Nora Gatiglia
The Horizon ARENAS project (2022-2027) focusses on extremist discourse of social and political discourse: in particular, the WP4 team is working on the extremization of political discourses as it is represented in the media. The way newspapers report, describe, and qualify political discourse can lead to polarization not only of content (the positions on the debated issues get radicalized), but of the speakers’ points of view (the possibility for dialogue becomes narrower and narrower).
In this lesson, the ARENAS corpus for French and Italian will be analysed, consisting of 1801 articles drawn from two left-wing newspapers (Libération for France, Repubblica for Italy) and two far-wing counterparts (Figaro for France, Il Giornale for Italy) from 2004 to 2024.
After a short presentation of the French Discourse Analysis theoretical and methodological framework which will guide the analysis, the notion of “extremization process” will be discussed.
Then, starting from a keyword search on the denominations of political parties, leaders, and the election dynamic (keywords: “elections”, “vote”), several occurrences of rhetorical and argumentative strategies such as metaphors and antitheses will be presented.
In conclusion, it will emerge a set of discursive strategies which are used in newspaper discourse which contribute to present the political arena as a perilous space where dialogue is often presented as undersirable or simply unconceivable.
These strategies show the configuration of an agonal discourse in which there is little room for negotiation of points of view between the different political forces in discourse. Instead, the confrontation of points of view is understood in highly dichotomous terms. This exacerbates the non-negotiable conflictual dimension to the detriment of the possibility of constructive dialogue leading to a common agreement.
Short bio
Nora Gattiglia is a researcher in French Linguistics at the university of Genoa, Italy. Her main research interest is political and militant discourse on social networks. She also studies interpreting and mediation with migrant users in public settings. She collaborates at the Horizon project AREANS – Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives and she has authored three books, “Comunicazione multilinguistica in ambito sanitaire” (with Mara Morelli, 2022), “Dialogo e interpretazione dialogica” (2023) and “Violences patriarcales et discours féministes socionumériques : Une étude de cas du compte Instagram Collages Féminicides Paris” (in press).