scholarly journals Aspects of relevance in the Romanian political discourse

Diacronia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Ene

This paper investigates political discourse from the perspective of relevance theory in relation to the function of reasonable persuasion oriented towards voters. The research’ objectives are to identify and to describe: 1) the mechanisms of persuasion used in election campaign speeches; 2) the meta-strategy of miming dialogue; 3) the manner in which political discourse infringes upon the principles of relevance. The accomplishment of the objectives requires a two-fold methodology: rhetorical and linguistic by means of instruments of lexical-semantic, pragma-stylistic and logical-argumentative analysis. The research is focused on political election campaigns speeches: slogans and speeches of the Romanian recent election campaigns. The most frequently encountered discourse strategies are: i) the use of various types of fallacious reasoning and ii) vague language.

Author(s):  
Popova N.M. ◽  
Rybalka O.Yu.

Purpose. The article deals with identifying effective language means and techniques which form the basis of polarization, solidarity and positive prospect describing tactics that the argumentative strategy is realized through in speeches, debates and interviews of such Spain’s political leaders as Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Casado and Santiago Abascal. Methodology. The study is based on an integrated approach to the analysis of political discourse, combining communicative and pragmatic, semantic and cognitive as well as contextual analyses which allow determining speaker’s communicative and pragmatic intentions, detect the axiological component of language units meaning and their possible interpretations by national conceptual sphere hosts in the relevant linguistic and situational context.Results. The study analyzes the means of the argumentative strategy creation in the campaign speeches of Spanish leading political parties’ leaders, in their interviews and debates. The predominance of tactics of positive prospects description, polarization and solidarity were identified. The research characterizes the peculiarities of lexical, grammatical and stylistic units’ combining, taking into account the nationally determined specificity of lexical units’ meaning, which verbalize the demanded concepts of the national conceptual sphere of Spain. The analysis of the 2019 pre-election campaign discourse has allowed identifying of such specific features of the argumentative strategy as focusing on the future, emphasizing their own achievements and opponents’ shortcomings, desire to reduce the distance between the speaker and the addressee. The focus on the future context is embodied in the tactic of positive prospects description where grammatical and lexical units should indicate the clarity and certainty of politician’s position. The tactic of polarization, characterized by the use of antonymous lexical units, allows politicians to present favorably their own candidacy and negatively affect opponents’ image. The need to convince voters is transferred into in the tactic of solidarity consisting in the use of lexical units that indicate the convergence of views and belonging of the speaker and the addressee to the same community.Conclusions. The analysis of peculiarities of argumentative strategy realization in the Spanish political discourse demonstrates the effectiveness of such frequently used communicative tactics as positive prospects description, polarization and solidarity. They are based on the selection of lexical, grammatical and stylistic units, taking into account the situational and pragmatic context as well as national and axiological dominants of Spaniard’s world view.Key words: political discourse, pragmatics, communicative strategy, tactic, axiologemes, semantic and cognitive interpretation, linguistic context, conceptual sphere. Мета. Метою статті є виявлення ефективних засобів та прийомів у тактиках окреслення позитивної перспективи, протиставлення та солідаризації, за допомогою яких реалізується аргументативна стратегія у промовах, дебатах та інтерв’ю політичних лідерів Іспанії, зокрема Педро Санчеса, Пабло Касадо та Сантьяго Абаскаля. Методи. Дослідження базується на комплексному підході до аналізу політичного дискурсу, у якому поєднано комунікативно-прагматичний, семантико-когнітивний і контекстуальний аналізи, що забезпечують визначення комунікативно-прагматичних намірів мовця, встановлення аксіологічного компоненту значення використаних мовних одиниць і їх можливі інтер-претації носіями національної концептосфери у відповідному мовному та ситуативному контексті.Результати. У межах дослідження було проаналізовано засоби реалізації аргументативної стратегії у передвиборчих про-мовах лідерів трьох провідних політичних партій Іспанії, інтерв’ю та дебатах за їх участю, виокремлено переважання тактики окреслення позитивної перспективи, протиставлення, солідаризації та описано особливості поєднання обраних політиками лексичних, граматичних і стилістичних одиниць із урахуванням національно детермінованої специфіки значення лексичних одиниць, що вербалізують затребувані концепти національної концептосфери Іспанії. Аналіз дискурсу передвиборчої кампа-нії 2019 року дозволив визначити специфічні риси аргументативної стратегії: спрямованість на майбутнє, акцент на власних досягненнях та недоліках опонентів, прагнення скоротити дистанцію між мовцем та адресатом. Орієнтованість на майбутній контекст втілюється у тактиці окреслення позитивної перспективи за допомогою використання граматичних та лексичних засобів, що позначають чіткість та визначеність позиції політика. Тактика протиставлення, що характеризується вживанням антонімічних лексичних засобів, дозволяє політичним діячам вигідно представити власну кандидатуру та негативно вплинути на імідж опонентів. Необхідність переконати виборців втілюється в тактиці солідаризації, що полягає у використанні лексич-них одиниць, які вказують на близькість поглядів і приналежність мовця й адресата до єдиного цілого.Висновки. Проведений аналіз особливостей реалізації аргументативної стратегії в іспанському політичному дискурсі свідчить про ефективність трьох основних комунікативних тактик: окреслення позитивної перспективи, протиставлення та солідаризації, добір лексичних, граматичних та стилістичних засобів побудови яких базується на врахуванні ситуативно-прагматичного контексту та національно аксіологічних домінант іспанського світогляду.Ключові слова: політичний дискурс,прагматика, комунікативна стратегія, тактика, аксіологема, семантико-когнітивна інтерпретація, мовний контекст, концептосфера.


Author(s):  
Christoph Schubert

Abstract Presidential primary debates in the USA are commonly concluded by brief closing statements, in which the competitors outline the central messages of their election campaigns. These statements constitute a subgenre characterized by a set of recurring rhetorical moves, which are defined as functional units geared towards the respective communicative objective, in this case political persuasion. Located at the interface of rhetorical move analysis and political discourse studies, this paper demonstrates that moves and embedded steps in closing statements fulfill the persuasive function of legitimizing the respective candidate as the most preferable presidential successor. The study is based on the transcripts of 98 closing statements, which were extracted from eight Democratic and eleven Republican primary debates held between August 2015 and April 2016. Typical moves, such as projecting the speaker’s future political agenda or diagnosing the current situation in America, are presented with the help of illustrative examples, frequencies of occurrence, and a sample analysis of a complete closing statement.


PCD Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Irit Talmor ◽  
Osnat Osnat Akirav

During pre-election campaigns, parties make great efforts to persuade constituents to vote for them. Usually, new parties have smaller budgets and fewer resources than veteran parties. Generally, the more heterogeneous the party’s electorate, the more critical the issue of resource allocation. This paper presents a method for new parties to efficiently allocate campaign advertising resources and maximise voters. The model developed uses the Pareto principle and multi-criteria approach, integrating the party’s confidential data together with official open-to-all data. We implemented the model on a specific new party during the intensive political period before the April 2019 elections in Israel, finding that the model produced clear and unbiased results, and this made it effective and user-friendly for strategy teams and campaign managers.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tunde Olusola Opeibi

The essay sets off by arguing that since the 1950s, there has been a growing enthusiasm in political advertising discourse. This was because political advertising became prominent as an effective communicative and publicity tool in the 1952 U.S. presidential election campaign when Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed its instruments to win the most prestigious and highest political post in the U.S. (Reece 2003). Since that time, several rhetorical strategies have been adopted by politicians all over the world to cast and communicate political messages to their various audiences. Most previous research efforts appear to be in the monolingual or L1 settings (e.g. Chilton and Schäffner 1997; Obeng 1997). In this study, we examine how Nigerian politicians demonstrate their bilingual creativity in an innovative manner, employing linguistic facilities to publicise and sell their political programmes, especially in the use of media multilingualism, a novel persuasive strategy that has come to characterise political campaign texts. Specifically, we consider this recent phenomenon in Nigerian political discourse in which political candidates ‘marry’ and exploit the resources of both the exogenous (English) and indigenous languages (and sometimes along with pidgin) in the same campaign texts in order to woo voters. So the term ‘media multilingualism’ here is taken to be the variety of code-mixing and codeswitching in written political texts. The paper thus examines inter/intrasententially code-mixed facts found in the written campaign texts and discusses their functional implications especially as part of the discourse strategies deployed by the politicians to elicit support and woo voters to support their candidatures. Relevant literature on codeswitching and theories (e.g. Speech Accommodation Theory) that provide theoretical underpinning for the study are reviewed. An attempt is also made to demonstrate that codeswitching in political discourse is an interpersonal strategy that can be used to create, strengthen or destroy interpersonal boundaries, and thus it functions as a discourse strategy for pragmatic and strategic purposes (Wei 2003). The framework for analysis follows the insights provided in Rational Choice Models (RC) as seen in the works of Myers-Scotton (1993), Myers-Scotton and Agnes Bolonyai (2001) and Wei (2003). The essay concludes by presenting a summary of some important analytical observations that arose from the study. It also suggests that a similar pattern is bound to occur in political discourse found in other L2 contexts. The data set for this work came from selected political texts produced during the 2003 governorship and presidential elections campaigns in Nigeria and sourced from selected Nigerian national newspapers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-237
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Łukasik-Turecka

The principle of equal electoral opportunities is implemented, inter alia, by allocating free airtime to political entities. In Poland, like in many other countries, the authorized committees have the right to use the public media’s airtime free of charge during election campaigns. The present article’s objective is to show the Polish solutions in this domain compared with the regulations in other countries and to present the research results and their analysis concerning Poles’ attitude to free election broadcasts – including their assessment of the broadcasts as a source of knowledge about candidates and parties taking part in the election campaign. The studies were carried out based on the survey questionnaire, which was compiled using the five-level Likert scale. The sample was selected by the stratifiedquota method (N = 971). The conclusions resulting from the survey suggest the need to retain the regulation that enables political entities in Poland to use free election broadcasts during election campaigns. At the same time, they point out that it is necessary to seek more advantageous forms and content to put airtime to appropriate use during the campaign period.


Author(s):  
Nilay Yavuz ◽  
Naci Karkın ◽  
İsmet Parlak ◽  
Özlem Özdeşim Subay

Along with the growing use of twitter as a tool of political interaction, recently, there has also been an attention in the academia to understand and explain how and why politicians use twitter, and what its impact on the political outcomes are. On the other hand, there has been little analysis about the content of the tweets that politicians from different parties posted during major political events. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the discourse strategies that the top-level politicians of the party in power and of the main opposition party in Turkey used in their tweets during Gezi Park events in the summer of 2013. Findings from a hand-coded content analysis based on Van Dijk's framework (2006) indicate that while the most frequently used strategy was actor descriptions and categorization for both parties' politicians, burden strategy and lexicalization / metaphor strategy were used significantly more by the main opposition party politicians compared to the politicians of the party in power.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511989122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzana Masroor ◽  
Qintarah N. Khan ◽  
Iman Aib ◽  
Zulfiqar Ali

The form and functions of political discourse have considerably taken a new orientation with the evolving ways of communication. Twitter is a platform that is increasingly preferred by the political elites for the purpose of gaining public acclaim and propagating political ideologies. The political discourse on Twitter requires a critical attention toward linguistic structures and strategies to uncover the relationship between language and social practices. For this purpose, tweets of two eminent Pakistani political figures are chosen for unmasking a variety of discourse strategies at work from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA) through the socio-cognitive model of ideological square. The analysis uncovers the hidden ideological structures and strategies realized through a number of rhetorical moves in the selected tweets. The cognitive binary of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation help achieving political domination and legitimization of political actions by controlling the public opinion. The underlying motives vary and are context bound such as the aims to topple a government or to restore public faith in the governance. This research is significant for political discourse analysts as well as the general public, as a means for analytical activism propagated by any CDA inquiry, and paves way for further research in the use of social media platforms for political purposes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Kamil Glinka

Abstract The main aim of the article is to present the relationship between urban policy and the marketing activity of the presidents of Wrocław, Wałbrzych, Legnica, and Jelenia Góra during the period of the 2014 local government election campaign. Analysis of the marketing activity of the presidents, conducted via chosen social media, enables presentation of the most important conditions and reasons for using urban policy in the competition for the support of citizens – potential voters. First, it will show that the marketing actions of a president during an election campaign are not the means of creating the image of a city but gaining the support of voters. Second, the analysis will prove that the election message constructed by presidents is based on the actions conducted in the various areas of urban policy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882090640
Author(s):  
Carolina Plescia ◽  
Sylvia Kritzinger ◽  
Jakob-Moritz Eberl

In spite of broad interest in internal party dynamics, with previous literature relatedly demonstrating that voters are not oblivious to party infighting, very little attention has been paid to the antecedents of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict. This article addresses this research deficit with the support of empirical evidence gathered over the course of the 2017 Austrian national election campaign. The study examines variations in perceived intra-party conflict over time, both across parties and within the same party. We find that although voter perceptions largely mirror actual distinctions in intra-party fighting, conspicuous individual-level variations can also be identified owing to attention to the election campaign and motivated reasoning in information processing. These results have important consequences for our understanding of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict and the role of election campaigns, with potential implications for party strategies during election campaigns.


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