“Here is the difference, here is the passion, here is the chance to be part of great change”
Strategic context importation in political discourse
This contribution examines the strategic importation of context through conventional means focusing on the communicative function of the indexical deictic form here and its counterpart there in the dialogic genre of political interview and in the monologic genre of political speech. It is based on the premise that context is a dynamic construct which is both presupposed and co-constructed, and imported and invoked. Context is cognitive insofar as the pragmatic premise of intentionality of communicative action is concerned; it is social insofar as language use is seen as social interaction, and it is linguistic insofar as the linguistic system is seen as a constitutive part of communicative action. As indexical deixis, here and there ground reference to origo, and as relational deixis, they sign relation to origo. In the two genres, the distribution and function of here and there differ: the local linguistic context of here and there contains more linguistic means of a determinate nature in the speeches than in the interviews