Edited by Piotr Cap and Urszula Okulska
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 50] 2013
► pp. 267–295
The aim of this work is to present an integrative approach for analyzing discursive strategies in political speeches and for characterizing British and German election night speeches as a subgenre of political speech on the generic, discursive and cross-cultural level. The study deals with Blair’s speech after winning the British General Election of 1997 and Schröder’s speech after the German Bundestagswahlen in 1998. The quantitative and qualitative analyses focus on the interplay of the following linguistic macro- and micro-phenomena with regard to van Dijk’s “ideological square”: speech acts, pronouns, metaphors, evaluative expressions, rhetorical formats/applause. The analysis demonstrates that cross-cultural similarities on the micro level do not have to correspond to similarities on the macro level. The numerous implicit messages identified illustrate the hybrid character of the genre of election night speeches.