The Pragmatics of Governmental Discourse

This book presents a novel methodological framework for analysing governmental discourse that combines pragmatist perspectives on language with computational sociolinguistics and large language models.
The first half engages with critical traditions of discourse analysis such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis. Drawing upon pragmatist views on meaning - views rarely considered in sociological discourse analysis - the book critiques these critical traditions, arguing that understanding how discourse grounds social structures and power relations must begin with a systematic understanding of how meaning is contextually fixed. A pragmatist reading of Foucault's arguments about governmentality that incorporates David Lewis' scorekeeping framework and relevance theory is advocated for as a framework for discourse analysis. Using a dataset of 92 million tokens sampled from approximately 170,000 government documents, this book illustrates how this framework can be used in combination with natural language processing through a case study of the British government's adoption of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing discourses during 2000-2020.
This book will be of interest to both theoretically-oriented sociologists interested in language to those interested in how the power of recent developments in natural language processing, particularly pre-trained neural language models, can be harnessed to bring new perspectives to long-standing sociological questions.