Abstract
Greek crisis is both a social-economic and discursive phenomenon: the social-economic crisis has triggered a variety of discourses concerning its causes, management and consequences, which, in turn and almost at the same time, constitute the crisis. The volume brings together studies examining discourses produced by various Greek social actors ranging from elite to non-elite. All contributions seek to combine critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL) perspectives to offer a better understanding of the Greek crisis as both social-economic and discursive. The volume addresses the necessity of adopting an insiders’ view to examine how Greeks themselves represent the crisis, and also fulfills the methodological need of combining CDA and CL to go beyond the shortcomings of content analysis.
The volume consists of three main sections: Greek crisis in the making; Debating the Greek crisis; Crisis, neo-nationalism and the extreme Right. Section I focuses on discourses of prominent Greek politicians and administrators before the crisis. Through a close examination of data, all papers in this section seek to uncover how political discourse was manipulated before the crisis. Kostopoulou’s study of the evolution of the pre-election discourse of two prominent politicians in the pre-crisis national campaigns of 2004, 2007 and 2009 shows how collocates of words pertaining to crucial concept form narratives and act as manipulating devices. Her comparison of collocates of words with positive and negative prosody shows that varied lexical choices can be used as rhetorical devices. With an emphasis on evidential expressions and cognitive factive verbs, Polymeneas’ study of political speeches during the Greek debt crisis finds that political knowledge is a truth constructed discursively by transforming politicians’ beliefs and arguments into group knowledge. Both these studies exemplify how to explore the link between language and manipulating power behind it, as well as between group knowledge and political discourse, and show how evidential expressions pertaining to the construction of group knowledge can be studied by combining CL and van Dijk’s social cognitive model.
Section II is concerned with debates and reactions during the crisis, ranging from official social media to resistance speech. The originality lies in their combination of transitivity analysis, stance-taking, identity and frequency lists, keywords and concordances to explore the relationship between language structure and Greek society during the crisis. For instance, Lykou and Mitsikoupoulou’s study of discursive representation of Greece and Europe in the Greek press during different phases shows that the construction of the crisis is related to political ideology; Goutsos and Polymeneas’s contrast of self-constructed and ascribed identity of the Greek protesters shows the intervention of media’s power in representing others; Stamatia Koutsoulelou’s study of song lyrics shows an Us-Them divide between Greek people as the in group pole and corrupt politicians as the out-group.
Section III concerns discourses related to the growth of the far right in Greece and Cyprus. Three studies deal with discourses related to Golden Dawn by looking at keywords, their extended context lexical clusters and semantic relations. Mouka and Saridakis focus on the representation of this far-right movement in newspapers while Saridakis examines self-representation in its own website; Fragaki studies responses to the murder of Pavlos Fyssas by a Golden Dawn member; finally, Constantinou explores the construction of nationhood in videos, website, avatars and pseudonyms by analyzing salient semantic fields and frequent items related to Us and Them.
This organisation in three parts makes the volume coherent in content while abundant in its variety of data, with another uniting thread being the synergy of CL and CDA through the whole book – bar one individual paper focusing on the discursive features of Facebook communication which is not so closely linked to CDA in terms of power critique. Three contributions stand out. First, the combination of methodological CL and CDA to address weaknesses in each approach. The compositionality and quantitative orientation of CL cancel out the subjectivity in CDA by focusing on frequent lexical choice, keywords, collocation etc. on the one hand; on the other hand, the interpretive power of CDA complements the often largely decontextualised quantification of language data by focusing on argumentation structure, ideology, power relations, etc. In this sense, this volume can serve as a textbook for those who want to adopt a synergy of CL and CDA in their discourse studies. Second, this volume provides a repertoire of interfaces like mental model, stance-taking, evidentiality, identity and so on that help explore the relationship between linguistic structure and society. The analytic route from language structures to those interfaces and finally to society is significant in exploring the relationship between discourse and society. Third, the insider’s view adopted in this volume not only enriches the current literature in terms of how Greeks themselves perceive and construct the phenomenon under analysis, but also highlights the contribution of CDA in understanding Greek crisis by allowing ‘for the engagement of the analyst as one of the agents intimately connected to the phenomenon investigated’ (p. 461). This volume is a must-read for those who are interested either in gaining a deep understanding of Greek crisis, or in exploring discourse as a constitutive part of society.