Discourses of War: from Napoleon’s Addresses to the Ideational Peace/War Dichotomy. A Corpus-based Analysis

This paper is part of a larger study focusing on how conflict discourse is enacted in different genres, both old and modern, such as memoirs, diaries, proclamations, novels, newspapers articles, tweets, Facebook posts. Specifically, the study aims at providing a discursive representation of war across different centuries (i.e., from the 18th century through contemporary times). Discourses are «ways of representing aspects of the world» [Fairclough 2003, p. 124], therefore different discourses from different social actors or groups involve different perspectives on the world. World perspectives are realized by means of both verbal and non-verbal sign systems; these must not be considered as isolated, independent units but as networks of semantic relationships, e.g., collocations, metaphors and other tropes, speech acts and types of exchanges, within the same text or among more texts. On these grounds, this paper provides the findings of two case studies: a) the representation of the Napoleonic war through different forms of discourses, i.e., hortatory and epideictic discourses; and b) the building of conflict discourse in a diachronic perspective, focusing on the salience of the keywords war and peace as lexical and ideological elements that go beyond their declarative status [Tobia 2016]. Methodologically, the paper adopts the tools of discourse analysis [Fairclough 2003] and corpus-assisted discourse studies [Baker 2023]. The study is carried out on four corpora of texts, each representative of a different genre. Findings from the corpora demonstrate how orders of discourse that characterized war during the Napoleonic era and which characterize contemporary times are formed, thus providing different conflict narratives.