This volume seeks to illustrate the fundamental role of language in political action, focusing on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus that was queried through special software with the aim of identifying regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, with classical discourse analysis, which seeks to investigate naturally occurring language in the context in which it is produced. Interpreting the field of politics quite widely, to include news reporting and a quasi-judicial inquiry into the behavior of politicians and journalists, discourses in the USA and the UK are considered. The central purpose of the volume is to gain insights not just into language, and the ways in which we can investigate it through a corpus, but also into the ways in which political action is realized through discourse.
Paul Bayley is Professor of English Linguistics and teaches at the Faculty of Political Science "Roberto Ruffilli" of the University of Bologna at Forlì.
John Morley holds the chair of English Linguistics in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Siena.