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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. 83–110

Chapter 3
“Today I know, we know, that these sacrifices are heavy, but necessary”

Constructing governmental knowledge on Greece’s sovereign debt crisis

This study attempts an analysis of political discourse during the current Greek debt crisis at the beginning of 2010, when the size of the debt became apparent. It draws upon both the critical discourse analysis tradition and corpus linguistics in order to examine the relationship between discourse and group “knowledge” in speeches of the then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, and the Minister of Finance, George Papakonstantinou. It is argued that political knowledge on the crisis is a matter of “truth” between contesting political groups. The Greek government talked and wrote about the crisis so as to establish their “truth”, by transforming their beliefs and interpretations on how the crisis can be converted into knowledge.
Keywords: context, evidentiality, knowledge, political discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality in discourse
    • 2.1From grammar and pragmatics to discourse
    • 2.2Evidentiality in political discourse
  • 3.The political context of the study: The IMF in the EU
  • 4.Data and methodology
  • 5.Data analysis
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.70.03pol
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Cited by (2)

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Kitis, E. Dimitris & Dimitris Serafis
2020. Legitimizing austerity in crisis-hit Greece. Journal of Language and Politics 19:4 ► pp. 691 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
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