Publications

Publication details [#58413]

Zakowski, Samuel. 2014. You didn’t build that. A relevance-theoretic approach to President Obama’s campaign flub. Pragmatics 24 (4) : 819–838.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
IPRA
Journal DOI
10.1075/prag

Annotation

During the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign, President Obama startled some people by asserting “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”. This paper claims, from a relevance-theoretic viewpoint, that both possible interpretations derive from diverging contextual suppositions on the side of the audience. Different contextual suppositions engender a different cognitive impact when the utterance allows for more than one interpretation. Joint with a very polarized U.S. political scene, where participants throw themselves at every possible opponent’s miscue, all the elements for misunderstanding are present.