Paul Bayley Analysing language and politics

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Paul Bayley Analysing language and politics

This paper will first present a synthesis of the inseparable links between discourse and political activity; secondly it will outline some linguistic models and approaches that have proved, or should prove, useful in analysing political language. 1. Discourse in politics 1.1 Language and political processes The claim that underlies this paper, that politics and language are inextricably linked, is perhaps little more than a truism. Indeed, it would be difficult to identify any sphere of social or institutional life in which language does not play a pivotal role from education to religion, from work (in the post-fordist world) to leisure, from buying to selling. To quote Threadgold (1986: 44): Acts of communication are forms of social discourse which maintain and regulate social activities, and define status and power relations. As such they are part of and a metaphor for the social actions and belief systems of a given culture. But together with education, religion and law, politics is one of those spheres of institutional life in which language is largely, although not exclusively, constitutive of its actions. Politics is conducted in and through talk and texts and such talk and texts enact political action. Politics does of course have material and non-linguistic goals let us say, for the sake of simplification, that they are to regulate the distribution of resources, in a concrete as well as an abstract sense, in a given society. There are also means of conducting politics that are non-linguistic war is an obvious example. However, it is difficult to imagine political action that is neither, on the one hand, founded on language nor, on the other, a result of linguistic breakdown and at the same time a premise for further linguistic action. For example, in the case of military aggression, wars break out when talks break down, and once a war, which may be conducted with words as well as weapons, has reached its conclusion, it is followed by renewed linguistic activity, in the form, for example, of peace treaties and on occasions, war trials. 1.2. Language and the construction of the state Let us consider, rather allegorically, the role of language in the formation and evolution of a sovereign state. A state may be founded on an initial declaration of its independence and the principles on which it is to be formed, such as the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, or it may be founded on legal precedents, that is to say, on authoritative and authorized written texts. If there is a solemn declaration, it will most likely have drawn on the writings of political philosophers, which, I would argue, are not codifications of pre-linguistic concepts that were simply out there but are elaborated in and through linguistic structures. Such concepts are then appropriated and re-elaborated by an emerging social and political force, which discusses, negotiates and rewrites their wordings and meanings. The foundation document that is produced is subsequently used to persuade and/or to convince other social actors, at home and abroad, and to legitimate and to justify the new social order that it foresees. But this new social order will require some form of regulation and perhaps a constitution will be drafted, based on previous texts and/or constitutional literature, and amended through discussion and debate, which, in a final written form, will not only establish how certain relationships are to be regulated but also create institutions for this purpose. For example a constitution may create institutions such as legislative bodies and elaborate concepts of representation. Legislatures and representative methods for choosing their members engender aggregations based on linguistically mediated affinities between socially and politically positioned subjects; but they will also create competition between different groups, which seek to gain support from those who have been designated as electors and such an endeavour will be conducted in and through language via political arenas such as pamphlets or public speeches. True enough, political agreements may be sealed through the material exchange of goods and services, but even such an exchange will inevitably be preceded and followed by a linguistic exchange, since otherwise it would probably serve very little. 1.3. Language, policy and law Legislatures are forums for talk and text policies are formulated, perhaps in an executive body or among political groupings, and they are drafted into bills by specialised personnel; they are debated publicly in large and small settings, such as the full chamber and select committees. Alliances are constructed among participating groups, either through public or private discourse, and majorities are formed; a vote is held and what began as a policy proposal becomes enshrined in the law, which commands the obedience of the citizens. But citizens may also contest these norms and the constitution may also have formed an institution which allows them a form of redress a supreme court, for example. On the supreme court will sit a panel of judges who will be asked to interpret the language of the contested law and/or its application, perhaps on the basis of its conformity with the supreme law, perhaps on the basis of other social norms. Constitutions, like language itself, are metastable; that is to say that their stability is guaranteed by their capacity to change. Professions which have the function of mediating between the citizens and judges arise, forming a caste of persons whose function is to produce texts designed to convince and to persuade an institutional authority. But here, of course, we are moving away from the sphere of politics and into that of law. 1.4. Language and mediating structures

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Independently of these institutions, other organisations develop, like the press, among whose functions are those of informing the citizens on the activities of the institutions, recontextualizing and translating institutional language into a language of their own. In their infancy, these media are fairly rudimentary they contain few reports and have a narrow circulation - but they rapidly grow in popularity, as literacy rates increase, printing technology is improved and technologies for rapidly communicating data, such as the telegraph, are invented. From these media, another profession based on linguistic exchange is created - the journalist, whose functions include mediating between the institutions, and the persons who occupy them, and citizens, thus becoming de facto an instrument of political accountability. Newspapers acquire power and authority not only because they inform the public but also because they form public opinion and set the public agenda. Political actors, who had perhaps once scorned journalists, seek their attention and submit to interviews in order to gain access to this new public arena, which is not regulated exclusively by the formal institutions. Because of the media, citizens may gain new perspectives on the affairs of the institutions, and construct their own discourse around them, at the workplace, at home or at public meeting places, and this kind of talk is part of political socialization. At the same time as the press develops, so do political parties. They mediate between one another and between citizens and institutions and add another layer of discourse to political action. Parties meet periodically, in both the public and the private sphere, to discuss policy; at elections they prepare manifestos and organise public events to promote themselves. In parliament they organise themselves to vote together, thus depriving the legislature of some of its sovereignty. But political parties are not the only aggregations that develop; other groupings, such as trades unions and support and interest groups are formed in order to exercise some influence over the decision making bodies. They may act through language, but they may also may resort to physical actions, such as withholding labour or staging disruptive events, but the objective of such activities are to gain control over the discourse. As the media develop as a result of new technologies - first the radio, then television and finally the internet - they themselves become an arena for political activity, at least as important as the institutions. Governments continue to explain, justify and legitimate their actions to parliament but they may prefer to do so first to the media. Political parties and other groups stage press conferences and publish press releases and their leaders subject themselves to interviews. News programmes are available 24 hours a day and political information is available at the click of a mouse. And so politics, which intrinsically and since its inception has been a primarily linguistic activity, is characterised by multiple layers of discourse: dialogue in and between the institutions, dialogue between the media and the institutions, dialogue between the media and the parties, and dialogue between the media and the citizens. 1.5. Discourse and action Obviously, political institutions also act in a non verbal sense: they raise money and they spend it, for example. But in order to do this they must perform the appropriate linguistic acts, in a preordained sequence, permitting those groups who oppose their actions to express their dissent. Institutions also create sanctions for their citizens; for example they can jail them and, in some nations, execute them. But such actions are governed by the concept of due process, which means that, once again, certain forms of linguistic behaviour are necessary in order to perform them. Of course, not all forms of government, not even the majority of them, are characterised by the same wide range of institutions and discourse structures. Governments may repress discourse; for example, the first act after a coup d'tat is very often the occupation of broadcasting structures, and all established totalitarian regimes maintain strict control over the press; in other words, they try to control the boundaries of discourse. Fundamental rights may be denied or suspended and individuals or groups may be subjected to arbitrary detention and torture. Some governments have even practised the systematic elimination of social or ethnic groups. But even in dictatorships, political language is still important, although in this case it normally goes by the name of propaganda or indoctrination. In other words, tyrannies seek to impose their own discourse on their subjects through coercion. In liberal democracies, on the other hand, dominant discourse is said to be achieved through a process of consensus building, and those that govern are accountable to the governed, who, through periodic elections, retain the power to replace them. However, in order for such systems to maintain stability, they require shared values. The discourse practices that come into play in order to guarantee a set of shared values, a basic consensus on what is acceptable and what is not, on what can be said and what cannot, are very complex indeed and go beyond the scope of the political institutions in a strict sense. To quote Threadgold (1986: 44) once more: ...(L)anguage, as action, ensures that certain ways of talking and doing are maintained, guaranteeing the stability of the social system, but at the expense of other models of saying and doing which might threaten any stability. The typical ways of seeing the world, which we might characterise as the typical systems of knowledge and belief in a community, are constructed in and through the social meaning making practices of that community. Finally, states and their institutions do not use language merely to regulate domestic affairs; they also have to interact with other states, through the talks held between envoys, which have the purpose of maintaining good relationships and securing agreements, in much the same way as individuals engage in phatic communication in order to maintain social relationships. Some nations may elaborate and undersign treaties which bind them together and commit them to each others' mutual defence. Crises arise and nations may go to war, and one of the results of war may be the creation of supranational bodies whose aims include maintaining future peace by keeping channels of communication open. A new form of law is developed, international law, whose goal is to regulate the relationships between nations and whose effect is to create a further layer of political discourse. 1.6. Defining political language All these activities can be the subject of linguistic inquiry and the object of such study constitutes the empirical evidence of the

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discourse practices that are at the very root of political processes (Chilton, 2002: 4). But given that politics can be defined in both a wide and a narrow sense, it is necessary to determine what can be defined as political discourse. In its most simple definition, politics is limited to the activity of the institutions, such as government, parliament and parties, fulfilling their role of distributing resources. To complement this, it could be defined as a struggle for power among the members of these institutions through elections, parties, parliamentary procedures and propaganda. A wider definition would include the activities of those organizations that belong to civil society and which are not necessarily regulated by the state but at the same time compete for resources trades unions, business associations, environmental groups, etc.. It could also include the activity of the media because they produce discourse on, for example, politics, social conflict, and international relations. Non-institutional actors in social conflict may, similarly, be seen as engaging in politics. Moreover, many apparently non-political institutions, such as schools, universities and hospitals are the products of public policy, which is in turn determined by ideological choices. Such institutions are regulated by large administrations which produce their own form of public discourse. In his book Discourse and Social Change (1992), Fairclough analyses a number of linguistic and social phenomena, such as the changes in the discourse of educational institutions, which, he claims are transforming the role of student into that of customer or client. Such phenomena may be ascribed to social change, but at the same time they can also be interpreted as being political, not only because education is one of the ways through which resources are distributed, but also because such change is the result of a complex set of political and ideological discourse practices. Finally, political socialization takes place not just in the public sphere, but also in the private sphere; the home, the workplace and public meeting places are all sites at which political discourse may take place. Because of this, it should be quite obvious that there is no such thing as political language, but a wide and diverse set of discourses, or genres, or registers that can be classified as forms of political language. It would be feasible to identify a set of canonical forms of political discourse: policy papers, ministerial speeches, government press releases or press conferences, parliamentary discourse, party manifestos (or platforms), electoral speeches, etc. They are all characterized by the fact that they are spoken or written by (or for) primary political actors members of the government or the opposition, members of parliament, leaders of political parties, candidates for office. For the discourse analyst, most, although not all, instances of canonical political discourse have the advantage of being public talk on the record and thus readily available to be collected, analyzed and compared to similar instances. They also have the advantage of being relatively transparent. For example, although we would not necessarily expect a politician to be perfectly honest, on most occasions his or her purposes are reasonably clear accept the efficacy and opportunity of this policy proposal'; register my opposition to this proposal'; interpret my question as aggressive or friendly', give me your vote'. Other forms of political discourse media discourse, the discourse of pressure and interest groups, the discourse of administrative bodies could be considerable as forms of intermediate political discourse. And finally there is what we may call grassroots political discourse talk and discussion about politics in the private sphere. However, while on the one hand political discourse can be broken down into different registers, on the other a single text cannot be considered as an autonomous act of communication. Any instance of political discourse is but a part of a much wider network of intertextual relations. Let us imagine the discourse practices that accompany or constitute the enactment of public policy such as, for example, a reform of fiscal policy aimed at lowering taxes on high incomes. Such a process may originate in institutions like universities or government think tanks in which certain ideological precepts such as the idea that taxation should be progressive in order to mitigate the effects of a market economy and to redistribute wealth are challenged and overturned. For instance, it may be argued that reducing taxation on high incomes will eventually benefit the less wealthy sectors of the population because it will create work, and models will be elaborated to demonstrate this. Such an idea may first be published in learned journals, and then subsequently, in more simple language, in the op-ed pages of a newspaper. A group within a political party may work in order to make such a policy part of its official programme and may present a motion at the party's annual congress, where it will be discussed and debated both in public and private spheres. Once adopted, at the following election, the policy will become part of the party's manifesto and speeches will be made for (and against) it, and these pronouncements will be reformulated in many different ways in the media. Once the party has achieved power, it will produce a policy document to be presented to the media; the minister responsible will give interviews and a spin-doctor will make statements to present the document in its most favourable light, and to avoid malign interpretations. All this will be re-elaborated in the newspapers, in the form of news reports and editorials, and on television, on news broadcasts, current affairs programmes and talk shows. In the institutions, a member of the opposition may put a question to the minister, asking for clarifications, for example, on the effects of the measure on public spending. The policy document will be translated into the language of a bill, and in this form it will be debated in parliament. In the meantime, because it is a measure that will affect all citizens in some way or another, it will be discussed in the family and at the work-place. In this rather simplistic reconstruction of the political processes that lead to political change, it is clear that a great deal of discourse types are in operation from the academic paper to casual conversation and while a single text may be considered individually, it is unquestionably part of a wider discursive context, and this needs to be taken into consideration. For this reason, the discourse analyst must beware of drawing strong political conclusions from the study of single texts. For example, a considerable amount of work has been conducted on media bias; it is possible to analyze how this is achieved, but it would require a much wider interdisciplinary study to understand its possible effects. Research has been conducted on electoral language and discourse analysis is capable of illustrating how candidates for public office linguistically construct themselves. However, it would be mistaken to posit a strong causal relationship between, say, Bill Clinton's masterly performance in televised debates and his political success because too many discursive events are in play. Linguistic inquiry into political discourse, as well as helping us to understand how language is used in specific domains, should be able to throw some light on how linguistic practices have come to define institutions, on the one hand, and how institutions have defined discourse processes, on the other. Its results could be considered as complementary to the study of political science, sociology, communication studies. 2. Language and Politics: theoretical grounding

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2.1. An overview of recent literature There has been a considerable amount of interest, over the last sixty years, in the study of how language functions within specific institutional contexts, and, because political discourse is a broad macro-category, studies on political language have included investigations into very different sub-genres such as electoral language, party political language, the language of diplomacy and international relations, the language of social conflict, the language of parliament, and so on. Linguistics has not been the only discipline to investigate the relationship between language and politics; similar interest has been shown within political science. For book-length linguistic studies on politics, in the strictest sense, mention could be made of Rossini Favretti (1980), Atkinson (1984), Chilton (1985), Bollettieri Bosinelli (1985), Geis (1987), Wodak (1989), Fairclough (1989), Wilson (1990), Bayley and Miller (1993), Carb (1996), Miller and Vasta (1997), Blommaert and Bulcaen (1998), Chilton, Ilyin and Mey (1998), Fairclough (2000), Wodak and Van Dijk (2000), Chilton and Schffner (2002), Partington (2002), Bayley (2004) and Chilton (2004). Depending on how broadly we were to define politics, a complete list of books and articles that could be fitted into this category would be very long indeed. Volumes in which political scientists or political sociologists have tackled languagerelated questions include Lasswell & Leites (1949), Edelman (1964, 1977), O'Barr & O'Barr (1976), Shapiro (1982, 1984), Elder & Cobb (1983), Connolley (1993) Merelman (1993), Feldman & De Landtsheer (1998), De Landtsheer & Feldman (2000). There is, however, a rather large distance between the empirical, theoretical and conceptual standpoints of linguists and political scientists on language related questions. The latter have largely dedicated their attention to lexical items, in particular symbols, slogans and metaphors, rhetorical styles and content analysis. Linguists have used more complex analytical tools and it has been generally recognised that linguistic approaches to politics require particular analytical constructs: For example they need structures that create a link between language and the social context in which it is taking place. Secondly, they need a grammar that extends beyond the limits of the clause, and thirdly they need to be able to handle large quantities of linguistic data. These three features are not always easy to combine. I shall outline three research traditions which, in my opinion, should be fruitful for the linguistic analysis of political texts but which are often considered to be mutually incompatible: Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and (small) Corpus Linguistics. 2.2. Critical Discourse Analysis. The linguistic study of political discourse has been particularly associated with what has come to be known as Critical Discourse Analysis, or CDA. The genesis of CDA can be traced back to the end of the 1970s, in particular to British critical linguistics' (Fowler et al., 1979, and Kress and Hodge 1979) and French discourse analysis (Pcheux, 1982), although their theoretical underpinnings are rather different from each other and from those of CDA today (for which see Fairclough 1995, Caldas Coulthard and Coulthard, 1996, van Dijk 1997a, 1997b). Stated very briefly, the aim of the early work in critical linguistics was to identify the social meanings that were expressed through lexis and syntax and to consider the role that language plays in creating and reinforcing ideologies. Its underlying presupposition was that linguistic choices relate to ideological positioning. For CDA (like other schools of functional linguistics), language is a form of social practice; discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially shaped (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258), and social practice constructs social reality. Unlike other traditions, CDA is socially and politically committed and engaged; it sees itself as intervening on behalf of oppressed groups and against dominating groups. It seeks to identify, moreover, linguistic change in terms of social change and posits the fundamentally linguistic or discursive nature of power relations; the link between text and society is mediated by orders of discourse' the network of conventions that underlie and legitimise discourse practices. Despite the subjectivity of reception processes, CDA claims to be able to identify inherent meanings' through systematic discourse analysis. The analytical instruments that it uses include syntax, local and global semantics, pragmatics, argumentation structures, cognition and contextual modelling. But CDA is also interdisciplinary and seeks to combine elements from diverse disciplines such as history, sociology, ethnography, social psychology, semiotics and cultural studies as well as, of course, linguistics. It has drawn on the work of a variety of scholars whose principal interest has not been language, such as Habermas, Foucault and Bordieu. The work of van Dijk emphasises the role of personal and social knowledge and belief and thus adds a cognitive element to CDA, according to which readings and interpretations of texts vary according to the cognitive schemata of individual hearers or readers, which may be determined by factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, age, etc. Chilton (2005) argues that mainstream CDA, in order to maintain credibility and utility, needs to pay much more attention to cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. CDA has been criticised from a number of points of view. Miller (1993: 401-408), despite asserting her sympathy for the CDA project, argues that its attempt to combine many different research traditions is at times contradictory and has led to what she has called model muddle, in particular as regards interpretation and multiple readings of texts. How is it possible, for example, to take on board the relativity and indeterminacy of Foucault and yet still to claim to be able to make authentic readings? Widdowson in two articles published in 1998 and 2000 makes a rather trenchant attack on CDA, accusing it of what amounts to intellectual dishonesty. The intentions of producers and consumers of texts, he says, are vicariously inferred from the analysis itself, by reference to what the analyst assumes in advance to be the writer's ideological position (1998: 143). The main accusation is that CDA, being explicitly committed and engaged, is looking only for textual confirmation of a bias that is presumed to exist in a given text. The principal argument against this line of reasoning is that the analyst is necessarily a socially and politically positioned subject the observer is part of the theory (Chilton 2002: 6) - and recognition of this contributes to greater transparency. De Beaugrande (2001) presents an articulated critique of Widdowson, arguing, inter alia, that language study over the last 25 years has been trying to come to grips with the relationship between language and reality', and not limiting itself to idealisations and abstractions. Finally, a further criticism of CDA has come from Martin who has recently argued that if discourse analysis is to enact social change, it will have to take into consideration discourse that inspires, heartens; discourse that we like, that cheers us along and not just that which we dislike (1999: 38). In other words, Martin argues that alongside critical discourse analysis, we need positive discourse analysis. 2.3. Systemic Functional Linguistics

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The second theoretical and descriptive framework that has a clear commitment to discourse analysis is Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL). It should be said that the analysis of political texts, in a strict sense, is not the principal activity of SFL, which has addressed a wide variety of different text types. Moreover, a great deal of publications within its framework have dealt with the theoretical modelling of language rather than with discourse analysis. However, the analytical tools that it has developed have been demonstrated to be capable of handling the complexity of political language analysis (see, for example, Martin and Rose, 2003). SFL derives from and is generally associated with the work of Michael Halliday and, like CDA, it sees language as social practice but unlike CDA it seeks to present a unitary vision of the systems, structures and functions of language, tolerating the fuzziness of categories that this inevitably implies. It fundamentally has two aspects. It is systemic, and this means that its grammar is based on the notion of paradigmatic choice and that grammar can be represented as an open-ended and (extremely large) interlocking network of options. For the genesis of systemic theory, which is the major theoretical component of SFL, see Kress ed., 1976, Halliday and Martin, eds., 1981 and Halliday and Fawcett, 1987. Secondly, it is functional: SFL posits that the relationship between a language and the social functions that its serves is reflected in the internal organisation of the language. A grammar is thus not arbitrary but motivated and its features can be explained by the uses to which a language is put. Meanings, moreover, are created in and through language and not merely encoded by it. Function in the SFL perspective, however, does not amount to an inventory of the things we do with language but with more general and abstract categories. Firstly language functions to interpret and to represent the world real or imaginary - around us in terms of actions, actors, objects relationships of time and space, and so on. Secondly language has to express logical relationships such as and' and or'. Thirdly language expresses the participant roles and statuses of speakers and the way speakers act or try to act on others. Finally language has to do these three things at the same time, relating what is being said now to what has been said before as well as relating it to the context of situation in which it is being produced. Within SFL, these functions of language are known as metafunctions and they are classified into the ideational (including experiential and logical), the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions and together they represent the basic semantic system of a language our potential to make meanings. These functions are intrinsic to language but they are also related to the context of situation'; every text takes place in a recognisable social event and concerns a particular subject matter. This is known as the field of discourse' which is said to activate the ideational metafunction of language. Ideational meanings are realized' in the lexicogrammar (the system of wording) through the system of transitivity by and through which we can express actions, events, states and their participants as well as other notions such as time, space and other circumstances. Furthermore, any text involves Speakers and Addressees whose roles and statuses are reflected in or constructed by the interchange between them, expressing not only individual identity but also social roles based on varying degrees of power and solidarity. This is known as the tenor of discourse' and is realized in the grammatical systems of Mood and Modality. Finally texts are transmitted through a certain channel they may be oral, spoken or hybrid and in a certain rhetorical mode, according to the intertextual tradition of that certain situation type. This is known as the mode of discourse' and is realized in the grammar, according to standard SFL thought, through and by Thematic and Information systems and by non-structural relationships of cohesion. These various meanings are realized contemporaneously and thus linguistic units are to be seen as multifunctional. For an account of the functional aspects of SFL see Kress (1976), Halliday (1978), Martin (1992) and Halliday (1994). A further system, or system of systems, that is being explored in SFL is that of appraisal. Appraisal is defined as [...] the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements and valuations, alongside resources for amplifying and engaging with these evaluations (Martin 2000, 145) and its goal is to trace [...] a comprehensive map of appraisal resources that we could deploy systematically in discourse analysis, both with a view to understanding the rhetorical effect of evaluative lexis as texts unfold, and to better understanding the interplay of interpersonal meaning and social relations in the model of language and the social we were developing, especially in the area of solidarity (Martin 2000, 148). To cut appraisal theory down to its bare bones, it identifies three systems: attitude, engagement and graduation. Attitude is further sub-divided into affect (emotional responses) judgement (moral evaluations of human behaviour) and appreciation (evaluations of things). Engagement deals with subtle gradings of speaker commitment to what is said, while graduation deals with the force or intensity of the evaluation. Evaluation in language is crucial in political discourse because it is essentially opinionated; while on the one hand many of its forms are transparently evaluative, electoral speeches are an obvious example, others are dressed in informative terms, for example a statement by a Minister to a parliamentary chamber is often formulated as if it is the only reasonable explanation of a given situation (see Dibattista, 2004). A delicate model is required in order to tease out much evaluation and appraisal theory is proving to be a useful analytical construct for the study of political texts (see Miller 2002a, 2002b, 2004a and 2004b). SFL is not incompatible with CDA in as much as it claims to provide a model through which we can interpret texts. Indeed, many exponents of the CDA tradition, such as Fowler, Kress and Fairclough, have been influenced by SFL, and have included the term social semiotic' as one of the components of CDA. However, as Fowler put it, the descriptive apparatus of SFL grammar offers both more and less than is required (1996: 8). The grammatical detail of SFL is perceived as being too great; critical linguistics gets a very high mileage out of a small selection of linguistic concepts such as transitivity and nominalisation (ibid.) but at the same time CDA theorists argue that other methodologies are more suitable and, so together with some concepts drawn from SFL, CDA makes use of speech-act theory, Gricean cooperative principles, pragmatics, conversation analysis, relevance theory, cognitive psychology and Foucault's discursive formation. Van Dijk (2004) has been particularly critical of one of the fundamental pillars of SFL - its model of context which he sees as being an ill-assorted assembly of different concepts and as lacking what he sees as vital to CDA analysis, that is a cognitive component. Van Dijk, furthermore, argues that although the hypothesized hook-up between the contextual configuration, the semantic metafunctions and the grammatical systems (according to which, for example, the field activates the ideational metafunction which is realized in the grammar through the system of transitivity) may work in some cases for example the tenor can be seen to relate to mood and modality the correlations seem far less clear in other cases, such as the relationship between the mode of discourse and thematic and

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information systems. Questions of this kind have also been raised within SFL itself (see Thompson, 1999: 101-124). 2.4. Corpus Linguistics The third research tradition I shall mention is Corpus Linguistics (CL). CL has not been associated with the analysis of political language but rather with the study of lexical and grammatical patterns in general language, using very large corpora. Moreover, unlike the traditions of CDA and SFL, in which the subjectivity of the analyst's reading position is candidly admitted, CL makes a claim to the objectivity of its findings and is concerned with questions such as the replicability of its analyses. A third and perhaps fundamental feature which differentiates CL from the other two approaches is that it is not theory-driven but data-driven, and this alone might be enough to make it incompatible with CDA (but see Garzone and Santulli, 2003) and, in particular, with SFL. Corpus Linguistics is an empirical approach to the study of language based on the computer assisted analysis of the actual patterns of language on the basis of a finite-sized body of machine-readable texts, sampled in order to be maximally representative of the language variety under consideration (McEnery and Wilson, 1996: 24). Its origins can be dated back to the 1960s with the construction of the Survey of English Language, the Brown corpus, the London-Lund corpus and the LancasterOslo/Bergen corpus, which were corpora amounting to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 running words. But it was in the 1980s and 90s, with the ever-growing memory sizes and operational speed of computers and the greater and greater availability of text through the internet, that corpus linguistics definitively took off. In Great Britain in particular, two large-corpus projects have been realised: the Bank of English a corpus developed at the University of Birmingham now amounting to over 400 million running words which is constantly being up-dated and controlled via a monitor corpus and the British National Corpus composed of 100 million running words, 10 million of which of spoken language. There are also many other corpora which claim to represent languages other than English such as the COSMAS corpus of almost 400 million running words of German developed by the Mannheim Institut fr Deutsche Sprache . It can be expected that there will be a rapid expansion in both the number and size of linguistic corpora available. The kind of linguistic information that a corpus can provide includes data on the relative frequencies of lexemes, their distributions across the corpus and the patternings of collocation and colligation associated with lexemes, and patterns of co-selection. Work on corpora has demonstrated that language use is characterised by spectacular regularities of patterns; it highlights the very routine constrained nature of much language behaviour, in contrast to its creativity and individuality. The data it provides us with are not merely quantitative but also qualitative. For example, corpus linguistics has shown us that the meanings of words are not properties that can be found in dictionaries but are highly sensitive to their immediate linguistic context and may be said to have their own grammar. Thus while the OED gives the following definition of the verb cause : Be the cause of, effect, bring about; occasion, produce; induce, make [ ], findings from corpora demonstrate that the thing caused is nearly always something constructed as undesirable. Conversely, the complement of the verb provide is nearly always something desirable (Stubbs, 1996: 173-4), and many other findings of this kind of semantic prosody have been provided by the analysis of corpora. For a basic bibliography of corpus linguistics, see Aimer and Alternberg, eds. (1991), Aston ed. (2001), Baker, Francis and Tognini Bonelli eds (1993), Biber, Conrad, and Reppen, (1998), Hoey ed. (1993), Hunston and Francis (2000), Leitner, ed. (1992), McEnery and Wilson (1996), Partington (1998), Sinclair (1991), Stubbs (1996), Svartvik ed. (1992), and Tognini Bonelli (2001). In discussing the use of corpora, a distinction should be made between mainstream corpus linguistics and those discourse analysis which uses some of the tools of corpus linguistics. Perhaps the most important general claim made by the latter is that corpus linguistics is finally reinstating observation, and on a scale previously not feasible (De Beaugrande, 2001: 115). However, there are some basic theoretical assumptions that seem to make bridge-building between different approaches difficult. For example, there is little agreement as to what the role of corpora should be vis--vis linguistic theory. Should linguistic study be driven by a study of the data we find, in other words should the procedures be bottom up and inductive? Or should corpora be used for verifying and correcting descriptions, models and theories, following a top down deductive approach? The mainstream position is that corpus findings cannot be modelled onto existing theories of language and that we should always start with the data and postpone the use of [abstract categories] for as long as possible (Sinclair, 1991: 29). Indeed it is argued that starting from theory is likely to blinker the linguist and Tognini Bonelli (2001) has proposed an acronym for an independent discipline within linguistics CDL, or corpus driven linguistics. Tucker (2005), on the other hand, presents a case for the incorporation of corpus findings within existing linguistic theory, in this case SFL. Next we have the problem of corpus dimension, the question of size. Within mainstream CL, the position seems rather clear - the larger the corpus the better. Given some of the aims of CL, for example lexicography based on a huge quantity of authentic data, or delicate grammatical description deriving from the observation of large corpora, this position is fully justified. A small corpus simply does not give us enough lexemes or enough instances of each to conduct sophisticated lexicographical or grammatical research. However, as I shall claim later, for the discourse analyst the role of small specialised corpora is fundamental. The size question also implies a claim for representativity the more tokens a corpus contains, the more likely it is to represent a language. However, the claim may be too strong. Can 300 million words be said to be representative of a population or universe whose size nobody has been able to quantify? The definition of the dynamic, extremely varied, potentially infinite and continuously expanding population' of a language is in itself rather problematic. Moreover, to my knowledge no general corpus dedicates a sufficiently large collection of spoken language. The British National Corpus, made up of 100 million running words, contains some 4.5 million running words of unscripted conversation. Collecting this data, it must be admitted, is no mean feat, but it was drawn from recordings made by just 125 informants and makes up less than 5% of the whole corpus. The third problem that discourse analysts may have with corpus linguistics concerns the nature of quantitative studies and the

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potential loss of the textual dimension of language that it necessarily involves. Within discourse analysis, it is taken for granted that entire texts and not isolated examples should be studied; it is taken for granted that meanings are made over long stretches of text and across texts, and that to understand a text we need to know something about the context of situation, the social positioning of speakers, etc. In a very large corpus this aspect of textual analysis is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. The language we find in a concordance line is no longer discourse, it is a decontextualized abstraction. Moreover, work with small corpora has shown that meanings that seem to be apparently clear in a concordance line often turn out to be very different when we see the line situated in its full context. When Sinclair argues that corpus data should be studied from the bottom up, he is making a claim for a qualitative study of language. However, as he concedes, there is a price to pay for dealing with large quantities: a qualitative study of language implies a considerable amount of insight into the texts themselves and the conditions of their creation, the intertextual network that they fall into. This is very difficult to achieve with large corpora. 2.5. Small corpus discourse analysis In concluding this section, what I shall argue is that the analysis of political language can be enhanced by adopting some of the tools and procedures of CL in what might be called small corpus discourse analysis, or corpus-assisted discourse studies ( Partington, Morley and Haarman eds., 2003) and while this may not satisfy mainstream corpus linguists, it could provide a healthy corrective to the tendency in discourse analysis (of any theoretical persuasion) to focus on relatively small amounts of text. As the first section of this paper should have demonstrated, there is an enormous quantity of discourse that can reasonably be considered as falling in the broad macro-category of political language and a great deal of it is readily available. Specialized corpora can be constructed in order to examine say, a particular kind of discourse (for example parliamentary language), a particular period of time (such as the discourse of US Presidents since World War II), a particular political issue (say, the war in Iraq) as it is discussed in various arenas. Such corpora serve a twin function: they may serve to provide an entry point into the textual dimension of the corpora and they may also serve to verify the significance of the findings. The analyst may shift backwards and forward between the data provided by concordance findings and the texts themselves, and small corpora may be compared with large corpora in order to identify characterising traits. This is the spirit of the national research project current being conducted by the University of Siena, the University of Bologna, the University of Bologna at Forl, and the LUISS of Rome (Corpora and Discourse: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of political and media discourse on the conflict in Iraq in 2003) which has as its starting point the construction of indexed and annotated corpora of discourse in the House of Commons and the House of representatives, of White House press briefings, of the Hutton inquiry, of British and US newspapers and of British, US and Italian television news broadcasts. References Aijmer, K. and Alternberg, B. (eds.) 1991. English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik . London: Longman. Aston, G. (ed.) 2001. Learning with Corpora . Bologna: CLUEB Baker M. Francis, G. and Tognini Bonelli, E. (eds.) 1993. Text and Technology: in Honour of John Sinclair . Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bayley, P. (ed.) 2004. 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