Doing politics or doing media? A linguistic approach to European parliamentary debate

The aim of this paper is to show that a linguistic method is necessary in order to understand whether political discourse is simply mediated or in fact mediatised (Strömbäck 2008). A large number of previous studies on political discourse have typically been carried out on televised programmes, which has lead to a number of generalisations, one of them being that the mediated sphere dominates the political sphere. I will argue that this is not the case for institutionalised political discourse. I will then proceed to illustrate how an analysis of verbal and paraverbal phenomena, such as terms of address, expressions referring to the addressee and abbreviations constitutes empirical evidence of the degree to which a particular political genre is mediatised.The study is based on C-Parleur. Corpus de discours du PARLement EURopéen which consists of all speeches during the debates delivered by the French and Swedish members of the European Parliament April 2006 – March 2008.