Georgia's Path to Europe - A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Speeches by President Salome Zourabichvili and Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili
Abstract
Social and political phenomena come into existence through a discursive dimension. The linguistic construction of reality is pervasive as well as predetermining social and political environment. The present paper undertakes a linguistic scrutiny of Georgia’s endeavor to become a member state of the European Union. Joining the EU (accession) exists linguistically in a discursive dimension before its political establishment. The accession officially started on March 3, 2022. Therefore, President Salome Zourabichvili’s and former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili’s speeches/addresses stored at the official websites represent the discursive formation of Georgia’s path to the European Union. This article seeks to study the perceptions of the EU accession through 97 speeches delivered by the president and the prime minister of Georgia with the help of corpus linguistics software tools #LancsBox® and Wmatrix5® alongside corpus linguistics (CL) and discourse analysis (DA), which is referred to as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Moreover, the application of CADS to Georgian political discourse analysis is a novel endeavor itself. The paper scrutinizes lexical frequencies (a quantitative aspect) as well as identifying semantic/notional domains (a qualitative aspect) that the political figures most frequently resort to. The paper attempts to shed light on the discursive choices the politicians make regarding the European path, which is essential in the current political unrest and polarization. Based on Keyword and T-score analysis of essential collocates along with stance-taking peculiarities, the findings show that the speakers convey their intent to the listeners through their own idiolects.
Downloads
Metrics
References
2. Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum. doi:10.5040/9781350933996
3. Baker, P. (2010). Corpus Methods in Linguistics: A Practical Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
4. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1999). Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge University Press.
5. Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, T. (2020). #LancsBox 5.x and 6.x [software]. Available at: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox.
6. Brezina, V., Timperley, M., & McEnery, T. (2018). #LancsBox 4.x [software]. Available at: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox.
7. Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015). Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(2), pp. 139-173.
8. Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Brown, K., and A. Mondon. (2021). “Populism, the Media, and the Mainstreaming of the far Right: The Guardian’s Coverage of Populism as a Case study.” Politics 41 (3), pp. 279–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720955036.
10. Chindamo, M., Allwood, J., and Ahlsén, E. (2012). "Some Suggestions for the Study of Stance in Communication," 2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 International Conference on Social Computing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 617- 622, doi: 10.1109/SocialCom-PASSAT.2012.89.
11. Firth J. R. (1957). Papers in linguistics 1934-1951. Oxford University Press.
12. Fitzgerald, J. (2014). Discourse and the Politics of Migration: A Corpus-Assisted Study of British Political Rhetoric. Routledge.
13. Anonymous, Anonymous, 2024, "Corpus 1 - Salome Zourabichvili's Speeches & Corpus 2 - Irakli Garibashvili's Speeches", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Q2WQMD, Harvard Dataverse, V1
14. Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (2000). Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Routledge.
15. Kolb, I. (2018). Framing the European Union: Political Discourse in the Context of EU Enlargement. Palgrave Macmillan.
16. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (2003)Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
17. Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
18. Lischinsky, A. (2018). Overlooked text types: From fictional to real-world discourses. In C. Taylor, & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review (1st ed.), pp.60-82. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179346
19. Mautner, G. (2019). A research note on corpora and discourse: Points to ponder inresearch design. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 2, 1–13. DOI: 10.18573/jcads.32
20. Nelson, M. B. (2016). The Political Discourse of the European Parliament: A Corpus-Assisted Comparative Study. John Benjamins.
21. Nikisianis, N., Siomos, T., Dimitroulia, T., Stavrakakis, Y., & Markou, G. (2019) In Discourse, Culture and Organization: Inquiries into Relational Structures of Power, pp.267–295. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
22. Palmer, F. R. (2001). Modality and the English Modals (2nd ed.). Longman
23. Partington, A., & Marchi, A. (2015). Using corpora in discourse analysis. In D. Biber, & A. Marchi (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics, pp.216-234. Cambridge: CUP
24. Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
25. Politico. (2023). “Georgian parliament fails to impeach president over unsanctioned EU visits.” October 18.
https://www.politico.eu/article/georgia-parliament-fail-impeach-president-salome-zourabichvili-unsanctioned-eu-visits/#:~:text=Georgia's%20ruling%20party%20failed%20in,the%20government%20to %20do%20so.
26. Rayson, P., Archer, D., and Wilson, A. (2002). Introduction to the USAS category system.
27. Rayson, P., and Garside, R. (2000). “Comparing Corpora using Frequency Profiling.” In The Workshop on Comparing Corpora, pp. 1–6, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
28. Richardson, J. E. (2006). Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan
29. Shenhav, S. R. (2006). Political Narratives and Political Reality. International Political Science Review /Revue Internationale de Science Politique, 27(3), 245–262.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20445054
30. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
31. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh University Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nino Guliashvili
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
