Key-.words and emotions: a case study of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Using public discourse on Northern Ireland as a case study of a theme, i.e. conflict in its various dimensions – physical, ideological and dialogical – the paper looks at ways in which the representation of conflict contributes to developing an argumentative position. In particular it looks at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, focusing on politicians discussing their present and past evaluations and positions, mostly by displaying emotions. The idea is to study how ideological and dialogical conflict is transposed from courtroom discourse to news discourse. The specific linguistic aim of the paper is to bring together the analysis of key-words and the study of evaluative meanings. The paper looks at the interplay between the two, in order to see how the analysis of key-words can be brought to bear on the identification of the speaker’s evaluative position or point of view. The various meanings of the expression “key-words” are discussed and related to Speaker/ Writer’s point of view and to Listener/Reader’s engagement.Following procedures which are based on a mixture of endogenous and exogenous criteria, the paper explores tools for the identification of key-words on the textual and discourse levels relying on the network of collocational and lexico-semantic relations which are established among the single elements.The analysis includesdifferent aspects: a general analysis of statistical key-words, a study of reporting tools in courtroom and news discourse, a qualitative analysis of how emotions are staged in public discourse, with a discussion of how this contributes to the representation of positions in a debate.