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Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates
Abstract
The present study explores the language of evaluation in a sub-genre of political discourse, preelectoral
debates, and its potential persuasive function for gaining voters via a contraposition
of positive self-evaluation and negative evaluation of the other candidate. A further aim of this
research is to check whether the candidate’s ideology has a bearing on the entities that get
evaluated. After a brief examination of the characteristics of the sub-genre at hand, specifically
in the Spanish context, we present the results of an evaluation analysis carried out in a corpus
of 19,849 words, which is the extension of the most recent pre-electoral debate held in Spain
between the candidates of the two main political parties. Taking into account Van Dijk’s critical
discourse analysis (CDA) framework for parliamentary debates as global semantic strategies
of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, Martin and White’s method was
adopted as an analytical tool. The results showed that, although each candidate had different
preferences in the choice of evaluative devices, they both used them as a strategy to win electoral
votes while deprecating the opposing party and, therefore, minimizing their opponents’ chances
of winning the elections. On the other hand, and despite their opposing ideology, they both seem
to defend those policies that are more widely accepted in order not to risk losing voters: public
services and egalitarian social policies.
... This ultimately helps to 'uncover ideologies that reverberate throughout a piece of discourse ' (2017, p. 3). Appraisal theory has also proved insightful in revealing the ideological stance of those in power (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014). When used in combination, Transitivity and Appraisal construe a certain version of reality through grammatical and evaluative choices to represent particular ideologies. ...
... The expression of evaluation has also been examined in political texts to discover politicians' ideological stances (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Scott, 2003Scott, , 2008 or the evaluative potential of metaphors and metonymies in political discourse (Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2020;Díez-Prados, 2016). The results indicate that politicians use the general strategy of positive self-evaluation and negative other-presentation (van Dijk, 2005) to construct their own version of reality that would help them reach power, remain there once again or justify controversial decisions involving death and suffering. ...
... Martin & White's (2005) Appraisal theory was selected, because it is the most wellknown framework for the analysis of evaluation (see Bartley, 2017;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Scott, 2003Scott, , 2008 to name but a few). The objective remaining is now to check whether Halliday's Transitivity system (Halliday, 1994;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, 2014 also proves insightful in showing how politicians of different ideologies represent events discursively and whether the Transitivity and Appraisal analyses combine to illustrate the politicians' ideological positions. ...
The present study explores the interplay of evaluation and transitivity in an American and Spanish parliamentary debate by President Obama and PM Rajoy aiming at legitimizing their actions and at convincing candidates to vote for them in the upcoming elections. A further objective is to investigate whether the transitivity and appraisal analyses illustrate the politicians’ ideological positions. Within the general framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we use the results obtained for Appraisal following Martin and White’s appraisal scheme [Cabrejas-Peñuelas, A. B. (2020). Metaphor, metonymy and evaluation as political devices in American and Spanish parliamentary political discourse. Ibérica, 40, 75–99] and add a study of the interplay with transitivity [Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar. Routledge]. The results reveal that both politicians used transitivity differently: Obama used mental desiderative processes for expressing desires and showed the active role of ‘us’ to bring about positive changes. In contrast, Rajoy preferred relational, verbal and existential processes. These contribute to his particular picture of reality, which is ideological in nature. Also, the results show that evaluation and transitivity were used as an ideological tool for persuasion and legitimization of the politicians’ economic decisions.
... However, to our knowledge none has attempted to analyze the construction of political identity of the candidates to Prime Minister as a result of political interaction in pre-electoral debates in Spain. In previous research (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014), we addressed the issue of evaluation, according to the Appraisal Model, in order to demonstrate how Conservative Rajoy and Socialist Rubalcaba employed evaluative devices for self-praise and other-deprecation in the 2011 debate. Now, we examine the same debate under a different light: how the two politicians construct and negotiate their discursive identities in the debate via the discursive strategies of evaluation, implicatures, interactional negotiation and complementary identity relations, as Bucholtz & Hall (2005) suggest. ...
... 595), making positive evaluations of themselves and negative evaluations of the other(s). This is precisely the type of interaction held between contenders in a pre-electoral debate (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014). Recent work on evaluation has shown that evaluative language is a resource that can be used for the construction of identity, as Ponton (2010, pp. ...
... Evaluation, an amply researched phenomenon (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Hunston & Thompson, 2000;Martin, 2000Martin, /2003Martin & White, 2005;Ponton, 2010Ponton, , 2011Thompson & Alba-Juez, 2014), is a prevalent resource for persuasion in political discourse (Partington & Taylor, 2018). Indeed, through positive lexical markers politicians praise their attitude and their deeds (e.g. ...
In this article we examine the identity construction of two politicians in the 2011 Spanish pre-electoral debate, following four of Bucholtz & Hall’s (2005) linguistic means: evaluation, implicatures, interactional negotiation, and complementary identity relations. For the analysis, Martin & White’s (2005) evaluation model and Corpus Linguistics are adopted. The politicians’ identity construction is dependent on the debate format, its discursive nature, the conversational norms of the debate and the candidates’ ever-present need to give a positive image before the audience and a negative one for their opponent. The Socialist candidate’s positive identity positions him as a defendant of laymen’s interests (i.e. Nurturant Parent identity), while he contributes to Rajoy’s emergent identity as a dishonest politician. However, the Conservative politician plays down the other candidate’s identity inferences, casts his identity as a Nurturant Parent to attract the audience’s sympathy and embodies an identity of change. This positive identity contributed to his ethos and resulted in an overwhelming win.
... However, it is less clear what devices they use to achieve their purpose. Various studies (Meadows, 2007;Cortés de los Ríos, 2010;Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados;, Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2015 have uncovered diverse linguistic tools (i.e. rhetorical figures, evaluative language, lexical choice, among others) that serve politicians «to trigger powerful connections in the minds of listeners» (Meadows 2007, 14) and, thus, it is no wonder that they exploit their rhetorical power to achieve their own political ends. ...
... At the same time, metonymy (and its uses with metaphor) serves the purpose of «constructing and reproducing dominant discourse» (Catalano and Waugh, 2013b: 32), leading to manipulation. Political interviews, electoral meetings and speeches, presidential addresses and pre-election debates have been widely studied (Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2015;Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014;Proctor and I-Wen Su, 2011); however, to our knowledge none has attempted to make a comparative analysis of Spanish and American parliamentary debates in terms of the metonymies used. The present study attempts to fill this gap by analyzing what and how metonymies are used in the State of the Union Address (henceforth, sotu) in the US and in the State of the Nation Address (henceforth, sona) in Spain, which took place on January 20 th , 2015 and on February 24 th , 2015, respectively. ...
... Thus, we only concentrate on President Obama's and Prime Minister Rajoy's speeches. Our recent field of research (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2015;Díez-Prados, 2016;Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2018 in press) concentrates on discourse strategies (positive/negative evaluation, fallacies, metaphorical mappings) from a contrastive perspective (English-Spanish) in pre-election and parliamentary speeches that contribute to persuasion in text. The objective of the present study is to expand our previous work on metaphor (Díez-Prados, 2016;Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2018 in press) by studying metonymy and contrast the results in the 2015 us sotu with those found in a coetaneous address in Spanish, the 2015 sona. ...
This study attempts to analyze the metonymies used in the Economy section of two equivalent parliamentary speeches: the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain, which belong to two different debate traditions. The present study aims at answering the following research questions:What metonymies do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in their American and Spanish parliamentary speeches in an attempt to convince the public of economic victory?What are the similarities and differences between the role of metonymy in shaping public opinion about economic recovery in America and Spain in both speeches?To answer these questions, we use the method of conceptual metonymy (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) which serves to determine the role that metonymy plays in swaying the public’s opinion to their side and, thus, it is a tool of manipulation. The results indicate that Democrat Obama and Conservative Rajoy used metonymies (and their interactions with metaphors) ideologically as they attempted to persuade their audiences that economic recovery was a reality and gain public support for them, replaced the discourse of crime for the discourse of a natural tragedy and stressed Us and Our good actions and Them and Their bad actions. Despite the similarities, both politicians used metonymies to a different extent and used them to stress different aspects of their countries’ economic recovery.
... Based on few notable exceptions, e.g. Miller (2004), Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados (2014), this study makes use of Martin and White's attitudinal framework (2005), to take a first glimpse at the mechanics of evaluation in US-American online campaigning. It likewise sheds light on an influential and increasingly popular Twitter genre, namely political tweets, of which we still know very little. ...
... Subcategories of attitudinal evaluation (based onMartin and White (2005) and Cabrejas-Peñuelas andDíez-Prados (2014) ...
While there is extensive research on the language of twitter, our knowledge of the pragmatics of particular twitter genres (and sub-genres) is still piecemeal. At the same time, in the past decades, political discourse analysis has widened our understanding of how language can be used instrumentally to alter or manipulate public interaction, meanings and opinions. However, it has seldom examined the evaluative load of political communication in much detail. To this end, the paper, on the one hand, serves to illuminate the pragmatics of political tweets as a twitter genre. On the other hand, the study brings to the fore the strategic use of negative evaluations in political online campaigning and discusses its potential (and actual) socio-political ramifications. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of negative evaluations largely draws on Martin and White’s Appraisal framework (2005) and is based on a compatible study by Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados (2014). I track down, classify and categorize the negative evaluations of a subset of twitter posts by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a self-compiled corpus of 1965 tweets, with a view to evaluation types, their relative frequencies and dispersion across the corpus, as well as objects and targets of evaluation. The quantitative analysis is then completed by a qualitative examination of the objects and targets of evaluation in both twitter profiles as well as a closer look at the recurrent language used to evaluate the political “other”. The results show that Trump makes more flexible (and strategic) use of negative evaluations (both in terms of types, frequency and distribution), while Clinton’s negative evaluations are less frequent, less diverse and, thus possibly, less convincing.
... Political discourse has been explored in the light of Martin and White's (2005) appraisal framework as it is "well suited to express evaluation" (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014, p. 2). Politicians involved in political discourse often use negative and positive attitudes, judgements of others' capacity and ethics, and subjective evaluations of the quality and composition of things to appeal to the expectations of their audience (Sornig, 1989;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014). ...
This study employed Martin and White's (2005) appraisal framework to explore evaluative language within political discourse. The study utilized a mixed-method research design to examine the features of the three types of attitude: affect, judgement and appreciation employed by Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Leslie Stahl and Norah O'Donnell in four political interviews on 60 Minutes during the 2020 presidential elections in the United States of America. The analysis revealed that Trump and Stahl employed more attitude resources of affect in their interviews, whereas Biden and O'Donnell used more attitude resources of appreciation. The findings also revealed that each of the four participants strategized the attitude types and polarity to achieve particular argumentative goals. Moreover, the analysis established a correlation between the attitudinal resources employed by the four participants and the political stance and ideology they adopted during the interviews. Finally, the findings indicate that the overall atmosphere of the interviews was highly affected by the attitudinal exchange between the interviewer and interviewee.
... Appreciation shows speakers' esthetic evaluations of things, phenomena, or processes, we can evaluate a thing in terms of our "reaction" to it, its "composition" and its "value" (Martin and White, 2005). As a major subsystem in the Appraisal System, the Attitude System contributes to analyzing how the speaker or writer evaluates people and things (e.g., Marshall et al., 2010;Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014). It is a useful tool for the discourse analysis of various genres such as tweets (Ross and Caldwell, 2020), personal emails (Ho, 2014), public statements (Meadows and Sayer, 2013), and doctors' discourse (Gallardo and Ferrari, 2010). ...
Online consumer reviews benefit not only buyers but also sellers in the virtual market place. For consumers, they can realize their attitudes to products through the various lexical attitudinal resources indicating emotion and judgment, and for sellers they act as a form of customer feedback which can enhance the relationship between buyers and sellers. In that sense they improve the operation of the market price mechanism. The purpose of this study is to investigate the Interpersonal meanings realized through the attitude resources drawn upon by English and Chinese online consumers. Based on the Appraisal System, especially the Attitude System in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study conducts a contrastive analysis of the attitudinal resources employed by consumers in Amazon UK and Amazon China. These features are analyzed by using the UAM CorpusTool to annotate the relevant resources, with similarities and differences in the general distribution of attitudinal resources identified, and any potential underlying reasons explained. The results of this study suggest that different features and distribution of attitudinal resources are employed in English and Chinese online consumer reviews, and that more attitudinal units are involved in English online consumer reviews than in the Chinese versions. Consumers from the United Kingdom also seem to use more affect resources than Chinese consumers in their online reviews, while Chinese consumers employ slightly more judgment resources and more appreciation resources. Possible factors that may cause such differences are examined in terms of the differing contexts of cultures.
... A universal strategy adopted by politicians to win electoral support relies on attempts at discrediting the opposing party to minimise their chances of achieving victory (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014). This can be accomplished in various ways, though typical strategies essentially include highlighting other parties" perceived failures, such as economic inefficiency, weak stances against crime or terrorism, and corruption (Curini, 2018). ...
This study investigates the discourse of the French right-wing political party National Front (FN) through a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis approach examining their electoral campaign material from 2011 until 2017. The findings reveal that the FN adopts typical populist tropes and strategies to broaden its electoral base and win popular support. At the core of their discourse lie binary conceptualisations constructing an in-group (the FN, the people) and an out-group (political individuals and entities, immigrants) in a scheme of opposition, typically attributing positive qualities to the former and negative values to the latter. The linguistic construction of the Self and the Other was achieved through the use of metaphor and speech acts, in addition to other discursive strategies involving the appeal to negative emotions. In accordance with van Dijk’s ideological square, metaphors reveal a sharp polarisation in the depiction of the Self and the Other, mainly through the FN's positive self-presentation in terms of benevolent and optimistic metaphors. In contrast, the Other is mainly portrayed through war metaphors. Similarly, through the use of speech acts, the FN blames, accuses and criticises the Other, holding it accountable for the French people’s grievances, while the Self (in the person of the FN’s leader Marine Le Pen) is assertive, firm and determined in its defence of the nation and the people. Linguistic strategies are ultimately reinforced through semiotic representations, enhancing the us/them dichotomy.
... Evaluation in pre-election debates has been studied by Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados (2014), again through the Appraisal framework, to highlight the specific uses participants make of positive versus negative attitude markers. The authors also identify the politicians' use of affect and judgement, to respectively evaluate emotions and political skills or capabilities. ...
This study compares two seminal speeches given by Boris Johnson in the context of Brexit. The first is from 2018 during his tenure as Foreign Secretary, and the second from 2020, by which time he had become Prime Minister. The transcripts of the two complete speeches together constitute a corpus of 7,270 words. The current study applies Hunston’s ( 2000 , 2008 , 2011 ) model of evaluation as a means of testing Johnson’s attitude towards the propositions he develops through his political oratory. Using the concepts of evaluation of status and value, this model allows us to identify Johnson’s degree of alignment with his representation of the world, and to perceive an ideological component in his choices here. It is hypothesized that the changes which took place in the political landscape in the time that separated the two speeches, a period of two years in which Johnson became Prime Minister and Britain left the European Union, may have had an effect on his use of evaluative language. The study reveals statistically significant findings. Johnson is found to have changed from contributing primarily world-creating propositional content in his 2018 speech to a more significant use of world-reflecting statements in his 2020 speech, and to rely in both speeches most importantly on himself as the source of information. The study also reveals a reluctance to display any hypothetical speech behaviour, and a strong preference for truth driven statements.
... Diverse aspects of political discourse such as political speeches (Chilton, 2004;Reyes, 2011; Charteris-Black 2013), parliamentary and electoral debates (Roitman, 2014;Cabrejas-Peñuelas, & Díez-Prados, 2014;Riihimäki, 2019), political campaigns (Degani, 2015;Garcia, 2017), media and politics (Fang, 2001;Ademilokun & Taiwo, 2013) and terrorism and politics (Bhatia, 2009;El-Nashar, & Nayef, 2019) have been analysed. Also, the studies on political discourse, aimed at examining language use, have focused on issues bordering on metaphor (Beard, 2000;Wei, 2001;Charteris-Black 2006;Musolff, 2016), representation and ideology (van Dijk, 2006;Leach, 2015), identity construction (Qaiwer, 2016), resistance and emancipation (Nartey & Ernanda, 2019;Nartey, 2019). ...
This study examines self-legitimation and other-delegitimation in the online radio broadcasts of Nnamdi Kanu, the Supreme Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). Using Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation approach, the paper analyzes four speeches he delivered in Israel following his ‘reappearance’ in 2018. The analysis reveals that Kanu uses three legitimation strategies, namely authorisation, moralisation and rationalisation to justify his sudden escape from Nigeria, call for Biafra’s self-rule and boycott of elections and to discredit alleged cloning of the president, electoral malpractices, marginalisation of the Igbo and corruption and brutality among security agents. These strategies are linguistically realized by self-glorification, exclusive and inclusive pronominalisations (us-them dichotomy), polarisation, derogatory nomination (labelling), and hyperbolic expressions. They are aimed at presenting Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB positively as fighting a legitimate cause.
... Considerable research has been conducted using Appraisal Theory to examine evaluation in different discourses. These include narrative discourse (Cortazzi & Jin, 2000;Goodwin, 1997;Gwyn, 2000;Macken-Horarik, 2003;Martin, 1996;Page, 2002Page, , 2003Painter, 2003), academic discourse (Chusna & Wahyudi, 2015;Hood, 2004Hood, , 2010Liu, 2010Liu, , 2013Mei & Allison, 2003;Pascual & Unger, 2010;Xinghua & Thompson, 2009), legal discourse (Bock, 2011;Miller, 2002), journalistic discourse (Arrese & Perucha, 2006;Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin, 2015;Khoo, Nourbakhsh & Na, 2012;Pounds, 2010;White 1998White , 2004White , 2006White , 2009Wang, 2004;Zhang & Liu, 2015) and political discourse in which the focus has been mainly on interviews (Becker, 2011;Tilakaratna & Mahboob, 2013), speeches (Cabrejas-Penuelas & Diez-Prados, 2013;Miller, 2004b;Simon-Vandenbergen, 2008) and debates (Cabrejas-Penuelas & Diez-Prados, 2014;Miller, 2004aMiller, , 2007. As shown in the aforementioned literature, previous research has employed a genre-based approach to study evaluation using Appraisal Theory. ...
... Appraisal System is comprised of three main subsystems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement (Martin and White, 2005). One or more subsystems will be applied for specific purposes: Attitude subsystem contributes to analyzing how the speaker or writer evaluates people and things (Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014;Marshall et al., 2010), Graduation subsystem deals with the intensification of evaluative expressions (Ross and Caldwell, 2020), and Engagement subsystem is related to the source of evaluations (Tian, 2013). With the aim of examining individual attitudes, this study will concentrate on the Attitude subsystem. ...
In her cross-border debate with Chinese anchor Liu Xin, Trish Regan, an American anchor, behaved differently than what she had done in her previous commentaries. This paper explores the attitudinal differences evinced by Trish Regan on different occasions from a linguistic perspective. Based on the Appraisal System, especially the Attitude subsystem (Martin and White, 2005), this paper examines the attitudinal resources utilized by Trish Regan in her two news commentaries and her online debate with her counterpart Liu Xin—a set of texts which provides a longitudinal account of how Trish has changed her attitude. By annotating the attitude resources used by Trish, positive and negative evaluations are expected to be clarified, with detailed analyses of subsystems in the Attitude System to be given. The results suggest that Trish’s attitude towards China has changed a lot in her commentaries and the debate with Liu Xin—from negative to partly positive. It also appears that Trish maintained a positive attitude towards the United States while she changed her positive attitude towards the trade war into a negative one in her debate with Liu Xin.
... Appraisal System is comprised of three main subsystems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement (Martin and White, 2005). One or more subsystems will be applied for specific purposes: Attitude subsystem contributes to analyzing how the speaker or writer evaluates people and things (Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014;Marshall et al., 2010), Graduation subsystem deals with the intensification of evaluative expressions (Ross and Caldwell, 2020), and Engagement subsystem is related to the source of evaluations (Tian, 2013). With the aim of examining individual attitudes, this study will concentrate on the Attitude subsystem. ...
The present study examines the role that feedback plays on the development of second language (L2) English learners’ writing accuracy over time. Earlier formal accounts and empirical works have focused on the relevance of corrective feedback (CF) in L2 writing learning (Ellis et al., 2008; Sheen, 2007), and what kind of CF (i.e. direct or indirect) has proved to be the most effective one, especially at low L2 levels (García Mayo and Labandibar, 2017; Ismail et al., 2008). We have analyzed 3 pieces of writing produced by 8 L2 English participants (aged 11 to 12). The participants were randomly divided into two groups, one of them received direct CF on their written tasks and the other group was exposed to indirect CF. Results revealed that both groups seemed to improve their mean scores from the pre-task to the post-task, regardless of the type of CF implemented. However, the direct CF group has proven to benefit more from teacher’s written CF, when compared to the indirect CF group. This is especially the case in the development of grammar accuracy.
... Indeed, various analyses unveil a wide repertoire of linguistic strategies (e.g. political implicatures, rhetorical figures, lexical choice, evaluative language, among others) that serve politicians to pursue their rhetorical goals of persuasion and, ultimately, of legitimization and justification of unpopular decisions (Atkinson, 2011;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014). One of such devices is metaphors, since "a lively language, loaded with images, creates a mental image and, with it, an emotional and physical reaction" (our translation) (Molpeceres Arnáiz, 2012, p. 299) that contributes to persuasion. ...
The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions:
What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America’s and Spain’s economic victory?
What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in the speeches as the politicians attempt to shape the economic recovery of America and Spain after recession?
To answer these questions, we use an analytical framework for the identification of conceptual metaphors and a theoretical framework for the use of conceptual metaphors ( Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 ). The results indicate that both politicians use metaphors in an attempt to reify the new economy in such a way that the economic policies used to fight crisis are justified, while the negative effects on citizens are not mentioned and, thus, are dismissed as unimportant. However, the politicians take different approaches to reification.
... The Ideological Square Model that was presented by Teun A. Van Dijk under the umbrella of Critical Discourse Analysis because it specifically focuses upon the polarizing macro strategy of 'positive self-representation and negative other-represenation' (Ghauri, 2019). Several recent studies (Adegoju & Oyebode, 2015;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Mazid, 2008;Reynolds, 2018;Khan et al., 2019)), suggest that this approach is very relevant and suitable for analysing the type of discourses in the political or media domains where we see the construction of 'self' and 'others' on the basis of ideological conflicts. Accordingly, , 2009 asserts that this analytical tool is well suited for exploring and highlighting the polarization of 'us' vs 'them', where the speaker and his or her allies are considered to be 'us or in-group', while his or her opponents are placed in the 'them' or 'out-group' category. ...
... There has been a wide variety of attempts to analyze the linguistic mechanisms that speakers use to convey their personal attitudes and assessments in social interaction (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Hunston & Thompson 2000;Martin 2003;Martin & White, 2005;White, 2002). These proposals differ in the methodologies they have used for their analysis, with these varying approaches including consideration of affect (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), evaluation (Thompson & Hunston, 2000), stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989), and appraisal (Martin, 2003). ...
... There has been a wide variety of attempts to analyze the linguistic mechanisms that speakers use to convey their personal attitudes and assessments in social interaction (Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Hunston & Thompson 2000;Martin 2003;Martin & White, 2005;White, 2002). These proposals differ in the methodologies they have used for their analysis, with these varying approaches including consideration of affect (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), evaluation (Thompson & Hunston, 2000), stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989), and appraisal (Martin, 2003). ...
... In previous publications (Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados 2014; Cabrejas-Peñuelas 2015; Díez-Prados 2016; Cabrejas-Peñuelas, forthcoming) diverse discourse strategies-positive and negative evaluation, fallacies MERCEDES DÍEZ-PRADOS AND ANA BELÉN CABREJAS-PEÑUELAS or metaphorical mappings-have been tackled from a contrastive English-Spanish perspective in pre-election and other types of debate, with the final aim of discovering how these devices may contribute to persuasion in texts. The objective of the present study is to expand on our previous work on evaluation (Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados 2014), which applied Martin and White's categorization of "affect" (2005) We now test a different evaluation model, proposed by Susan Hunston (2000; which focuses on the evaluation of status by comparing the results from a Spanish pre-electoral debate (Rajoy vs. Rubalcaba in 2011) with those from a debate in English (Obama vs. McCain in 2008); the characteristics of the two debates being equitable in that both were held during the worldwide financial crisis and both Rajoy and Obama managed to attract a massive vote through their respective political campaigns. In order to gain insight into Obama's and Rajoy's messages and those of their opponents-McCain and Rubalcaba, respectively-the research questions that we attempt to answer here are the following: RQ1. ...
En este estudio se explora la función evaluativa del lenguaje desde el punto de vista de la expresión del "estatus"-es decir, cómo se presenta el mundo-y su potencial persuasivo en los debates preelectorales en Estados Unidos y España. Para ello, se contrastan los tipos de proposiciones utilizadas en dos corpus equivalentes en español e inglés para así estudiar las similitudes y diferencias, conforme al modelo de evaluación de Hunston (2000; 2008) y su concepto de "estatus": el grado de convergencia entre una proposición y la realidad que representa. Los resultados obtenidos indican que, en general, los políticos analizados prefieren proposiciones que reflejan el mundo actual más que aquellas que lo crean, en un intento por ser vistos como candidatos objetivos. Sin embargo, hay diferencias entre los dos debates: en el debate americano parece haber una preferencia por la evaluación racional mientras que en el español encontramos más opiniones y juicios de valor. Los resultados de este trabajo indican, además, que podría haber una correspondencia entre el éxito político y las estrategias retóricas utilizadas. Asimismo, los ganadores de las elecciones que nos ocupan utilizan proposiciones que reflejan mayor objetividad que los perdedores (es decir, los primeros presentan un ethos más fiable), lo que, a su vez, puede contribuir a persuadir a la audiencia. Si esto es así, adoptar una postura negativa hacia el oponente sería más persuasivo que una postura propia de intenciones y sugerencias positivas. En conclusión, la persuasión parece presentarse más a través de la evaluación negativa del mundo factual que a través de la evaluación positiva de una realidad utópica. Esta conclusión, que, en cierta medida, podría parecer evidente viene avalada por la investigación empírica en este trabajo.
... Att framställa sig själv positivt och motståndaren negativt är något som tidigare forskning har kopplat till politisk diskurs (Nuolijärvi & Tiittula 2011, Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados 2014, men i de svenska valdebatterna 2014 handlade det också om en hel nations självbild. Debatterna kan betraktas som ett uttryck för det Billig (1995) kallar banal nationalism, en pågående process som handlar om att skapa "svenskhet" genom att konstruera Sverige på ett visst sätt. ...
Frågor om rasism och flyktingpolitik är vanligt förekommande i politiska debatter, inte minst sedan Sverigedemokraterna 2010 tog plats i riksdagen och driver begränsad migration till Sverige som sin huvudfråga. Föreliggande studie undersöker hur politiker talar om flyktingpolitik och migration till Sverige i de tv-sända partiledardebatterna inför valet 2014. Syftet är att undersöka hur positioneringar och attityder till migration formas genom interaktionen mellan deltagarna och av debatterna som medieproduktion. Analysunderlaget utgörs av de sekvenser där ämnena flyktingpolitik, migration och integration diskuteras. Sammanlagt handlar det om åtta sekvenser från åtta olika debatter.
Med aktör-nätverksteori (Latour 2007) som teoretiskt ramverk studerar jag hur partiledarna, tv-kamerorna, programledarna, bildskärmarna i studion och publiken blir till aktörer som i samspel med varandra skapar den bild av debatten som når tittarna. Jag använder verktyg från appraisal (Martin & White 2005) och multimodal diskursanalys (van Leeuwen 2005, 2008) för att studera hur aktörerna översätts och positioneras. Jag tittar bland annat på hur partiledarna citerar, förnekar och motsäger varandras yttranden och hur de formulerar egna åsikter genom att ta avstånd från någon annan.
Analysen visar hur debatten polariseras då samtliga partiledare tar avstånd från Sverigedemokraternas partiledare Åkesson och han från dem, men också hur Åkesson görs till en central aktör då kameran filmar honom i betydligt större utsträckning än de andra partiledarna. Analysen visar också hur Åkesson gör negativa bedömningar både av migration och av de andra partiernas politik i frågan. Den dominerande attityden bland övriga partiledare är att Sverige är ett demokratiskt och öppet land som bör ta emot flyktingar och immigranter. Denna ”toleransdiskurs” skapar en positiv självbild som upprätthålls av att det finns ”andra” att tolerera och hjälpa (Blommaert & Verschueren 1998). Immigranter och flyktingar bedöms också utifrån ett nyttoperspektiv (jfr Boréus 2006b) där de välkomnas till Sverige med argumentet att de bidrar till Sveriges ekonomi.
En analys av de bilder som visas på bildskärmarna i en tv-studio ger resultatet att debattämnet illustreras av negativa skildringar av människor som flyr. Individerna på bilderna avbildas med dunkla färger och på distans, vilket bidrar till att konstruera dem som främmande och hotfulla. Detta ligger i linje med den attityd till migration som Sverigedemokraterna ger uttryck för.
En slutsats är att den polariserade debatten upprätthålls både av partiledarna, av kamerans val av fokus och av programledarna. Attityderna till migration skapas i interaktionen där de också blir ett sätt att positionera sig politiskt och upprätthålla bilden av Sverige – antingen som ett tolerant och godhjärtat land eller som ett land under hot från det som betraktas som icke-svenskt.
... Garcia -Gómez 2009) or political debate and argument (e.g. Simon-Vandenbergen 2008, Bull & Simon-Vandenbergen 2014, Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados 2014, Cabrejas Peñuelas 2015 on how participants might be induced to change their opinions or stances. But in this paper I confine myself to "local" attempts at SD; that is, situations in which participants in an encounter do not bring to it any mutual sense of being in a pre-existing state of opposition to their interlocutors. ...
This paper explores the interpersonal pragmatic aspect of seductive discourse (SD). It demonstrates that SD – understood as getting people to do, believe or feel what you want them to do, believe or feel – is more than a matter of propositional content and also more than a matter of the linguistic finery in which this content is dressed. This is because all language forms and all speech acts depend for their effects on context.Furthermore, it demonstrates that SD in the sense above is an inherent part of everyday interaction and at the centre of relationships. The fact that these desires often take the form of background, half-conscious or unconscious expectations should not blind us to the fact that this concern for self-presentation is ever-present. This is one reason why, although SD is often necessarily covert, it is not thereby inherently deceptive. The other reason is that we simply do not have the time to present ourselves fully and explicitly. The exigencies of interaction force us all to act on impressions.Among other pragmatic concepts, a major tool for the exploration of these inevitable interactional realities is the concept of face. Following a brief account of these concepts, and the interpersonal pragmatic perspective more generally, the demonstration of the above claims is achieved through the analysis of three very different cases: an excerpt from a TV comedy, a (generic) academic conference presentation and a (particular) incident during a rugby match.
The exploration of the discourse-power interplay has been the motivation behind Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) research orientation. CDA analysts have and continue to display vivid interest in the discourse of the dominant groups, particularly politicians, with the objective of describing and elucidating how existing social structures – power abuse, dominance, and inequality – are enacted, reproduced and sustained. While there is a vibrant literature on political speeches, not much work has been done on discursive manipulation as a form of social power abuse and dominance in political discourse from the Ghanaian perspective. This study therefore presents a critical analysis of a political speech by Mohammadu Bawumia, presidential candidate for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), with the aim of investigating how the Vice-President discursively represents himself, the government, and the past government as a strategy for accomplishing his manipulative goal. Drawing on van Dijk’s ideological square framework for analysis, the result shows the use of the macro-strategy of positive representation of the in-group (government) and negative representation of the out-group (opposition or former government), which manifests at all levels of discourse through the use of other minor discursive strategies: positive self-presentation, authority, number game rhetoric, active/passive structures, implication, and presupposition. Key findings include the strategic use of statistics to enhance credibility, the deployment of passive constructions to conceal government failures, and the use of metaphors to dissociate Bawumia from the government’s shortcomings. The outcome of the study implies that political speeches are imbued with covert ideologies, asymmetrical power relations, power abuse, dominance, inequality, and deception, which can only be exposed and resisted through the application of CDA tools. The study therefore recommends advocacy by policymakers and other civil society groups to awaken the consciousness of readers and listeners of political speeches to scrutinize political utterances, given their opaque nature and partisan or ideological functions.
У статті досліджується взаємодія метафори, метонімії та оцінки в американському політичному дискурсі на прикладах публічних виступів представників Демократичної партії США, де вони намагаються переконати громадськість в економічних перемогах через позитивну самооцінку та знецінення інших. Головне завдання полягає в тому, щоб дослідити, чи існує зв’язок між ідеологічними позиціями доповідачів та суб’єктами, які оцінюються. Також у статті було проаналізовано та встановлено теоретичну базу попередніх досліджень, що охоплюють особливості політичного дискурсу та проаналізовано вплив метафори й метонімії на формування оцінних суджень адресатів. Проаналізовані публічні промови свідчать про той факт, що метафори та метонімії рясніють у цьому типі політичного дискурсу та що здебільшого такі мовні явища збігаються з оцінкою. Уважніше вивчення відносних частот вказує на те, що політики-кандидати повсякчас покладаються на різні способи формування вигідного для них ставлення при створенні досить різних образів, які допоможуть їм отримати голоси виборців на майбутніх виборах, водночас зменшуючи шанси кандидатів-супротивників на перемогу. Зосереджуючись на судженнях, політики складають думку про нормальність (тобто, наскільки особливим/(не) звичайним є стан поведінки людини), про здатність (тобто, оцінку компетентності та/або здібностей) оцінюваних елементів. Позитивне оцінювання людської поведінки з етичної точки зору сприяє в цілому оптимістичному сприйняттю промови. Результати показують, що політичні діячі використовують оцінку у своїх виступах зокрема як інструмент для виправдання та переконання аудиторії у правильності своїх економічних рішень. Водночас політики використовують оцінку не лише як вираження власних ідеологічних поглядів, а й як ідеологічний інструмент, що сприяв би їхнім намірам прийти до влади у майбутньому.
The question if the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol were an insurrection, a protest or something in between, is highly contentious, and the words someone uses to refer to those events may reveal a great deal about their political stances. The present paper performs a corpus-linguistic analysis in order to investigate how the two major US news outlets CNN and Fox News reported on the January 6 events. The corpus contains 633 articles from CNN and 847 from Fox News, all of which were written over a time span of 10 months, starting on January 6, 2021. The corpus analysis is preceded by a detailed analysis of each outlet’s position on the political spectrum and their respective audiences, both based on statistics from independent polling organizations.
Modern politics is permeated by blame games—symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a framework for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticize and delegitimize governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgments of the target’s (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and policy failures; (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances; (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption; and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target’s (1) bad character, (2) bad behavior, or (3) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyze a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020–2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realizations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics.
This chapter examines self-praise use across different genresGenre in Russian with a focus on the use of key-words of praise/self-praise. In providing a cultural and linguistic background, the chapter demonstrates that self-praise in Russian is highly undesirable and associated with drunkenness, stupidity, vanity, and a lack of sophistication. The study explores the portrayal of self-praise in Russian paremias, followed by a text analysis of self-praise in Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays as well as in contemporary online story telling. Finally, the chapter analyzes the use of self-praise in the spoken language sub-corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. A methodology for extracting self-praise and praise speech actsSpeech act from corpora with no speech actSpeech act marking is piloted. The results indicate that Russian paremias contain highly negative attitudes to self-praise. Self-praise instances are rare across the examined types of written texts and speech transcripts. The key vocabulary of praise is used for self-praise, with a few exceptions. Commonly-used syntactic structures and contexts for self-praise are reported, along with some speakers’ attitudes to self-praise. It also appears that depersonalizing self-praise expressions through grammatical means is a specific attenuative strategyAttenuative strategy employed in Russian. The mediation of self-praise in conversational Russian is also achieved through the use of swear words and slang, the addition of other-praiseOther-praise, a focus on working hard, and the use of indirect self-praiseIndirect self-praise. A “pragmatic cornerPragmatic corner” explanation for a rare use of self-praise in conversation is introduced.
In Thai culture where the cultural concept of /?ɔ̀ɔnnɔ́ɔm-thɔ̀mton/ ‘being respectful-being modest’ is a core principle of politeness, self-praise is generally considered to be an undesirable trait. However, in certain political discourse genres such as campaign speeches and media interviews where positive self-presentation is anticipated, the notion of /kaalá?theesà?/ ‘time-place’ or the Thai notion of contextual appropriateness authorizes the act of self- praise to be carried out. This study aims at examining how Thai politicians adopt strategies to perform self-praise in order to negotiate with the social expectation of being polite and modest and, at the same time, achieve the ends of self-enhancement. In this study, self-praise strategies employed by three Thai politicians who are considered to be newsmakers during the 2019 general election are investigated by adopting the conceptual frameworks proposed by Dayter (2014) and Tobback (2019). Self-praise with mitigation and the use of mixed strategies are preferred in the Thai political data examined here. The mitigating devices frequently adopted include (1) shifting the credit for accomplishment to a third party; (2) reporting the third party positive assessment; and (3) referring to concrete work experience or hard work. The findings reveal that even though the act of self-praise is considered to be contextually appropriate according to the notion of /kaalá?theesà?/ ‘time-place,’ the Thai politicians prefer to show conformity to the principle of modesty while presenting themselves as the most suitable candidates for the voters.KeywordsPolitical discourse(Im)politenessEmic conceptsThai pragmaticsThai culture
In this chapter we explore different understandings of self-praise within the Mexican Spanish-speaking context. After an examination of Mexican concepts of face (Goffman, 1967)Goffman, E.and self-presentationSelf-presentation (Goffman, 1959)Goffman, E. where interactants present both positive and submissive images of themselves, discussion centres on Mexican politeness and impoliteness practices with a focus on self-praise as acceptable or improper behaviour. In the Mexican context, national, group and individual acts of self-praise are carried out through self-face boosting acts or self-enhancementSelf-enhancement (Dayter, 2014; Garcia, 2018)Dayter, D.. Whilst frowned upon in classic politeness approaches where the focus is normally on the addressee (e.g., Leech, 1983)Leech, G., self-praise in the Mexican Spanish context is researched in terms of national, individual and group faceGroup faceand self-presentationSelf-presentation and the patterns and practices that were adopted by Mexican interlocutors.
We investigated how two English-language newspapers – Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) and the mainland China Daily (CD) – portrayed key social actors (police, students, protesters, and governments) during the Occupy Central/Yellow Umbrella movement. We examined emotional valence, arousal, and dominance characterizations in 1,180 news articles via a multilevel, multivariate outcome regression and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that emotional sentiments associated with students and protesters in SCMP were generally more positive than in CD but that this was reversed for the police and the government. Whereas SCMP deployed personal stories to construct a humanized image of protesters and students, CD relied on expert authority, rhetorical questions, and imagined scenarios to convey empathy towards Hong Kong residents, creating a villainized image of protesters. Our mixed-methods approach reveals how SCMP and CD portrayed students differently via the discursive frames of “optimistic dreamers” and “powerless scapegoats,” respectively.
The emergence of Donald Trump as an anti-Muslim-Islam presidential candidate and victory over Hillary Clinton is an issue of debate and division in the United States’ political sphere. Many commentators and political pundits criticize Trump for his disparaging rhetoric on Twitter and present him as an example of how Twitter can be an effective tool for the construction and extension of political polarization. The current study analyzes the selected tweets by Donald Trump posted on Twitter to unmask how he uses language to construct Islamophobic discourse structures and attempts to form his ideological structures along with. The researchers hypothesize that Islamophobia is a marked feature of Trump’s political career realized by specific rhetorical and discursive devices. Therefore, the study purposively takes 40 most controversial tweets of Donald Trump against Islam and Muslims and carried out a critical discourse analysis with the help of macro-strategies of the discourse given by Wodak and Meyer and van Dijk’s referential strategies of political discourse. The findings reveal that Trump uses language rhetorically to exclude people of different ethnic identities, especially Muslims, through demagogic language to create a difference of “us” vs. “them” and making in this way “America Great Again”.
Parliamentary debates are adversarial in nature where the government and the opposition engage in legislation as a global action, and in asking or criticising as local actions (van Dijk, 2004). This study examines discursive practices of Japanese female politicians which remain uncovered. A video recording of a Japanese parliamentary debate was chosen for the analysis which involves three female politicians: the minister of women empowerment (MS), the vice minister of health, labour and welfare, and an opposition member (OP). They discuss the so-called Women Empowerment Law, which was passed in 2015 to promote gender equality at work. Three research questions are addressed: (1) How do the participants allocate their speaking time in the debate and what words are uttered frequently? (2) What discursive patterns are observed in the question–answer sequences? (3) How do they assert or downgrade their own or others’ epistemic primacy, centring/marginalising themselves or others? The results show the OP talked for more than half of the session and, in most cases, sought the government’s action or opinion in her question, which MS evaded. The OP then sought specific information, questioning MS’s knowledge and, by so doing, marginalising MS in the epistemic community.
This study analyses Theresa May"s three seminal Brexit speeches. These describe the kind of desirable post-Brexit EU-UK relationship that she envisioned, and together constitute a corpus of 18,532 words. The speeches can be considered as landmarks on a timeline that was initially meant to lead to the delivery of Brexit. It is hypothesized that there may be meaningful differences between the speeches, and that these affect the representation of reality. These in turn would have a bearing on May"s discursive self-representation as either an individualized or a collectivized social actor. To account for such representational values, the study draws on Halliday"s Transitivity System (1994), starting from the clause and its potential to express ideational meanings. With the aim of uncovering more convincing and interesting findings, a statistical analysis is applied.
Introducción: Nuestro objeto de análisis es la conversación mantenida en Twitter en uno de los debates electorales de las elecciones generales del 28 de abril: el que tuvo lugar el 22 de abril en Televisión Española entre los candidatos de los cuatro principales partidos políticos: PP, PSOE, UP y Cs. Metodología: La metodología empleada en el trabajo es el análisis del discurso de base pragmática, en la que se emplean técnicas cuantitativas y cualitativas de análisis. Para este, se seleccionaron de forma aleatoria 1000 tuits de entre los más populares que habían empleado los hashtags promocionales del debate: #ElDebateEnRTVE y #ELDEBATEenRTVE. Resultados: Los resultados indican que los cuatro partidos analizados participaron en el debate paralelo generado en Twitter y que, si bien la mayor parte de las intervenciones en la segunda pantalla fueron de ataque, los partidos prefirieron sobre todo elogiar a su candidato, a excepción de Ciudadanos, que optó por el ataque al PSOE y luego por el elogio propio. Discusión y conclusiones: En cuanto a los temas tratados fueron no tanto políticos sino pseudopolíticos. Los memes, mensajes irónicos y bromas ocuparon un espacio reducido en esta conversación transmediática.
Political discourse is a major site where ideological construction of both Self and Others is carried out. Based on a corpus of 98 political texts issued by Chinese governing bodies from 2000 to 2018, this study adopts Appraisal System to analyse the lexical items that indicate attitudes towards China and other countries with a view to revealing the ways in which China and other countries are appraised in Chinese political discourse. It is found that (1) Chinese political discourse does represent the ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation, but more frequently it negatively evaluates China’s things (appreciation) rather than its behaviours (judgement) while more negative appraisals are used to describe Others’ behaviours rather than Their things, (2) interestingly, while China upturns Others’ negative profiles, it also upscales negative presentation of Self; likewise, China mitigates negative presentation of both Self and Others, (3) Chinese political discourse allows more external voices when expressing its attitudes towards Self. The analysis shows that the producers of Chinese political discourse skilfully use appraisal resources, sometimes implicitly, to construct a subtle but dynamic ‘Self versus Other’ ideological structure in Chinese political discourse, which enhances the understanding of China’s moderate view on itself and others in its pursuit of national interests.
The present chapter analyzes verbal and nonverbal engagement devices in four business pitches delivered by entrepreneurs in the British TV program Dragon's Den. Taken for granted their eminently persuasive character, the purpose is to analyze the expression of engagement in verbal and nonverbal signs aiming at convincing potential investors of the product's worth. A tridimensional analysis is carried out: firstly, structural features are identified following Daly and Davy's (2016a and b) proposal. Secondly, verbal engagement devices are examined according to Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal System and Hyland's (2005a and b) Engagement Model. Thirdly, persuasive nonverbal signs are identified applying Cestero Mancera's (2016 and 2017) taxonomy. Results show that while pitches are grossly monoglossic in their verbal realizations, nonverbal persuasive signs seem to acknowledge and guide the audience's perception.
The Muslim community in America has been facing turmoil, particularly after the events of 9/11. Muslims are facing a number of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim discriminatory practices, biases, and sentiments from many Americans. These religious prejudices are apparent at the public and political leadership levels, as well as other facets of the country. The current study has concentrated on Trump’s emerging ideology that positions him within anti-Islamic and anti- Muslim discourses since he announced his candidature for the presidency. The study aims to examine and pin point the self-other representations that are evident in the Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments in Trump’s statements during the American Presidential Elections of 2016. In order to examine Trump’s prejudicial discourse, the research engaged with Critical Discourse Studies as its framework, with a specific focus upon Van Dijk’s Ideological Square Model as well as NVIVO 12 Pro for linguistic inquiry. The results showed that the self-other binary is strongly evidenced in Trump’s statements and that he employed various discursive techniques to represent Islam and Muslims in a negative manner, while representing himself as very patriotic to the country. To legitimatize his arguments, he deployed several rhetoric strategies, including victimization, presupposition, authority, number game, evidentiality, polarization, and populism. Keeping the religious and economic context in view, the research reveals that Donald Trump has represented Islam and Muslims as a negative phenomenon and presented himself as an Islamophobe by negatively targeting Islamic components, like Shariah and Jihad. In his prejudicial representation of Islam, most of the Islamic beliefs are represented as anti-women and anti-American, threatening the security of America and its very way of life.
This PhD thesis concerns language and racism. The aim is to explore how racism is reproduced in interaction in public debates on immigration, integration and refugee policy. From a constructivist pragmatic perspective, language is considered as a practice that composes and makes sense of our social world and all the phenomena and individuals that we perceive in it. Racist discourses discriminate against and privilege people by categorising them according to notions of cultural, ethnical, racial, religious and national differences.
The thesis has two main themes: 1) the linguistic reproduction of, and response to, racist discrimination and privileging in interaction, and 2) the role of language in various public arenas, and the norms and conditions for participation in these arenas. The thesis comprises five studies. Study I examines racist discourses and conditions for participation in an online newspaper comments section. Study II examines how the phrase “politically correct” is used and negotiated in the same comments section, and how its usage leads to the reproduction and normalisation of racism. Another comments section is the focus of Study III, in which discriminating and privileging categorisations of Muslims, Islam, Swedes and Sweden are analysed. Study IV examines an anti-racist forum on the social networking site Instagram. In the study, the reproduction of norms of whiteness is analysed, as well as power relations that are evoked, sustained and transformed in interaction. Finally, Study V is an analysis of linguistic, visual and material reproductions of political positions and racist discourses in a debate among party leaders on Swedish television.
The thesis demonstrates how normalisation of racism is accomplished in interaction, and how reproduction of hierarchically structured difference and bigoted stereotypes are performed, and challenged, through language. The medium, combined with the user’s speech acts, set up the norms and conditions for participation, and for the discursive processes that reproduce the relations and structures of power.
This paper offers a formally driven quantitative analysis of stance-annotated sentences in the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). Our goal is to identify features that determine the formal profiles of six stance categories ( contrariety, hypotheticality, necessity, prediction, source of knowledge and uncertainty ) in a subset of the BBC. The study has two parts: firstly, it examines a large number of formal linguistic features, such as punctuation, words and grammatical categories that occur in the sentences in order to describe the specific characteristics of each category, and secondly, it compares characteristics in the entire data set in order to determine stance similarities in the data set. We show that among the six stance categories in the corpus, contrariety and necessity are the most discriminative ones, with the former using longer sentences, more conjunctions, more repetitions and shorter forms than the sentences expressing other stances. necessity has longer lexical forms but shorter sentences, which are syntactically more complex. We show that stance in our data set is expressed in sentences with around 21 words per sentence. The sentences consist mainly of alphabetical characters forming a varied vocabulary without special forms, such as digits or special characters.
In this paper we argue that aspects of the discourse of the governing party in Spain at the time of writing, the Partido Popular , and its predecessor (1976–1989), Alianza Popular , reveal a marked continuity in its self-presentation and its representation of its adversaries, spanning the entire period from its origins in the immediate post-Franco period of the late 1970s to the present. We conclude that the type of construction we describe can be found in the discourse of many of the party’s most prominent figures, that it is central to the entire historical trajectory of AP / PP , and in some cases is in the process of becoming if anything more explicit.
This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.
In this paper, we make a comparative analysis of two pre-electoral debates belonging to two different traditions-the 2011 Rajoy-Rubalcaba debate and the first 2008 Obama-McCain debate-in terms of the manipulative processes used. For that purpose, we compare the similarities and differences in the use of the genre contributing to manipulation in the two debate traditions. Also, we identify the manipulative devices employed following Rigotti's (2005) coding scheme, which is complemented with those fallacies often encountered in the field of politics (van Eemeren et al. 2009; Pirie 2006; Tindale 2007). Various similarities in the use of the genre between the two debate traditions have been identified, such as in the use of strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation that are inherently manipulative and that entail (de-)emphasizing Our/Their positive and Their/Our negative aspects (van Dijk 2006). The differences are related to the discursive strategies preferred, the role of the moderator in the debates, and the candidates' physical position in the confrontation, all of which may contribute to manipulation. Similarly, there are also similarities and differences in the candidates' use of manipulative processes as their strategy for winning the elections and a different preference for personal attacks and the dialectical battle.
The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various analytical tools of functional linguistics, this volume seeks to provide explanatory analyses of parliamentary discourse in different countries – Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States – and to explore its peculiarities. Each chapter outlines a particular methodological framework and its application to instances of parliamentary discourse on important issues such as war, European integration, impeachment and immigration.
Located within the framework of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994; Iedema, Fezz y White, 1994; Martin, 2000; White, 2003) Appraisal Theory constitutes a valuable theoretical and analytic tool in the study of evaluation in language. This approach elaborates on the notion of interpersonal meaning and explores, describes and explains the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships. More particularly, Appraisal is concerned with the language of attitude and emotion. In this context, this work examines evaluative resources in the broad semantic domain of attitude, focussing upon the data provided by British national newspapers comment articles. Further, this paper intends to show the role evaluative meanings play in the dissemination of ideology, in the constitution of textual styles and authorial identities, and in the negotiation of writer/reader relationships.
Located within the framework of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994; Iedema, Fezz y White, 1994; Martin, 2000; White, 2003) Appraisal Theory constitutes a valuable theoretical and analytic tool in the study of evaluation in language. This approach elaborates on the notion of interpersonal meaning and explores, describes and explains the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships. More particularly, Appraisal is concerned with the language of attitude and emotion. In this context, this work examines evaluative resources in the broad semantic domain of attitude, focussing upon the data provided by British national newspapers comment articles. Further, this paper intends to show the role evaluative meanings play in the dissemination of ideology, in the constitution of textual styles and authorial identities, and in the negotiation of writer/reader relationships.
Este artículo busca describir y comparar las estrategias discursivas utilizadas en los debates televisados, así como las de los candidatos ganadores de las últimas elecciones presidenciales de México y Estados Unidos, y las elecciones generales españolas. Para lo anterior, se realizó un análisis de contenido donde se aplicó la Teoría Funcional del Discurso de Campaña Política. Se observó que la aclamación fue la estrategia predominante en los debates de México y Estados Unidos, mientras que en los de España
fue el ataque. Sin embargo, los tres candidatos ganadores emplearon más la aclamación que otras estrategias. Además,en los debates se abordaron más los temas de política que los de candidato.
Billig (1995) wrote that politicians often evoke nationalistic views when delivering their speeches – they do this through the use of simple words (as personal pronouns) in a specified context. The context, and the way personal pronouns are utilized, creates decisive turning points for any politician, especially one on the electoral road (Johnson, 1994; van Dijk, 1997, 2002). A politician must decide which stance to take on given issues, which constituents to support, and with which group/ideology to self-identify. This paper analyzes self-identifications that particular American politicians develop through their employment of pronominal choice. The period that was of particular interest was during 2008 elections in the US and the subsequent year. We compared how the 1st person plural pronoun was used during the interviews and during the debate. This paper finds that American politicians make use of personal pronouns to evoke nationalistic emotions and achieve their career goals differently, depending whether it is during the interview or during a debate. We argue that the role of the venue as an external characteristic of context is underestimated in the political discourse research.
This article deals with the sequences of irony in TV debates during the Finnish presidential election in 2006. The aim of the article is, within the framework of Conversation Analysis, to analyse how irony is accomplished in the interaction: how it is constructed, used and dealt with in the sequential context. We analyse instances which ridicule the opponent and shift the serious modality of the setting. Although the target or the victim of irony is the opponent, in public discussion, the talk is always designed for an overhearing audience. In the analysed debates, irony is used as a defence in response to criticism and as an attack; in both cases it provides a resource for the participants to improve their own position against their opponents. In most cases, irony is easily recognisable, but owing to its ambiguity, it is sometimes difficult to assign a specific function to it. In a staged debate, this ambiguity is a resource which can be exploited for positive self-display. The recipient typically treats irony-implicative utterances literally, which is a means to ironise the original ironist who in his/her turn shifts back to the serious mode as if not having been ironic at all.
In the discourse of political interviews, references to coparticipants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift as the status of the participants shifts in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question-response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.'s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goffman's (1981) concept of footing. In all but one of the questions, the interviewers sought to establish the politicians' authorship, whereas the politician typically responds in terms of the principal; in the other instance, the questioner sought to establish the position of the principal and the politician responds in terms of his own authorship. Possible strategic advantages of these forms of equivocation are discussed.
This article offers a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning, meanings which have elsewhere been treated under such headings as modality, polarity, evidentiality, hedging, conces-sion, intensification, attribution and consequentiality. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin/Vološinov's dialogic perspective, it proposes that this lexico-grammatically diverse grouping can be brought together on discourse semantic grounds, namely that they all provide the means for speakers/ writers to take a stance towards the various points-of-view or social posi-tionings being referenced by the text and thereby to position themselves with respect to the other social subjects who hold those positions. The paper offers a typology of these resources, with categorizations attending to differences in the way the textual voice engages with the alternative voices and/or points-of-view being referenced or activated by the text. It argues, for example, that these resources can be broadly divided into those which entertain or open up the space for dialogic alternatives and, alternatively, those which suppress or close down the space for such alternation. The typology has emerged from continued research into the interpersonal functionality of discourse, research interested in how language construes social roles and relationships and in the potential of language to operate rhetorically to influence beliefs, attitudes, expectations and modes of inter-relating. In order to demonstrate the application of the typology to the exploration of such questions, the paper singles out one issue for close attention—the linguistic mechanisms by which texts naturalise certain value positions and construct for themselves ideal, model or compliant readerships.
Dada la escasa tradición de los debates políticos electorales en España, el que ha tenido lugar este año entre Rodríguez Zapatero y Rajoy reviste singular importancia. Desde la perspectiva del lenguaje político (que se proyecta sobre el periodístico), conviene analizar lo más sobresaliente de su contenido para examinar aquellos puntos peculiares (que se ponen al servicio de la persuasión y la propaganda). Este análisis es realizado en el nivel sintáctico (empleo de deícticos, estructuras repetitivas y esquemas ordenadores) y semántico (eufemismos, metáforas, palabras símbolo y valoración de la sufijación). Given the lack of tradition in Spain for presidential debates, the one which took place earlier this year between Rodríguez Zapatero and Rajoy is of great importance. From the perspective of political language (seen trough the journalistic language), it would be convenient to analyse the most important details from its content in orden to examine those special points (which are at the service of persuasion and propaganda). This anlysis is carried out on a syntactic level (use of deictic, repetitive structures and ordering schemes) and on a semantic level (euphemisms, metaphors, symbol words and valuation of suffixation).
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
The present work offers a discursive analysis of questions in mce to face political
debates. From a corpus of five debates held in Spain during the General
Elections of 1993 and 2008, the author analyses a wide range of question types which differ from other speech genres both from a quality and quantity standpoint.
Next to questions meant by the speaker to get a reply and obtain information from
his/her interlocutor, there are others that don't follow that pattern. However,
among the latter we should distinguish between traditional rhetorical questions
which do not need reply and others of a mixed nature since ~hey share some characteristics
ofboth types. On the one hand,just like rhetorical questions, they don't
look for the interlocutor's response but, unlike these ones, they follow the usual
search for information of standard questions. Their peculiarity lies on the fact
that this information is provided by the speaker and not by the opponent. At the
same time, institutional constraints ofthese debates are such that the answer is not
meant to solve the cognitive gap of the speaker or the interlocutor, but that of the
audience, the final target of the politicians' messages in electoral campaigns. In
addition to the interactional and informational analysis, the article reviews other
functions of the referred and other questions, botli at argumentative and interpersonallevels,
as well as the influence ofvarious con textual fuctors that help to
explain the varied distribution of these utterances in the corpus.
The focus of this chapter is a speech made on 2 November 2005 by Mariano Rajoy, leader of Spain’s Partido Popular (henceforth PP), during the parliamentary debate on the then draft Catalan Statute of Autonomy, a proposed replacement for the statute ratified in 1979. I have chosen to analyse this particular speech for two reasons. The first is its key importance in the parliamentary debate of one of the most highly publicised and contentious pieces of legislation approved by the Spanish Parliament in this decade — the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia that came into force in 2006. The second reason is that it illustrates the construction of in-groups and out-groups within the institutional activity type (cf. Chapter 7) of parliamentary speeches in Spain. My aim, however, is not just to describe the rhetorical construction of these groups in the speech selected but also to offer an explanation of this construction by means of van Dijk’s (2005b) concept of political implicature. Clearly, in democratic political systems, parliamentary debates are a key component of the process of ‘doing politics’ and, as such, an important source of data for analysis of political discourse. As van Dijk furthermore argues, access to privileged social resources by elites is a fundamental aspect of the power wielded by politicians through ‘preferential access to the mass media and public discourse’ (2006: 362). This has become increasingly true of parliamentary debates in recent years in Spain through their television coverage and the availability of parliamentary speeches on the Internet. Moreover, parliamentary debates are highly performative in the sense that their results can lead to concrete action including, as in this case, legislation that affects people’s daily lives.
Since Lakoff’s (1975) early efforts to connect language and gender by studying what women and men do or do not do in conversation, gender studies have moved away from regarding the language of women as a deficient version of men’s language towards constructivist and poststructuralist frameworks.1 Over the past two decades, the understanding of the relationship between gender and Second Language Acquisition has led to the flourishing of different studies on language learning as a gendered experience (see Sunderland, Introduction, this volume). In the same way, there is an abundance of literature that shows the many implications of gender in the teaching-learning process: differential teacher treatment according to gender (Sunderland, 2000a, Baxter, 2002); different ways children construct their gender identities and establish public alliances through same-gender friendships (Hruska, 2004); or potential teachers’ gender bias when assessing students (Sunderland, 2000b) or when interacting with boys and girls (Sunderland, 1998); among others.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of “manipulation”, “suggestion”, and “persuasion” inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.
Following some previous lines of thought held by the author on the role of politeness and related phenomena in face-to-face electoral debates, this article deals with a series of linguistic devices frequently used by participants in this adversarial genre, and commonly characterized as mitigated aggression, in order to determine their main strategic values in the context of both current politics and the mass media spectacle. By making use of a methodology which combines both qualitative and quantitative analysis, it is demonstrated that the meaning and context in which these resources appear in electoral debate often contradict their literal meaning, and hence weaken the moderating function which is operative in non-adversarial genres. This, as well as other structural facts discussed in the article, allows us to understand some apparent contradictions in the fact that more aggressive participants could make the greatest use of both polite and impolite strategies; or that apparently polite strategies appear mainly in the core phases of the debate where aggressiveness and rudeness are the norm, and much less in the peripheral parts, where the dialectic war tones down.
While previous research on political interviews has concentrated on strategies of evasion and non-commitment, this paper aims to show that a complementary and equally important feature of interviewers' discourse is the use of modal certainty. An examination of modal selections in a British corpus of political interviews further reveals that the choices are functional and can be related to the speakers' aims, their position in the discourse and their affinity with the thesis. On a more theoretical level this paper aims to demonstrate that interpersonal meanings structure texts just as much as ideational ones and that macro-modalities contribute to coherence in important ways. Finally, it is argued that a fruitful analysis of modality in discourse must be based on the view that modal choices in a strict sense are closely linked with other choices expressing the speaker's intrusion upon the thesis.
This paper looks at the way in which politicians use radio interviews to present an image of themselves as fully committed to their cause. In previous research the focus has been on strategies of evasion which are developed by interviewees in response to face-threatening questions. In this article I aim to complement the picture of the hedging politician by concentrating on the equally important linguistic devices employed for conveying intellectual power. The desirable image is created through the use of expressions emphasizing cognitive certainty as well as emotional and social commitment. The investigation is based on a corpus of radio interviews with British politicians recorded between 1985 and 1990.
This report contains an extensive discussion of an approach to the study of discourse. Initial remarks concern arguments for studying discourse and approaches for discourse study that have been used; the author then discusses the relationship of discourse analysis and generative semantics. Language is considered on two issues: the decisions that a speaker can make regarding what and what not to say, and the mechanisms and patterns that are available to him for implementing the results of those decisions in a way that communicates with another person. The remainder of the report discusses relevant issues in this approach to the study of discourse. (VM)
In this paper we examine some of the properties of the speeches by former Prime Minister José María Aznar held in Spanish parliament in 2003 legitimating his support of the USA and the threatening war against Iraq. The theoretical framework for the analysis is a multidisciplinary CDA approach relating discursive, cognitive and sociopolitical aspects of parliamentary debates. It is argued that speeches in parliament should not only be defined in terms of their textual properties, but also in terms of a contextual analysis. Besides an analysis of the usual properties of ideological and political discourse, such as positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and other rhetoric devices, special attention is paid to
political implicatures
defined as inferences based on general and particular political knowledge as well as on the context models of Aznar’s speeches.
In this paper, the author analyzes the main reference meanings of personal deixis in a sub-genre of political speech, a debate between two Spanish political leaders held during the 1993 general elections. From the point of view of some theoretical concepts like frames and discourse spaces, he distinguishes three main domains of reference (the world of the speaker, the world of the interlocutor, and an intermediate world between them) giving rise to some major subdivisions such as the presidential I or the partisan we. Then, in the second part of the article, he compares the use of deixis by the two main participants in the debate; here, he reveals some pertinent differences. While the president and socialist candidate, Felipe González, appears more balanced in his criticism of his opponents and the description of his own political agenda (in which the presidential I and the partisan we have a special importance), the conservative candidate, José Maria Aznar, spends most of his time attacking his rival without leaving himself much time to explain his own political proposals.
The Critical Discourse Analysis is often applied to analyze political discourse including the public speech, in which the speaker wins favorite response from the audience. This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics, analyzes Barack Obama’s presidential speeches mainly from the point of transitivity and modality, in which we can learn the language how to serve the ideology and power. Moreover, we can have a better understanding of the political purpose of these speeches.
In this paper the author analyses the repetitions in a political discourse type, the debates between two Spahish political leaders in the 1993 general elections. From the formal standpoint several classes of repetition and their discursive conditioners in the debate are analyzed. Functionally it is shown how repetition carries out important roles at diverse levels of the analysis. From favouring the production and understanding of linguistic messages to the creation of various interactional effects that have a profoundly negativa and conflictive nature in the debate. It performs also the textual functions of opening, recovering, or concluding topics during the political argumentation and is used as a sing that allows speakers to signal diverse stages in the turn-taking system. Finally, it cant not be forgotten the stylistic factor that retoric has in the study of political oratory and that is also present in political debates. Some final considerations about the productivity of this discourse strategy are also considered.
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