Pragmatics of participatory discourse 

The paper deals with participatory practices, as a fundamental element of governance, considered in their linguistic and discursive aspects. Based on a corpus of utterances expressed by the stakeholders involved in the PUC (Shared city planning) of Guardia Sanframondi and San Lorenzo Maggiore, the research examines linguistic elements such as pronouns and verb forms, and argumentative/ rhetorical elements such as modality and agency. The analysis of materials allows, on the one hand, to verify the effectiveness of “participatory governance”, often accused of being a “social engineering” to impose and legitimize neo-liberal practices, on the other hand to make an assessment of the participatory communication via the web (web-democracy), of which the shared PUC constitutes a pilot example. 

Keywords: Participatory Discourse, Governance, Agency, Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics.