Meanings and functions of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in media and political discourses in Belgium, France, and Spain: a corpus-based discourse analysis of sociopolitical keywords
(2026)
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- (en) This thesis analyses the use of socially and politically significant words in media and political discourse. Specifically, it examines the meanings and functions of the terms 'populism' and 'populist' in two complementary case studies using a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods. The first case study zooms out and analyses the collocational profiles of these terms in the Belgian, French, and Spanish mass media discourses in 2019, an electoral year in all three countries. The second case study zooms in on one language and compares the pragmatic functions of these terms in Spanish-language tweets posted by politicians and lay users of Twitter. The findings suggest that 'populism' and 'populist' are powerful sociopolitical keywords in contemporary public discourse: negatively coloured yet meaningful, seemingly vague yet overloaded with meanings, apparently descriptive yet centrally involved in marking the boundaries of political legitimacy.
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Shchinova Shchinov, N. (2026). Meanings and functions of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in media and political discourses in Belgium, France, and Spain: a corpus-based discourse analysis of sociopolitical keywords. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/280572