Virtual dialogues in monologic political discourse
Constructing privileged and oppositional future in political speeches
This paper describes ways in which political speakers define and legitimize future policies by construing
different policy options in terms of ‘privileged’ and ‘oppositional’ futures. Privileged and oppositional futures are conceptual
projections of alternative policy visions occurring in quasi-dialogic chunks of speech, revealing specific evidential, mood, and
modality patterns. Privileged future involves the speaker’s preferred, or at least acknowledged vision and is articulated through
absolute modality and evidential markers which derive from factual evidence, history, and reason. Oppositional future involves an
antagonistic and plainly threatening vision, expressed by probabilistic modality and (usually) the interrogative mood. Following
the principle of psychological consistency in belief, oppositional future is normally communicated first, allowing for a swift and
strong response from the privileged future expressed in the speaker-preferred vision.
Article outline
- Introduction
- 1.Privileged and oppositional futures in political discourse
- 1.1Political communication as the site of alternative futures
- 1.2PF and OF as forms of virtual dialogue
- 1.3Extending the analytical toolkit for alternative futures
- 1.3.1Rhetorical structure theory
- 1.3.2Consistency and credibility
- 1.3.3Cheater detection and displays of coherence
- 2.Lexico-grammatical and pragmatic markers of alternative futures
- 2.1Grammatical mood
- 2.2Modality and nominalization
- 2.3Evidentiality
- 3.A case study of alternative futures in Polish anti-immigration discourse
- 4.Conclusion
- Notes
-
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Mìžnarodnij fìlologìčnij časopis 15:1
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