Continuità e discontinuità linguistiche nei discorsi programmatici del governo italiano (1948 - 2008)

This thesis deals with the language used in the 57 policy speeches given since 1948 in Parliament by the Italian Prime Ministers when they took office. The aim was providing an outline of this discourse genre and identify the constant elements and changes that have occurred over the last 60 years. The first stage envisaged the use of quantitative analyses through text statistics methods to identify a few strains of research to be further investigated from the linguistic viewpoints by analysing textual mappings, syntactic structures, lexical and semantic choices and by providing a short description of specific rhetorical patterns. The analysis highlighted the stereotypical nature of this text-type, inevitably connected to the markedly institutionalised context of its utterance: the discourse structure has remained virtually unchanged over the years; opening structures, tributes and greetings clearly mark the ceremonial function of the text; all the speeches included in the corpus maintain stable syntactic structures typical of bureaucratic and legal language (e.g. non-finite verb structures, frequent nominalisations, the prevalence of noun phrases as compared to verbal clauses), as well as other patterns such as structures resembling slogans and aphorisms or lists. Also at the lexical and semantic levels, all 57 texts share common features such as the institutional, economic and financial semantic fields. On the other hand, the relatively uniform picture shows a budding evolution provided by the temporal development of discourse modes. The analyses carried out on different linguistic levels show that it is not the President’s personality the main factor determining language traits: rather, it is diachronic evolution that defines certain changes in the communication modes of the 57 speeches. While the speeches held in the post-war period are mainly technical in character, political programmes play a greater role in the speeches given from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. Starting from the beginning of the so-called “Second Republic”, signals have emerged of a transition towards a more flexible approach that, from the linguistic viewpoints, led to shorter and more “user-friendly” structures that, especially in the cases of Berlusconi, Prodi and D’Alema, seem to address the speech not only to Parliament but to the electorate in general. In this respect, the language of policy speeches may be said to be slowly changing, possibly influenced by the overall spectacularisation of politics and political language.