Il discorso sulla crisi economica nella stampa italiana (2007-2017)

The economic crisis that emerged between 2007 and 2008 and the subsequent periods of recession (2009 and 2011) have long captured the attention of the Italian media. Economic crises are certainly not new to the West, nor are they to Italy; however, due to its exceptional intensity and duration, the last recessionary phase in our country represented a decisive moment in recent history. The study wants to set itself as a starting point for an overall analysis on the theme of the economic and (neo)liberal discourse in the media and in Italian politics. The corpus collected for this first survey includes articles of national newspapers published between August 2007 and July 2017, thus covering a vast period of time. The corpus is composed of about 300 thousand articles from 6 national newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Sole 24 Ore, MilanoFinanza) for a total of over 200 million words. The analysis will combine a series of quantitative and qualitative techniques; we refer here to the now consolidated field of study of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (PARTINGTON 2004). In the present paper we will focus on the description of some particularly salient social actors (the markets, the ECB, the workers) and on the concept of social class