Laura Filardo-Llamas

A comprehensive approach to the study of discourse and conflict, this book explores how opposing communities construe discourse worlds which appear to reflect the existence of “paradoxical realities”. Adopting a novel method for the study of conflict, framed in the cognitive linguistic tradition within critical discourse studies, the book explains how conflict may be discursively created by relying on the study of four main construal operations. Grounded in examples specific to Northern Ireland, each chapter also highlights how the method used could be applied to other conflictual contexts. In doing so, it demonstrates how language and representation in conflict situations may stem from a combination of different layers in conflictual relations and the existence of both overt and covert conflict. It also provides a comprehensive list of linguistic cues upon which researchers can rely for analysing and explaining the role of discourse in conflictual situations.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.