Pragmatics of Political Discourse
José Luis Blas Arroyo
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Abstract
Political language is not in essence any different from other manifestations of language and therefore its specificity must be sought instead in the particular relationships that are established between the discourse itself and the extralinguistic context (Van Dijk, 1997, p. 24). It is there, within that framework of specific historical, economic and social coordinates, where the forms of political language appear in a more extreme way than in other textual genres and where the relationships between the explicit and implicit meanings become especially relevant. Whatever the case may be, when it comes to defining the limits of this discursive genre it would be wise to distinguish, at least initially, between political discourse in the strict sense of the term and other forms of public discourse with potential political implications (e.g. scholarly discourse, legal discourse, etc.). In this chapter, we will focus on analysing the first of these two discursive practices, so we will refer mainly to the first-frame participants in political discourse, such as politicians going about their parliamentary activity, being interviewed by journalists from the media, confronting each other in parliamentary and electoral melees or giving speeches before overjoyed followers at public addresses. Of the many subjects that can be discussed in the analysis of this type of discourse in the literature, in these pages we will review several pragmatic aspects of these verbal interactions in which politicians usually participate, such as some strategies and formats used by politicians in their interactions with journalists in political interviews (section 2), the different types of audiences faced and the tactics they usually display in order to seduce them (section 3), the face-work exhibited in conflict discourses between antagonists during political debates (section 4), or the increased number of mediatisation and conversationalisation processes in the way politics has been ‘doing’ in recent times (section 5). Now, considering the complexities of dealing with all these issues around the world, in this introduction we will focus mainly on political discourse pronounced in western democracies and, in particular, on the communicative behaviour that politicians usually display in some of the abovementioned subgenres and types of media, especially TV. Nevertheless, for space reasons, the new interactive media, in which politicians have recently begun to establish new forms of interaction with people (blogs, chats, social networks, etc.) will be dealt with only in passing (see section 5).
