77762 - Analysis of Political Language

Academic Year 2021/2022

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Forli
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in Mass media and politics (cod. 8051)

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 tools and methods of (critical) discourse analysis of political and media discourse with particular reference to the US and UK, by focusing on a variety of text types and genres. More 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 lexico-grammatical 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

Recommended Readings

  • Baker, P. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
  • Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., and 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.
  • Bayley P. and Miller D. R 1993. Texts and Contexts of the American Dream: A socio semiotic study of Political Language. Bologna: Pitagora
  • van Dijk, T. 1998 "What is Political Discourse Analysis?", Political Linguistics, J. Blommaert J and C. Bulcaen, C. (eds), pp. 11–5
  • Wodak, R. 2009. “Language and Politics’’, English Language, pp.576-593

 

Selected Readings

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)

Extra material will be posted on Virtuale.


 

 

Teaching methods

 The course is organized in lectures and laboratory sessions, as detailed in the following program. Lectures aim to introduce students to the core tenets of the discipline. The laboratory sessions  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 and another group will do the seminar remotely on MS TEAMS. 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.  

Assessment methods

Assessment methods

Students will have to prepare a paper (4,500/5,000 words) and take an oral exam. The choice of the topic for the paper shall be agreed upon by the end of the course, and can be either a qualitative analysis of a single text or a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a specialized corpus. Students are encouraged to make a ppt presentation of their own work project. The final paper is to be handed in via email 10 days before the exam date.

The oral exam will deal with a discussion of the paper and a discussion of selected articles as follows.

Attending Students (presenting their own work during the course):

2 articles of your own choice - 1 article from ""recommended readings" and  1 article from selected readings.

Non Attending Students ( AND Attending Students NOT presenting their own work during the course):

4 articles of your own choice - 2 articles from "recommended readings and 2 articles  from "selected readings".

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)

Office hours

See the website of Cinzia Bevitori

SDGs

Quality education

This teaching activity contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda.