A Word about Politics

 

As suggested above, syntactic selection undoubtedly affects interpretation, but this must be seen in relation to other contextual factors, and indeed in relation to the impact of lexical choices themselves. Wilson and Rose (1997) argue, for example, that the problems of interpretation which accompanied one piece of controversial legisla tion, the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, seemed to revolve around single lexical items. Making use of Sperber and Wilson's (1996) theory of relevance, Wilson and Rose describe how a single lexical item, in this case consultation, drives differing interpreta tions of the agreement. This controversial legislation brought together the Irish and British governments in an intergovernmental forum. The British government described the relationship as one of “consultation,” and modified this as “merely consultation,” revealing their view that they were only talking to the Irish government as opposed to being influenced by them. The Irish government, in contrast, viewed “consulta tion” as a process of influence. One does not normally consult someone unless one is willing to take the person's advice. In this case, consultation meant more than discussion; it was discussion plus impact. This was also the interpretation given by the Unionist parties within Northern Ireland, who were vehemently opposed to the agree 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 than talk 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 of presentation seemed to have little impact on ideologically contrived lexical interpretations.

Such conflicts over lexical interpretation are not new, of course. Everyday words, organized and structured in particular ways, may become politically implicated in directing thinking about particular issues, and with real and devastating effects. Even the process of uttering someone's name may become a political act, as it did in the infamous McCarthy trials of the 1950s (see also Wilson 1990: ch. 3).

McCarthy's witch-hunt for communists created a context where “naming names” became a central issue (see Navasky 1982). The McCarthy trials raised questions about the very act of naming and what it means to name someone in certain kinds of social context. If one agreed to name names, was one an informer” or an inform ant,” for example? Ultimately, this depended on which side of the semantic fence you stood on. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was quite clear on his position:

They stigmatize patriotic Americans with the obnoxious term “informer,” when such citizens fulfil their obligations of citizenship by reporting known facts of trie evil conspiracy to properly constituted authorities. It would require very little time for these critics to pick up a dictionary; Webster's unabridged volume specifically states that an “informant” is one who gives information of whatever sort; an in former is one who informs against another by way of accusation or complaint. Informer is often, informant almost never, a term of opprobrium, (cited in Navasky 1982: xviii)

Whatever one's reasons for providing names to McCarthy's committee – and Navasky notes that justification ranged from the protection of the country (where one Manning Johnson admitted he would lie in a court of law in the course of protecting his country) to liberal outrage (James Wechsler argued that only by cooperating with the committee could he gain access to a transcript of the trials, which he could then use to attack the committee itself) – in those cases where names were provided a number of analysts took a simpler and alternative view to Hoover's: Navaksy (1982) states quite straightforwardly that anyone who gave names “was an informer.”

The interesting 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 word has. Hoover objected to the use of the word “informer” not because it cannot be, in one sense, correctly applied to anyone who gives names, but because it carries negative connotations, and he believed that the actions of naming within the context of the search for communists and communist sympathizers ought to be seen as positive. Navasky takes an opposing view; despite Hoover's suggested semantic arguments, he points out that most of those who gave evidence thought of themselves as infor mers, and, says Navasky, “that's what I will call them” (1982: xviii).

Or consider another context where ordinary, everyday words are organized differ ently within the discourse of speechmaking. The following extracts are taken from a speech given by Neil Kinnock, at the time the Labour Opposition leader in Britain, on Tuesday June 2, 1987, at a Labour Party rally in Darlington, England: Uunemployment is a contagious disease … it infects the whole of the economic body …If limbs are severely damaged the whole body is disabled. If the regions are left to rot, the whole country is weakened …… just as the spread of unemployment, closure, redundancy, rundown … affects the economic life in that region so the same ailments in a country gradually stain the whole country.… if the battered parts and people of Britain don't get noisy they will just get neglected. Silent pain evokes no response.

What is clear from these extracts, and many others within the same speech, is that the semantic fields of illness and health are being evoked in an attempt to produce rel evant political images. Some of the vocabulary employed in this effort 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, chronically ill, affliction, handicapped, medicine, infects

It is also clear that many of these terms are negatively marked. Examples are weak as 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 use these 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.

This is 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 in political discourse (Wodak 1989; Hodge and Fowler 1979; Geis 1987; Bolinger 1982), the reality is that in most cases it is the context, or reflected form (Leech 1995), of the words which carries the political message. This is particularly true of the kinds of metaphorical uses made by Kinnock. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have shown, metaphorical uses may describe the world for us in particular ways such that we come to understand the world in that way (representation again: see Chilton and Ilyin 1993). And this is what Kinnock is trying to do. What he wants is for us to understand the world in such a way that all aspects of Conservative government control lead to disease and decay.

The issue here, as with both the POLITIC system interpretation and the human interpretation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, is that some humans, like some systems, may be biased in their mode of interpretation from the start. For such individuals, manipulations of transitivity, or other aspects of structure, may have little effect on interpretation, which is not to say that such structural forms may not have an impact elsewhere. The point is that there are many dimensions of language involved in political output, and all of these have the potential in their own way for political impact. Even individual sounds may become political, and a much-neglected area of political language is what we might call “political phonology.”

Sounds Political

 

It may be initially difficult to grasp how specific sounds come to be interpreted as political, although where one sees politics as tied directly to forms of ideology, the issue becomes a central plank of variationist sociolinguistics, and beyond (see Cameron 1995; Lippi-Green 1997). Research on accent clearly indicates that selected phonolo gical variables can carry political loading. By their very nature, phonological vari 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 O Brian 1998).

Despite this natural link between phonological work in variationist sociolinguistics and political and social facts, there have been few studies of the potential of phono logy in the direct construction of political discourse. There is no reason to presuppose, however, that this level of linguistic structure may not also be available for political orientation. There is general evidence, for example, that Margaret Thatcher modified her speech in very particular ways in order to make herself more attractive to voters. And in the work of Gunn (1989; Wilson and Gunn 1983) it is claimed that leading politicians and political supporters may make adjustments within their phonological systems for political effect. For example, Gerry Adams is said to have adopted phono logical forms as representative of southern Irish dialect alternatives, and placed these within his own Belfast phonological system. Similarly, selected members of the Democratic Unionist Party, at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Adams's Sinn Fein, were shown to modify some of their phonology in the direction of a perceived and geographically (North Antrim) located Ulster Scots dialect. What this means is that politicians can choose to sound ideological/political, and indeed that such modifications are perceptually salient to the public. Matched guise studies (see Lambert et al. 1960), manipulating the kinds of phonological variables noted by Gunn (Wilson and Gunn 1983), revealed that certain variables were associated with political factors such as Unionism and Republicanism and general social factors such as Protest antism, Catholicism, Britishness, and Irishness. By adopting particular alternative phonological forms, one could be perceived as either more Catholic/Irish/Republican or more Protestant/British/Unionist.

political discourse

CONCLUSIONS

 

One of the core goals of political discourse analysis is to seek out the ways in which language choice is manipulated for specific political effect. In our discussions we have clearly seen that almost all levels of linguistics are involved; i.e. most samples of political discourse may be mapped onto the various levels of linguistics from lexis to pragmatics. At the level of lexical choice there are studies of such things as loaded words, technical words, and euphemisms (Graber 1981; Geis 1987; Bolinger 1982). In grammar, as we have seen, there are studies of selected functional systems and their organization within different ideological frames (Fowler and Marshall 1985). There are also studies of pronouns and their distribution relative to political and other forms of responsibility (Maitland and Wilson 1987; Wilson 1990; Pateman 1981; Lwaitama 1988) and studies of more pragmatically oriented objects such as implic- atures, metaphors, and speech acts (van Dijk 1989; Wilson 1990; Holly 1989; Chilton and Ilyin 1993).

As we have discussed above, defining political discourse is not a straightforward matter. Some analysts define the political so broadly that almost any discourse may be considered political. At the same time, a formal constraint on any definition such that we only deal with politicians and core political events excludes 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 is that they make clear in which way they are viewing political discourse, because they too, like politicians, are limited and mani pulated in and by their own discourse. As we have seen, in a number of cases (Stubbs and van Dijk, for example) the text which is being analyzed has already been delimited as a specific 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 analysis commences. In other studies (Gunn and Wilson, for example) the data generate their own stories, and the initial constraint is usually only linguistic, the political being drafted in later to explain why patterns may have emerged as they 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 to illustrate the way in which some analyses may become as much political as linguistic; and I think political discourse is made up of, and must allow for, both.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the area of political discourse (with studies emerging from across the globe: see Chilton 1997). While many studies have adopted (explicitly or implicitly) a critical perspective (see van Dijk, this volume), there has also been a variety of other approaches available, rang ing from the descriptive to the psychological. The essential issue in political discourse is, as we have noted, the balance between linguistic analysis and political analysis, and we have perhaps emphasized the former in this chapter as opposed to the latter, since, in general, this is what distinguishes political discourse analysis from political research as found, say, in political science.

It is also now a growing trend in political discourse to combine social theory with linguistic theory (see Fairclough 1992a; Wodak 1995). The trick, however, is not to lose linguistic rigor for the sake of sociopolitical claims, but equally not to simply continue producing language-based analyses which do not fully consider why, in social and political terms, specific linguistic choices have been made. There is also an emerging argument for a more integrated semiotic view of public and political com munications which combines analyses of a range of sign-based systems (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990, 1996). But certain core features will, and must, remain constant in the field of political discourse, and central to this is the role of language and lan guage structure, and its manipulation for political message construction and political effect.

 

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