From the uniformity of political discourse: bibliometric and linguistic analysis of the categorization of political discourses

There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but there has been little attention to what is meant by the concept of political discourse itself. In these studies, political corpora collected from discourses by political elites (presidential debates, presidential addresses, public speeches,...) often appear to be overrepresented, leaving aside other forms of political discourses such as media discourse on political issues or citizen discourse. In this context, this contribution pursues a twofold objective. First, we aim to understand what types of discourse are categorized as political in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (type of actors, themes, etc.). To answer these questions, this contribution provides a PRISMA bibliometric analysis on a sample of 172 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Secondly, this article explores to what extent the notion of political discourse refers to a coherent whole from a linguistic point of view. To answer this second question, we study the formal characteristics of three subtypes of political discourse (parliamentary debates, televised debates and citizen corpora) in order to assess their degree of divergence. The results of these analyses reveal a real difference between these three corpora and allow us to better understand what could constitute the political genre and its textual registers.