Political discourse

CRIMEAN UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCESINSTITUTION OF PHILOLOGY, HISTORY AND ARTSDISCOURSOLOGYPOLITICAL DISCOURSEPetrakova HelenGroup 61 EYalta — 2010
INTRODUCTION
Thestudy of political discourse, like that of other areas of discourse analysis,covers a broad range of subject matter, and draws on a wide range of analyticmethods. Perhaps more than with other areas of discourse, however, one needs atthe outset to consider the reflexive and potentially ambiguous nature of theterm political discourse. The term is suggestive of at least two possibilities:first, a discourse which is itself political; and second, an analysis ofpolitical discourse as simply an example discourse type, without explicitreference to political content or political context. But things may be evenmore confusing. Given that on some definitions almost all discourse may beconsidered political (Shapiro 1981), then all analyses of discourse arepotentially political, and, therefore, on one level, all discourse analysis ispolitical discourse.
Thispotentially confusing situation arises, in the main, from definitions of thepolitical in terms of general issues such as power, conflict, control, or domination(see Fairclough1992a, 1995; Giddens 1991; Bourdieu1991; van Dijk 1993; Chilton andSchaffer 1997), since any of these concepts may be employedin almost any form of discourse. Recently, for example, in a study of apsychotherapeutic training institution, Diamond (1995) refers to her study ofthe discourse of staff meetings as “political,” simply because issues of powerand control are being worked out. They are being worked out at differentlevels, however: at interpersonal, personal, institutional, and educationallevels for example, and in different strategic ways (Chilton 1997).By treating all discourse as political, in its most general sense, we may be indanger of significantly overgeneralizing the concept of political discourse.
Perhapswe might avoid these difficulties if we simply delimited our subject matter asbeing concerned with formal/informal political contexts and political actors (Graber1981); with, that is, inter alia, politicians, political institutions,governments, political media, and political supporters operating in politicalenvironments to achieve political goals. This first approximation makes clearerthe kinds of limits we might place on thinking about political discourse, butit may also allow for development. For example, analysts who themselves wish topresent a political case become, in one sense, political actors, and their owndiscourse becomes, therefore, political. In this sense much of what is referredto as critical linguistics (Fairclough1992b) or critical discourse analysis (van Dijk 1993; Wodak 1995)relates directly to work on political discourse, not only because the materialfor analysis is often formally political but also, perhaps, because theanalysts have explicitly made themselves political actors (see van Dijk, thisvolume).
Butsuch a delimitation, like all delimitations, is not without its problems. Forexample, how do we deal with the work of Liebes and Ribak (1991) on familydiscussions of political events? Is this political discourse, or familydiscourse of the political? In one sense it is both – but the issue of whichmay simply be a matter of emphasis (see, for example, Ochs andTaylor 1992). While delimitations of the political aredifficult to maintain in exact terms, they are nevertheless useful startingpoints. Equally, while one can accept that it is difficult to imagine a fullyobjective and nonpolitical account of political discourse, analysts can, atbest, and indeed should, make clear their own motivations and perspectives.This may range from setting some form of “democratic” ideal for discourseagainst which other forms of political discourse are then assessed (Gastil 1993)to explicitly stating one's political goals in targeting political discoursefor analysis (as in the case of a number of critical linguists: Fairclough1995; Wodak 1995; van Dijk1993). It also allows for more descriptive perspectives (Wilson1990, 1996; Geis 1987),where the main goal is to consider political language first as discourse, andonly secondly as politics. The general approach advocated above would respondto the criticism of Geis (1987), who argues that many studies of politicallanguage reveal their own political bias. Most of us who write about politicaldiscourse may do this at some level, but as long as this is either made clear,or explicitly accepted as a possibility, then this seems acceptable.
1. STUDYING POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Thestudy of political discourse has been around for as long as politics itself.The emphasis the Greeks placed on rhetoric is a case in point. From Cicero(1971) to Aristotle (1991) the concern was basically withparticular methods of social and political competence in achieving specificobjectives. While Aristotle gave a more formal twist to these overall aims, thegeneral principle of articulating information on policies and actions for thepublic good remained constant. This general approach is continued today.
Modernrhetorical studies are more self-conscious, however, and interface with aspectsof communication science, historical construction, social theory, and politicalscience (for an overview see Gill andWhedbee 1997). While there has been a long tradition ofinterest in political discourse, if one strictly defines political discourseanalysis in broadly linguistic terms (as perhaps all forms of discourseanalysis should be defined: see Fairclough and Wodak 1997), it is only sincethe early 1980s or 1990s that work in this area has come to the fore. Indeed, Geis (1987)argues that his is the first text with a truly linguistic focus on politicallanguage/discourse. There is some merit in this argument, but without openingup issues about what is and what is not linguistics, many of the earlierstudies in social semiotics and critical linguistics should also be included ina general linguistic view of political discourse (Fowler et al. 1979; Chilton1990, 1985; Steiner 1985). While language is always clearlycentral to political discourse, what shifts is the balance between linguisticanalysis and political comment. Distinguishing the direction of this balance,however, is not always straightforward.2. Political Discourse: Representation andTransformation
Inmore modern times it was perhaps Orwell who first drew our attention to thepolitical potential of language. This is seen in his classic article “Politicsand the English Language,” where he considers the way in which language may beused to manipulate thought and suggests, for example, that “political speechand writing are largely the defence of the indefensible” (1969: 225). Hisexamples are types of inverted logic (reflected in literary detail in his book NineteenEighty Four) and they echo through much of the present work on politicaldiscourse. Instances include the use of “pacification” to refer to the bombingof defenseless villages, or the use of “rectification of frontiers” to refer tothe relocation or simply removal of thousands of peasants from their homes.
Orwellwas concerned with a general decline in the use of English, and politicians hada central responsibility for this decline. They have a general reputation forthe construction of what Americans call “fog” or the British political gobbledygook(see Neaman andSilver 1990: 320). For example, the American navy havedescribed high waves as “climatic disturbances at the air-sea interface,” whilein the 1970s, President Nixon's press secretary coined the phrase “biosphereoverload” for overpopulation (also called “demographic strain” by somegovernment officials) (see Neaman and Silver 1990: 317–21). The British are notexempt from such excesses of lexical production, however; an antivandalismcommittee of the Wolverhampton District Council was given the title, “The UrbanConservation and Environmental Awareness Work Party” (Neaman andSilver 1990: 321).
However,it is not simply manipulation that is at issue in the case of politicallanguage; it is the goal of such manipulation which is seen as problematic.Politicians seem to want to hide the negative within particular formulationssuch that the population may not see the truth or the horror before them. Thisis the general thrust of Orwell's comments, and it emerges again and againthroughout work on political discourse, but with perhaps different levels ofemphasis and analysis. The influential work of the political scientist Murray Edleman(1971, 1977, 1988) mirrors Orwell's concerns and looks at the symbolicmanipulation of reality for the achievement of political goals. In a moredirected political sense Pěcheux(1982, 1978), following Althusser's claim that ideology isnot just an abstract system of thought but becomes actualized in a variety ofmaterial forms, set about studying discourse as one type of material form. Pěcheuxargued that the meanings of words became transformed in terms of who used them,or, in Foucault's (1972) terms, in relation to particular “discourseformations.” Here words (and their interaction) in one formation weredifferently interpreted within another. Conservative or right-wing views ofterms like “social benefit” and “defense spending” may differ radically frominterpretations available within a socialist or left-wing discourse (seebelow).
Thegeneral principle here is one of transformation. Similar words and phrases maycome to be reinterpreted within different ideological frameworks. Linkeddirectly to this process is the concept of “representation.” Representationrefers to the issue of how language is employed in different ways to representwhat we can know, believe, and perhaps think. There are basically two views ofrepresentation: the universalist and the relativist (Montgomery1992). The universalist view assumes that we understand ourworld in relation to a set of universal conceptual primes. Language, in thisview, simply reflects these universal possibilities. Language is the vehiclefor expressing our system of thought, with this system being independent of thelanguage itself. The relativist position sees language and thought asinextricably intertwined. Our understanding of the world within a relativistperspective is affected by available linguistic resources. The consequenceshere, within a political context, seem obvious enough. To have others believeyou, do what you want them to do, and generally view the world in the way mostfavorable for your goals, you need to manipulate, or, at the very least, payattention to the linguistic limits of forms of representation.
Whilemany analysts accept the relativist nature of representation in language, i.e.that experience of the world is not given to us directly but mediated bylanguage, there is a tendency to assume that politically driven presentation isin general negative. In Fairclough's (1989) view of critical linguistics/discourse,for example, political discourse is criticized as a “form of social practicewith a malign social purpose” (Torode 1991:122). The alternative goal is “a discourse which has no underlying instrumentalgoals for any participant, but is genuinely undertaken in a co-operative spiritin order to arrive at understanding and common ground.”
Examplesof this malign social purpose are highlighted in work on the politicaldiscourse of what has been referred to as “nukespeak.” As is clear, the verytitle “nukespeak” is formed on analogy with Orwell's famous “newspeak,” wherethe assumption was that if one could manipulate or limit what was possible inlanguage then one could manipulate or limit what was possible in thought. Chilton(1985) and others argue, using a range of analytic techniques, that in thepolitical discourse of nuclear weapons efforts are made to linguisticallysubvert negative associations. An example from Montgomery(1992: 179) highlights this general issue (see also Moss 1985):
Strategicnuclear weapon– large nuclear bomb of immense destructive power
Tacticalnuclear weapon– small nuclear weapon of immense destructive power
Enhancedradiation weapon – neutron bomb (destroys people not property)
Demographictargeting –killing the civilian population
Inthis example Montgomery is performing a type of translation in which heexplicitly attempts to show how the language on the left of the dash ismanipulating reality as represented by the translation on the right. ForMontgomery, the language of nuclear weapons is clearly “obscurantist andeuphemistic.”3. Syntax, Translation, and Truth
Asimilar and related point to that noted in Montogmery's work has been madespecifically in the case of syntax (Montgomery1992; Simpson 1988, 1993; Chilton 1997).The system of “transitivity,” for example (Halliday 1985), provides a set ofchoices for describing “what is going on in the world.” One such choice isreferred to as a “material process,” where what is going on may be described asan action, transaction, or event.
An examplefrom Goodman(1996: 56) clearly illustrates these options:Actions a. The solider (Actor) fired (material process: action) Transactions b. The soldier (Actor) killed (material process: transaction) innocent villagers (goal) Event c. Innocent villagers (goal: material process) died (material process: event)
Goodman(1996:57) comments on the possible reasons behind such selections, suggesting:
Writerswith a technical interest in weaponry (in a specialist magazine) might have aninterest in obscuring the pain and destruction that weapons cause. Writers whoare on the same side as the soldiers might also have an interest in obscuringtheir army's responsibility for the death of innocent civilians.
AlthoughGoodman is writing in 1996, we can note the similarity with Orwell's commentssome 50 years previously (see also Chilton 1997;Stubbs 1996). While many of Goodman's claims may be true, Fairclough(1995) notes that such claims are often built around single,isolated utterances, taking no account of the textual or historical context ofproduction. One might, for example, decide to present the sentences highlightedby Goodman by sequencing the events for the listener in very specific ways:
Announcement
Innocentvillagers died last night. It was the soldiers who fired on them. It was thesoldiers who killed them!
Inthe first sentence here it is the villagers who are highlighted, not thesoldiers. One might argue, as does Goodman, that such a form obscures thoseresponsible. However, not only are those responsible highlighted in the nexttwo sentences, but the very contrast that is indicated by their exclusion fromthe first and not the following sentences might lead readers back to the firstsentence to confirm their originally hidden responsibility. By invitingreaders/listeners to revisit the first sentence, this small text may emphasizenot only the responsibility of the soldiers, but that they have tried to avoidthat responsibility.
Issuesof representation, however, need not only revolve around specific syntactictransformations: without any seemingly manipulative intent one can achievepersonal and political goals by relatively uncontroversial structuralselections. Consider the general area of evidentiality. Evidentiality refers tothe way in which forms of evidence become grammaticalized in differentlanguages and to the attitude one takes or adopts toward this evidence (seepapers in Chafe and Nichols 1986), since not all evidence is of a similar type.There is a complex interaction here between such things as beliefs,assumptions, inferences, and physical experiences (sight, hearing, smell,touch, etc.): I saw John yesterday; I believe I saw John yesterday; I was toldJohn was seen yesterday; it is possible that John was seen yesterday.
Ina study of political discourse just prior to American entry into the 1990 GulfWar, Dunmire(1995) argues that newspaper articles in both the New YorkTimes and the Washington Post, and statements made by representatives of theAmerican government, actively assisted the USA in positioning itself for intervention.They did this by shifting their concerns from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait to aseries of claims regarding a potential attack on Saudi Arabia. Dunmire arguesthat, through an increased use of nominal clauses to represent the threat ofIraq's attack on Saudi Arabia, what was speculation came to be accepted asfact.
Equally,it may be that in some cases it is not simply the syntactic form which ischosen, but rather the relative distribution of particular syntactic selectionswhich carries the political implications. Work by Stubbs (1996) on thedistribution of ergative forms within two school geography textbooks may beused to illustrate this point. As Stubbs (1996:133) explains, ergatives are verbs which: can be transitiveor intransitive, and which allow the same nominal group and the same objectgroup in transitive clauses and as subject in intransitive clauses: severalfirms have closed their factories factories have been closed factories haveclosed
Theimportant point is that ergatives have agentive and nonagentive uses. Thisallows ergatives, like transitivity in active and passive sentences, to be useddifferentially depending on the ideological goals of the text.
Usinga computer analysis of two different types of school text, one which looked athuman geography from a fact-based perspective (text G), and one which adoptedan environmentalist position (text E), Stubbs discovered significantdistributional differences between the two:
Relativeto text length texts G and E have almost the same number of ergative verbs:slightly fewer than one per 100 words of running text. However, thedistribution of transitive, passive, and intransitive choices is significantlydifferent (p
Clearly,text E's author has adopted an explicit political role within the text and thisis revealed through both a grammatical and a distributional analysis ofspecific verb forms.
Theidea that similar grammatical categories may be operationalized in differentways is taken up by Kress and Hodge (1979), who haveargued that several different types of strategy might be subsumed under ageneral heading of negation. They explore the use of a variety of optionsavailable to politicians which allow them to articulate some contrastive alternativesto what they are saying: I agree with you but…; that is a fair point, nevertheless…;I see your point yet…. However, such stylistic assumptions seem to overlap withother levels of structure such as discourse, for example, and indeed forms suchas but, nevertheless, well, etc. are now normally referred to as discoursemarkers (Schiffrin 1987; Gastil 1993;see Schiffrin, this volume). Wilson (1993) explicitly treats such forms asdiscourse markers and suggests that they may function differentially in themarking of ideological contrasts. In an analysis of students' debates onspecific political subjects, it is noted that “and” may be used for eitherplanned coordination (as in X, Y, and Z) or unplanned coordination (as in X andY and Z). The choice one adopts relates to the way one wishes to present theelements coordinated by “and.” In political terms, unplanned coordination is usedwhere one wishes the elements to be treated independently (Scotland and Englandand Wales and Northern Ireland), whereas planned coordination treats theelements as naturally linked (Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland).4. Politics, Representation, and Textual Production
Linguisticoptions for representing the world are clearly, then, central issues inpolitical discourse, but so are issues of action and textual production.Utterances within the context of political output are rarely isolatedgrammatical cases; they operate within historical frameworks and are frequentlyassociated with other related utterances or texts (Bakhtin 1981).In 1993, for example, the prime minister of Britain responded to a question inthe House of Commons in the following way:
PMJohn Major: “If the implication of his remarks is that we should sit down and talkwith Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA, I can say only that would turn mystomach and those of most hon. Members; we will not do it. If and when there isa total ending of violence, and if and when that ending of violence isestablished for a significant time, we shall talk to all the constitutionalparties that have people elected in their names. I will not talk to people whomurder indiscriminately”. (Hansard Official Report, November 1, 1993: 35)
Despitethis statement, however, on November 15, 1993, Gerry Adams, the leader of SinnFein, claimed that the British government was, in fact, involved in protracteddialogue with Sinn Fein. The claim was rejected by the British government, butAdams went on to claim that Major had broken off the contact “at the behest ofhis Unionist allies” (Belfast Telegraph, December 15, 1993). The next day SirPatrick Mayhew, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, when asked on BBCTelevision if there had been contact with Sinn Fein or the IRA by people who could be regardedas emissaries or representatives of the British government, said “No therehasn't.” The controversy over government contacts with the IRA resurfaced when, on November 22,Mayhew announced that “Nobody has been authorised to talk to or to negotiate onbehalf of the British Government with Sinn Fein or any other terroristorganisation” (Belfast Telegraph, December 15, 1993). However, reports in the Observernewspaper later that week forced the government to admit having been in contactwith the IRA inresponse to an IRApeace overture in February of that year.
Bothjournalists and Unionist politicians were by now beginning to argue that atbest the government had misled them, and at worst lied to them (see IanPaisley's comments in Hansard, November 29, 1993: 786). The government insistedthat any contact had been at arm's length. On November 28 Sir Patrick admittedthat the meetings had been going on for three years. The following day in theCommons he was forced to account for the seeming discrepancy between governmentstatements and government actions.
Thegeneral claims made by Mayhew in the House of Commons were summarized andparaphrased in Wilson (1993: 470) as follows:
·  Wedid not (1a) talk to the IRA, wehad channels of communication/contacts.
·  Wedid not (1b) authorise anyone totalk with the IRA.
Inthe first case a semantic contrast between talk and communication is presented,the claim seemingly being that the British government did not have articulateverbal contact, but did communicate with the IRA using selected channels ofcommunication. In (1b) negation is employed in the context of a particular typeof presuppositional verb (authorize) which creates two possibleinterpretations, both of which are equally acceptable:
We did notauthorize anyone to talk to the IRA, so no one did.
We did notauthorize anyone to talk to the IRA, although someone did (unauthorized).
Whichstatement was intended was never made clear in the debates that took place.However, as a number of politicians indicated at the time, the issue was notwhether the government had communication channels with the IRA, but that JohnMajor (and the secretary of state in other statements) implied by theircomments (“[to] talk with Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA… would turn mystomach”) that the British government would not have any contact with the IRAuntil they gave up violence. For some of the politicians who listened to JohnMajor's original claims, any contact at whatever level, authorized orunauthorized, was in breach of such claims.
Thisparticular incident involves a complex of textual and historical issues as wellas examples of particular forms of representation. It illustrates the need forarguments about political manipulation to draw on larger-scale linguisticstructures, as well as general grammar and single words or phrases.
Thisis not to deny the significance of single words or phrases in the discussion ofpolitical discourse; the aim is merely to highlight other relevant aspects indelimiting political discourse. But even at the level of words and phrasesthemselves, as Stubbs has shown, it may not merely be the single occurrence ofa term that is important but sets of collocational relationships, which intheir turn produce and draw upon ideo logical schemas in confirming orreconfirming particular views of the world. For example, Stubbs (1990:cited in Stubbs 1996: 95) analyzed a newspaper text of riots in South Africaand showed how blacks and whites were frequently described by differ ent setsof words (see Wodak and Reisigl, this volume):
Blacksact in mobs, crowds, factions, groups. They constitute millions, who live in townshipsand tribal homelands. They mass in thousands and are followers of nationalistleaders. But Whites (who are also reported as committing violence) are individualsor extremists. By implication different from other (normal) Whites.
Ona related level there is a further potential problem with some of the examplesof political representation noted above, and this is that relativism affectseveryone, including the analyst. The descriptive and, indeed, manipulativeelement in ana lyses concerned with the way in which representation may becomesystemically struc tured for specific effect is not in doubt. The derivedimplications may sometimes, however, be more political than analytical. At onelevel there is a suggestion that heroic terms for weapons, such as tomahawk, peacekeeper,Hawkeye, etc. (Moss 1985:56), or the reordering of events (active vs. passive), reconstitute the worldfor hearers such that the truth or reality of an event is subverted. I have nodoubt of the gen eral truth in this, but along with Horkheimer (1972) and Garfinkel(1967), I do not view participants to communication aspotential “interactional” dopes but rather, as Giddens (1991) suggests, socialactors capable of making choices, no matter how constrained the conditions. AsGiddens notes, an agent who has no choice is no longer an agent.
Equally,since the transitive system of English syntax is available to all Eng lishspeakers, alternative ways of representing the world may not be interpreted byhearers in exactly the ways that producers intend. As suggested above, thetransforma tion of a passive sentence in production into an active sentence ininterpretation is perfectly feasible. Indeed, research into politicalinformation processing clearly indic ates that interpretation in affected bycognitive bias (St Evans1989). Once information is encoded into memory in terms ofone set of concepts, it is unlikely to be retrieved and interpreted in terms ofother, alternative sets presented at a particular point in time. For example,people who have conceptualized their view of blacks in a particular negativeway are unlikely to adjust that view on reading or hearing a text which hasmanipulated any presentation of this group in a more positive manner. This doesnot suggest there are no possibilities for change, however. Views can bereformulated given forms of counterevidence presented over time and broughtforward in parti cular ways, and part of this reformulation will, of course, bethrough different lin guistic presentations. The fact is, however, thatspecific biases may override structural presentation.
Thismay be seen clearly in attempts to model ideological reasoning in a computa tionalform. One of the best known systems is POLITICS (see Carbonell 1978; see also Hart 1985),which is a program designed to interpret political events in relation todiffering ideological frames. For example, if the input is (2), then the outputfor a conservative interpretation of the event would be (3) and that for aliberal interpreta tion of the same event would be (4):
·  TheUnited States Congress voted to fund the Trident Submarine project. (2)
Conservativeinterpretation:(3) a. The United States Congress wants the United States armed forces to be stronger, b. The United States Congress should be strong to stop communist expansion.
Liberalinterpretation:(4) a. The United States Congress fears falling behind in the arms race. b. The United States should negotiate to stop the arms race, (adapted from Carbonell 1978:30)
Thereference to an arms race or communist threat dates the POLITICS system. Theimportant point nevertheless is that such systems generally work on the basisof key propositions within the input. These are then linked to particularscripts or frames (Schank andAbleson 1977); for instance, what the USA should do in thecase of nuclear threat. These scripts provide a mechanism for groupinginferences and de fining the context in which interpretation takes place. Suchcontexts are modified relative to certain ideological formations (conservativeor liberal). While it would be possible to build in specific parsingconstraints which may be sensitive to structural dimensions of syntax, theimportant features for the system are elements such as “Congress” and “fund,”not necessarily their syntactic embedding.5. A Word about Politics
Assuggested above, syntactic selection undoubtedly affects interpretation, butthis must be seen in relation to other contextual factors, and indeed inrelation to the impact of lexical choices themselves. Wilson and Rose (1997)argue, for example, that the problems of interpretation which accompanied onepiece of controversial legisla tion, the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, seemed torevolve around single lexical items. Making use of Sperber andWilson's (1996) theory of relevance, Wilson and Rose describehow a single lexical item, in this case consultation, drives differinginterpreta tions of the agreement. This controversial legislation broughttogether the Irish and British governments in an intergovernmental forum. TheBritish government described the relationship as one of “consultation,” andmodified this as “merely consultation,” revealing their view that they wereonly talking to the Irish government as opposed to being influenced by them.The Irish government, in contrast, viewed “consulta tion” as a process ofinfluence. One does not normally consult someone unless one is willing to takethe person's advice. In this case, consultation meant more than discussion; itwas discussion plus impact. This was also the interpretation given by theUnionist parties within Northern Ireland, who were vehemently opposed to theagree ment. On the other hand Sinn Fein accepted the British interpretation,and for this very opposite reason (i.e. the British would do nothing more thantalk to the Irish government) they also opposed the agreement. The point is,however, that in the myriad debates which took place at the time, the syntax ofpresentation seemed to have little impact on ideologically contrived lexicalinterpretations.
Suchconflicts over lexical interpretation are not new, of course. Everyday words,organized and structured in particular ways, may become politically implicatedin directing thinking about particular issues, and with real and devastatingeffects. Even the process of uttering someone's name may become a politicalact, as it did in the infamous McCarthy trials of the 1950s (see also Wilson1990: ch. 3).
McCarthy'switch-hunt for communists created a context where “naming names” became acentral issue (see Navasky 1982).The McCarthy trials raised questions about the very act of naming and what itmeans to name someone in certain kinds of social context. If one agreed to namenames, was one an informer” or an inform ant,” for example? Ultimately, thisdepended on which side of the semantic fence you stood on. J. Edgar Hoover, thehead of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was quite clear on his position:
Theystigmatize patriotic Americans with the obnoxious term “informer,” when suchcitizens fulfil their obligations of citizenship by reporting known facts oftrie evil conspiracy to properly constituted authorities. It would require verylittle time for these critics to pick up a dictionary; Webster's unabridgedvolume specifically states that an “informant” is one who gives information ofwhatever sort; an in former is one who informs against another by way of accusationor complaint. Informer is often, informant almost never, a term of opprobrium,(cited in Navasky 1982: xviii)
Whateverone's reasons for providing names to McCarthy's committee – and Navasky notesthat justification ranged from the protection of the country (where one ManningJohnson admitted he would lie in a court of law in the course of protecting hiscountry) to liberal outrage (James Wechsler argued that only by cooperatingwith the committee could he gain access to a transcript of the trials, which hecould then use to attack the committee itself) – in those cases where nameswere provided a number of analysts took a simpler and alternative view toHoover's: Navaksy(1982) states quite straightforwardly that anyone who gavenames “was an informer.”
Theinteresting issue in all this is in relation to what one believes a word means,and what effect, beyond a word's core or semantic meaning, the use of the wordhas. Hoover objected to the use of the word “informer” not because it cannotbe, in one sense, correctly applied to anyone who gives names, but because itcarries negative connotations, and he believed that the actions of namingwithin the context of the search for communists and communist sympathizersought to be seen as positive. Navasky takes an opposing view; despite Hoover'ssuggested semantic arguments, he points out that most of those who gaveevidence thought of themselves as infor mers, and, says Navasky, “that's what Iwill call them” (1982: xviii).
Orconsider another context where ordinary, everyday words are organized differently within the discourse of speechmaking. The following extracts are takenfrom a speech given by Neil Kinnock, at the time the Labour Opposition leaderin Britain, on Tuesday June 2, 1987, at a Labour Party rally in Darlington,England: Uunemployment is a contagious disease … it infectsthe whole of the economic body …If limbs are severely damaged the whole body isdisabled. If the regions are left to rot, the whole country is weakened …… justas the spread of unemployment, closure, redundancy, rundown … affects theeconomic life in that region so the same ailments in a country gradually stainthe whole country.… if the battered parts and people of Britain don't get noisythey will just get neglected. Silent pain evokes no response.
Whatis clear from these extracts, and many others within the same speech, is thatthe semantic fields of illness and health are being evoked in an attempt toproduce rel evant political images. Some of the vocabulary employed in thiseffort is highlighted below:
Fracture,illness, decay, deprivation, contagious, (contagious) disease, body, strength,(shrivel), cuts, limbs, damage (severe), disabled (body), weakened, spread(disease), rundown, ailments, battered (parts), pain, dose (decline), deaden,waste, accident, healing, caring, disabled, short-sighted, welfare, chronicallyill, affliction, handicapped, medicine, infects
Itis also clear that many of these terms are negatively marked. Examples are weakas opposed to strong; dead as opposed to alive; decline as opposed to revival;and ill as opposed to well. It would, of course, be possible for Kinnock to usethese terms to actually refer to the health issues of real groups of people,and within the speech the use of handicapped would fall into this category.Nevertheless, the majority of words taken from the area of health (see below)are employed out of context, that is, in this case, metaphorically.
Thisis a further reflection of Fairclough's(1995) general point about not looking at isolated sentences,or in this case isolated words. While much has been made of single words inpolitical discourse (Wodak 1989; Hodge andFowler 1979; Geis 1987; Bolinger1982), the reality is that in most cases it is the context,or reflected form (Leech 1995), of the words which carries the politicalmessage. This is particularly true of the kinds of metaphorical uses made byKinnock. As Lakoff andJohnson (1980) have shown, metaphorical uses may describe theworld for us in particular ways such that we come to understand the world inthat way (representation again: see Chilton and Ilyin 1993). And this is whatKinnock is trying to do. What he wants is for us to understand the world insuch a way that all aspects of Conservative government control lead to diseaseand decay.
Theissue here, as with both the POLITIC system interpretation and the humaninterpretation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, is that some humans, like somesystems, may be biased in their mode of interpretation from the start. For suchindividuals, manipulations of transitivity, or other aspects of structure, mayhave little effect on interpretation, which is not to say that such structuralforms may not have an impact elsewhere. The point is that there are manydimensions of language involved in political output, and all of these have thepotential in their own way for political impact. Even individual sounds maybecome political, and a much-neglected area of political language is what wemight call “political phonology.”6. Sounds Political
Itmay be initially difficult to grasp how specific sounds come to be interpretedas political, although where one sees politics as tied directly to forms ofideology, the issue becomes a central plank of variationist sociolinguistics,and beyond (see Cameron 1995;Lippi-Green 1997). Research on accent clearly indicates that selected phonological variables can carry political loading. By their very nature, phonologicalvari ables have been tied to issues such as class, gender, and ethnicity, and,in turn, to the social and political implications of the use of such variables(at both macro- and microlevels; Wilson and OBrian 1998).
Despitethis natural link between phonological work in variationist sociolinguisticsand political and social facts, there have been few studies of the potential ofphono logy in the direct construction of political discourse. There is noreason to presuppose, however, that this level of linguistic structure may notalso be available for political orientation. There is general evidence, forexample, that Margaret Thatcher modified her speech in very particular ways inorder to make herself more attractive to voters. And in the work of Gunn (1989;Wilson andGunn 1983) it is claimed that leading politicians andpolitical supporters may make adjustments within their phonological systems forpolitical effect. For example, Gerry Adams is said to have adopted phonological forms as representative of southern Irish dialect alternatives, andplaced these within his own Belfast phonological system. Similarly, selectedmembers of the Democratic Unionist Party, at the opposite end of the politicalspectrum from Adams's Sinn Fein, were shown to modify some of their phonologyin the direction of a perceived and geographically (North Antrim) locatedUlster Scots dialect. What this means is that politicians can choose to soundideological/political, and indeed that such modifications are perceptuallysalient to the public. Matched guise studies (see Lambert et al. 1960),manipulating the kinds of phonological variables noted by Gunn (Wilson andGunn 1983), revealed that certain variables were associatedwith political factors such as Unionism and Republicanism and general socialfactors such as Protest antism, Catholicism, Britishness, and Irishness. Byadopting particular alternative phonological forms, one could be perceived aseither more Catholic/Irish/Republican or more Protestant/British/Unionist.
political discourse
CONCLUSIONS
Oneof the core goals of political discourse analysis is to seek out the ways inwhich language choice is manipulated for specific political effect. In ourdiscussions we have clearly seen that almost all levels of linguistics areinvolved; i.e. most samples of political discourse may be mapped onto thevarious levels of linguistics from lexis to pragmatics. At the level of lexicalchoice there are studies of such things as loaded words, technical words, andeuphemisms (Graber 1981; Geis 1987;Bolinger 1982). In grammar, as we have seen, there are studies of selectedfunctional systems and their organization within different ideological frames (Fowler andMarshall 1985). There are also studies of pronouns and theirdistribution relative to political and other forms of responsibility (Maitlandand Wilson 1987; Wilson 1990;Pateman 1981; Lwaitama1988) and studies of more pragmatically oriented objects suchas implic- atures, metaphors, and speech acts (van Dijk 1989; Wilson 1990;Holly 1989; Chilton andIlyin 1993).
Aswe have discussed above, defining political discourse is not a straightforwardmatter. Some analysts define the political so broadly that almost any discoursemay be considered political. At the same time, a formal constraint on anydefinition such that we only deal with politicians and core political eventsexcludes the everyday discourse of politics which is part of people's lives.The balance is a difficult one, and perhaps all we can expect from analysts isthat they make clear in which way they are viewing political discourse, becausethey too, like politicians, are limited and mani pulated in and by their owndiscourse. As we have seen, in a number of cases (Stubbs and van Dijk, forexample) the text which is being analyzed has already been delimited as aspecific political type. Stubbs refers to his chosen text as an“environmentalist one,” and van Dijk refers to specific speeches as “racist.”In both cases, social and political judgments have been made before analysiscommences. In other studies (Gunn and Wilson, for example) the data generatetheir own stories, and the initial constraint is usually only linguistic, thepolitical being drafted in later to explain why patterns may have emerged asthey have. I am not suggesting that these are mutually exclusive alternatives,or that one or the other has any specific problems. The point is made toillustrate the way in which some analyses may become as much political aslinguistic; and I think political discourse is made up of, and must allow for,both.
Sincethe early 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the area of politicaldiscourse (with studies emerging from across the globe: see Chilton 1997).While many studies have adopted (explicitly or implicitly) a criticalperspective (see van Dijk, this volume), there has also been a variety of otherapproaches available, rang ing from the descriptive to the psychological. Theessential issue in political discourse is, as we have noted, the balancebetween linguistic analysis and political analysis, and we have perhapsemphasized the former in this chapter as opposed to the latter, since, ingeneral, this is what distinguishes political discourse analysis from politicalresearch as found, say, in political science.
Itis also now a growing trend in political discourse to combine social theorywith linguistic theory (see Fairclough1992a; Wodak 1995). The trick, however, is not to loselinguistic rigor for the sake of sociopolitical claims, but equally not tosimply continue producing language-based analyses which do not fully considerwhy, in social and political terms, specific linguistic choices have been made.There is also an emerging argument for a more integrated semiotic view ofpublic and political com munications which combines analyses of a range ofsign-based systems (Kress andvan Leeuwen 1990, 1996). But certain core features will, andmust, remain constant in the field of political discourse, and central to thisis the role of language and lan guage structure, and its manipulation forpolitical message construction and political effect.
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