Who are the people? As a semantically underspecified noun, the lexeme “people” and related terms such as “citizen(s)” or “constituent(s)” lead to various representations and are filled with competing meanings. By undertaking a cross-linguistic analysis of the semantic value of nouns denoting human referents in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this paper investigates how the “people” (people in English, Volk in German, peuple in French) and related linguistic expressions (notably Mensch, Bürger, citoyen) are discursively staged in national parliamentary debates on Europe.
The people represent the entity Members of Parliament (MPs) speak to, about, and on behalf of. In political sciences, mentioning the people immediately raises concerns about a populist message or stance. To which extent, then, does the reference to “the people” or “a people” pertain to a populist stance?
Based on an annotated corpus of forty-four national parliamentary debates between 1998 and 2015, this paper uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to assess how the “people” are referred to across the political spectrum in the British House of Commons, the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée nationale. By taking into account a large amount of speakers across different times and cultures, the analysis shows that the reference to “the people” – partly in opposition to “a people” – is a basic component of political discourse, thus indicating that the mere mention of the “people” cannot be regarded as a feature of populist rhetoric.
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Cited by six other publications
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2020. Metonymy and the conceptualisation of nation in political discourse. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 8:1 ► pp. 181 ff.
Taylor, Charlotte & Dario del Fante*
2020. Comparing across languages in corpus and discourse analysis: some issues and approaches. Meta 65:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Truan, Naomi
2019. Talking about, for, and to the People: Populism and Representation in Parliamentary Debates on Europe. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67:3 ► pp. 307 ff.
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