Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2003

Devolution in the UK has engendered debates about which language (or languages) should be the language of parliament in the respective regional institutions. Simultaneously, the European Union, while officially endorsing cultural and linguistic diversity, is moving towards a supranational state which operates alongside devolution and regional autonomies. In this context, the contestation of the language of parliamentary discourse can be seen as a site of power struggle and political negotiation. The present analysis focuses on a specific example of regional parliamentary discourse from Northern Ireland, in which Members debate the desirability of using Ulster-Scots and Irish, alongside English, in official House proceedings. This can be seen to operationalise “language” in specific, but interrelated, argumentative contexts: (a) as a form of agreed and formally recognised communication; (b) as a natural right, reflecting individual culture or heritage; (c) as a legal and formal right; (d) as a political symbol. These themes are discussed in terms of “nationalist” and “sovereign” state arguments, with reference to both the political context of Northern Ireland, and the processes of devolution and supranationalism, in the broader political arena.

Parliamentary debates on the definition of the nation-state and national identities are a very revealing discursive domain of tracing the cues of the social construction of this category. Integrating social-psychological and discourse analyses, this article studies how Spanish nationalism interacts with the most influential regional (Catalonian and Basque) nationalisms in the Spanish Parliament in Madrid, and in the regional Parliaments of Catalonia and the Basque Country.The study is based on a two-dimensional framework, which characterises nationalist cultures in terms of their Institutional Status (“established” vs. “rising” nationalism), and in terms of the Basic Assumptions (“civic” vs. “ethnic” aspects in the social representation of the nation — Smith, 19986, 1991). According to the conceptual framework, each of these nationalisms represents a different combination of “established” (Spanish) or “rising” (Basque and Catalonian) Institutional Status as well as of “civic” (in Catalonia) or “ethnic” (Spanish and the Basque) Basic Assumptions (Grad, 1999). The study shows that, in these parliamentary contexts, the Institutional Status and the Basic Assumptions not only configure different nationalist positions, but also configure distinct “discursive formations” — reflected in interactional dynamics (of inclusion vs. exclusion, compatibility vs. incompatibility, and consensus vs. conflict relations) — between the different national projects and identities. These discourses belong to an “enunciative system” including systematic subject (the dominant national identity), system of references (or referential) terms to denote national categories or supra-regional — Spain, Spanish State, Basque Country, Catalonia — that serve to distinguish between national in-group and out-group, and clearly differ in extent and connotations in established and rising national codes), as well as associated fields (more ascriptive membership criteria, rigid group boundaries, requirement of internal homogeneity, restrictive referent and extension of the “us” in the ethnic than in civic codes), and materiality (strategies of discursive polarisation, especially salient in the Basque Country parliamentary discourse, which both indicate less compatibility between identities and aim to delegitimise dissent with regard to national referents and goals). Finally, in parliaments where ethnic codes are confronted (Spanish and Basque) politeness is impaired, there is a higher degree of controversy, and the strategies of delegitimisation constitute strong face-threatening acts which endanger the “tacit contract” of the parliamentary interactions. In this regard, ethnic centralist and independentist political positions make harder the compatibility between national identities than civic regional-nationalist and federal proposals. Recent confrontations between Spanish and Basque national positions seem to confirm the patterns found in this analysis.

Oral metadiscourse is envisaged in the present study as a set of rhetorically structured communicative and interactional strategies used by speakers to signal, highlight, mitigate, or cancel parts of their ongoing discourse and their varying relevance to different addressees and/or audience members. Parliamentary metadiscursive strategies are typical manifestations of MPs’ joint negotiations of the degree of directness, explicitness, appropriateness, etc., of the interlocutors’ discursive representations, interpretations and evaluations of events, processes, as well as people’s ideas and actions. One important consequence is that institutional adversariality co-occurs with interpersonal adversariality. Metadiscourse does not simply consist of distinct fragments of discourse and discursive patterns. Some of the rhetorically most effective strategies of parliamentary metadiscourse operate simultaneously on several levels of discourse. These strategies include various manifestations of the participants’ cognitive and inter-relational acts aimed at controlling, evaluating, adjusting and negotiating the goals and the effects of their and of their interlocutors’ ongoing talk. The metadiscursive level of parliamentary discourse helps to articulate particular aspects of speaker-interlocutor relations and/or speaker-audience relations. This involves particularly speaker role shifts, discursive scope widening/narrowing, multiple-audience targeting, re/definition of terms and concepts, minimising/maximising accountability and merit, challenging facts and statistics. Metadiscursive statements may convey simple, double or multiple messages

Parliamentary debates, like all discourse, presuppose vase amounts of knowledge of their participants. MPs need to know about parliamentary procedures, about parties and other MPs, the political system, current social events, and of course the details of ongoing business and the current context of parliamentary interaction, among many other types of knowledge. Within the framework of a new, multidisciplinary epistemology, this paper first explores the many dimensions of knowledge, both in terms of mental representations as well as socially shared Common Ground. Then it examines how these kinds of discourse influence discourse production and comprehension, in general, and of parliamentary debates in particular. The chapter concludes with an “epistemic” analysis of the speech by Tony Blair held in the British House of Commons on the occasion of the September 11 attacks in the USA.

This article addresses a recent instance of transformed communicative behaviour within the Mexican heavily ritualized and tightly controlled parliamentary scene. The Zapatismo, a new (sort of) political actor — of indigenous, armed, rebellious status — managed to be asked, in March, 2001, to the Legislative Power stage, to expound their visions and aims, a propos a project of law on indigenous rights. The strategic impact of their public intervention was considerable, given that the visitors’ discursive (scenic) strategy on the occasion was remarkably proficient. They provided a renewed instance of creative political communication in official scenarios, still managing not to lose the ethnic bases (senses, demands) of the 1994 uprising. Comandanta Esther acted as spokesperson, and her performance is the focus of the present analysis. A multidisciplinary approach is advocated and case-shown. A close reading is applied to the evidence (of mixed character), drawing from discursive, semiotic, visual and anthropological sources. It is an attempt to blend, for best descriptive and interpretive results, various angles of qualitative approaches for the (improved) understanding of a documented instance of political performance. Some ideas concerning the political value of ritualized, symbolic processes, such as the ones mobilized by the Zapatistas, are also briefly explored.

Identity has recently become one of the most frequently theorised and explored topics within various sub-branches of social sciences. Collective identities in general, and their ancestry and construction in particular, are being perceived in different ways by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and, last but not least, discourse-analysts. This article aims at shedding a new light on the concept of European identity, which, so far, has been most frequently analysed within the context of the European Union and its political and economic impact on European space. Despite drawing theoretically on some well-grounded traditions of research on European identity, such as, e.g., analysis of its contradiction and suplementariness with national identities, or, its interconnection with such concepts as European citizenship or European integration, the analysis of European identity presented here is put in the context of globally understood identification processes. Empirically, the article draws on the analysis of TV talk show thematically bound by the topics concerning European Union’s impact on national identities.