Political Discourse Analysis: The Dangers of Methodological Absolutism

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.

Metaphor scholars have widely explored metaphor use in political discourse. Nevertheless, the current research does not account for the ‘gradable metaphoricity’ in political discourse analysis. This dissertation fills this gap by addressing this specific issue in two frameworks: (1) viewing political metaphor from a static and gradient perspective (Source-Target mapping; Conventional vs. Novel vs. Dead), and (2) viewing political metaphor from a gradable and dynamic perspective (a matter of salience and awareness of metaphoricity). A systematic literature review in chapter 2 points out that the static and dynamic perspectives differ significantly in underlying assumptions and organizing principles, although both are indistinctly referred to by metaphor scholars as constituting a ‘gradable’ view. The former takes metaphor as a static conceptual unit or lexical unit, but the latter tends to accord a central role of activation of metaphoricity to metaphorical expressions. To launch a theoretical advancement about the dynamic view in political discourse, chapter 3 offers a usage-based model of gradable and dynamic metaphors—the YinYang Dynamics of Metaphoricity (YYDM). In addition, this thesis investigates political metaphors from an interdisciplinary angle, incorporating theory from the field of International Relations. An empirical evaluation of political (discourse) studies in chapter 4 shows the large absence of transdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the abovementioned gaps, this dissertation reports on two empirical analyses of trade metaphors in a big corpus that represents the official trade positions of the United States and China during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin (1993-1997) as well as Donald Trump and Xi Jinping (2017-2021). Based on a codebook of a cross-linguistic metaphor identification procedure in chapter 5, the first empirical part contributes to the static and gradient perspective and includes two corpus-based studies of metaphorical framing about trade (chapters 6-7). The diachronic and cross-linguistic use of source domains from a socio-cognitive approach in chapter 6 reveals that source domains are semantic fields that vary with trade discourse contexts (interests, power, and power relations). Chapter 7 shows that the use of trade metaphors (source domains of Conventional and Novel metaphors) to construct and legitimize political ideologies correlates with differences between political genres. The second part contributes to the gradable and dynamic view by applying the transdisciplinary model of YinYang Dynamics of Metaphoricity in chapters 8-10. In chapter 8, an evaluation of the new model in the Clinton-Jiang trade discourse shows that the dynamic cognitive process (transformation of metaphoricity) and rhetorical process (argumentation and persuasion) mutually develop with the evolution of the socio-political process (trade perspectives and trade events). Chapter 9 investigates the transformation of metaphoricity in the Trump-Xi trade discourse and finds that cognitive processes (patterns of metaphoricity activation) and affective processes (emotions or sentiments) mutually develop with the evolution of socio-political processes (trade perspectives and trade events). Based on the findings in chapters 8-9, chapter 10 further shows several phenomena in the Clinton-Jiang and Trump-Xi trade discourses: the movement of metaphors on the metaphoricity spectrum, the bodily motivation of gradable and dynamic metaphoricity, and the interconnected political discourse systems. Drawing on all the theoretical and empirical insights revealed in the dissertation, the final section of the thesis outlines a future direction, i.e., moving towards a transdisciplinary and dynamic approach to metaphor in political discourse analysis.

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.

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.

Defining Political Reality for Europe. Political Discourse Analysis as a Method in International Relations Research

У статті розглянуто комунікативні недоліки в політичному дискурсі, що виникають у безпосередніх комунікативних діях, які викликані дисбалансом політичної ситуації в суспільстві. Щоб уникнути комунікативних недоліків у політичному дискурсі, політики намагаються застосовувати відповідні стратегічно передбачувані комунікативні тактики. Проведено аналіз того, про що вони говорять, думають, у чому вони переконані та що ставлять за мету донести до відома суспільства, в чому переконати, користуючись сугестивними комунікаціями. Наведено перелік успішних комунікативних тактик у політичному дискурсі.

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.

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.

This essay overviews the body of research known as political discourse analysis (PDA). I begin by situating this work within the linguistic and political turns that took place in the latter part of the 20th century within the human and social sciences. I then discuss different conceptions of what comprises the political and the appropriate objects of study for PDA. Adopting an inclusive conception of politics and discourse, I consider the relationship between PDA and critical discourse analysis (CDA). I close with a review of studies of political discourse in terms of their theoretical and analytic frameworks and the socio‐political issues they address.

Political discourse very often relies on translation. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA), however, has not yet taken full account of the phenomenon of translation. This paper argues that the disciplines of Translation Studies (TS) and PDA can benefit from closer cooperation. It starts by presenting examples of authentic translations of political texts, commenting on them from the point of view of TS. These examples concern political effects caused by specific translation solutions; the processes by which information is transferred via translation to another culture; and the structure and function of equally valid texts in their respective cultures. After a brief survey of the discipline of Translation Studies, the paper concludes with outlining scope for interdisciplinary cooperation between PDA and TS. This is illustrated with reference to an awareness of product features, multilingual texts, process analysis, and the politics of translation.

Politics and political discourse are closely related to people’s daily life, and this study aims to propose a new approach to political discourse analysis by combining English and Chinese corpora. By exploring the composition of formal language and the grammar generation process, this paper proposes an improved N-gram algorithm to address the shortcomings of the N-gram model in dealing with low-frequency words with low accuracy and uses the strategy of introducing alternative words to alleviate the problem of sparse data. Then, a critical metaphor analysis of political discourse in the English-Chinese corpus is conducted based on the improved statistical language model, and the convergence of political discourse is studied in terms of space and time. By analyzing the political discourse of American presidents, the spatial centrality factors of “we” and “our nation” were accurately extracted, and their correlations were 0.83, 0.73, 0.68, 0.51, 0.76, and 0.41 in order. The correlations of the unqualified facsimile noun phrases in the temporal convergence of political discourse reached 0.28, 0.25, 0.72, 0.68, and 0.54, respectively, and the accuracy of the improved N-gram model improved by about 28.1% compared with the traditional method, making using statistical linguistic models for political discourse analysis feasible and applicable.

The research aims to determine the pragmatic potential of basic metaphorical models in shaping the image of leading foreign government representatives in British political media discourse using artificial intelligence tools. The article examines the mechanisms of metaphorical modeling used in the creation of political texts, the primary goal of which is to exert manipulative influence on public consciousness. Special attention is paid to assessing the validity of language models as a tool for applied analysis in political discourse research. The scientific novelty of this research lies in the development of a hybrid approach (human-artificial intelligence) to political discourse analysis. Using neural networks, a complex of metaphorical models for the targeted construction of the image of political figures in the British press was identified, and their pragmatic effect was established. Based on the analysis results, data were obtained regarding the capabilities and limitations of neural network models (ChatGPT and DeepSeek) when performing cognitive-discursive analysis tasks, and the role of applying artificial intelligence in researching the cognitive mechanisms of political discourse formation was clarified. As a result of the study, the repertoire of metaphorical models aimed at creating positive and negative images of political figures was examined. Through these metaphorical models, ideological influence is exerted, which involves constructing a specific political worldview and shaping readers’ emotional response to the politicians’ activities. Analysis of the neural network interpretations confirmed their potential as an applied tool for political discourse analysis, while emphasizing the need for critical interpretation of the results by the researcher.

Introduction. Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums (such as debates, speeches, and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest. Discourse originating in political institutions can be subdivided into genres that are instrumental in policy-making and thus produced by and addressed to politicians and genres that communicate, explain, and justify political decisions, produced by politicians and addressed to the general public . This article investigates the role of translation and interpreting in political discourse. Purpose of this article is to define and characterize the linguocultural features of the German language in the political discourse and its translation into Ukrainian. Methods. In this study, the following types of research methods were used: descriptive method (by which the use of a certain type of translation was justified), transformation method (using this method, various types of lexical and grammatical transformations (transduction, descriptive translation, tracing) were investigated), statistical method (consists in counting the corresponding linguocultural units by thematic groups and by means of translation of realities). Results. Public speaking is a special form of language activity in terms of direct communication, a language addressed to a specific audience, ie oratory. Oratory is characterized by a number of features that determine its essence (the presence of the reaction of the speaker's speech, oral form of communication, the relationship between literary language and its oral embodiment, the use of various means of communication). Three approaches to the study of political discourse have been explored (descriptive, critical, cognitive). Originality of this study is due to the increased attention of modern linguists and translators to the study of non-equivalent vocabulary and socio-political realities in the political discourse of the German language and the methods of their reproduction in Ukrainian. Conclusion. Political discourse is an essential component of sociocultural communication, the main features of which are interests, goals and the formation of public opinion, which is necessary for the author of political discourse. The functions of political discourse include: information dissemination, agenda setting, projection into the future and the past. The most important function of political discourse is considered the function of political propaganda, persuasion and influence.

An overview of political discourse analysis (PDA) research is provided in this essay. We start by placing this work in the context of the linguistic and political shifts that occurred in the last half of the twentieth century in the social and human sciences. We next go over many opinions about what constitutes the political and relevant subjects of study for PDA. We examine the connection between PDA and critical discourse analysis (CDA), adopting an inclusive understanding of politics and discourse. We conclude by reviewing political discourse studies in terms of the theoretical and analytical frameworks they use, as well as the sociopolitical topics they tackle.