Phraseology in Political Discourse. A corpus linguistics approach in the classroom

The book starts from the assumption that the attraction between words is a matter of convention, that is, certain words significantly prefer each other’s company whether in adjacent or in discontinuous phrasal frameworks, other words just do not co-occur because they have no relationship with each other, and certain words are prohibited from co-occurring for no apparent reason other than habit. Thus, the investigation concerns not only those phrases which are obviously conceived as idiomatic, but also those which are not intuitively felt as such and which co-occur more often than chance would predict. This study highlights clearly that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent and that patterns, collocations, phraseology are the norm in language and not the exception, the core and not the periphery. After a short introduction to Corpus Linguistics and to how this applied discipline can illuminate language teaching, and after a brief account of the several different kinds of corpora that we rely on in our classrooms, this work presents a detailed investigation of some structures that appear very frequently in spoken political discourse, as well as in general spoken discourse, but are nevertheless somewhat overlooked in traditional reference texts. It also analyses first the most recurrent clusters in the speeches of British and American politicians, and then the most common as well as the most typical phrasal verbs, so frequently used by native speakers yet so commonly “avoided” by non-native speakers. The book is aimed at students, as well as at teachers and researchers, with the attempt to help provide some domain-specific insights on the teaching of political language as well as of general language. It tries to answer these basic questions: how idiomatic is language? How aware are students of such idiomaticity? How far do traditional reference books and dictionaries tend to be from the language which is taught in class? How useful are corpora in the classroom? All the examples provided are uttered by political leaders in the UK and in the USA from 2001 to 2011.