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Paul A. Chilton and Christina Schäffner (eds.); John Benjamins, Philadelphia, PA, 2002. 245 pp.; $70.00 hardcover
Political discourse has become an attractive window through which to study political behavior, with a growing number of political and social scientists adopting discourse as their analytical foundation. Since the social sciences took a so-called 'discursive turn' in the 1980s and 1990s, many publications have offered helpful and successful approaches to the language of politics, from descriptive to critical, and from functional to pragmatic. This book does not intend to be an exception. Introducing newcomers to this field is indeed among the chief aims of Politics as Text and Talk, as the editors stress at the very beginning. The book is organized in such a way as to update readers on contemporary linguistic scrutiny into political discourse and to provide a methodological review.
This volume includes an introductory chapter plus six contributions, all of which are concerned with two major themes: (a) what is 'politics', what is 'political', and what defines 'political discourse', and (b)...