EXPLORING DIFFERENCES IN NATO DISCOURSES USING THE ReaderBench FRAMEWORK

This paper explores military discourse from a diachronic perspective focused on an in-depth linguistic analysis of the differences between the writing styles of NATO official documents. The approach consists of a quantitative investigation of the evolution of this specific language throughout two different periods-the Cold War (1949–1990) and the post-Cold War period (1991–2018)-, with explicit emphasis on the examination of discourse corresponding to power dynamics. The main aim of the paper is to describe and explain the manner in which two predominant power relations-integrative and adversarial-have been reified in the Alliance's discourse over a seventy-year time span, tightly correlated with the historical and political context. To this end, we employed the ReaderBench framework to compute a series of textual complexity indices that account for the differences in the writing style. Significant differences were identified, and our results illustrate, from a linguistic perspective, the fluid dynamics of the power relations embedded in NATO discourse.