What is it about?
This book represents the outcome of research undertaken by the Eurling group, working 2005-2013 on linguistic and contextual questions related to political discourse in the European Union (EU).
Why is it important?
The present book has a clear interdisciplinary focus, combining perspectives from linguistics (and from different languages), history, political science, rhetoric and media science. The aim is to present and discuss how different methodologies may contribute to an improved understanding of political discourse, as it is realised within the EU setting. Thus, a series of different theoretical perspectives are incorporated, including orientations that are different from the most dominating anglo-american ones (for example French text statistics and Scandinavian polyphonic theory). In contrast to many studies on political discourse focusing on national (parliamentary) traditions, this book focuses on EU contexts – in particular the European Parliament (EP), and the empirical materials comprise EU political discourse produced by politicians from many different countries.