The New Challenges of Populist Discourses in Romance Speaking Countries

Malin Roitman is Associate Professor in French at Stockholm University. Her research deals especially with argumentation and pragmatic phenomena in media and political discourse, especially the presidential election debates in France. She has mainly been interested in the use of negation as an argumentation strategy in political and media discourse. Furthermore, Malin has published studies on the self-representation (the use the first-person pronoun “I”), (ethos), the terms of address, and the denomination of national identity in French presidential election debates. She has published two books gathering studies on the function of negation in different languages: The Pragmatics of Negation: Negative Meanings, Uses and Discursive Functions (JB Publishing Company, 2017) and Negatives and Meaning: Social Setting and Pragmatic Effects: Using Negatives in Political Discourse, Social Media and Oral Interaction. (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press 2023)

María Bernal is Full Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden), and a member of the EDICE Programme, which focuses on the study of linguistic (im)politeness. Her research interests are interactional pragmatics, conversation and discourse analysis, mainly from a sociopragmatic perspective and through oral corpora (Spanish colloquial conversations, courtroom interactions, political discourse, etc.). Her work has appeared in journals such as Pragmatics, Sociocultural Pragmatics and Journal of Spanish Language Teaching. She is the co-editor (with Diana Bravo) of Perspectivas sociopragmáticas y socioculturales del análisis del discurso. Buenos Aires, Dunken, 2015. She is currently engaged in a research project devoted to Political discourses in Romance-speaking countries (ROMPOL, Stockholm University) and in a project investigating the communication on gender equality between Andalusian institutions and citizens.

Christophe Premat is Associate Professor in French with a major specialization in Cultural Studies at Stockholm University. He is a member of the editorial board of the review Sens Public, an international web journal of social sciences. His current research focuses on the perception of participatory processes in the political discourse of French-speaking elites, the analysis of memory debates in France, and discourse analysis. He recently published a book on the institutionalization of Francophonie organization (Pour une généalogie critique de la Francophonie, Stockholm University Press, 2018) and, in 2015, co-edited a handbook on French-German relations, Handwörterbuch der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen (Nomos). He is part of the research project analyzing the political discourses in Romance-speaking countries (ROMPOL, Stockholm University) and the research project ‘Language and Power’ (Språk och Makt, Stockholm University).

Françoise Sullet-Nylander is Professor Emerita of French Language and Linguistics at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University. Since her doctoral thesis (1998), Le Titre de presse : analyses syntaxique, pragmatique et rhétorique, she has published a number of scientific articles focusing on polyphony, reported speech, rephrasing and wordplay in journalistic texts. She has also co-edited several books : Le Français parlé des médias (2007), La Linguistique dans tous les sens (2011), Discours rapporté, genre(s) et médias (2014), Le discours rapporté : une question de genre ? (2015) and Political Discourses at the Extremes. Expressions of Populism in Romance-Speaking Countries (2019). Her research deals with linguistic and discursive aspects of political debates during the French presidential elections (1974-2017). She has conducted a research seminar on Romance Linguistics (RomLing) and an interdisciplinary research project on Political discourses in Romance Speaking Countries (ROMPOL).