Speaking Of Europe: Approaches To Complexity In European Political Discourse (discourse Approaches To Politics, Society And Culture)

Recent Years Have Witnessed The European Union Struggling To Keep Europe Together In Increasingly Difficult Economic And Political Circumstances. Communication Within And About European Institutions Has Become More Challenging In This Perplexing Political Environment, Demonstrating The Complex Nature Of Eu Political Discourse. In Order To Highlight These Complexities, The Contributors To This Volume Present Different Theoretical And Methodological Approaches To The Analysis Of Diverse Facets Of Eu Discourse, Realized Through A Variety Of Linguistic And Discursive Phenomena. The Approaches Represent Rhetorical Theory, Metaphor And Conceptual Theory, Cognitive And Corpus Linguistics, Lexical Statistics, Polyphony, Logical Semantics, Pragmatic And Philosophical Perspectives. Through This Multitude Of Perspectives The Book Complements Existing Approaches And Suggests New Approaches In The Study Of Political Discourse--provided By Publisher. Edited By Kjersti Fløttum, University Of Bergen. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. In this chapter we take issue with the widespread view that overinterpretations and speculations are signs of weak research and tendentious treatment of data. This view is damaging to the study of political discourse as it encourages the reproduction of common sense and normalcy. In this chapter we therefore argue for the necessity of speculative readings and overinterpretations in studies of political discourse. Extreme and speculative readings of political language - readings that do too much to the data and that read too much into the texts - are crucial for the fine-grained a Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. This volume presents different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena.