О језику и/у политици: повест југословенских истраживања
On the Language in/and Politics: A Brief History of Yugoslav Research in the Domain of Political Discourse

Summary/Abstract: In this brief overview the author will analyze the works (articles and books) of Yugoslav authors who have dealt with the relationship of politics and language (or the usage of language in politics) in Yugoslavia, in the period between the end of the sixties until the disintegration of the SFR Yugoslavia. The intention of the author is to present the relevant literature that is published in this period and to systematize it, i.e. classify (and evaluate) it against the certain content or theoretical parameters, or against its scientific contribution. Bearing in mind the popularity and proliferation of modern discourse (or critical discourse) research of political texts/speeches abroad, but also in our academic community, the author considered that it would be useful to draw attention to the beginnings (or the precursors) of political discourse analysis in our country and social sciences and humanities. The author also attempts to indicate the (thematic, theoretical, or methodological) similarity/similarities of these (investigated) works with the current ”state of art“ papers and (text)books in this field. The undertaken analysis shows following results: firstly, there is a substantial amount of papers, written between 1970s and early 1990s (till the break-up of SFR Yugoslavia), on the topic of language in politics or political language; secondly, authors of these papers usually deal with lexical aspects of the language in politics, but they also analyse (morpho)syntactic aspects as well; thirdly, some pragmatic questions are also raised in this papers, though not in a substantial among; fourthly, superstructural (textual and genre) aspects of the political language are rather rarely investigated; fifthly, cognitivism is not visible in these papers at all, since it was rather new approach in linguistics, and Yugoslav author did not have opportunity to apply it in their research. Lastly, this analysis shows that Serbian (Yugoslav) authors, in 70s and 80s paved the way for modern approaches and new research into the contemporary political discourse in this part of Europe.

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