, manipulative, selective and combined functions related to political goals. The use of critical discourse analysis allows you to identify these functions most fully.Conclusion. The study of political discourse can be carried out at different levels, but the discursive level compared to cognitive and rhetorical levels is the most effective from a linguistic point of view. Discourse analysis allows to explore political discourse at more qualitative different level than rhetorical and other linguistic methods of research. Discourse analysis is presented as a method of researching hidden meanings in politics in this article.

In Australia, Closing the Gap is a highly profiled federal government policy aimed at closing the gap of disadvantage between Australia’s First Peoples and non-Indigenous Australians. This policy comprises of a yearly report providing statistical data addressing the progress of the initiative. As a significant parliamentary contribution towards the ideology of reconciliation in Australia, political leaders present a national address that responds to the statistical data of the report. This thesis presents a com-bined discourse analysis of the speeches presented in 2017, by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten. Being a political discourse analy-sis, it focuses on the language features used by Australian political leaders to support their political ideology. Michele Koven (2002) presented a model that explained how political leaders align (or misalign) themselves with other social actors. This research will adapt that model to identify how these leaders position themselves ideologically through their Closing the Gap speeches. Then by using critical discourse analysis, it will also present a typology of discursive strategies used in such political discourses, when negotiating an ideological alignment with Australia’s First Peoples. These two approaches will be further justified with two more supporting analyses. This compara-tive analysis contributes to a clearer understanding of how political language is used in Australia. Additionally, it contributes to the surprisingly minimal literature related to Australian political discourse analysis surrounding Indigenous issues, reconciliation and the Closing the Gap policy itself. By analysing such political speeches, reflection, engagement and empowerment then have the capacity to influence institutionalised notions of racism, poverty and class-consciousness with the view to rectifying them.

From its colonial history, twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of British divide et impera, paired with perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep Us vs. Them division, especially between two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in country have always served as the critical arbiter in adjudicating rival claims by main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege (Premdas 2004: 19), 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in history of nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only second person of East Indian origin to hold PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as leader of People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of 41 in House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as first woman PM candidate in history of country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both analysis of her election speeches as well as study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for analysis of visual data. Although English-speaking Caribbean is home to largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around globe, political discourse from archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has potential to shed light on complexities, struggles and contradictions of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond Euro-American zone.

Drawing on recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006), in this research, it was tried to follow this research route. The main intention was to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements-here rhetorical devices and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk- live 2008 US presidential debates- among two Republic vs. Democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'populism’, 'generalizations', and 'number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘metaphor’, ‘hyperbole’, ‘irony’, ‘euphemism’, etc. The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicated that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like repetition and metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'comparison’, 'populism' and 'future representation’ respectively.

The relevance of this study is conditioned by the comparison of the original texts (in Kazakh) and translated texts (in English) within the framework of the analysis of political discourse and translation analysis. The purpose of the study is to identify the features, patterns, and difficulties for translators to comprehensively assess the adequacy (quality) of the translation and recommendations for compilation to facilitate the translation process. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the modern Kazakh political discourse and its translation into English to identify the features of the translation of language tools, taking into account their pragmatic potential. The theoretical relevance and originality of this research are due to the considerably increased interest in the study of political discourse in the aspect of translation. A comparative approach in political discourse consisting of two languages can be a useful material for studying and comparing political discourse in each of the languages, as well as arouse interest in further research of translation in this language pair. The practical relevance lies in the fact that the presented results can be used in teaching courses of the following disciplines: onomastics, pragmalinguistics, terminology, political science, LSP (language for special purposes), and SPVE (special professional vocabulary of the English language). The materials of this paper can be useful in the field of international relations for international specialists, journalists, translators.

Interpreter as participant. Critical Political Discourse Analysis in multilingual simultaneous interpretationThis paper examines a participative approach of a simultaneous interpreter in the Critical Analysis of Political Discourse. It describes two examples of Polish and Spanish MEPs’ interventions about tobacco production in the EU in a debate that took place during a meeting of the Committee of Agriculture and Rural Development in the European Parliament. The analysis of the discourse indicates the mechanism of identification of discursive categories possible in both languages, which can be crucial for an interpreter in transmitting the contextualised message into another language. These categories can be a tool to improve interpreting of different contextual characteristics in the multicultural and multilingual political debate.

This article provides an exhaustive analysis of American and Russian political discourse through the examination of the linguistic techniques employed by President Joe Biden and President Putin in their speeches. The aim of this research is to examine the linguistic approaches employed in referencing social and political traditions in the United States and Russia, investigate disparities in linguistic strategies within both political discourses, and assess variations in semantic outcomes. The analysis has been conducted to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the linguistic methods of referring to social and political traditions in America and Russia? (2) Do the linguistic strategies differ depending on the political discourse? (3) Is the semantic output different depending on the political discourse? The findings reveal marked differences between the two discourses, reflecting the social and political discrepancies between the political systems of the United States and Russia.

Starting from the thesis that critical discourse studies, with their qualitative, critical and explanatory approach to the study of political communication, represent a valuable complement to the dominant approaches that privilege the positivist paradigm and quantitative research, in this paper we tried to provide more complex insights into the scientific contributions of these studies to the study of political discourse, through observing the specifics of their theoretical-methodological frameworks, analytical categories and interpretive procedures. For this purpose, some of the key features of Teun van Dijk's sociocognitive approach, Paul Chilton's cognitive-linguistic approach, Ruth Wodak's discursive-historical approach and Norman Fairclough's dialectical-relational argumentative approach were considered. In the introductory part of the paper, we provided an overview of the general distinctive features, main starting points and research interests of the critical analysis of political discourse, as well as an insight into the basic dilemma related to the scope of the content of the term "political discourse". The central part of the work consists of two complementary parts. In the first part, we started from the presentation of the analytical aspects of the following levels and dimensions of the political discourse structure: topics, superstructures or textual schemata, local semantics, lexicon, syntax, rhetoricand speech acts. Using an analytical-synthetic approach, we connected the semantic-grammatical dimensions of the textual level and the cognitive-pragmatic dimensions of the discursive level of production and analysis of political discourse. The second part of the central part of the work is focused on the presentation of the theoretical framework of the argumentative approach to political discourse, as a kind of upgrade and reframing of existing conceptual settings and analytical categories. In the concluding review of the insights reached in the article, as the main scientific contribution of critical studies of political discourse, we singled out the way in which is achieved the synthesis of systemic, but contextually sensitive textual analysis on the one hand, and descriptive, normative and explanatory viewpoints of critical social research, on the other.

The aim of the research is to identify and distinguish between methods of political discourse analysis, in order to better understand how international relations, perhaps most clearly in their security dimension, should be understood, conceptualized, researched and taught because this area of research is highly discoursive, making also EU law, politics and economic research highly discoursive even if we say that the contemporary World is oriented rather toward cooperation than political contradiction. This research bases on observation of international processes mostly with the help of theoretical sources. Distinguished are: 1) Political discourses; 2) Discourses as Viewed in the Context of Theories of International Relations; 3) Policy analysis; 4) Discourse Analyses; 5) Key Approaches to Discourse Analysis by Glynos, Howarth, Norval, and Speed. The main assertion is that in the hegemonic World international relations are also determined by hegemonies, and consequently one of the main research methods in international relations is political discourse analysis – as reflecting the political nature of the World community.

This chapter discusses the specificity of French discourse analysis in the 20th century, highlighting its inherent and natural focus on political discourse, linked to the political effervescence of the 1960s in France. It starts with discussing the main features of the close relationship between discourse research and political communication in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and the influence of the thinking of L. Althusser and M. Foucault on the conception of discourse and discourse study. Then it highlights the distinctive characteristics of the ‘French school’, and particularly the central role played by enunciative pragmatics. Finally, it critically reflects, along the lines of the French school, on two examples taken from electoral campaigns: one from the former US president B. Obama, and the other from the anti-globalization activist J. Bové. The analysis of these examples underlines the importance of the notion of ethos, a core concept in French (political) discourse analysis.

The war unleashed by Russia in 2022 is widely presented in online versions of English-language newspapers; Ukraine is constantly in the epicentre of the world news. This study highlights political and ideological contexts of the war in Ukraine, the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of news according to an interdisciplinary approach considering the language as a social practice. The article highlights the polarization in the presentation of the events and the main actors entitled in the discursive strategies, representing the dichotomy In- versus Out-group. The study is aimed at the investigation of the ideological structures and their manifesting linguistic devices in political discourse based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of discursive strategies for constructing the images of Ukraine and Russia in the British and American press. The integrated Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to the research of the news to study the media discourse and the language, where CDA focuses on social practice, social power and ideology. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) is used to research the ideology of war images presented in the language of news reports. The relevance of this study determined by the aim is to show the main discursive strategies of polaeization in political media discourse. The research methods of the article combine three vectors of the analysis by Fairclough with explanatory tools (by van Dijk), and the elements of stylistic analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis. The illustrative material was collected by information search and continuous sample from the open access newspapers and magazines issued in the US and Great Britain (The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others). Conclusion. This research argues that polarisation is being demonstrated in the media discourse on the war in Ukraine in 2022. The taxonomy of the identified discursive strategies of polarization deployed in the media political discourse includes labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization, personalization and analogy, that can either be used singly or intervened. The discursive strategy of evidentiality is applied to authorities, officials, witnesses that are accepted as trustworthy sources of data; the number game strategy combined with victimization are verbalized by metaphoric simile, metonymy, enumerating and magnifying the numbers with the modifying adverbs; the strategy of hyperbole conveys the positive impression of the in-group and negative acts magnification of the out-group verbalized by metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy; the personalization strategy is deployed with the purpose of foregrounding the positive actions of the in-group that implies negative out-group actions; the strategy of analogy is applied in the comparison of the war in Ukraine and the struggle of the Ukrainians for their independence with other historical events. Linguistic means used to realize the discursive strategies of polarization include the conceptual metaphor, metonymy, simile, idioms, metaphtonymy, intertextual allusion and personification.