77762 - Analysis of Political Language

Learning outcomes

The course, which is taught in English, deals with quantitative and qualitative methods for the analysis of political language. At the end of the course, the student: - is able to identify various genres of political discourse and political reporting with particular reference to Great Britain and the USA; - can analyze the contextual features which determine the lexical and grammatical characteristics of different varieties of political language; - is able to make a semantic and lexical analysis of a individual political discourse and of a corpus of political discourse - has an English language competence not inferior to B2 (CEFR)

Course contents

The course aims at introducing students to quantitative and quantitative methods of (critical) discourse analysis of political and media discourse, with particular reference to the USA and Great Britain, by focussing on a variety of text types and genres. Specifically, the following issues will be presented and discussed: definition of political language; relationships between language, text and context; the concept of linguistic register; basic lexicogrammatical categories for a functional analysis of a text; political lexis, linguistic and rhetorical features of political language; creation of a specialized corpora of political language, media and social media; tools for corpus-assisted analysis: frequency, concordances, collocations, keywords, clusters.

Readings/Bibliography

Recommedned Readings

Baker, P. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. 2008. "A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press". Discourse and Society, 19(3), 273–306. 

Bayley P. 2005. “Analysing Language and Politics”, MediAzioni, 1. http://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/images/stories/PDF_folder/document-pdf/2005/articoli2005/4%20bayley.pdf

Bayley P. and Miller D. R. 1993. Texts and Contexts of the American Dream: A socio semiotic study of Political Language. Bologna: Pitagora

Partington, A. and Taylor, C. 2017. The Language of Persuasion in Politics: An Introduction, Routledge

Wodak, R. 2009. ‘’Language and Politics’’, English Language, pp.576-593

Selected Readings (2 Chapters from the following)

Bayley, P. 2007 “Terror in political discourse from the Cold War to the unipolar world” in N. Fairclough, G. Cortese and P. Ardizzone (eds), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change, Bern: Peter Lang.

Bayley, P. and G. Williams (Eds) (2012), European Identity: What the media say. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Selection of Chapters : 2, 3 , 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Bevitori, C. (2015) “Discursive Constructions of the Environment in Presidential Speeches 1960-2013: A Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Study”, in T. McEnery and P. Baker, Corpora and Discourse Studies, London, Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 110 - 133

Bayley, P. and Bevitori, C. (2016) “Diachronic change from Washington to Obama: The challenges and constraints of corpus-assisted meaning analysis. in S. Gardner and S. Alsop, Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age. Sheffield and Bristol: Equinox.

Bevitori, C. (2017) ‘in a world of complex threats...’: Discourses of in/security in the State of the Union Address (1790-2014). «CRITICAL APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ACROSS DISCIPLINES», 8, pp. 19 - 36

Charteris-Black, J. 2011. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Morley and P. Bayley (Eds),(2009) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraqi Conflict: Wording the war. London: Routledge (Selection of Chapters : 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Wodak, R. & b. Forchtner 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge (Selection of Chapters: 11, 20, 22, 26, 32)

A dossier of documents will be available on Virtuale.
Each student will be given a one-year license for the software WordSmith Tools 6.0

Teaching methods

The course is organized in lectures and laboratory sessions, as detailed in the following program. Lectures (16 hours in remote on MS TEAMS) aim to introduce students to the core tenets of the discipline. The labortory sessions (12 hours) aim to provide occasions for in-depth discussions and exercises, making use of specialized corpora and software for corpus analysis. For the laboratory session of the course, students will be divided in two groups according to their preferences and according to rules concerning the current pandemic emergency: one group will do the seminar in classroom (12 hours) and another group will do the seminar remotely on MS TEAMS (12 hours), for a total of 28 hours for each student. Students are required to carefully read the assigned material before the session and - in the case of laboratory - active participation through presentations and case studies will also be expected. Regardless of the health-related conditions and the specific organization of the course, students will be able to follow the lessons of the entire course remotely on MS TEAMS.

Assessment methods

Assessment methods

Students will have to prepare a paper (4,000/4,500 words) and take an oral exam. The choice of argument for the paper shall be agreed upon by the end of the course with the teacher, and can be either a qualitative analysis of a single text or a quantitative analysis of a specialized corpus. Students are encouraged to make a ppt presentation of their own work project, dealing with main topic, aims and initial data. The final paper is to be handed in via email 10 days before the exam date. Overall assessment is based on oral presentation, final paper, oral exam. The oral exam will take into consideration various aspects such as the students' knowledge of the basic concepts dealt with during the course, their capacity for critical reasoning and their capacity to organize discursively an argument.

Teaching tools

Projector, PC, internet, Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (in alternative AntConc, LancsBox)

Office hours

See the website of Cinzia Bevitori