On the representativeness of political corpora in linguistic research

Abstract

There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse from various theoretical perspectives, including critical discourse analysis (see among many others Fairclough 1995, Fairclough & Fairclough 2012, Wodak 1989), lexicometric approaches (see for instance Arnold 2005, Mayaffre 2005, 2016, Mayaffre & Poudat 2013, Authors 2015a) or cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor (see among many other Charteris Black 2011, Musolff 2004, 2013, 2016 L'Hôte 2012). In these studies, political corpora collected from discourses by political elites (presidential debates, presidential addresses, public speeches,…) often appear to be overrepresented, leaving aside other forms of political discourses such as media discourse on political issues (see however Musolff 2004, 2013) or citizen discourse. As Bougher (2012 :149) posits for metaphor analysis : "while research on metaphors in political discourse has flourished in recent years, the focus on elite communication has left metaphor's wider capacity as a reasoning tool for citizens underexplored". This results in a certain lack of representativeness of the political domain in linguistic studies. Indeed, political discourse is not restricted to the political elites alone. Advocating a more global to political corpora, including corpora from different subdomains of the political spectrum, our talk is structured in two main parts. Firstly, we will propose a quantitative bibliographic analysis aiming at assessing what type of political corpora are frequently used in linguistic research. Secondly, on the basis of previous and current analyses of different kinds of political corpora (including citizen, media and elite discourse) we have been collecting in the framework of the ADAPOF-project (see for example Authors 2015b), we will illustrate how taking this variety of political genres into account, allows us to unravel phenomena such as conceptual alignment or metaphor circulation, related to specific political issues (in this case Belgian federalism).