The Pragmatics of Political Discourse

Explorations across cultures

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| University of Augsburg
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027256331 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027272393 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00
 
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The volume promotes a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of political discourse as multilayered mediated discourse. The chapters cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of speech act theory, social positioning theory, and argumentation theory and rhetorics. They address the strategic use of address terms and irony, the form and function of questions, and the expression of certainty in the contexts of parliamentary discourse, interview, talkshow, phone-in programme and motion of support across different discourse domains. Different cultural contexts are represented, including Africa, the Middle East, different parts of Europe and the United States.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 228] 2013.  vi, 246 pp.
Publishing status:
Table of Contents
The Pragmatics of Political Discourse is not just another addition to the growing literature on language and politics. It breaks away from a tradition that tends to limit the topic to the language of politicians. Taking an explicitly pragmatic perspective, the volume zooms in on interaction between different agents who co-construct the political world from different angles, with different means, in different contexts, and through different channels. This kaleidoscopic and dynamic picture is further enriched by an intercultural comparative dimension that distinguishes this book even more from its predecessors.”
“With this new edited book, Anita Fetzer adds to her already long list of publications on political discourse, making her one of the world-leaders in this multidisciplinary area between discourse analysis, pragmatics, linguistics, media studies, psychology, political science and the other social sciences. Already in her own introduction, Anita Fetzer shows that she herself dominates theories, concepts, methods and empirical research in several of these disciplines, and is able to devise a complex theoretical framework in which the respective chapters of the book can be inserted. She thus articulates the vast domain of political discourse studies in several useful ways, such as official and instititional discourse from above, specifically so in parliament, on the one hand, and grass roots political discourse, from below, on the other hand. Within a broad, pragmatically inspired approach defined in terms of various context structures, she examines politically relevant settings, participants, goals, political actions and cognitions, with special attention to the hybrid media interface where politics and mass communication meet, for instance in the form of political interviews. [...] All studies bear witness of the vast, diverse and multidisciplinary field of contemporary political discourse studies, and make significant contributions to international scholarship. The book is recommended for students and scholars in all of the humanities and social sciences, especially for those interested in discourse and media analysis - and especially should be able to finally inspire more scholars in political science to join the international research effort that explicitly recognizes that politics is largely 'done' by text and talk.”
“Language is essential for politics, be it for producing, disseminating, engaging with, and reacting to political discourse. Various social actors are involved in a multitude of discursive practices: politicians debate political topics and take decisions, journalists interview politicians and comment on decisions in the mass media, and members of the public make increasing use of social media to express their (dis)agreement with politics. The chapters in this volume investigate several discursive practices, addressing political discourse produced in national parliaments (political discourse from above), the interaction between politicians and journalists in the form of interviews (as mediated political discourse), and phone-ins and motions of support as examples of public engagement (political discourse from below). All contributors approach their topics from the perspective of pragmatics and explore actual forms of language in use in diverse contexts of politics. The focus in each case is on revealing how socio-cultural constraints affect the various types of political discourse both at the macro level of interaction (e.g. constraints on topic selection) and at the micro level of communication (e.g. discursive styles, speech acts, turn taking). The significant value of this volume is that the contributors explore political discourse across cultures, covering discursive practices in countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Russia, Israel, and Cameroon. They illustrate culture-specific aspects of conventionalised forms of interaction as well as differences in the social significance of institutions in various cultures. It is this cross cultural perspective of the pragmatic analysis which significantly enriches our understanding of how politics is being done.”
“This volume takes an important step in employing pragmatics in political discourse analysis, which gives readers much inspirations and references for this emerging domain.”
“The current volume greatly facilitates the understanding of political discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It will be of great value to scholars and research students who are working in pragmatics and discourse analysis, and to professionals who are dealing with political discourse. It will also be an important asset, of value to a wider audience interested in political discourse.”
Cited by (17)

Cited by 17 other publications

Qi, Lintao
2024.  Literature and art as political discourse: adapting The White-Haired Girl in the communist context of China . The Translator  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Hutabarat, Adinda Natassa Valentine
2023. Political Discourse Analysis in Translation of Speech Texts on “One Belt One Road (OBOR)”: A Dialectical Cognitive Approach. In Proceedings of the fourth Asia-Pacific Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, Arts and Humanities Stream (AHS-APRISH 2019) [Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 753],  pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Shkvorchenko, Nataliia
2023. Political toxicity in the contrastive perspective (Based on American, British and Ukrainian media discourse). Cognition, Communication, Discourse :26  pp. 152 ff. DOI logo
Fetzer, Anita & Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
2021. Argumentative, Political and Legal Discourse. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics,  pp. 520 ff. DOI logo
Jürine, Anni, Djuddah Leijen, Helen Hint, Jolanta Sinkuniene, Diāna Laiveniece, Christer Johansson & Nicholas Groom
2021. Academic Writing in the Baltic States. Educare :1  pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
Wilton, Antje
2020. “We have a grandios saison gespielt” – English as a lingua franca in media sports interviews. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 9:1  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Woodhams, Jay M.
2019. Politics, Identity and Discourse. In Political Identity in Discourse,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Woodhams, Jay M.
2019. An Untrustworthy Entertainer: Populist Identities in the Voices of New Zealand Voters. In Populist Discourse,  pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
Fetzer, Anita
2018. “And you know, Jeremy, my father came from a very poor background indeed”. In The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 78],  pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
Hoffmann, Christian R.
2018. Crooked Hillary and Dumb Trump. Internet Pragmatics 1:1  pp. 55 ff. DOI logo
Ilie, Cornelia
2018. Pragmatics vs rhetoric. In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294],  pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Tsakona, Villy
2017. Küçükali (2011). Discursive strategies and political hegemony: The Turkish case . Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5:1  pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
Kolodii, Nataliia, Ekaterina Khomyakova, Vyacheslav Kolodii, Yuliya Chayka, I. Ardashkin & N. Martyushev
2016. A spectacularity concept in modern philosophy. SHS Web of Conferences 28  pp. 01057 ff. DOI logo
Arroyo, José Luis Blas
2015. Pragmatics of Political Discourse. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2017. The digital agora of social media: Introduction. Discourse, Context & Media 19  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics,  pp. 247 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2012039970 | Marc record