European Identity—What the Media Say

European Identity examines how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four EU countries, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. This multilingual comparable corpus, is composed of the entire contents of four newspapers published in each country, collected over two periods of three months, and the transcriptions of two TV news broadcasts, collected over two periods of two months. The theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The individual chapters investigate various aspects of European identity as it is discursively construed in the news media of the different countries, such as Europe as a political and geographic entity, European Union institutions, European history, citizenship, and immigration. Based on a bottom-up orientation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, all chapters but one use a comparative approach to the data, juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages. The fundamental aim of the volume is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis, and in particular the study of large amounts of linguistic data, can make a vital contribution to the analysis of political and social issues

Paul Bayley has held teaching posts at the Universities of Padua and Macerata. He has published widely on various aspects of political language, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. He is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Bologna where he teaches academic English and analysis of political language.


Geoffrey Williams lectures in corpus linguistics, lexicography, and the use of the Text Encoding Initiative for data management. He has published widely in corpus linguistics and lexicography. He is currently President of EURALEX and the French Association for Applied Linguistics - AFLA. He is Professor of Linguistics and Pro Vice-Chancellor for International Relations at the University of South Brittany, member of the European University of Brittany.