Narratives of a Nation; The Discourse of National Unity and Division in the Slovene Parliament — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 4: Corpus linguistics
  3. Narratives of a Nation; The Discourse of National Unity and Division in the Slovene Parliament

Narratives of a Nation; The Discourse of National Unity and Division in the Slovene Parliament (20282)

David Bordon 1 , Vojko Gorjanc 1 , Selenia Anastasi 2
  1. Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  2. Languages and Modern Cultures, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

The presentation endeavors to explore the multifaceted nature of political discourse surrounding national and nationalist essence in Slovenia, focusing on its manifestation within the parliamentary debates. The study aims to elucidate the range of themes which, although diverse, coalesce under a unified ideological essence to construct a narrative of national cohesiveness. Within the Slovenian context, political discourse at the right pole often encompasses historical references related to divisions experienced during the Second World War, alongside themes associated with communism and the subsequent post-communist society.

Our primary focus is to elucidate the spectrum of themes that are inextricably woven into this debate. To this end, we employ a data-driven approach, adopting a topic modeling technique based on Sentence Transformers. The BERTopic application is particularly valuable because it extracts topics from the context of entire sentences rather than relying on bag-of-words representations. Subsequently, we group the most frequent topics into thematic units and apply the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis to validate our findings through close reading. The dataset utilized is a specially curated subcorpus derived from the ParlaMint-SI 3.0 corpus, which encapsulates the transcriptions of plenary debates from the Slovene parliament spanning the years 2000 to 2021. We aim to shed light on the multifarious themes of national identity and their interplay in shaping narratives in the Slovene political space.

  1. Brookes, G., & McEnery, T. (2019). The utility of topic modelling for discourse studies: A critical evaluation. Discourse Studies, 21(1), 3-21.
  2. Erjavec, T. et al. (2023) Linguistically annotated multilingual comparable corpora of parliamentary debates ParlaMint.ana 3.0, Slovenian language resource repository CLARIN.SI, ISSN 2820-4042, http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1488.
  3. Grootendorst, M. (2022). BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.05794.
  4. Jacobs, T., & Tschötschel, R. (2019). Topic models meet discourse analysis: a quantitative tool for a qualitative approach. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(5), 469-485.
  5. Baider, F. & Kopytowska, M. (2018): Narrating hostility, challenging hostile narratives. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14/1. 1–24.
  6. https://maartengr.github.io/BERTopic/index.html