John Benjamins, 2013. — vii, 191 p. — (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture). — ISBN: 978-90-272-7203-4.
Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. Communication within and about European institutions has become more challenging in this perplexing political environment, demonstrating the complex nature of EU political discourse. In order to highlight these complexities, the contributors to this volume present different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena. The approaches represent rhetorical theory, metaphor and conceptual theory, cognitive and corpus linguistics, lexical statistics, polyphony, logical semantics, pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Through this multitude of perspectives the book complements existing approaches and suggests new approaches in the study of political discourse.
Speaking of and within the EU – Introduction
Speaking to Europe: A Rhetorical approach to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech to the EU Parliament
Doing politics or doing media? A linguistic approach to European parliamentary debate
Quantitative approaches to political discourse: Corpus linguistics and text statistics
On what is not said and who said it: Argumentative connectives in Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches to the European Parliament
Voices and identities: Th polyphony of Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy at the European Parliament
That heart of Europe: Synchronic variation and historical trajectories of a political metaphor
Images and roles of the European Union in the climate change debate: A cognitive approach to metaphors in the European Parliament
Risky readings: The virtue of overinterpretations and speculations in political discourse analysis