The permeable context of institutional and newspaper discourse. A corpus-based functional case study of the European sovereign debt crisis

This chapter presents a comparison between two electronic corpora about the European sovereign debt crisis, one consisting of Financial Times articles and one consisting of official statements published on-line by the European Union and European Central Bank. The aim of this study is to contribute to the relatively recent investigations of the interface between SFL and corpus linguistics (Thompson & Hunston, 2006; Bednarek, 2010), especially as concerns the analysis of linguistic markers of ideology and evaluation in small scale corpora of institutional and newspaper discourse. The corpora contain all the texts published in the week December 9-December 15 2011, so as to reflect a particular stage in the crisis: the selected time span coincides with the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s refusal to sign up to a new EU treaty aimed at enforcing greater fiscal discipline and integration in the eurozone, described by the president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, as a “fiscal compact”. Mr Cameron’s veto, which was wielded on December 9, 2011 at a European Union summit in Brussels, revived the debate over euroscepticism and created worries of a “two-speed Europe” with Britain playing a marginal role. Firstly, we provide a brief introduction to the interaction between SFL and corpus linguistics in current linguistic theory. Secondly, we present and compare the layout and structure of the corpora, as well as their main keywords and recurrent key word clusters. Thirdly, we use some of the highest ranking keywords as the starting point for an analysis of the patterns of Transitivity (with particular attention to relational Processes) and Modality (especially the use of objective Modality) that emerge from the corpora. Our results show a significant degree of “permeability” (Hasan 2004, Fairclough, 2004) between the institutional and newspaper discourse of the debt crisis, especially as concerns Modality markers that convey the idea that much economic policy is not a matter of choice, but one of necessity.