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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. 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
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