#Présidentielle2017 : a critical discourse analysis of the 2017 French presidential campaign on Twitter

In the context of the 2017 French presidential election, this dissertation examines political discourse on Twitter from a socio-semiotic perspective. Specifically, it focuses on campaign tweets as a unique genre of discourse that plays a pivotal role in the dissemination and amplification of political discourse. This study uses an innovative framework which combines two approaches to discourse analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). CDA and SFL are socially-oriented approaches to discourse which share a dialectical view of text-in-context whereby discourse shapes and is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it occurs (Fairclough, 2003; Hasan, 2014). I draw on Norman Fairclough’s concept of ‘order of discourse’, which refers to a unique configuration of genres, discourses and styles constitutive of a social practice or structure (Fairclough, 1993). I suggest that digital campaigning constitutes a growing social practice with its own order of discourse, and I examine how the 2017 presidential candidates mobilized particular discursive mechanisms to realize a variety of discourses (ideologies) and styles (identities). In addition, I analyze how they exploited the generic affordances and constraints of tweets to their advantage. To this end, I collected a total of 208 tweets from six main actors of the 2017 election: outgoing president François Hollande and candidates Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Benoît Hamon. All tweets were posted in reaction to three events of significance for the election. This dissertation provides an in-depth, multifunctional analysis that focuses on ideational, interpersonal and textual ways of meaning-making: (1) transitivity and social actor representation, (2) modality and engagement and (3) texture and generic structure. I argue that the 2017 election was above all characterized by an effort of the candidates to distance themselves from the political class. I suggest that this antiestablishment sentiment was realized by two ‘styles of politics’: the populist style and the centrist style. Finally, I argue that the structural constraints of tweets amplify these populist appeals through the combination of decontextualization and semantic condensation.