Analysing Political Discourse

Theory and Practice

Paul Chilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134378876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is an essential read for anyone interested in the way language is used in the world of politics. Based on Aristotle's premise that we are all political animals, able to use language to pursue our own ends, the book uses the theoretical framework of linguistics to explore the ways in which we think and behave politically. Contemporary and high profile case studies of politicians and other speakers are used, including an examination of the dangerous influence of a politician's words on the defendants in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial.
International in its perspective, Analysing Political Discourse also considers the changing landscape of political language post-September 11, including the increasing use of religious imagery in the political discourse of, amongst others, George Bush.
Written in a lively and engaging style, this book provides an essential introduction to political discourse analysis.

Part I Political animals as articulate mammals

1 Politics and language

How can politics be defined? It is not the business of this book to answer this question definitively. We shall, however, say that politics varies according to one’s situation and purposes – a political answer in itself. But if one considers the definitions, implicit and explicit, found both in the traditional study of politics and in discourse studies of politics, there are two broad strands. On the one hand, politics is viewed as a struggle for power, between those who seek to assert and maintain their power and those who seek to resist it. Some states are conspicuously based on struggles for power; whether democracies are essentially so constituted is disputable. On the other hand, politics is viewed as cooperation, as the practices and institutions that a society has for resolving clashes of interest over money, influence, liberty, and the like. Again, whether democracies are intrinsically so constituted is disputed.

Cross-cutting these two orientations is another distinction, this time between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. At the micro level there are conflicts of interest, struggles for dominance and efforts at co-operation between individuals, between genders, and between social groups of various kinds. As Jones et al. (1994: 5) put it,

[a]t the micro level we use a variety of techniques to get our own way: persuasion, rational argument, irrational strategies, threats, entreaties, bribes, manipulation – anything we think will work.

Let us assume that there is a spectrum of social interactions that people will at one time or another, or in one frame of mind or another, think of as ‘political’. At the macro extreme, there are the political institutions of the state, which in one of the views of politics alluded to above serve to resolve conflicts of interests, and which in the other view serve to assert the power of a dominant individual (a tyrant) or group (say, the capital-owning bourgeoisie, as in the traditional marxist perspective).¹ Such state institutions in a democracy are enshrined in constitutions, in civil and criminal legal codes, and (as in the case of Britain) in precedent practice. Associated with these state institutions, are parties and professional politicians, with more or less stable practices; other social formations – interest groups, social movements – may play upon the same stage.

What is strikingly absent from conventional studies of politics is attention to the fact that the micro-level behaviours mentioned above are actually kinds of linguistic action – that is, discourse. Equally, the macro-level institutions are types of discourse with specific characteristics – for example, parliamentary debates, broadcast interviews. And constitutions and laws are also discourse – written discourse, or text, of a highly specific type. This omission is all the more striking as students of politics often make statements like the following:

Politics involves reconciling differences through discussion and persuasion. Communication is therefore central to politics.

(Hague et al. 1998: 3–4)

And Hague et al. cite Miller (1991: 390), who says that the political process typically involves persuasion and bargaining. This line of reasoning leads to the need to explain how use of language can produce the effects of authority, legitimacy, consensus, and so forth that are recognised as being intrinsic to politics. What is the role of force? What is the role of language? As Hague et al. (1998: 14) point out, decisions, reached (as they must be, by definition) through communication, i.e. persuasion and bargaining, become authoritative – a process that involves force or the threat of force. However, as they also point out, ‘politics scarcely exists if decisions are reached solely by violence but force, or its threat, is central to the execution of collective decisions’. If the verbal business of political authority is characterised by the ultimate sanction of force (fines, imprisonments, withholding of privileges and benefits, for example), it needs to be also pointed out that such force can itself only be operationalised by means of communicative acts, usually going down links in a chain of command. However politics is defined, there is a linguistic, discursive and communicative dimension, generally only partially acknowledged, if at all, by practitioners and theorists.

Politics and language: what’s the connection?

Political animals and articulate mammals

Embedded in the tradition of western political thought there is in fact a view that language and politics are intimately linked at a fundamental level. It is not generally pointed out that when Aristotle gives his celebrated definition of humans as creatures whose nature is to live in a polis, in almost the same breath he speaks of the unique human capacity for speech:

But obviously man is a political animal [politikon zoon], in a sense in which a bee is not, or any other gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech.

But what does Aristotle mean by ‘speech’? Aristotle’s next sentence distinguishes ‘speech’ from ‘voice’. The latter is possessed by all animals, he says, and serves to communicate feelings of pleasure and pain. The uniquely human ‘speech’ is different. Aristotle sees it in teleological terms, or what might in some branches of today’s linguistics be called functional terms:

Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc.

(The Politics, 1253a7, translated by T. A. Sinclair 1992)²

Of course, the ability of individuals to have a sense of the just and the unjust might logically mean that there could be as many opinions as there are individuals. Such a state of affairs would probably not correspond to what one understands as the political. Not surprisingly, therefore, Aristotle’s final point in this significant section, is that ‘[i]t is the sharing of a common view in these matters [i.e. what is useful and harmful, just and unjust, etc.] that makes a household and a state’.

What we can hold onto from this is the following. It is shared perceptions of values that defines political associations. And the human endowment for language has the function of ‘indicating’ – i.e., signifying, communicating – what is deemed, according to such shared perceptions, to be advantageous or not, by implication to the group, and what is deemed right and wrong within that group. Almost imperceptibly, Aristotle states that the just and the unjust is related to what is (deemed) useful and harmful, in the common view of the group. In addition, while Aristotle places the state above the household, we may note that the domestic and the public are defined in similar terms. This is important because it suggests that it is not only the public institutions of the state that depend on shared value perceptions and shared ‘speech’, but also other social groupings, not least what Aristotle’s society understood as the ‘household’, which included, in subordinate positions, slaves and women.

Aristotle does not pursue in detail the connection between the linguistic and political make-up of humans, but the implications have a fundamental importance. In linguistics it is now widely accepted that the human capacity for speech is genetically based, though activated in human social relations. What is controversial is how the genetic base itself evolved. Did it evolve as part of social intelligence? This might be the Aristotelian view, for language would have evolved to perform social functions – social functions that would in fact correspond to what we understand as ‘political’. Or did it evolve by a random mutation, providing neural structures that led to the duality and generative characteristics of human language? In this view the language instinct would not be intrinsically bound up with the political instinct.³ However, two things need to be noticed in this regard. First, this view does not entail that the social and/or political behaviour (as in Aristotle’s political animal) is not itself genetically based. And second, even if the language instinct is itself politics neutral, so to speak, one has to assume that the cultural and culturally transmitted characteristics of human language observably serve (though of course not exclusively) the needs of the political.

What is clear is that political activity does not exist without the use of language. It is true, as noted earlier, that other behaviours are involved and, in particular, physical coercion. But the doing of politics is predominantly constituted in language. Conversely, it is also arguably the case that the need for language (or for the cultural elaboration of the language instinct) arose from socialisation of humans involving the formation of coalitions, the signalling of group boundaries, and all that these developments imply, including the emergence of what is called reciprocal altruism. This is not of course to say that language arises exclusively out of these motives or functions.

Just semantics

What about the political animals themselves, especially the expert ones? Does language matter to politicians? At the level of use of language, at the level, say, of wording and phrasing, political actors themselves are equivocal. Here are two examples.

In 1999 the UK Labour government was introducing legislation to reform the House of Lords. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, a government spokesperson, when asked about the future composition of the second chamber, said that it would be ‘properly representative’. The interviewer observed that she had not said ‘properly democratic’, to which the spokesperson replied dismissively: ‘we’re talking about semantics now’. British politicians habitually use the word semantics to dismiss criticism or to avoid making politically sensitive specifications. In this instance, it was of interest to know whether ‘properly representative’ meant that members of the reformed chamber would be appointed by government to represent sectors of the population or whether the members would be democratically elected by the population. In the linguistic sense of the term, the semantics is actually politically crucial, because ‘representative’ may mean ‘claimed or believed to be representative by the drafters of the new constitution’ and not ‘representative’ in the sense of ‘representative by popular election’. Somehow, one aspect of the semantics of the term semantics in English makes it possible to take it for granted that people think seeking the clarification of meaning is a bad thing. We need not explore here what it is in popular English culture that can be invoked by politicians when it comes to the discussion of ideas. The point is that the interviewer’s concern to clarify meaning had sufficient political significance for the politician to fend it off, and to do so by implicitly challenging the very validity of inquiry into the speaker’s meaning.

Views may vary depending on political ideology. An example that illustrates the extremes is the following. In 1999, at a UK parliamentary Select Committee on Public Administration a Labour MP was questioning a certain Sir David Gore-Booth, a former British High Commissioner in India and ambassador to Saudi Arabia, about, among other things, his use of the phrases ‘company wives’ and ‘one of yours’ (i.e. ‘one of your employees’). While ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir David had used this expression in a letter to the chief executive of British Aerospace, on the subject of a complaint made by an Aerospace employee against British consular staff, a complaint that had led to the employee’s being asked to resign. The Parliamentary Ombudsman had enquired into and criticised various cases of undiplomatic language. At one end of the spectrum of attitudes towards language were two women Labour MPs (Helen Jones and Lynda Clarke) and the Labour chairman Rhodri Morgan, who regarded the expression ‘company wives’ as ‘insulting’ and ‘incredibly disrespectful’. At the other extreme was Sir David himself, who retorted that the offending phrase was no worse than ‘FO wives’ (‘Foreign Office wives’) and was merely ‘convenient shorthand’. For the Labour members, the phrasing mattered, presumably because it embodied social values which they did not share and which had manifestly contributed to the bad relations between the Foreign Office and a British company overseas. For Sir David (Eton educated, of an older generation, and probably old Conservative in outlook), the concentration on ‘language’ was ‘bizarre’. He also observed that he was ‘not a particularly politically correct person’.⁴

This minor example tells us several things. The different actors have different views of the significance of phrasing and wording, although the referent is constant. ‘Company wives’ versus, for example, ‘wives of employees of the company’: both have the same referent, refer to the same individuals, but the different syntax can be arguably related to different conceptualisations. For example, the noun-plus-noun construction could be said to prompt the interpretation that the wives in some sense belong to the company, or have no other independent definition. Some speakers would deny that alternative phrasing changes the meaning in any way; such speakers may or may not also deny that, for example, it matters whether wives are thought of or portrayed as company property. While some speakers are sensitive to such possibilities and integrate them with their political ideology, others do not.

In fact, Sir David’s moves illustrate two commonplaces in political argumentation of a certain kind. The politician (and particular political ideology may not be relevant here), when questioned about some verbal formulation, will frequently respond with some version of the formula ‘do not concentrate on words’ or, as it is often put, ‘this is just semantics’. A similar move involves the notion of ‘political correctness’. Anyone challenging a verbal formula that can be said, when its meanings are attended to in relation to political values, to contravene certain political values, may be countered with some version of the objection ‘you are just being politically correct’, where ‘political correctness’, is expected to be taken as referring to something undesirable. Of course, since politics is partly about priorities, it may be justifiable, whatever one’s political values, to claim that attention to linguistic detail in ongoing discourse is an inappropriate prioritisation. But, unless one wishes to argue that alternate referential formulations are indeed arbitrary and neutral (in which case one also has to explain why they occur at all), there may also be very good reasons to relate wording and phrasing to concepts and values. Challenging verbal formulation on such grounds is a part of doing political discourse, as is refusing to do so. Some political actors regard it as legitimate, others attempt to delegitimise it. As will be seen later in this book, legitimising and delegitimising are important functions in political discourse.

Furthermore, despite the tendency of politicians to deny tactically the significance of ‘language’, the importance of ‘language’, in the sense of differential verbal formulation, is tacitly acknowledged. Political parties and government agencies employ publicists of various kinds, whose role is not merely to control the flow of, and access to information, but also to design and monitor wordings and phrasings, and in this way to respond to challenges or potential challenges. The terms ‘spin’, ‘put a spin on’ and ‘spin doctor’ are terms that reflect the public belief in the existence of and significance of discourse management by hired rhetoricians. The proliferation of mass communication systems has probably simply amplified the importance of a function that is found not only in contemporary societies but in traditional societies also.

Language, languages and states

If politicians, through their very denials, suggest that wording and phrasing is important at the level of micro-interaction, what about language at the macro level? Or rather languages, in the sense that English and Spanish are separate languages. Many people take it for granted that the political entities we call states have their own language. This is not a state of affairs that comes about naturally, so to speak; it is deeply political (Haugen 1966).

The ‘standard’ language of the state is the medium for activity yielding the highest economic benefits. The role of the state in providing instruction in the prestige standard can be viewed not only as the part of the construction of nationhood and national sovereignty, but also as a part of the institution of democracy. This is so not only because the standard may provide equal potential access to economic benefits, but because the standard may be demanded (openly or tacitly, rightly or wrongly) for participation in political life. If one could not speak Greek, one would not de facto be able to participate in the deliberations of the city state. If one cannot speak French, one cannot, in the French Republic, be regarded as fully French; in the United States, the defining character of American English causes controversy about the use of Spanish. What is true of national languages is also true for literacy in modern societies. The ability to use the standard writing system is even more basic. Even with a command of the spoken standard, the range of economic opportunities open to non-literates will be highly restricted. Yet states are not linguistic monoliths.

What is a language?

We have already introduced an important distinction between a language (say English, French or Arabic) and language, the universal genetically transmitted ability of humans to acquire any language, and often more than one. However, even this distinction can be misleading, since it gives the impression that a language, let us say French, for example, is a uniform system that is spoken the same way throughout a whole territory. In fact, what are conventionally referred to as ‘languages’ show a great deal of internal variability across geographical and social space. Not only do different regions that speak the ‘same’ language show greater or lesser degrees of variation in one or more levels of language structure (pronunciation, word-forms, syntax, vocabulary), but so also do different social strata and different ethnic groups.

Furthermore, if one considers the language that people speak over a geographical area, one frequently finds one speech community shading off gradually into another, without a sudden break. Such linguistic spaces are known as ‘dialect continua’. In so far as it is possible to isolate distinct dialects in the linguistic flux, one can say that dialect d₁ overlaps with dialect d₂ which overlaps with dialect d₃. Adjacent dialects are usually mutually intelligible, although speakers often perceive differences that ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Political animals as articulate mammals
• Part II The domestic arena
• Part III The global arena
• Part IV Concluding thoughts
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography