| There is no doubt of the importance of political discourse in European democratic societies. The power of words is unquestionable in a parliamentary system in which, next to political, economic and social achievements, the transmitted linguistic message, together with the semiotic component, can be decisive when it comes to determine the vote of undecided or floating voters. In this sense, the political discourse written during election campaigns is the result of a detailed planning which takes into account a series of elements, ranging from vocabulary and syntactic structures to pragmatic inferences as well as ideological and generic variables. Cultural and social aspects are essential, especially if we take into account the different democratic tradition in one country and another, which determines the final results.; This thesis is structured in ten chapters. The first one is a general introduction to the aims and hypotheses. In the second one there is a detailed analysis of different methods of discourse analysis which led us to choose Semiotic Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001) as the most appropriate for our purposes. The third chapter is an analysis of the social context, as election campaigns can not be understood without the context in which they are developed and which shapes them. This context is different in Spain and Britain. Chapter four deals with the concepts of election campaigns (Arceo Vacas, 1982; Herreros Arconada, 1989) political discourse (van Dijk, 1997; Wilson, 2001) and political advertising (Cook, 1992; Myers, 1994). The last part of the chapter deals with the concepts of genre and register (Albentosa and Moya, 2001; Bhatia, 1993; Eggins, 1994; Martin, 1992, 2001; Paltridge, 1997; Swales, 1990, 2001) and there is a classification of political genres and election campaigns subgenres. Chapters five, six and seven are a detailed analysis of the chosen subgenres: posters, leaflets and manifestos. This analysis includes the linguistic and semiotic aspects which Semiotic Discourse Analysis takes into account. The results are established in chapter eight. Chapters nine and ten include bibliography and appendixes. |
