This volume looks at the growing interest of different specialists in the problems associated with political discourse, in general, and parliamentary discourse, as one of its major sub-genres, in particular. Its main goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices across space and time. The papers aim to highlight the role played by local social and historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political institutions. Approaching the problems from a large variety of theoretical perspectives, the investigations are based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodologies, offering an image of the multifaceted manifestations of parliamentary debates. The volume addresses specialists in several fields, such as linguistics, discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, (social) anthropology, (social) psychology, media and communication.

The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various analytical tools of functional linguistics, this volume seeks to provide explanatory analyses of parliamentary discourse in different countries – Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States – and to explore its peculiarities. Each chapter outlines a particular methodological framework and its application to instances of parliamentary discourse on important issues such as war, European integration, impeachment and immigration.

This edited volume offers new insights into contemporary political discourses in Slavic speaking countries by focusing on discursive and linguistic means deployed in relevant genres, such as parliamentary discourse, commemorative and presidential speeches, mediated communication, and literal and philosophical essays. The depth of the linguistic analysis reflects different levels of linkage between language and social practice constituting the discourse. The theoretical and methodological approaches discussed range from interactional pragmatics over corpus linguistics to CDA. The chapters contain original language material in Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian, and the authors address issues such as the affiliation to different political and social groups within parliamentary settings, national identity, gender and minorities, as well as cultural memory and reconciliation.

Any system of government is comprised of several dimensions of functionality, which must all work in congruence. When any part of the system is dysfunctional, the government’s stability becomes fractured and societal problems can arise. Political Discourse in Emergent, Fragile, and Failed Democracies examines the effects of unstable democratic systems of government in modern society, providing an imperative analysis on political communications from such nations. Highlighting real-world examples on the constraints seen in malfunctioning or emerging governments, this book is a pivotal reference source for policy makers, researchers, academicians, and upper-level students interested in politics and governance.

Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse extends.

This edited collection explores the perceptions and memories of parliamentarianism across Europe, examining the complex ideal of parliament since 1800. Parliament has become the key institution in modern democracy, and the chapters present the evolution of the ideal of parliamentary representation and government, and discuss the reception and value of parliament as an institution. It is considered both as a guiding concept, a Leitidee, as well as an ideal, an Idealtypus. The volume is split into three sections. The establishment of parliament in the nineteenth century and the transfer of parliamentary ideals, models and practices are described in the first section, based on the British and French models. The second part explores how the high expectations of parliamentary democracy in newly-established states after the First World War gradually started to subside into dissatisfaction. Finally, the last section attests to its resilience after the Second World War, demonstrating the strength of the ideal of parliament and its power to incorporate criticism. Examining the history of parliament through concepts and ideals, this book traces a transnational, European exchange of models, routines and discourse.

This volume illustrates the role of language in political action by analyzing the discourse of various British and US institutions on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus in order to identify regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, and qualitative context-based discourse analysis.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

The volume promotes a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of political discourse as multilayered mediated discourse. The chapters cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of speech act theory, social positioning theory, and argumentation theory and rhetorics. They address the strategic use of address terms and irony, the form and function of questions, and the expression of certainty in the contexts of parliamentary discourse, interview, talkshow, phone-in programme and motion of support across different discourse domains. Different cultural contexts are represented, including Africa, the Middle East, different parts of Europe and the United States.

Stancetaking is inherent in verbal communication, as it is connected with the expression of subjectivity and the construction of intersubjectivity in discourse. This book presents theoretical findings in this field and their practical implications, exploring the variations in time and space of meaning negotiation processes in a large variety of communicative forms, including political and judicial discourse, journalism, fiction, private letters, informal conversations, and school debates. Some articles refer to events with a strong impact on social and political life, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or Ceaușescu’s trial. The volume’s approach is mainly pragma-rhetoric and interactional, but also interdisciplinary, promoting dialogue between stance researchers in different fields. There is a specific focus on possible applications of some key findings of stance research in improving inter-ethnic communication and the teaching of foreign languages, as well as students’ communicative abilities.