Abstract
The purpose of this study is to review some discursive strategies used to (de)territorialize the European public sphere by the newly elected President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek. A corpus of his inaugural speeches (over 7,000 words) is examined in order to identify salient pragma-linguistic devices, such as for example high-frequency references, linguistic markers of identities, values and interests, as well as metaphors and argumentative schemata. These are presumed to have been used by Buzek to territorialize the presidential office: to position himself as its leader, to establish his credibility, to become its agenda-setter. Additionally, the analysis focuses on the way Buzek constructs Europe and the EU rhetorically for the purposes of political self-legitimization. In this respect, Europe is projected as a fairly deteritorrialized space: a common, even homogenous, public sphere that depends on specific European institutions for administration.
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Notes
- 1.
Numbers refer to speech number in the corpus (as listed in Sect. 13.4): paragraph number.
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Molek-Kozakowska, K. (2011). Territorialization in Political Discourse: A Pragma-Linguistic Study of Jerzy Buzek’s Inaugural Speeches. In: Pawlak, M., Bielak, J. (eds) New Perspectives in Language, Discourse and Translation Studies. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20083-0_13
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