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The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and functions of follow-ups
Edited by Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizman and Lawrence N. Berlin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 259] 2015
► pp. 59–84

Monologic follow-ups in political macro-discourse

The US anti-terrorist discourse as a case in point

ORCID logo | University of Lódz, Poland

Follow-ups have been often considered a primarily dialogic/conversational phenomenon. In this chapter I demonstrate that the concept of the follow-up could be extended to cover monologic discourses as well, especially those in which the speaker realizes a macro-goal over a number of texts produced in different contextual conditions. These dynamically evolving conditions make the speaker – as happens in dialogue – continually update and redefine her rhetorical choices to maintain realization of the macro-goal intact. Such an approach subsumes a ‘dialogic’ relation between the speaker and the shifting discourse context – rather than between the speaker and her specific interlocutor – and views follow-up as an instance of rhetoric that has been forcibly modified from the previous/initial instance, to keep enacting the speaker’s macro-goal against requirements of the new context. As an illustration, I show how monologic follow-ups work in G.W. Bush’s War-on-Terror discourse. In particular, I discuss how the macro-goal of Bush’s 2003-04 rhetoric of the Iraq War (legitimization of the pre-emptive military strike and the later US involvement) has been maintained in the ‘follow-up discourse’ responding to loss of the initial legitimization premise, i.e. the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Published online: 27 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.259.03cap
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