Discorsi di guerra : il prologo del conflitto iracheno nella stampa britannica e italiana

The book presents the results of an analysis of the discourses that have preceded the second war on Iraq in the British and Italian press, from a discourse analytic perspective, i.e. exploring the role of the language in the representation and construction of reality. At the same time, a theoretical model for the analysis of discourse is proposed, which integrates the critical approach and the qualitative tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with the methodological rigour and the quantitative tools of Corpus Linguistics. In this way the book contributes to the debate on the possibility of overcoming the limits of CDA – whose detractors accuse of being excessively ideologically driven and scarcely anchored to the linguistic data – while maintaining its rationale, which makes of this discipline an important instrument for reading and interpreting texts in the era of mass-communication. The analysis, carried out on a corpus of newspaper articles spanning between Bush’s speech on th “Axis of Evil” (January 2002 and the beginning of the war (March 2003), addresses different levels of language description, from lexico-grammar and syntax to more complex discursive structures, taking into examination also aspects of argumentation theory, with special regard for the pragma-dialectical approach.