Critical discourse analysis e corpus linguistics : un'analisi dei discorsi sull'eventualità del conflitto iracheno nella stampa britannica e italiana

This thesis explores the possibility of combining the qualitative approach of Critical Discourse Analysis with the mainly quantitative methodology of Corpus Linguistics in order to propose an integrated model of discourse analysis which benefits both from the interest of the former for the modalities through which language represents and constructs reality and from the latter’s concern for a rigorous description of language, closely bound to the data. Starting from a model proposed by van Dijk (2001), which distinguishes three levels of text analysis (topics, local meanings and subtle formal structures), particular attention is dedicated to the third level that includes elements of discourse construction such as syntactic structures and argumentative schemes. For this reason some aspects of argumentation theory were also integrated into the model. The analysis are carried out on ad hoc-built corpus of newspaper articles which deal with the issue of the war on Iraq, covering the lapse of time which passed between Bush’s “axis-of-evil” speech (January 2002) and the beginning of the war (March 2003). During this time words occupied the centre of the stage, in the attempt to make a case for war, and this offered a particularly interesting occasion for discourse analysis.