Abstract: The article analyses the discourse of the political leader of a nationalist party, Ataka, in the Bulgarian Parliament for its 42^nd session. Based on a corpus comprising all the speeches of the leader, Volen Siderov, corpus analytical techniques, such as key word lists, collocates and clusters are used to elicit characteristics of the discourse, which reveal dominant features of nationalist rhetoric. The analysis is situated within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and applies concepts from Functional Linguistics, such as the nature of the verbal activity, the specifics of attributes, affected objects etc. The conclusions reveal a rhetoric of claims which aims to condemn without even seeking grounds for the accusations, and an array of activities which remain unrelated to reality. Several features project the traits of populism.

Key words: corpus assisted critical discourse analysis, nationalism, Bulgaria, Parliamentary discourse.

Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 19, October 2015, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464

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