DIE EUROPÄISCHE IDENTITÄT IN DEUTSCHEN BUNDESTAGSDEBATTEN: EINE POLITOLINGUISTISCHE ANALYSE
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2023
Citazione:
DIE EUROPÄISCHE IDENTITÄT IN DEUTSCHEN BUNDESTAGSDEBATTEN: EINE POLITOLINGUISTISCHE ANALYSE / E. Verra ; tutor: M. M. Brambilla, T. Niehr ; coordinator: M. V. E. Calvi. Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni, 2023 Dec 04. 35. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2022.
Abstract:
Die europäische Identität in deutschen Bundestagsdebatten:
Eine politolinguistische Analyse
(European identity in German parliamentary debates: a politolinguistic analysis)
The question of European Identity is controversial and its topicality in the public debate has not disappeared within the last years, consider for example the results of the last European elections (2019), which saw the emergence of (at least at the beginning) Euro-critical actors, such as the Italian Lega or the German Alternative für Deutschland, or the recent Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Its complexity derives from the very definitions of Europe and identity, both polysemous words; this complexity also explains why there has been many attempts to study this concept from different perspectives (sociology, political sciences etc., cf. Prutsch 2017). Considering the close relationship between language and identity (cf. for ex. Pistolesi/Schwarze 2007), the main objective of my PhD thesis is to contribute to this debate by investigating European identity from a linguistic perspective, i.e. looking at how it is thematised or discussed about in the political field. The main research questions are therefore: (1) How and which texts can a corpus for the linguistic analysis of European Identity be constituted of? (2) How can this phenomenon be analysed from a linguistic perspective? (3) Which (lexical, metaphorical, argumentative) patterns emerge from the study of the thematization of European identity? In order to answer question (1), for the purpose of this study I took into consideration the German parliament and the political parties represented in it: in particular, I considered parliamentary debates that took place between 1991 and 2021, trying to sort out the most relevant for the present analysis, first automatically on the Discourse Lab platform, then manually through the software MAXQDA. For the corpus selection as well as for the analysis I decided to focus on one expression of European identity, i.e. the thematization through the explicit use of the name identity (together with its word forms and compounds) in relation to Europe (and its word forms and compounds). In order to answer question (2), European identity has already been studied in linguistics, especially from a sociolinguistic and (critical) discourse analytical standpoint (cf. for ex. Krzyżanowski 2010, Heinemann/Helfrich/Visser 2022). Less investigated seem however the studies which focus specifically on this phenomenon in the political language, using a mainly descriptive approach: in my thesis I therefore claim that a politolinguistic analysis, which makes use of methods derived from the discourse analysis, that is a politolinguistische Diskursanalyse (politolinguistic discourse analysis, cf. Niehr 2014), could prove particularly fruitful to provide new and valuable insights into this question. Such an approach focuses on three levels of analysis: lexis, metaphors and argumentation (ibid.). Seeing identity as the main part of the nominal phrase European identity, I focused for the lexical part on word forms, compounds and collocators of this term. I then annotated the corpus in MAXQDA, focusing firstly on the “higher-level concepts” (übergeordnete Konzepte in Wichmann 2018) and the source domains for the metaphorical part and then on the “prototypical arguments” (prototypische Argumente in Niehr 2004) for the argumentation part. The integration of these three levels made it possible to answer research question (3), thus conducting a quantitative-qualitative synchronic-diachronic investigation. The results were manifold and underlined general as well as party specific tendencies. In general, the frequency of use of the concept of European identity seems to decline over the
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
identità europea; politolinguistica; linguaggio politico; analisi del discorso
Elenco autori:
E. Verra
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