La crisi del dibattito pubblico nell'Italia contemporanea: il discorso populista

In this paper I discuss the current state of the so called populist political discourse in Italy. In particular my purpose is to shed light on some features of this kind of discourse in order to show the relation between language and policy in the discourse of populism. In this perspective I will follow the eight key points that, according to Diamanti & Lazar (2018), identify the actual populist movements, in order to verify if – and, in that case, which – linguistic traits characterize their discourse.The analysis will be focused on the semantic and argumentative aspects of the discourse of some of the most important political actors in contemporary Italy.