Come scrivono i politici italiani su Facebook Appunti per un’analisi linguistica comparativa

Abstract

This article aims at proposing a linguistic analysis of 358 posts written on Facebook (FB) by six Italian politicians. More specifically, the corpus consists of six official political Italian pages, which can be divided into two samples (three pages per sample), corresponding to two different observation moments: 1. December 2012 – January 2013 (88 post); 2. May – August 2017 (270 post). While the focus of attention is on posts, comments have also been taken into account in this survey (10 for each post). The two samples here analyzed are fairly close in time, but, given the accelerated speed of web evolution, some (micro-)diachronic remarks can be made in order to show how the Italian politicians’ communication on FB has been changed from 2013 to 2017.
In sections 1 and 2 the issue concerning the language of politics on the web (with special reference to social networks) has been introduced and the corpus has been presented in detail; in sections 3 and 4, the language and the stylistic characteristics of the two samples have been analyzed; finally, in sections 5 and 6, some concluding remarks are given, especially focusing the most recent sample.