Monstrosity in Italian Politics

Abstract

In the aftermath of the last political election in Italy, the independent journalist Gwynne Dyer wrote about the victory of ‘a mythical beast called “Grillosconi”’, a blend term formed by the surname of the leader of the newborn Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, and the most controversial figure of Italian politics in the last twenty years, Silvio Berlusconi. What Dyer names ‘the Grillosconi monster’ is emblematic of the social, political and democratic crisis that Italy has been experiencing over the last few years. By applying the Appraisal framework – an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances and to manage interpersonal relationships – to a corpus of journalistic articles, the present chapter aims at investigating to what extent lexical choices, linguistic uses and the employment of pragmatic strategies may reveal an idea of monstrosity regarding Italian politics.