European Identity - What the Media Say

Provides comparative analyses of media language in four different nations Provides an interface between the analysis of language and the analysis of politics European Identity examines how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four EU countries, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. This multilingual comparable corpus, is composed of the entire contents of four newspapers published in each country, collected over two periods of three months, and the transcriptions of two TV news broadcasts, collected over two periods of two months. The theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The individual chapters investigate various aspects of European identity as it is discursively construed in the news media of the different countries, such as Europe as a political and geographic entity, European Union institutions, European history, citizenship, and immigration. Based on a bottom-up orientation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, all chapters but one use a comparative approach to the data, juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages. The fundamental aim of the volume is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis, and in particular the study of large amounts of linguistic data, can make a vital contribution to the analysis of political and social issues

1: Paul Bayley and Geoffrey Williams: Introduction: Exploring the IntUne Corpus Part I Representing Europe: Its Nations and its Institutions 2: Nathalie Dugalès and Gordon Tucker: Representations of Representation: European Institutions in the French and British Press 3: Geoffrey Williams, Roberta Piazza, and Delphine Giuliani: Nation and Supernation: A Tale of Three Europes 4: Joanna Thornborrow, Louann Haarman and Alison Duguid: Discourses of European Identity in British, Italian, and French TV News Part II Representing Europe: Its People and its Citizens 5: Anna Marchi and Alan Partington: Does 'Europe' Have a Common Historical Identity? 6: Paul Bayley, Delphine Giuliani, and Vanessa Serret: Semantic Constructions of Citizenship in the British, French, and Italian Press 7: John Morley and Charlotte Taylor: Us and Them: How Immigrants are Constructed in British and Italian Newspapers 8: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Jerzy Tomaszczyk: We in the Union: A Polish Perspective on Identity 9: Marco Venuti, Silvia de Candia, Mikolaj Deckert, and Christophe Ropers: Legitimated Persons and Vox Populi Attitudes Towards Europe in French, Italian, Polish, and UK TV news 10: John Morley: Conclusions: Speaking in Tongues about Europe References Index