La Rifondazione Comunista alla prova del VI Congresso: una strategia di analisi testuale e semantica

In the last years the new Italian Communist party (Rifondazione Comunista) has acquired such a national and international importance to provoke the interest of political scientists. The 6th conference of the party (spring 2005) was very important because of the change from a traditional opposition attitude to the decision to form an alliance with the future Left government, in the case Romano Prodi wins the competition with Berlusconi. This change of perspective was long discussed within the party. As a matter of fact, during the 6th conference, five alternatives motions were discussed: the first was proposed by the secretary Fausto Bertinotti, who decided the alliance with the others Left wing parties, while the other four motions proposed alternative strategies.To analyse this process we have considered 72 articles, published before the conference in the party newspaper («Liberazione») to support the different motions (18 for each motion). The textual analysis we carried out with the new release of TaltaC2 allows us to describe the contents of five groups of articles, the specific language utilised, the kind of actors cited in the corpus and the negative language used. This description is carried out also in a multidimensional perspective.