Georgia's Path to Europe: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Presidential and Prime-Ministerial Speeches
Keywords:
EU accession, corpus linguistics, political discourse, discourse analysis, CADS
Abstract
Social and political phenomena come into existence through a discursive dimension. The linguistic construction of reality is pervasive and plays a predetermining role in shaping social and political environment. The present study applies the framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to explore how Georgia’s two political figures – former President Salome Zourabichvili and former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili – discursively represent Georgia’s path toward European Union accession. The research examines 97 speeches (69 presidential/28 prime-ministerial) delivered between March 2022 and December 2023, totaling 64,321 and 29,559 tokens, respectively. Quantitative analyses were conducted using #LancsBox ® to identify keyword frequencies, collocates, and statistically significant differences, while Wmatrix5 ® was employed for semantic-domain and stance-related analysis. The findings reveal that both politicians tend to frame Georgia’s European trajectory through recurring metaphors of journey and family, yet their linguistic emphases diverge: Salome Zourabichvili’s discourse stresses European values, moral obligation, and collective unity, whereas the Prime Minister foregrounds national sovereignty, economic progress, and pragmatic governance. Despite differing communicative styles, both leaders converge in portraying EU integration as Georgia’s shared national destiny.
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References
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32. Shenhav, S. R. (2006). Political narratives and political reality. International Political Science Review, 27(3), 245–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20445054
33. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
34. Tomczak-Boczko, J., Gołębiowska, K., & Górny, M. (2023). Who is a ‘true refugee’? Polish political discourse in 2021–2022. Discourse Studies, 25(6), 799-822.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445623118748
35. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh University Press.
36. Zawadzka-Paluektau, N. (2023). Ukrainian refugees in Polish press. Discourse & Communication, 17(1), 96-111.
https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813221111636
2. Baker, P. (2009). The BE06 Corpus of British English and recent language change. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(3), 312–337. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.14.3.02bak
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), 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), 279–295.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720955036.
10. Chindamo, M., Allwood, J., & Ahlsén, E. (2012). Some suggestions for the study of stance in communication. In 2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 International Conference on Social Computing (pp. 617–622). IEEE. https://doi.org/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. Glaas, S. L. (2022). A corpus-assisted discourse study of political and media discourse in the lead up to the Brexit referendum (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Birmingham.
14. Guliashvili, N. (2024). "Corpus 1 - Salome Zourabichvili's speeches & corpus 2 - Irakli Garibashvili's speeches",
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Q2WQMD, Harvard Dataverse, V1
15. Hayes, N., & Poole, R. (2022). A diachronic corpus-assisted semantic domain analysis of U.S. presidential debates. Corpora, 17(3), 449–469.https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2022.0266
16. Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (2000). Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Routledge.
17. Kolb, I. (2018). Framing the European Union: Political discourse in the context of EU enlargement. Palgrave Macmillan.
18. Kryvenko, A. (2025). Is it ‘the Ukraine crisis’ or a war in Europe? Multiple frames of Russia’s aggression in parliamentary discourse from a comparative MD-CADS perspective. Language, Discourse & Society, 13(1(25)), 79–106. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15763141
19. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20. Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
21. 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
22. Mautner, G. (2019). A research note on corpora and discourse: Points to ponder in research design. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 2, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.18573/jcads.32
23. Nelson, M. B. (2016). The political discourse of the European Parliament: A corpus-assisted comparative study. John Benjamins.
24. Nikisianis, N., Siomos, T., Dimitroulia, T., Stavrakakis, Y., & Markou, G. (2019). Inquiries into relational structures of power. In Discourse, culture and organization (pp. 267–295). Palgrave Macmillan.
25. Palmer, F. R. (2001). Modality and the English modals (2nd ed.). Longman
26. 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
27. Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). John Benjamins.
28. Politico. (2023, October 18). Georgian parliament fails to impeach president over unsanctioned EU visits. Politico.
https://www.politico.eu/article/georgia-parliament-fail-impeach-president-salome-zourabichvili-unsanctioned-eu-visits
29. Rayson, P., Archer, D., & Wilson, A. (2002). Introduction to the USAS category system.
30. Rayson, P., & Garside, R. (2000). Comparing corpora using frequency profiling. In The Workshop on Comparing Corpora (pp. 1–6). Association for Computational Linguistics.
31. Richardson, J. E. (2006). Analysing newspapers: An approach from critical discourse analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.
32. Shenhav, S. R. (2006). Political narratives and political reality. International Political Science Review, 27(3), 245–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20445054
33. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
34. Tomczak-Boczko, J., Gołębiowska, K., & Górny, M. (2023). Who is a ‘true refugee’? Polish political discourse in 2021–2022. Discourse Studies, 25(6), 799-822.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445623118748
35. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh University Press.
36. Zawadzka-Paluektau, N. (2023). Ukrainian refugees in Polish press. Discourse & Communication, 17(1), 96-111.
https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813221111636
Published
2025-11-30
How to Cite
Guliashvili, N. (2025). Georgia’s Path to Europe: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Presidential and Prime-Ministerial Speeches. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 21(32), 86. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2025.v21n32p86
Section
ESJ Humanities
Copyright (c) 2025 Nino Guliashvili
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
