Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT, i.e. Essex School) will inform the project at each stage of project by providing a theoretical and conceptual framework. PDT provides a relational discursive epistemology to study the foreign policy: on the one hand, a conceptualization of identity in relational terms with a privileged Self and a devalued Other and on the other hand, an emphasis on the discursive construction of identity as both constitutive of and a product of foreign policy. Following current empirical research by PDT scholars, EMOFORTE adopts methodic triangulation combining close qualitative readings with a corpus linguistics approach that uses computer software to identify frequent and salient linguistic patterns over large amounts of data.
Building the corpora: EMOFORTE will compile its corpora from the political domain (mostly ‘official texts’). Texts for the general corpus will be collected through purposive sampling using the salient events relating EU-Turkey relations. The CORPUS of EMOFORTE will be shared as open access in openair.eu for further studies by researchers.