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Greece in Crisis: Combining critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives
Edited by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 70] 2017
► pp. 45–82

Chapter 2
The dream that turned into a nightmare

Addressing the Greek voters long and right before the crisis

This study aims at shedding light on the evolution of the pre-electoral discourse of two of the most prominent politicians of the 2000s, centre right-wing Kostas Karamanlis and social-democrat George Papandreou and, in particular, on the transformation of their lexical choices across three pre-crisis national election campaigns (2004, 2007 and 2009). Furthermore, it critically presents lexical choices with positive and negative prosody for the voting audience and examines how they function as rhetorical tools for persuading and manipulating the addressees (traditional, potential and swing voters) in the light of the broader socio-political context.

Keywords: campaign talk, persuasion, political discourse, pre-electoral discourse, rhetorical devices
Article outline
  • 1.Campaign talk as a subgenre of political discourse
  • 2.The context of situation
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1A positive prosody word: όραμα ‘vision’
      • 4.1.1Karamanlis’ speeches
      • 4.1.2Papandreou’s speeches
    • 4.2Other positive prosody words
      • 4.2.1όνειρο ‘dream’
      • 4.2.2νέα ‘new’
      • 4.2.3ανάπτυξη ‘development’, μέλλον ‘future’, προοπτική ‘prospects’
      • 4.2.4ελπίδα ‘hope’, αισιοδοξίa ‘optimism’, εμπιστοσύνη ‘trust’, σιγουριά ‘certainty’
    • 4.3Negative prosody words
      • 4.3.1κρίση ‘crisis’
      • 4.3.2χρέος ‘debt’, πρόβλημα ‘problem’, μέτρα ‘measures’
    • 4.4A dual prosody word: αλήθεια ‘truth’
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.70.02kos
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