The paper studies the textual, discursive and social practices of the Greek “aganaktismeni” (indignados) movements, which mainly took place in the public gathering of tens of thousands of Greeks in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek parliament from May to August 2011. Data come from multiple sources, including the General Assembly proceedings and resolutions, while a linguistically-informed approach is followed, which combines Critical Discourse Analysis concepts with corpus linguistic methods. It is argued that the Syntagma protests generated a new context in Greek politics, by introducing new genres and the innovative articulation of already existing discourses. It was also found that social/political identities and social/public space were co-articulated, since the identity of the movement was crucially constructed in terms of space.

In this chapter we contrast our findings from a previous study of the textual, discursive and social practices of the Greek protester movements, based on data from the General Assembly proceedings and their resolutions (Goutsos and Polymeneas 2014), with how the protesters in Syntagma square were viewed by others, namely the Greek media in a series of articles coinciding with or following the protests. The protesters’ own linguistic and discursive practices are thus juxtaposed to their recontextualizations and representations by others. A pronounced difference is found between self-constructed and ascribed identity as indicative of the representational power of the media, which have attempted to interpret the protesters’ identity within the existing political context.

This study attempts an analysis of political discourse during the current Greek debt crisis at the beginning of 2010, when the size of the debt became apparent. It draws upon both the critical discourse analysis tradition and corpus linguistics in order to examine the relationship between discourse and group “knowledge” in speeches of the then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, and the Minister of Finance, George Papakonstantinou. It is argued that political knowledge on the crisis is a matter of “truth” between contesting political groups. The Greek government talked and wrote about the crisis so as to establish their “truth”, by transforming their beliefs and interpretations on how the crisis can be converted into knowledge.

The chapter studies the textual, discursive and social practices of the Greek “aganaktismeni” (indignados) movements, which mainly took place in the public gathering of tens of thousands of Greeks in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek parliament from May to August 2011. Data come from multiple sources, including the General Assembly proceedings and resolutions, while a linguistically-informed approach is followed, which combines Critical Discourse Analysis concepts with corpus linguistic methods. It is argued that the Syntagma protests generated a new context in Greek politics, by introducing new genres and the innovative articulation of already existing discourses. It was also found that social/political identities and social/public space were co-articulated, since the identity of the movement was crucially constructed in terms of space.