Abstract
European Identity: What the Media Say investigates the linguistic representation of Europe in the news media of four European Union (EU) countries, namely France, Italy, Poland and the UK. The research is based on a corpus of 150,000 million words of news texts collected from four newspapers and two television news broadcasts in each country over two periods in 2007 and 2009. This volume represents one aspect of the EU-financed research project entitled IntUne, with three other dimensions of the project focusing respectively on the opinions of mass public, political elites and experts.
This volume combines the efforts of corpus linguists and discourse analysts in tackling a variety of sociological and political issues related to Europe. The introductory Chapter 1 by the volume editors outlines the social background and methodological framework of the research, introducing the IntUne corpus with relevant software and procedures explained. The brief overview of the ensuing chapters demonstrates that the eight corpus-based studies reported in the book are organized around two themes: Chapters 2–5 that constitute Part I deal with the representation of European nations and institutions, while Chapters 6–9 that fall into Part II cover issues related to European people and citizens. Six of the eight chapters (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8) examine print newspapers, while the other two (Chapters 4 and 9) focus on television news.
Chapter 2 by Nathalie Dugalès and Gordon Tucker shows how EU institutions are represented in the national press of France and the UK. It is found that within the EU institutional triangle the European Commission is by far the most frequently mentioned in press coverage as compared with the European Parliament and the European Council. Furthermore, the corpus-based agency analysis also supports the view that the European Commission is the predominant agent which performs the executive role in EU governance as represented in the media press of both countries. Chapter 3 by Geoffrey Williams, Roberta Piazza and Delphine Giuliani explores the representations of the word ‘Europe’ in the English, French and Italian press. A lexicographical prototype model is built to capture the meanings of different ‘Europes’. It is shown that the newspapers of the three countries tend to present a vague Europe without specifying whether they are referred to as a broad geographical area or the European Union. Chapter 4 by Joanna Thornborrow, Louann Haarman and Alison Duguid looks into the discursive construction of European identities in television news in France, Italy and the UK. Through the linguistic, discursive and visual analyses of televised news, the pervasive reference to a united European identity is found in French TV news, while the political and institutional roles of Europe are found to be emphasized in Italian TV news. In British TV news, Europe is represented in a sceptical and distancing way. Focusing on European identity again, but from a diachronic perspective, Chapter 5 by Anna Marchi and Alan Partington examines how European historical identity is discursively constructed in the Italian and UK press. It argues that the idea of a European historical identity is rarely explicitly described and is projected in different ways in the two corpora. The Italian press focuses more on recent post-World War II European history as well as the future for Europe, while the UK press is concerned with a more widespread and general European history, including colonial activities and events during World War II.
After the discussion on European nations and institutions in Part I, Part II of the volume explores the key concept of citizenship in the IntUne project. As demonstrated in Chapter 6 by Paul Bayley, Delphine Giuliani and Vanessa Serret, cittadino is far more frequent in the Italian press than citoyen in the French corpus and citizen in the British corpus. The collocation profiles of the three lexemes and the semantic associations of citizenship, citoyenneté and cittadinanza are also examined to explain the co-selection of citizens and citizenship within a wider context and co-text. Chapter 7 by John Morley and Charlotte Taylor is concerned with representations of non-EU immigrants in the UK and Italian press. The negative representation of immigrants is found in the Italian corpus but not in the UK data, which does not confirm previous corpus-based studies on immigration in the UK (e.g. Baker et al., 2008). As pointed out by the authors, the difference could be due to the absence of tabloids and the inclusion of complete editions of whole newspapers in the IntUne corpus. Chapter 8 by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Jerzy Tomaszczyk focuses on integration processes and identity in the Polish press. It uncovers two main strands of opinions concerning Europe in the Polish media: one takes integration for granted, while the other is somewhat ambivalent. While eager to enjoy the benefits, the latter view deplores the possible loss of sovereignty.
Based on a comparative quantitative analysis of televised news in the French, Italian, Polish and UK corpora, Chapter 9 by Marco Venuti, Silvia de Candia, Mikołaj Deckert and Christophe Ropers investigates the use of language by legitimated persons and vox populi on issues about Europe. Drawing upon the appraisal system (Martin and White, 2005), it also examines the attribution and intensifiers used to boost attitudinal meanings in the multilingual data. Chapter 10 by John Morley, the coordinator of the media research group for the IntUne project, concludes the entire volume by summarizing some of the advantages and problems of corpus linguistics with reference to the preceding chapters.
Overall, this volume reveals to us the possibility and necessity of comparative studies on the media representation of Europe based on large amounts of multilingual data from a variety of perspectives. It will be of tremendous value to those who are working in the fields of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and will also be a great asset to a wider audience interested in sociological and political issues on Europe.