Copyright by Fanny Macé 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Fanny Macé certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: #PRÉSIDENTIELLE2017 A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE 2017 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ON TWITTER Committee: Carl S. Blyth, Supervisor David P. Birdsong Barbara E. Bullock Elizabeth L. Keating #PRÉSIDENTIELLE2017 A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE 2017 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ON TWITTER by Fanny Macé Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2019 Dedication To the memory of my father, Pascal Macé (1957-1997) Acknowledgements Thank you to my advisor, Carl Blyth, for placing his faith in me and in my ability to complete this project. Thank you to my committee, Elizabeth Keating, Barbara Bullock and David Birdsong, for accompanying me along this journey. Thank you to Jessica Luhn, for being always helpful and supportive. Thank you to my students, for brightening my days and perpetuating my love for teaching. Thank you to my friends, in Austin and all around the world, for believing in me even when I didn’t. Thank you to my family, for their love and support, even from thousands of miles away. Thank you to my fiancé, Justin Gannon, for keeping me sane and for being so patient with me, even during my daily rants about politics. Special thanks to our two cats, Zumi and Willow, for their adorableness and comforting presence. Finally, thank you to coffee, for keeping me alive and awake. v #PRÉSIDENTIELLE2017 A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE 2017 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ON TWITTER Fanny Macé, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Carl S. Blyth In the context of the 2017 French presidential election, this dissertation examines political discourse on Twitter from a socio-semiotic perspective. Specifically, it focuses on campaign tweets as a unique genre of discourse that plays a pivotal role in the dissemination and amplification of political discourse. This study uses an innovative framework which combines two approaches to discourse analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). CDA and SFL are socially-oriented approaches to discourse which share a dialectical view of text-in-context whereby discourse shapes and is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it occurs (Fairclough, 2003; Hasan, 2014). I draw on Norman Fairclough’s concept of ‘order of discourse’, which refers to a unique configuration of genres, discourses and styles constitutive of a social practice or structure (Fairclough, 1993). I suggest that digital campaigning constitutes a growing social practice with its own order of discourse, and I examine how the 2017 presidential candidates mobilized particular discursive mechanisms to realize a variety of discourses (ideologies) and styles (identities). In addition, vi I analyze how they exploited the generic affordances and constraints of tweets to their advantage. To this end, I collected a total of 208 tweets from six main actors of the 2017 election: outgoing president François Hollande and candidates Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Benoît Hamon. All tweets were posted in reaction to three events of significance for the election. This dissertation provides an in-depth, multifunctional analysis that focuses on ideational, interpersonal and textual ways of meaning-making: (1) transitivity and social actor representation, (2) modality and engagement and (3) texture and generic structure. I argue that the 2017 election was above all characterized by an effort of the candidates to distance themselves from the political class. I suggest that this anti- establishment sentiment was realized by two ‘styles of politics’: the populist style and the centrist style. Finally, I argue that the structural constraints of tweets amplify these populist appeals through the combination of decontextualization and semantic condensation. Key words: French, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, social semiotics, political discourse, social media, Twitter. vii Table of Contents List of Tables ........................................................................................................ xii List of Figures ...................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................1 Context of the study ........................................................................................5 The 2017 French presidential election ...................................................5 The age of Twitter Politics .....................................................................8 Research focus and methodology ...................................................................9 Relevance and contribution to the field ........................................................14 Research Questions .......................................................................................17 Organization of the dissertation ....................................................................18 Chapter 2: Background: A Socio-semiotic Approach to Political Discourse ........20 Introduction ...................................................................................................20 Discourse as social practice ..........................................................................21 Genres, discourses, and styles ..............................................................21 Power relations and dominant discourses ............................................24 Framing the presidential election ..................................................................27 Ideologies as sociocognitive frames ....................................................27 Metaphors and political affiliation .......................................................28 Globalization and the technicalization of political discourse ..............32 Personalization and the marketization of the self ................................35 Rhetorical framing: the populist example ............................................37 Elections as theatrical performances .............................................................40 Performance and performativity ..........................................................40 Narrativization and storytelling ...........................................................43 Narratology and intertextuality ............................................................48 Chapter 3: Background: Anatomy of a Twitter Campaign ....................................51 Introduction ...................................................................................................51 viii The era of Twitter politics.............................................................................52 Participation and affiliation on Twitter ................................................54 Power relations and the fallacy of digital exceptionalism ...................58 New practices, new genres ............................................................................62 The marketization of identity ...............................................................62 Genre 2.0: emergence and techno-discursivity ....................................65 Chapter 4: Framework and Methodology ..............................................................74 Introduction ...................................................................................................74 Conceptual framework ..................................................................................75 Scope and aims of Critical Discourse Analysis ...................................75 Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach ........................................78 The dialectics of discourse ..........................................................78 Internal and external relations .....................................................81 SFL and the social functions of language ............................................83 The semogenic power of language .............................................83 Halliday’s systemic functional grammar ....................................90 Two complementary approaches ................................................97 Strengths and weaknesses of the CDA approach ...............................100 From theory to practice .............................................................100 Researcher bias .........................................................................103 Application to computer-mediated environments .....................105 Corpus and data collection ..........................................................................109 Events .................................................................................................110 Participants .........................................................................................111 Sampling and collection methods ......................................................113 Methods of analysis ....................................................................................116 Metafunctional analysis .....................................................................117 Ideational resources: Transitivity and representation ...............119 Interpersonal