Kristiina Anneli SavolaLecturer, Doctoral Student

In my doctoral thesis, I will discuss linguistic mechanisms of confrontation in Finnish politicians’ social media texts by trying to answer the following questions:

-What kind of confrontations occured in the social media texts of the Finnish politicians in 2015?

-How are these confrontations produced on the linguistic level?

-How do politicians construct representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in their texts?

The research material is comprised of blog and Facebook texts of Finnish politicians. The writers of the texts are members of the Finnish parliament and positioned on the different sides of the Finnish political field. The texts of the material have been published during 2015, after the latest parliament elections of Finland. The topics discussed in the material contain, inter alia, so-called migration crisis and the difficult economic situation in Finland and Europe at the time, as well as the supposed division of the Finnish people based on the differing values and opinions.

My methodological perspective is based on Critical Discourse Analysis and I lean specifically on Ruth Wodak’s and Teun A. van Dijk’s approach to the CDA. My interest lies in the argumentation strategies for producing us-them-confrontations. More precisely, at the text level, I examine metaphors, lexicon, naming strategies of 'us' and 'them', and narratives as means of negative other-representations and positive self-representations. By these means, I will try to identify discourses that produce and bear confrontations between different groups and individuals.