Abstract:

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) aims at analyzing textual and contextual levels to reveal the meaning in various kinds of oral, written and visual texts. Correspondingly, it intends to unbare the social practice in discourse with a critical approach on the axis of the concepts of authority, power, ideology and identity at all levels. All the same, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), one of the salient approaches in Critical Discourse Studies, has an intense historical research tendency and offers an infrastructure that includes the historical and sociopolitical background in which the discourse is developed. This study aims to promote a research method with DHA and indicate how it can be applied to studies about Greece. The study focuses on the period “National Schism”, which Greece encountered during World War I. This naming originated from the conflicted policies of Eleftherios Venizelos, one of the prime ministers at the time, and of Constantine, the King of Greece, about how Greece must act during the war. Such that through the process (1915-1917) which became harder with the interventions of the Entente and Central Powers, a parallel administration was emerged and King Constantine was even dethroned. The articles written by Venizelos and one of his political opponents, Metaxas, in 1934 on the very period, are the research sample. The discourses they comprise are probed into to exemplify the research steps of DHA and to present a distinct perspective on the political dynamics and language in Greece in the first half of the 20th century.

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