Table of Contents

Table of Contents, Authorship Note, References, 1. Introduction, 2. Language and Politics, 2.1 Populism and polarization in the 21st century, 2.2 Politics and discourse: two sides of the same coin, 2.3 What can linguistics tell us about political discourse?, 2.4 Talking politics online, 3. A Multi-method Approach for the Analysis of Political Discourse , 3.1 Online political discourse: a multimodal challenge, 3.2 From messages to data, 3.3 Automated corpus analyses, 3.4 Appraisal analysis of polarized communication, 4. Right-wing Parties: Then and Now, 4.1 League, an Italian Story, 4.2 United Kingdom: from the Brexit Party to Reform UK, 4.3 Brothers of Italy, a cumbersome past, 4.4 France: from the National Rally to the National Front , 4.5 Concluding remarks, 5. Engaging with the Audience, 5.1 From followers to voters, 5.2 Fear, anger, trust , 5.3 Similarities and differences across media, 5.4 Concluding remarks, 6. Defining Identity, 6.1 Tweeting from right to right , 6.2 The website as a receptacle of programmes and values, 6.3 Concluding remarks, 7. Us Against Them: a multimodal perspective , 7.1 Visual campaigns, 7.2. Them, an overview, 7.3. Us against them, 7.4 Concluding remarks , 8. Online Communication and Societal Cha(lle)nges

About the Author

Claudia Roberta Combei is a Researcher (RTD-a) in Linguistics and Head of the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Pavia. She earned her PhD from the University of Pisa, specialising in phonetics and corpus linguistics. Her research employs a mixed-method approach, exploring topics such as political and social media discourse, non-native speech, and sociophonetics. She has co-coordinated the RadioCast-it speech corpus and serves as a member of the editorial board of Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy – MetBib. She has reviewed for national and international scientific conferences and journals.

Valeria Reggi is a discourse analyst and certified English-Italian translator. She is currently an Adjunct Professor and Tutor at the University of Bologna and the University of Brescia, and she collaborates with University College London. Valeria Reggi is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Media Ecology journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication. Her research interests include Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, political discourse, disinformation, stereotyping, nationalism, and critical thinking.