ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors focus on four genres of political discourse: the political speech, parliamentary debates, the governmental press conference and the political news report. A corpus of parliamentary debates makes it possible to analyze the political discourse of specific political parties or groups. A corpus of political news reports makes it possible to analyze political discourse as represented in the media. The chapter provides four examples of useful corpus analysis techniques in the context of political discourse: analyzing 'how X is talked about', making corpus comparisons, analyzing sets of linguistic features marking a particular style, and analyzing keywords. The explicit reference to what other speakers/writers have said/written is a prominent feature of many types of political discourse, such as parliamentary debates and political news reports. The chapter offers some reflections on possible future developments in corpus analysis of political discourse, considering new genres to study, new types of corpora to compile, and new topics to cover.
