The Pragmatics of Political Discourse: Explorations across Cultures

253 Pages·2013·1.15 MB·English

by  Anita Fetzer (ed.)

The Pragmatics of Political Discourse
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work
covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within
language sciences.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns
Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
John C. Heritage
University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson
Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at
University of Athens Santa Barbara
Susan C. Herring
Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk
Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Masako K. Hiraga
Barcelona
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà
University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 228
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse. Explorations across cultures
Edited by Anita Fetzer
The Pragmatics
of Political Discourse
Explorations across cultures
Edited by
Anita Fetzer
University of Augsburg
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse : Explorations across cultures/
Edited by Anita Fetzer.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 228)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis--Political aspects. 2. Pragmatics. I. Fetzer, Anita, 1958- editor of
compilation.
P302.77.P67 2013
320.01’4--dc23 2012039970
isbn 978 90 272 5633 1 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7239 3 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
The multilayered and multifaceted nature of political discourse 1
Anita Fetzer
Part I. Political discourse from above: Parliamentary discourse
On the metapragmatics of British, German and Russian
political questions and answers 21
Maria Sivenkova
The discursive practice of addressing in the Romanian Parliament 47
Răzvan Săftoiu
Part II. Political discourse mediated: Interviews
Argumentation in broadcast election campaign discourse:
Towards a rhetorical reconstruction 69
Margareth Sandvik
Strategic manoeuvring in a political interview:
The case of responding to an accusation of inconsistency 103
Corina Andone
The communication of certainty and uncertainty in Italian
political media discourses 125
Ilaria Riccioni, Ramona Bongelli and Andrzej Zuczkowski
Political irony: Constructing reciprocal positioning
in the news interview 167
Elda Weizman
vi The Pragmatics of Political Discourse
Part III. Political discourse from below: Phone-ins and letters
The effect of irony in radio talk-back programmes in Israel 193
Zohar Livnat and Gonen Dori-Hacohen
‘Motions of support’ and the communicative act of thanking
in political discourse 219
Eric A. Anchimbe
Index of names 243
Index of terms 245
The multilayered and multifaceted
nature of political discourse
Anita Fetzer
University of Augsburg, Germany
1. Introduction
The analysis of discourse in politics, discourse about politics, and discourse of
professional and non-professional politicians has gained a lot of attention in po-
litical science, sociology, social psychology, media studies, cultural studies, dis-
course analysis, and pragmatics, to name but the most prominent paradigms.
Political discourse has been classified as institutional discourse, taking place in
institutional settings and being thus constrained by particularized contextual
requirements, such as selection of discourse topics from the domain of institu-
tion, a preference for more neutral discursive styles and discourse identities, and
a turn-taking system constrained by the requirements of institution as regards
possible self-selection and length of turns. Political discourse has also been de-
scribed as public discourse with a public conversational record differing from
private-domain-anchored discourse with its less constrained contextual require-
ments. More recently, political discourse has been categorized as media discourse,
taking place in the media and being constrained by the contextual requirements
of media, such as an inherent perspectivisation and thus an inherent manipula-
tive component due to its transmission through different types of media, or dif-
ferent types of multimodality, which allows for strategic fore- and backgrounding
(cf., e.g., Fairclough 1995, 1998; Fetzer and Weizman 2006; Sbisà 2006). Because
of its multilayered status regarding (1) production, reception, transmission and
distribution in traditional media and new media, (2) discourse domain, viz.
professional politics, grass root politics, ordinary-life-anchored political action,
public-life-anchored political action, and media-life-anchored political action,
(3) participation, viz. politicians as professional politicians vs. ‘non-professional
politicians’, e.g. lay persons, activists and ordinary people on the one hand, and
2 Anita Fetzer
professional political journalists and other media representatives on the other,
political discourse has become a prime candidate for pragmatic analyses.
The most prominent research tools of discourse analysis, pragmatics, social
psychology, and media studies have only been recently applied to the examination
of political discourse (e.g., Bull and Fetzer 2006; Fetzer and Lauerbach 2007), as
is seen in a conceptualisation of politics as ‘text and talk’ (Chilton and Schäffner
2002), which is based on the premise that ‘‘political activity does not exist without
the use of language. It is true that other behaviours are involved: for instance,
physical coercion. But the doing of politics is predominantly constituted in lan-
guage’’ (Chilton and Schäffner 2002: 3). One of the reasons for the interdiscipli-
nary orientation of political discourse analysis is an ongoing shift from a still
prevailing examination of macro-politics and of politics as a product, to the more
recent focus on the investigation of the dynamics of politics and political proc-
esses, as is manifest in, e.g., microanalysis of politics (Bull 2003), empirical politi-
cal science (Mikalayeva 2011), face-work in political discourse (Bull and Fetzer
2010), and doing politics in context (Fetzer and Bull 2012). Another crucial factor
in a pragmatics-based analysis of political discourse is the impact of mass media
on politics in general and on the presentation of politics and political-decision-
making in particular.
Both macro and micro politics require language as a means of communica-
tion in order to exercise governmental control and to communicate felicitously in
the political arena. Similarly to rules in grammar, which specify what counts as
grammatical, well-formed, and appropriate, there are rules in the domain of poli-
tics, which specify what counts as political action, to employ speech-act-theoretic
terminology (Searle 1969, 2010), and which specify how politics is done, to em-
ploy a term from the field of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1994). For instance,
considering the possibility of having a house built may count as a private-domain
anchored personal decision if two (or more) individuals intend to build that house
on their own premises and for their own purposes. If the house in question were
to be an official building, for instance a train station, prison, school, or kindergar-
ten, the decision to have the house built would count as a political decision, which
would need to undergo institutional decision-making procedures.
The explicit integration of a pragmatic perspective to the investigation of me-
diated discourse in general, to adopt Scollon’s (1998) terminology, and mediated
political discourse in particular is an attempt to bridge the gap between a media-
specific production and a media-specific reception of text and talk. This is achieved,
first, by explicit accounts of the mediated status of the communicative processes
and communicative products as regards the questions of who the intended re-
cipient of the political discourse is, and of how meaning is negotiated amongst
the different recipients. Second, a pragmatic perspective explores the particular
The multilayered and multifaceted nature of political discourse 3
contextual constraints and requirements of the production and comprehension of
media discourse by shedding light on the audience’s inferences processes in order
to retrieve the speakers’ communicative intentions. Third, a pragmatic perspec-
tive accounts for context-dependent meanings and thus for the impact of social
and sociocultural constraints on the communicative event as a whole and on the
participants’ communicative performances as its constitutive parts.
In political discourse the duality of perlocutionary act and perlocutionary
effect (Austin 1971; Chilton and Schäffner 2002; Searle 1969) deserves particular
attention, as it differentiates into (1) intended versus achieved effects, and (2) a
distinction between the audience as a whole, and subsets of hearers and audiences
as its parts. The relevance of the intention/effect duality is explicitly highlighted by
Chilton and Schäffner, who draw the connection between a pragmatic approach
to political discourse and media studies by succinctly pointing out that the per-
locutionary effect ‘‘is (…) of crucial importance in political discourse analysis in
particular, because it points to the potential discrepancy between intended effect
(that is, effect that some hearers may infer to be intended) and the actual effect on
the hearer” (2002: 11). In that type of media context, the audience does not have
a direct impact on the process of negotiating meaning. Its constitutive members
cannot directly respond to a political text as such but can only react in an indi-
rect manner through commenting on the political discourse and exchanging their
opinions with other members of the audience. Mediated political discourse allows
for mediated responses only.
1.1 Political discourse as media discourse
Political discourse in the media is a complex phenomenon: it is institutional dis-
course, it is media discourse, and it is mediated political discourse. As institution-
al discourse, it differs from everyday conversation in being subject to institutional
goals and procedures. As media discourse it is different from other types of insti-
tutional discourse by being, above all, public discourse addressed to a mass media
audience. This sets it apart from the discourse of other institutions, such as educa-
tion or law. As mediated political discourse, it is the outcome of an encounter of
two different institutional discourses – those of politics and of the media.
In a world, which is becoming more and more global, and more and more
mediated and digitalized, political discourse has become just another sort of me-
dia discourse. This does not only have consequences on the production of politics
and on political discourse but also on its presentation, accommodating the needs
of the producers of politics and of its heterogeneous recipients, for instance, pub-
lic citizens – or rather their potential electorate – and their decision-making proc-
esses as regards support, criticism or opposition of policies, political parties and