–Corpus linguistics and the analysis of political discourse

Prof. Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio, Universidad de Granada
13 October 2021, 19:00 (Madrid time) Registration link

Sala de Grados Jorge Guillén, Facultad de Letras (aforo muy reducido), Murcia

After two decades looking at political discourse in different contexts, written in several languages and from various complementary perspectives, I would like to think that I have been able to grasp the nettle, and expose the essential tricks of such an important, at points bombastic, at points ineffective, cultural product. I have analysed the impact of gender in political speeches, politicians’ metaphorical construal of the concept “nation”, how fallacies are articulated in argumentation, body language and trustworthiness in politics, the language of evaluation in populism, you name it. That is why I thought I definitely had the clue to its essence. Nevertheless, I couldn’t be more wrong. The very persuasive and performative nature of politics makes political discourse look something slippery, with still too many angles unseen to uncover. In this presentation, I will try to show how corpus methods can help to proceed in this direction; by avoiding any bias possible, we will hopefully see how concordances, sketches, semi-automatic annotation, etc. can shed light on what patterns can be present in, for example, right- and left-wing radicalism, and subsequently reflect upon why they are, interestingly enough, the same ones.

Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio is Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Granada, Spain. Her main research area is corpus-based CDA, where she focuses on the notions of representation and power enactment in public discourse.

Coordination: Prof Pascual Pérez-Paredes

This event is sponsored by the Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Murcia, and the English Department, Universidad de Murcia.