Voice in Political Discourse

Castro, Chavez, Bush and their Strategic Use of Language

Antonio Reyes

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441134202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Politicians enact three main roles in political discourse - narrator, interlocutor and character - to achieve specific goals. This book explains these roles and how they constitute discursive strategies, correlating with political aims. In short: politicians evoke voices in discourse to strategically position themselves in relation to social actors and events. The book describes these strategies and analyzes the manner in which they are employed by three very different politicians - Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and George W. Bush. The roles are studied cross-culturally and from different ideological backgrounds. This book explains how political ideologies are constructed, defined and redefined by linguistic means, showing specific ways in which politicians manipulate language to achieve the goals on their political agenda. It applies new methodological approaches to the analysis of political discourse and also contributes to the sparse literature on political discourse analysis of Spanish-speaking politicians.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Introduction

This book looks at the nature of political discourse to decode the roles politicians adopt by evoking specific voices to achieve their political goals, such as solidarity with the general public or truthfulness about the information they present to the public. I believe politicians achieve these goals linguistically and this book is an attempt to show how.

The present chapter defines the scope of this book and explains the relevance of its unique approach to the analysis of political discourse within the discipline.¹ This chapter also introduces the research questions that motivate the methodological approach proposed to account for the data and the contributions of the analyses of political speeches to the literature.

In order to provide details about the context of the study, the political actors, and the time frame, this introductory chapter explains the sociohistorical context revealing the importance of an analysis of ideological alignments and distancing in the current global-political arena among politicians from different countries, cultures, and languages.

This work constitutes an interdisciplinary study that shows how politicians set misalignments by evoking different voices in political discourse. A comparative text analysis that relates linguistic choices with specific voices and ideological alignments of three international leaders in two different languages is proposed. This study presents explicitly the connection between linguistic form and sociolinguistic functions and it does so using a methodological framework that captures the sociolinguistically significant generalizations of alignment and distancing.

1.2 The Scope of This Book

This book decodes the roles politicians adopt by evoking different voices to achieve their political goals. By enacting different voices in their speeches, politicians set alignments with other political actors or events. For example, by quoting Simón Bolívar in his speech, Hugo Chávez aligns himself with Bolívar’s ideology of supporting the arguments of his here-and-now discourse. This study, therefore, explains a triangular relationship between the different roles enacted by politicians, the specific semiotic resources that activate the voices and the political objectives related to those voices.

This study explains how political ideologies are constructed, defined, and redefined by linguistic means and the different voices that politicians adopt. When Fidel Castro quotes newspapers, he constructs an ideological frame in his discourse by employing specific choices. When Chávez declares that he is not a president but a peasant and a worker (see fragment 34), he projects an ideology² for his administration and construes an ideology to share with the social members of the community. “As the basis of a social group’s selfimage, ideologies organize its identity, actions, aims, norms and values, and resources as well as its relations to other social groups” (van Dijk 2006: 115) Politicians, from a position of power, have the opportunity to shape, construe or challenge the ideologies shared within the audiences. As a set of beliefs that have a cognitive and societal component, ideologies are shared by the social members of a group or community. That community acquires an ideology “[t]hrough complex and usually long-term processes of socialization and other forms of social information processing” (van Dijk 1995b: 18). Politicians, for instance, activate an ideology of solidarity and brotherhood using specific linguistic features such as asking personal questions to the audience and developing an intimate conversation as an interlocutor. Similarly, politicians can reinforce an ideology of patriotism and motherland by quoting the messages and achievements of historical figures during the here-and-now discourse. They can also connect the political message to religion by quoting, for example, the Bible or Jesus Christ. Different structures of text, linguistic choices or even instances of nonverbal communication (i.e., a greeting with a raised, clinched fist or a hand over the heart during the national hymn) can therefore manifest expressions of ideology.

This book traces how politicians enact three different roles in their political discourses to position themselves in relation to social actors and events. These roles are evoked by different voices that constitute discursive strategies that correlate with specific linguistic choices and political goals. The use of these strategies is analyzed in three very ideologically different politicians–Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and George W. Bush–to study the use of these roles cross-culturally and from different ideological backgrounds.

Three main roles are proposed in this book: narrator, interlocutor, and character.³ Politicians evoke these three roles to create alliances with different social actors or events to achieve political goals such as building rapport with the audience, self-portraying themselves at an egalitarian level, or aligning themselves ideologically with historical and respected figures to contextualize their words into the current speech to obtain public support.

The narrator role is the unmarked role, it being the most extensive in political discourses. Politicians use the role of a narrator to present objectivity and therefore validate the story or the facts presented. Under the role of a narrator, politicians present a story from a distance, excluding themselves and the audience as participants. They provide information about political facts, historical events, political analysis, etc. The politician normally uses impersonal sentences, such as “se dice” [it is said] or passive constructions such as “taxes will be raised” to present objectivity, and typically avoids subjective remarks such as first-person personal pronouns (“I”) or modal verbs (could, would, etc.). This manner of presentation of information allows him to distance himself and present facts in an objective way.

The role of an interlocutor is enacted by politicians through a display of interactional features such as questions, vocatives and the use of first and second-person personal pronouns. The interlocutor’s role emulates a relaxed, casual atmosphere where the communication seems more like a conversation between two friends, producing confirmatory questions to create solidarity (Green 1996), such as “You see?” (Castro 4/15/2005). This role builds rapport with the audience in an attempt to create a fake interaction with questions such as “What are you laughing at?” (Chávez 1/14/2005). These questions are used to mislead the audience by feigning an egalitarian status between the leader and the audience. Nothing could be farther from reality since governments often dictate the destiny of a nation and, often, the audience’s only method of interference with public affairs is voting every X amount of years. The role of an interlocutor relates this fictitious consultation to the audience.

Politicians enact the role of a character to evoke someone else’s voice, quoting a famous character or other sources, such as newspapers, verbatim. This role allows politicians to bring a voice into the current here-and-now moment in the discourse. Politicians use these voices to align themselves with the person or words quoted to ultimately support their own political agenda. The role of a character, enacted by these quotes, stands as a powerful tool that reactivates a collective memory in the community (Hart and Sparrow 2001) and a shared belief among the listeners (Beasley 2004). The role of character becomes meaningful within the dialogic nature of discourse (Bakhtin 1981), showing through recontextualization how discourses are connected in a constant dialogue. Politicians evoke sociocultural conceptualizations (Silverstein 2004) creating new nuances or redefining old, established semiotic connections through these voices.

From these roles, political actors (Duranti 2006), being part of the political elite and having access to public discourse, have the power to produce and reproduce discourses of dominance (van Dijk 1993a: 252–254). In fact, these discourses constitute “sites of struggle in that they show traces of differing discourses and ideologies contending and struggling for dominance” (Wodak 2007: 210). The interaction of these different roles enacted by politicians presents a dynamic discourse where politicians adopt different perspectives to address the audience or other political actors, or to present facts. These three roles constitute specific strategies to distort reality and skew the audience’s view. This book presents suggestive categories to understand how politicians (ab)use power in political discourse.

In order to achieve its goals, this book presents an interdisciplinary methodological framework that is able to capture the sociolinguistic generalizations of voices, ideological alignments, and linguistic features. A new approach to the analysis of political discourse is employed to reveal how political speeches display sociocultural features that create and shape social meaning through language use. The linguistic choices, together with quotations from sources such as The Miami Herald (Castro), Simón Bolívar (Chávez), and ordinary citizens (Bush), reflect sociopragmatic nuances evoking voices that activate a series of indexical connections (Silverstein 1995/1976). These connections are latent in the discourse and are reproduced in each context through interdiscursivity (Blackledge 2005, Fairclough 2003). At the same time, they underline specific linguistic ways in which politicians employ deceptive language to support the arguments of the political agenda, i.e. recalling important national figures, or using ordinary people’s words and placing them out of context to validate the political argument at the very moment of the discourse.

This study presents a sociolinguistic analysis of political discourse, focusing especially on the various linguistic forms that are recruited by social actors–political leaders–to serve their political ideology. Using an analysis of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986), critical discourse analysis (CDA) and functional grammar (FG), I present evidence of the sociolinguistic functions engineered by the choice of linguistic forms used by political leaders. The sociolinguistic analysis yields generalizations of convergence and divergence of form-function mapping among the three leaders.

1.2.1 Research questions and contributions

The general questions motivating this study are: What are the linguistic mechanisms employed by politicians to achieve certain political goals? How are political ideologies constructed, shaped, and reshaped by semiotic resources? This book demonstrates how politicians achieve political goals by adopting different perspectives under different voices in the discourse. In this way, they set alignments and misalignments linguistically with different social actors and events, and therefore they position themselves ideologically within the discourse.

In order to account for the discursive strategies politicians employ to position themselves to achieve political goals, this study uses mainly Bakhtinian notions of voice, heteroglossia, and interdiscursivity (Bakhtin 1981). In particular, I look at Koven’s tripartite model of role-perspective (2002, 2007). This model integrates the notion of evaluation (Labov 1972, 1997), footing (Goffman 1981), and voicing (Bakhtin 1981). Labov’s studies on narratives define the level of evaluation speakers display in a specific narration, observing speakers’ use of evaluative remarks on a narrative event. Goffman’s notion of footing allows a multifunctional reading and analysis of different positionings of the self in interactional settings. Different enunciations of “I”, for instance, in different contexts reveal changes of direction bringing out different realizations or alignments of the self. Bakhtin understands voice as an identifiable social role or position enacted by a speaker. For him, different voices, culturally loaded through history, shape any given discourse.

Koven’s model (2002, 2007)–designed to analyze narratives of personal experience–is considered, with substantial modifications, in the present book to analyze political discourse. This model accounts for the different roles enacted by the speaker to set alignments with or create distance from different social actors or topics in a specific speech event. I show the relation between the different roles evoked by these politicians and the discursive goals they pursue. For example, through the role of a character, Castro evokes newspaper quotes; Chávez aligns himself with Simón Bolívar, a respected symbolic figure in the war of independence of Venezuela; and Bush specifically evokes the voice of ordinary people. All of these enactments of character reinforce and validate the speaker’s arguments. This model points out multiple alignments under three general strategies (three main roles) through multiple voices; it shows how the interaction among three dominant roles and the voices activating them constantly redefine discourse.

The literature on the analysis of political discourse offers numerous studies relating language and politics by emphasizing the importance of crucial notions such as ideology (i.e., Billig and MacMillan 2005; Briggs 1992; Hodge and Kress 1993; Irvine 1998; Seliger 1976; van Dijk 1991; Wodak 1989; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) and power (i.e. Blackledge 2005; Chouliaraki 2005; Fairclough 1989, 2002b; van Dijk 1993a). Other authors define general characteristics or propositions regarding political discourse such as the fact that political discourse operates indexically; it is specifically connected to the emotional centers of the brain or displays binary conceptualizations (Chilton 2004: 197–205). van Dijk (2005) discusses political implicatures such as positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, peace and security, internationalism, etc. Duranti (2006) identifies three discursive strategies used by candidates in a campaign for the U.S. Congress “(i) constructing a narrative of belonging; (ii) casting the present as a natural extension of the past; and (iii) exposing potential contradictions to show how to solve them.” (Duranti 2006: 467). Authors have noticed the occurrence in discourse patterns or thematic structures such as “positivity for the reinforcement of mutual trust” (Bhatia 2006: 173) to show the different positioning of political leaders in relation to their opponents. Bhatia (2006) indicates patterns of diplomatic talk among politicians from different ideological backgrounds (Chinese President Jiang Zemin and U.S. President George W. Bush), where the differences are announced in a positive way to smooth out discrepancies; she underlines the fragments that construct the “positivity for the reinforcement of mutual trust” (Bhatia 2006: 173) in the speeches. Billig and MacMillan (2005), for example, note how through repetition and pragmatic language use, metaphors become idioms, losing their original meaning. Blackledge (2005) points out that language indexes express and challenge existing relations of power and Silverstein (2003) adds, to have a better understanding of this genre, that political message relies on indexical readings⁴.

These propositions, generalizations, implications, and discursive strategies constitute relevant insights to understand the nature of political discourse and show ways in which language is manipulated to obtain political goals. The present study focuses on the analysis of the linguistic features as a departure point, to correlate language and ideology, and to account for the particular ways in which ideology, power, and sociocultural nuances are constructed linguistically. This book contributes to a better understanding of how politicians use language to convey their goals, to establish their views, and to set alliances. This interdisciplinary study observes how those political goals are construed linguistically, proposing a new methodological approach to the analysis of political discourse and a comparative text analysis of three international leaders in two different languages.

The framework of this book corresponds to the paradigm of socially responsible linguistics (Labov 1988; Hymes 1996) and builds on and extends the empirical scope and theoretical understanding of the recent works on language, power, and politics (c.f. Bhatia 2006; Billig and MacMillan 2005; Blackledge 2005; Butt, Lukin and Matthiessen 2004; Chilton 2004; Dunmire 2005; Lazar and Lazar 2004; Wodak 2002). The present work builds a bridge between ideology and linguistic features, providing a theoretical understanding of the relationship among linguistic features, voices, and discursive goals in the political speech. The analysis shows how social actors and events are ideologically voiced and represented in the here-and-now of political discourse. It contributes to the discipline of language ideology showing how meaning is located in discourse and is created through relationships with other discourses, i.e. interdiscursivity (Blackledge 2005; Fairclough 2003).

Methodologically, this research draws from disciplines such as linguistic anthropology (LA), CDA, and FG to build a theoretical framework to approach the data, applying new methods to the analysis of political speeches. This methodological model provides the necessary tools to triangulate the data and interpret the social meaning indexed in the linguistic choice employed in political speech.

This study develops further research in the area known as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002a, 2002c, 2003; van Dijk 1993b, 1997a, 2001, 2003, 2009; Wodak 2001, 2002) seeking new ways to relate Fairclough’s internal and external attempts to connect the text to social practices, and proposing means through which politicians attempt to shape people’s beliefs and values, altering the cognitive structures (“thought, perception and representation” [van Dijk 2009]) of their audiences. Furthermore, this study presents an interdisciplinary framework unifying diverse approaches. This interdisciplinary approach, suggested by Wodak (1989) for CDA practitioners, accounts for language use in political discourses using different theoretical and methodological notions.

The analysis of different politicians allows for a comparative analysis of discursive strategies of political leaders from different cultural, linguistic, and ideological backgrounds and this contributes to a better understanding of the use of language by political actors to pursue different goals. We analyze the political discourse of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and George W. Bush, bringing new social actors and new comparisons to the arena of political discourse analysis. This book contributes to the sparse literature on the analysis of political discourses in a language other than English.

1.3 Language and Politics: An Overview

Since Aristotle defines humans as political animals (Cope 1877), many works have tried to emphasize the importance of politics for our society. Simultaneously, political actors have discovered the importance of the effects of language use and that “politics is very largely the use of language” (Chilton 2004: 14). Only when language is tied to social and political inst...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series_Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Language and Politics
• Chapter 3 The Narrator's Role
• Chapter 4 The Interlocutor's Role
• Chapter 5 The Character's Role
• Chapter 6 Comparative Analysis
• Chapter 7 Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• References
• Appendix A: Coding of the three roles: Narrator, Interlocutor, and Character
• Index