ABSTRACT
Political discourse has a long-standing tradition as an object of study across many disciplines, including rhetoric, linguistics and political science. However, this is not to say that it is a well-defined entity. After brief reflection, it quickly becomes apparent that ‘political discourse’ is a vague term that can be defined rather narrowly or quite broadly. Essentially, our definition of political discourse boils down to how we define ‘political’. This stands in contrast to, for example, legal discourse, where ‘legal’ is a much more restricted concept than ‘political’. The reader may wish to look at how ‘political’ collocates in a large standard corpus, such as the British National Corpus, to learn more about its various meanings.
