Naming and framing in Belgian politics: An analysis of the representation of politicians and the political state of affairs during the 2007 government formation period in the Belgian press

Abstract

This paper describes the way Belgian politicians represented themselves, their parties and the political situation in newspaper interviews in the government formation period of 2007. Interviews with four politicians, both in Dutch and in French, have been analyzed in order to reconstruct the image the politicians convey of themselves and of the political parties they stand for, and to reconstruct the frames they apply to the political situation. A critical linguistic and framing analysis shows how this representation is built up through an interplay of names used to describe oneself, the specific use of the pronouns of the first person plural and consistent metaphors. The paper ties in with the theme of this special issue in that it bridges the gap between construction grammar and linguistic discourse analysis: knowledge of social networks (and their evaluation of utterances) is important for analyzing choices between discourse alternatives by discourse agents (as politicians are).