Towards a (Dis)Integrated Europe: The Constructs of ‘Europe’ and ‘Troika’ Versus ‘Portugal’ and ‘The Portuguese’ in a Corpus of Portuguese Opinion Articles

Abstract

Based on theoretical principles of Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis/Discourse Studies, the present work analysed a corpus of opinion articles, published in Portuguese newspapers and news magazines from December 2011 to March 2013, in order to foreground the dominant social representations of ‘Troika’, ‘The Portuguese Government’ and ‘The Portuguese’ in these discourses.

A systematic analysis of discourse structures in the corpus was developed in order to examine their potential in the expression of ideological content. Concepts such as Semantic/Thematic Roles, Force Dynamics and Symmetry were combined with analytic models from Discourse Studies to illustrate the Ideological Discourse Representations and the Positions in the Discourse Space (DS) of Social Actors. The linguistic hypotheses and generalisations were generated bottom up, departing from the regular patterns observable in the empirical data and extracting conclusions from them. The interpretative practice was, therefore, made in adherence to corpus evidence.

This integrated analysis has shown that the reconstruction of ‘Portugal’ and ‘the Portuguese’ vis-a-vis ‘Europe’, represented by ‘Troika’, corresponds to opponent positioning that polarise these entities, foregrounding the distance and the conflict between them and contributing to a vision of a disintegrated Europe. In fact, the reality depicted in the opinion articles analysed was a polarised reality, in the sense that these articles repeatedly used linguistic constructions that placed (through several rhetoric devices that will be analysed) Europe and Troika on one ‘pole’ and ‘The Portuguese’ on the other ‘pole’, expressing, thus, the movement of the actors to polar opposites.

On the theoretical level, this chapter proposes an integrated approach towards opinion discourse in the press, combining Critical Discourse analytic and DS Theory perspectives with the insights from Socio-Cognitive approach by Van Dijk and aspects of Cognitive Linguistics by Talmy.

Citation

Pinto, A. (2017), "Towards a (Dis)Integrated Europe: The Constructs of ‘Europe’ and ‘Troika’ Versus ‘Portugal’ and ‘The Portuguese’ in a Corpus of Portuguese Opinion Articles", Karner, C. and Kopytowska, M. (Ed.) National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 187-209. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78714-513-920171009