Territorialization in political discourse: A pragma-linguistic study of Jerzy Buzek’s inaugural speeches

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to review some discursive strategies used to (de)territorialize the European public sphere by the newly elected President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek. A corpus of his inaugural speeches (over 7,000 words) is examined in order to identify salient pragma-linguistic devices, such as for example high-frequency references, linguistic markers of identities, values and interests, as well as metaphors and argumentative schemata. These are presumed to have been used by Buzek to territorialize the presidential office: to position himself as its leader, to establish his credibility, to become its agenda-setter. Additionally, the analysis focuses on the way Buzek constructs Europe and the EU rhetorically for the purposes of political self-legitimization. In this respect, Europe is projected as a fairly deteritorrialized space: a common, even homogenous, public sphere that depends on specific European institutions for administration.