Cover not available
Part of
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. 263–290

Chapter 8
“Crisis is written all over me”

Greek songs in times of crisis

This paper aims at analyzing a corpus of Greek songs written during the contemporary Greek socio-economic crisis, along with a corpus of internet comments on these songs, as carriers of textual, socio-political and ideological information. Specifically, the combination of quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative critical discourse analysis uncovers the main themes of the songs, namely the negative representation of the crisis, its main causes and consequences, and potential ways of recovery. This allows us to reconstruct personal, collective and national identities shaped as a significant social and ideological phenomenon. Finally, recurrent motifs emerging from our corpora are found to function as argumentative points about the economic, social and psychological burden and risk, the politicians’ responsibility, and the formulation of a solution worthy of the Greek history and civilization.
Keywords: blaming, identity, economic crisis, song lyrics, topoi
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data
  • 3.Data analysis
    • 3.1Analysing the song corpus (C1)
      • 3.1.1Main themes
      • 3.1.2Frequent words and collocations
      • 3.1.3Macro-topics
      • 3.1.4Discourse strategies
    • 3.2Analysing the corpus of comments (C2)
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.70.08sta
References (21)
References
Angouri, Jo, and Ruth Wodak. 2014. “‘They Became Big in the Shadow of the Crisis’: The Greek Success Story and the Rise of the Far Right.” Discourse and Society 25 (4): 540–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arfiyantama, Riko. 2012. “Appraisals and Critical Discourse Analysis in “We will not go down” Song Lyric.” Master’s paper. Available at: [URL]
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 19 (3): 273–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2012. “Acceptable Bias? Using Corpus Linguistics Methods with Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (3): 247–256. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach”. Discourse Studies 7 (4/5): 585–614. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Cillia, Rudolf, Martin Reisigl, and Ruth Wodak. 1999. “The Discursive Construction of National Identities.” Discourse and Society 10 (2): 149–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Rycker, Antoon, and Zuraidah Mohd Don (eds). 2013. Discourse and Crisis: Critical Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Groom, Nicholas. 2010. “Closed-class Keywords and Corpus–driven Discourse Analysis.” In Keyness in Texts, ed. by Marina Bondi, and Mike Scott, 59–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “Multiple Identities, Migration and Belonging: “Voices of Migrants”.” In Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities, ed. by Carmen Caldas-Coulthard, and Rick Iedema, 95–120. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marchi, Anna, and Charlotte Taylor. 2009. “If on a Winter’s Night Two Researchers… A Challenge to Assumptions of Soundness of Interpretation.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 3 (1): 1–20.Google Scholar
Mautner, Gerlinde. 2009. “Corpora and Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Paul Baker, 32–46. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin. 2014. “Argumentation Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach.” In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by Christopher Hart, and Piotr Cap, 67–97. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Rodriguez-Rodriguez, Aixa L. 1995. Music as a Form of Resistance: A Critical Analysis of the Puerto Rican New Song Movement’s Oppositional Discourse. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Setyono, Wahyuni S. 2013. “Critical Discourse Analysis on the Javanese Song Lyric ‘Ilir – Ilir’.” Arab World English Journal 1: 78–91.Google Scholar
Thompson, Cathy. 2002. “A Critical Discourse Analysis of World Music as the ‘Other’ in Education.” Research Studies in Music Education 19 (1): 14–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun. 2013. “Prologue.” In Discourses on Immigration in Times of Economic Crisis: A Critical Perspective, ed. by María Martínez Lirola, xvi–xviii. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Wing-shum, Ko. 2011. The Asian American Voice: A Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Approach to Rap Lyrics. Master’s Thesis, The University of Hong Kong. Available at: [URL].
Wodak, Ruth. 2006. “Blaming and Denying: Pragmatics.” Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2: 59–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Jo Angouri (eds). 2014. “From Grexit to Grecovery: Euro/crisis Discourses.” Special issue of Discourse and Society 25 (4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Žagar, Igor. 2010. “Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 6 (1): 3–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Burgos Mascarell, Andrea
2020. Dystopian fiction in English: a corpus-driven analysis of esteem in Veronica Roth’s "Divergent" trilogy. Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 48 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Vasilaki, Maria
2020. Dear friends, traitors and filthy dogs. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 8:2 ► pp. 288 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.