This international conference on Parliamentary Discourses across Cultures, organized by the Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (University of Bucharest,  Faculty of Letters), in connection with the Research Project Tradition and Modernity in the Romanian Parliamentary Discourse: a Pragma-Rhetorical Approach, sponsored by the CNCSIS – UEFISCSU (code 2136/ 2008, PN II IDEI).

The conference has an interdisciplinary scope and is open to specialists in several fields, such as Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, History, Political Sciences, Sociology, Media and Communication.

The topic is motivated by the growing interest for research on political discourse and particularly parliamentary discourse, one of its major subgenres. The distinctive features of parliamentary practices are of central interest to scholars who are concerned with exploring various traditions and rhetorical discourse styles in and across European parliaments. Many investigations are increasingly based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodologies, whose main challenge is to try and integrate different approaches to the multifaceted manifestations of this discourse genre in a coherent system of analysis.

A historical perspective on national parliamentary discourses has the advantage of opening the way to a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices across time and space. It aims at highlighting the particular roles played by local socio-historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political institutions.

The perspective developed by political sciences contributes to shedding light upon the way social events are filtered by ideology and mapped onto discourse.

The linguistic perspective focuses on integrating context-based socio-political observations into the framework of pragmatics and pragma-rhetorical analysis of discourse.

The conference will be held at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest.

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