The Public Interest in Romanian Parliamentary Debate

2013

From a discourse analysis standpoint, the contemporary administrativist approach and the discursive perspectives on the concept of "public interest" were brought together by Jacques , as the deconstruction of discourse provides the researcher with the opportunity to identify the meaning or the purpose of discourse, having as starting point the meanings assigned by society to specific words or concepts. Consequently, the priority axis of our analysis revolves around the intentionality of political discourse, based on the assumption that the three basic elements (cf. Derrida) of discourse are intention, method and ideology, with public interest being a prerequisite for the democratic public sphere. The issue of discourse intentionality is the subject of pragmatic approach, as intentionality essentially defines the manner in which a discourse agent represents a specific matter (cf. ; it is thus understood in the context that the force of representation is intrinsic to the intentionality process of speech acts. The second core dimension specific to our study encompasses the social conditions which characterise the use of words/concepts, and the role played by the latter in determining discourse effectiveness, starting from the paradigm of illocutionary force (cf. J.-P. Austin, 1969Austin, , 1975 as well as from the significance of discourse context in relation with the paradigmatic competences of "the language of institution" or "authorized language" (cf. P. Bourdieu, 1975Bourdieu, /2001. In practical terms, our study is concerned with the occurrences and manners of (re)presentation which are specific to the syntagm "public interest" in the context of deliberative discourse; thus, our study comprises an analysis of the political debates in the joint meetings of the Parliament of Romania between January-December 2012 -i.e. 24 meetings -and seeks to identify operational definitions for the syntagm concerned.

2011

The Romanian Parliamentary Discourse: Tradition and Modernity. A PragmaRhetorical Approach is an exploratory research project, included in the program IDEAS (code 2136/2008) and sponsored by the National Council for Scientific Research in the Higher Education System (in Romanian: CNCSIS). Directed by Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, the research team includes five specialists, four linguists: Andra Vasilescu, Ariadna Ştefănescu, Melania Roibu, Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu, and a historian: Silviu Hariton. The team is in a permanent contact with two young political scientists: Irina Ionescu and Todor Arpad. The project started in 2009 and will be finished in 2011. The project is dealing with the description and analysis of the evolution of the Romanian parliamentary discourse (PD) as an institutional discourse genre, from its beginnings up to the present, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Its guidelines are given by an assumption largely accepted by specialists in complementary fiel...

Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, 2011

Comparative Southeast European Studies

Using the methodology of discourse theory, this chapter aims to analyse how Romanian society evolved after 1989 with special regard to the tension between direct and representative democracy. The author's main hypothesis is that in time the absence of the demos from the actual decision-making process fuelled a rhetoric based on direct democracy, and that beginning in 2004 that rhetoric succeeded in establishing itself as a hegemonic discourse. To test the hypothesis, the author uses the logical framework of discourse theory, analysing the constitutive modalities of the rhetoric about democracy and the people, paying close attention to the tensions that have arisen between direct and representative democracy and charting the sociocultural background of those tensions. He uses the methodological arsenal of discourse theory, focusing on its five key arguments. Finally, he suggests a series of preliminary conclusions derived from his analysis .

Land Forces Academy Review, 2023

The impact of communication upon political activities is inevitable, regardless whether we refer to socialization, participation, the establishment of an agenda, mobilization or negotiation. Every political activity is influenced by communication inasmuch as almost all such manifestations involve the use of a form of communication. The assertion of a moral and professional authority's competence and credibility is increasingly rivaled by media credibility or by the charisma, whose importance is admitted by journalists and image counselors. Thus, it is by means of their aggressive discourse that most of the Romanian political leaders have built up this 'charisma'. In a period of crisis and shortcomings, who could wish to see faded characters, deprived of personality, on television? In Romania, not revolting against 'someone' and not opposing them are equivalent to being unaware of the people's sufferance and, therefore, one cannot be a good leader.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013

The theoretical framework of this paper uses the key concepts provided by communication theories, communication criticism in the European context, and public sphere approaches. The context analysis focuses on the existence of a significant number of critics who lament the lack of real communication policies in the European Union and tailored strategies to promote intercultural communication in Europe. The methodological perspective is one based on discourse analysis. The study is focused on a corpus of 41 semi-structured interviews, whose subjects are graduate students at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Public Administration and Public Affairs. Based on the selected corpus, the research aims are to establish: a. how European values are represented and communicated by a homogeneous and educated group; b. whether subjects believe that European values and communication practices operate in Romanian public administration activities ; c. what perceptions the subjects have of the dynamics of democratic values in the EU. The premises of our research are that: a) European topics (in the broad sense) seem very uncommon in public discourse ; b) Romanian citizens do not seem to be connected to European themes and legislation. The study postulates that there is a 'lack of communication' in Habermas' sense of the term, and a poor connection with European topics of debate. The methodological approach is focused on identifying the most important recent topics of debate in Europe, using scientific literature on local-global, European controversies and social communication topics as source. These will form a basis for the creation of a discourse analysis grid , which will be applied to the 41 semi-structured interviews making up the corpus. The results of the analysis may lead us to a general conclusion regarding features of Romanian public discourse and the current context that builds public sphere opened by the European model.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 149, 2014

After Romania`s adhesion to the European Union, in 2007, the discursive actor Europe acquires new dimensions in Romanian political debates. This paper analysis the way Romanian political discourse uses the previous metaphors on Europe, in order to place European Union in the national political context. The methodological framework of this paper focuses on political discourse analysis, having as starting point an exhaustive corpus of Parliamentary debates between 2007 and 2013. The transversal aim of our study is to identify different hypostasis of Europe in Romanian political discourse and to classify associated European terms and concepts that define the way contemporary Romanian political discourse relates to Europe.

International Encyclopedia of Langiage and Social Interaction

Defining political discourse as talk and text produced in regard to concrete political issues (language in politics) or the actual language use of institutional political actors (language of politicians), this article outlines traditionally recognized and newly identified links between language and politics. After clarifying some conceptual ambiguities and elaborating the historical roots of political language research, the article surveys themes, actors, methods, data, and research goals of PDA, based on key texts and the latest studies in the field.

Certainty and Uncertainty in Dialogue, 2014

The paper presents some evidential and epistemic strategies that appear frequently in old and present-day Romanian parliamentary debates. By evidential and epistemic strategy we mean the manipulation of evidential and epistemic markers, either grammaticalized or pragmatic, in order to achieve various interactional and rhetorical aims. We have in view not only encoded evidential and epistemic meanings, but also (interactional) inferentially conveyed evidential and epistemic meanings. Modality can be manipulated in various ways: the usual ranking of evidentials can be reinterpreted for argumentative means: i.e., hearsay can be sometimes rejected, while, in other cases, it can be presented as more reliable than perceptual evidence.

Messages, Sages and Ages, 2016

The dominant ideology of a society seems to possess the means to infiltrate an individual's conscience with relative ease. From the perspective of the functions of language, we intend to investigate those fundamental characteristics of the ideological discourse that reify the left-right dichotomy in Romanian politics.