A critical discourse analysis of European Commission Turkey 2021 report

This research study focuses on the hegemonic discourse in the European Commission Turkey 2021 Report employing Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar. The study reveals ideological and political discourse structures in the target text. The overall methodological nature of this research is a textual examination of the target text's lexical, grammatical, graphological, pragmatic, and semantic manifestations of ideology, hegemony, and politics. Therefore, the study makes educated deductions and interpretations based on the findings of its analysis. The first analytic item is modality, which is a fertile semantic domain in the study of political and ideological discourse for it presents a number of semantic nuances. The study found that the report used deontic modality meaning that an external source exerts power and hegemony over the addressee. The external source is the European Union, and the addressee is Turkey. What makes the use of deontic modality significant for the study is that deontic modals accompany concepts, values and criteria emanating from a source of authority, which is the EU within the context of this study. Graphology was found to be another discursive strategy in the report. The use of 228 bold linguistic structures- including individual words, groups of words, phrases, and sentences (personal names, country names and names of institutions excluded) with negative neighbouring statements meant that the text placed a special emphasis on negativity and degradation. The ideological rhetoric of the text, which employs bold forceful terms and negative words, has the capacity to criticise and undermine Turkey. Such discourse structures in political texts of this kind serve to control and change the minds, attitudes, and postures of the reader. The study included 102 normative sentences with should, which reveals the EU's normative power identity at this level of study. Therefore, the study claims that such a discourse is a manifestation of a self-construction process that results in a distinct EU identity over non-EU or non-member countries, which can be defined as follows: EU norms vs. non-EU norms, or self- and others' norms. Political discourse has a general inclination to give greater weight to negative entities, based on both innate predispositions and experience of its producers. Therefore, political, and ideological texts are characterised by their negative potency, suggesting that negative entities are more powerful than equivalent positive entities. The report was no exception with the use of 1208 occurrences of negative words. The use of the quantity word some in sentences conveying a positive meaning about Turkey was interpreted as the very existence of a vague language in the text making the meaning and the message in these sentences less precise, valuable, respectable, or appreciable.