Discursive Strategies in the Language of Foreign Policy. The Semantics and the Appraisal of Security

As globalization has produced more complex interconnections among states, and borders have become more permeable, foreign policy practitioners deal with issues directly affecting the lives of individuals. From terrorism to climate change, from immigration to human rights, the term security appears in all of them. By combining different approaches, mainly Corpus Linguistics and Appraisal Theory, this book provides insights into the linguistic features of the discourse of security of British foreign ministers from a phraseological perspective. Through the interrogation of a corpus of political speeches, the study discloses those discursive strategies by which speakers and writers reveal implicit opinions, evaluations and feelings on relevant issues in their political agenda. The first part of the book illustrates the phraseologies in the discourse of security which is explored in its linguistic co-text and then context. The aim is to disambiguate the meaning of those adjacent and discontinuous associations of words which emerge as ambiguous in language. Following this, the wider context of “security” is analysed to extrapolate all those language resources that become strategic for the legitimation of the ideological positions of the speakers. The book is aimed at researchers who want to gain insight into the language resources employed in foreign policy and to students who wish to study the application of a synergy of approaches such as Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Appraisal Theory.