Pragmatics and discourse analysis (original) (raw)
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Pragmatics of Political Discourse
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).
Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics: Their Scope and Relation
Russian Journal of Linguistics
In this article I delve into the seas of the disciplines of Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics, trying to perform the difficult task of delimiting their scope and discussing their common and non-common ground, in order to present a general idea of the state of the art of both disciplines in the 21 st century. Being conscious of the fact that one can learn a great deal about any field by observing what its practitioners do, and precisely because these disciplines are hard to delimit, I also discuss what it is that pragmaticians and discourse analysts actually do. The concepts of text and discourse are explored by looking into different approaches and studies in the areas of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, as well as into how they have evolved from their beginnings to the present time. The main schools of Pragmatics, the Anglo-American and the European Continental (Huang 2016) are also explored, in order to compare their viewpoints and their relationship with the field of discourse analysis. As I see it, Pragmatics is not the same as, but is an indispensable source for, discourse analysis: it would be impossible to analyze any discourse without having a solid basic knowledge of pragmatic phenomena and the ways in which they work and interact (Alba-Juez, 2009: 46). I also examine some concepts and issues that are crucial for the topic of this paper, such as the concepts of context, cognition or culture, and the need to develop pragmatic awareness.
Pragmatic issues in discourse analysis (CADAAD 2007)
Starting from the problems raised by the notion of ‘discourse’ and its definition, this paper takes issue with the views that consider discourse as an object of study observable and describable as a ‘whole’ static structure, and which meaning is richer than the sum of the meanings stemming from the individual utterances composing it. The assumptions previously put forward by authors such as Chafe, who claimed that discourse is better studied as a process unfolding through time, is taken seriously into account. Within the ongoing discussion about the very notion of discourse, some arguments are proposed to sustain the view that all the meaning produced by a given discourse is in fact reducible to the meaning produced by the single utterances composing it; in particular, implicit rhetorical relations are conceived as the result of pragmatic inferences of the same nature as contextual hypotheses in general, and therefore rhetorical relations are to be interpreted at the level of pragmatic meaning.
2007. "Political (im)politeness. Discourse power and political power in electoral debates"
Catalan Review, 2007
This paper studies the pragmatic-discursive function of perception-verb markers in electoral debates in Catalan. The analysis reveals that these elements play an important role as implicit argumentation resources. In this sense, they emphasize the confrontation of the participants, which is organized basically through counter-argumentation and attack to the addressee’s face. This main function, related to the persistence of the imperative value of the verb forms, presents different degrees in the different markers analyzed: those markers coming from active perception (miri and even more escolti) structure a greater argumentative force. The extension of the theory about linguistic politeness from ordinary conversation to political discourse shows that the elements analyzed emphasize a peculiar kind of linguistic (im)politeness in political debates.
This paper presents a study of the constraint factors that condition the form and functions of questions in a corpus composed of several face-to-face election debates that took place in Spain during different election campaigns. Some of these factors are of a distributional nature, such as the position of the questions in the politician’s turns at talk, with final positions and fragments of simultaneous speech being the most favourable contexts for the formulation of these utterances. Questions are also favoured by stylistic and rhetorical forces, such as those which lead the speaker to repeat questions or question formats within wider inquisitive sequences, which represent almost half the corpus. In addition, these communicative units are also influenced by institutional factors, such as the political role played by the candidates in the debates (government/opposition), as well as the political expectations and identities that the politicians seek to enhance, and which may vary in different moments of the election campaign.
Pragmatic issues in discourse analysis
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across …, 2007
Starting from the problems raised by the notion of 'discourse' and its definition, this paper takes issue with the views that consider discourse as an object of study observable and describable as a 'whole' static structure, and which meaning is richer than the sum of the meanings ...
The use of demonstratives and context activation in Catalan parliamentary debate
Discourse Studies, 2014
Context is crucial in analyzing parliamentary debate, a field which has recently attracted attention from various perspectives. However, not many contributions focus on specific linguistic markers that shape and are simultaneously influenced by the context of production. The present article aims to partially fill in this gap by analyzing the demonstratives used in parliamentary debates and highlighting how they contribute to activating different aspects of context. After summarizing the features of parliamentary debate as a genre and the importance and complexity of context considered as a subjective and dynamic mental construct, the pragmatic functions of demonstratives are presented and the most frequent uses occurring in two debates in the Catalan Parliament are illustrated, namely text deictic and discourse-context demonstratives. The analysis shows the discourse significance of the latter, which corresponds to noun phrases such as this Parliament, referring to the members of parliament as a body, or this statement, referring to the document under discussion. These uses of a proximal demonstrative pointing to the shared context of communication clearly differ from text deictics. They are similar to but also different from both situational demonstratives, which point to the perceived context, and recognitional demonstratives, which point to the shared knowledge between the participants, the penultimate. The overall analysis not only enriches the description of parliamentary debates, but it also contributes to a more complete description of the various uses of demonstratives and to a better understanding of the complexity and dynamicity of context in this genre.