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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 201–228

Chapter 8
The discursive construction of the people in European political discourse

Semantics and pragmatics of a contested concept in German, French, and British parliamentary debates

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.

Keywords: people, citizen, constituent, populism, political discourse, parliament, comparison, Germany, France, United Kingdom
Article outline
  • Introduction: Referring to the “people”: A cross-linguistic perspective
  • On the assumed relationship between people and populism
    • Populism: The impossible definition?
    • Minimum requirements to be a populist
    • Populists in the parliament: An oxymoron?
  • Semantic properties of the “people”
    • Shared semantic properties in English, German, and French
    • Whom do the lexemes people, Volk, and peuple refer to?
  • Frequency and distribution of people, Volk, and peuple in the three corpora
  • National specificities: German Volk and French peuple
    • Defending the use of the noun Volk in German contemporary political discourse: A strong stance
    • Representing le peuple in the context of the 2005 French referendum
  • Responding to people’s (assumed) expectations
    • Appealing to the people in English: Searching for French and German “equivalents”
    • Formulating questions and claims through the lens of the people
    • Making the people speak: Ventriloquizing as a resource in political discourse
  • Picking the noun denoting human referents: “Citizens” and “people” in contrast
  • Conclusion: The reference to the people, a property of political discourse
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.09tru
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