The Pragmatics Of Political Discourse

The volume promotes a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of political discourse as multilayered mediated discourse. The chapters cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of speech act theory, social positioning theory, and argumentation theory and rhetorics. They address the strategic use of address terms and irony, the form and function of questions, and the expression of certainty in the contexts of parliamentary discourse, interview, talkshow, phone-in programme and motion of support across different discourse domains. Different cultural contexts are represented, including Africa, the Middle East, different parts of Europe and the United States.

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains - political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. - it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions concerning language itself. The twenty chapters in the volume, written by specialists in political linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and social psychology, address the diversity of political discourse to propose novel perspectives from which common analytic procedures can be drawn and followed. The volume is thus an essential resource for anyone looking for a coherent research agenda in explorations of political discourse as a point of reference for their own academic activities, both scholarly and didactic. "Politics in today's world consists of almost continuous interconnected talking and writing in a constantly expanding media universe. This comprehensive collection of papers edited by Urszula Okulska and Piotr Cap helps readers to get a hold on the flow of discourse that constitutes politics today. Indispensible for anyone seeking perspectives for understanding the language of politics and research methods for probing beyond the surface."

How did the G. W. Bush administration manage to persuade Americans to go to war in Iraq in March 2003? How was this intervention, and the global campaign named as “war-on-terror,” legitimised linguistically? This book shows that the best legitimisation effects in political discourse are accomplished through the use of “proximization”—a cognitive-rhetorical strategy that draws on the speaker’s ability to present events as directly and increasingly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or threatening way. There are three aspects of proximization: spatial, temporal and axiological. The spatial aspect involves the construal of events in the discourse as physically endangering the addressee. The temporal aspect involves presenting the events as increasingly momentous and historic and hence of central significance to both the addressee and the speaker. The axiological aspect consists in a growing clash between the system of values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee, and the values characterizing a third party whose actions, ideologically negative, are made “proximate” and thus threatening. Although the tripartite model of proximization proposed in the book is complex at the level of its linguistic realisation, the working assumption is intriguingly basic: addressees of political discourse are more likely to legitimise pre-emptive actions aimed at neutralizing the proximate “threat” if they construe the threat as personally consequential. The book shows how language of the war-on-terror, and especially the rhetoric of the Iraq war, respond to this precondition. This second revised edition features an extended preface and a new closing chapter.

The main concern of this work is to tackle manipulation in communicative events as one of the means used by politicians to achieve certain goals such as influencing the behavior, desire, belief and emotions of others to their self-interests without evident detection of their communicative intention. As a communicative event and from a pragmatic point of view, manipulation in the political field has not been given enough attention. Thus, this study scrutinizes the pragmatic aspects of manipulation in British and American political debates. As such, it sets itself the task of achieving several aims, the most important of which are: (1) specifying the pragmatic criterion/criteria according to whose presence a certain political debate is considered as manipulative, (2) identifying the manipulation types used by politicians and the pragmatic strategies via which each type is fulfilled, (3) exhibiting the whole pragmatic structure of manipulative, whether British or American, political debates, (4) pinpointing both the manipulative pragmatic strategies used to fulfill each sub-stage (component) and manipulative strategies adopted to attain all the sub-stages (components) of the entire pragmatic structure of manipulation, (5) highlighting the manipulative pragmatic strategies, the manipulative strategies, as well as the manipulation types highly resorted to by politicians in political debates, (6) showing transparent inter/intra-differences that can be detected in terms of the debater's employment of manipulation types, the whole pragmatic structure of manipulation, the manipulative pragmatic strategies, and the manipulative strategies used by the debaters, and (7) developing a pragmatic model for identifying the types of manipulation and the pragmatic strategies used to fulfill each type; in addition to another eclectic model to analyze the pragmatic structure and strategies of the data under scrutiny.

We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chávez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.

Rethinking Sinclair and Coulthard’s sequentiality-based notion of the follow-up, this volume explores its forms and communicative functions in traditional and contemporary modes of communication (parliamentary sessions, interviews, debates, speeches, op-eds, discussion forums and Twitter) wherein political actors address challenges to their political agenda and to their political face. In so doing, the volume achieves two major advances. First, its contributions expand the understanding of follow-ups beyond the traditional focus on structural sequentiality, considering communicative function as a defining feature of a follow-up. Second, it broadens the understanding of what constitutes political discourse, as not being limited to a single discourse, but also being able to span multiple discourses of different forms and speech events over time.

This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse, as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab, Dutch, British, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Israeli, Swedish, US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics, the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics, particularly multimodality, cognition, context, genre and recipient design.