LINGUIST List 14.1156

Mon Apr 21 2003

Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Chilton & Schaffner(2002)

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available for review." Then contact Simin Karimi at siminlinguistlist.org.

Directory

  • Elisabeth Le, Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse

    Message 1: Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse

     Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 18:24:58 +0000
    From: Elisabeth Le <elisabeth.leualberta.ca>
    Subject: Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse


    Chilton, Paul A. and Christina Schaffner, ed. (2002) Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse, John Benjamins, Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 4.

    Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-3177.html

    Elisabeth Le, University of Alberta

    The linguistic study of political discourse is increasingly attracting interest, and it benefits now from its own specialised publications, the ''Journal of Language and Politics'', and the book series, ''Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture'', both edited by Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton. Published in this series, ''Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse'', edited by Paul Chilton and Christina Schaffner, is offered as an introduction to the field. The book is intended to provide a methodological survey (although necessarily incomplete) in order to ''try to delineate the emergent methodology of the field'' (p. vii). The first chapter presents ''Themes and principles in the analysis of political discourse'', and each of the six successive chapters introduces a particular type of analysis.

    In the introductory Chapter 1, Paul Chilton and Christina Schaffner start on the premise that politics is largely language, and thus argue for the study of politics by linguists alongside political philosophers and political scientists. Indeed, with their fine-grained methods, discourse analysts bring a new dimension to the comprehension of old and new problems in politics. Politics is understood as a struggle for power but also as co-operation in order to resolve clashes. Both phenomena take place at the micro level (between individuals) and macro level (between institutions). Individuals interact through discourse, and institutions produce types of discourse with specific characteristics. As language is closely linked in practice with culture, and culture is itself linked with the practice of politics, the cultural context of the analysed political discourse always needs to be taken into account. The authors review some main principles in the analysis of discourse: speech acts (Searle), co-operative principle (Grice), politeness (Brown & Levinson), validity claims (Habermas), context and intertextuality, dialogism (Bakhtin), and functionalism (Buhler, Halliday). Then, they briefly expose how political discourse can be looked at in its cognitive dimension and in its pragmatic dimension.

    The first part of the book comprises four chapters that deal with institutions and identities. In Chapter 2, ''Politization and depolitization: Employment policy in the European Union'', Peter Muntigl ''attempts to provide political conceptual tools combined with linguistics tools for reading the political'' (p.46). He proceeds to demonstrate these concepts with the analysis of a speech from a Commissioner of the European Union. In ''politicking'', i.e. in both ''politicizing'' (creating opportunities for action) and in ''depoliticizing'', one of the main discursive resources is metaphors. According to Chilton (1996:50-55), the four most common metaphors in international relations are: container, path, force, and link. It has already been shown how the first metaphor, container, functions politically to delimit spaces of existent or non-existent competing interests (Sondermann, 1997). In the Commissioner's speech that is analysed, the three other metaphors of path, force, and link present the EU policy as the only one to follow, and efface potential alternatives. Thus, their interconnected use depoliticizes the question of employment.

    Stephan Elspass studies ''Phraseological units in parliamentary discourse'' (chapter 3). A phraseological unit ''consists of at least two words (but is no longer than a sentence), is syntactically and semantically not the results of the mere combination of its constituents, is used as a lexical unit in a language community, and may in some cases be idiomatic'' (Burger, 1998: 32). Such units can be, for example, proverbs, catch phrases, greetings, gambits, stereotyped comparisons. Of particular interest is the non-intentional deviant use of phraseological units that appear in spoken speeches but are not necessarily recorded in official transcriptions. The parliamentary discourse analysed here is composed of three post-war debates in Germany during which MPs were not bound in their speech or vote by their parties. Their quantitative analysis shows that phraseological language represents about 10% of a speech, and thus is not a marginal phenomenon. In the qualitative analysis, it appears that non-idiomatic phraseological units function as important elements in grammatical cohesion and textual structure, while idiomatic phraseological units affect the style of the speech. When phraseological modification is used creatively, it can function as a powerful linguistic device, but when it is the result of blunders, it can completely discredit the speaker.

    Christoph Sauer adopts a functional-pragmatic approach to analyse ''Ceremonial text and talk'' (chapter 4), in this case a speech given by John Major for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In the Functional Pragmatics (FP) of Buhler and Ehlich, language use involves external purposes (social differentiation, i.e. illocution) and internal purposes (procedures that orient mental activities). The combination of both dimensions forms a complex speech action model that is composed of five fields (symbol, deictic, prompting, toning, and operative) characterised by a choice of lexical and grammatical means. The application of this model allows to link the language of the surface structure (the words Major uses in his speech) with underlying structures (what he intends to communicate and the strategies he follows).

    In chapter 5, ''Fragmented identities'', Ruth Wodak exposes the discourse-historical approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This ethnographic approach assumes that discourse is shaped by and influences social and political reality, and that national identities are produced and reproduced in discourse. Notions that make up a national identity are internalised through socialisation; this implies a discursive construction of difference that is dependent on context. Thus, not one, but different national identities are constructed. The study of Austrian national identity involves five content-related areas: the idea of a 'homo Austriacus' and a 'homo externus', the narration of a collective political history, the discursive construction of a common culture, the discursive construction of a collective present and future, the discursive construction of a 'national corpus'. In these defined areas, different strategies (of construction, of perpetuation and justification, of transformation, of destruction) represent plans of action that are expressed with a variety of linguistic means. The study of these three interrelated dimensions (content, strategies, and linguistic forms) reveals how narratives of identity that Austrians can identify with are created.

    Two chapters form the second part of the book, ''Interaction and Cognition''. In chapter 6, Anita Fetzer examines questions of sincerity and credibility in political interviews ('Put bluntly, you have something of a credibility problem'). In order to define the notions of sincerity and credibility, speech act theory and Grice's cooperative principle are reinterpreted in a contextual approach that attempts to integrate the results of the politeness and face research in an interactive framework. ''Sincerity is defined as speaker's communicative intention meant as uttered and thus restricted to the participants' private domains. Credibility, on the other hand, is not restricted to an individual's attitude towards their illocutions, but interdependent on both illocutionary force and propositional content'' (p. 180). The combination of a pragmatic and a conversation-analytic approach shows how the function of sincerity in political discourse is to help remedy credibility problems.

    In the seventh and final chapter, Teun van Dijk exposes his approach to ''Political discourse and political cognition'', and illustrates is with the analysis of a speech by Sir John Stokes, a (very) conservative MP from the British House of Commons. Van Dijk argues that for the study of political discourse to be relevant, discourse structures must be connected to properties of political structures and processes with a theory of political cognition. The purpose of this theory is to function as an interface between the personal (relations between episodic mental models) and the social (socially shared political representations of groups). In other words, meaning and forms of political discourse are related to political context not directly but through the intermediary of the participants' construction of this interactional and communicative context, that is based on their knowledge, attitudes and ideologies.

    This book illustrates well one of the difficulties in defining the field of political discourse, a difficulty that also constitutes its richness, the diversity of analytical approaches. It would not be overtly exaggerated to say that any combination of relevant principles in the domains of pragmatics, text linguistics and discourse analysis, provided it can be justified theoretically, can be used for the linguistic study of political discourse. Indeed, the linguistic study of political discourse is first a linguistic study of discourse, and thus it requires a basic knowledge of domains such as pragmatics, text linguistics and discourse analysis; then only, it is a study of political discourse. For centuries, political philosophers, and then political scientists have attempted to define the concept of politics; it has remained somewhat elusive, and the notion of political discourse is therefore rather large. News discourse, not included in this book, could also be considered political discourse in certain circumstances. Thus, what is the specificity of the field of political discourse? Some comprehensive frameworks are presented in this book (i.e. Sauer's functional-pragmatic approach, Wodak's historical-discourse approach, van Dijk's political-cognitive approach) to which Scollon's approach to ''Mediated discourse as social interactions'' (1998) should probably be added. These approaches could also be situated in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, and some of them figure in Wodak's and Meyer's ''Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis'' (2001). Through its presentation of varied analytical approaches, this book does not offer so much an introduction to the field for newcomers (a number of non-linguists and linguists not specialised in the relevant fields would probably benefit from a simpler presentation of theoretical principles) as a starting point for a needed general reflection on the study of political discourse.

    REFERENCES

    Burger, H. (1998) Phraseologie. Eine Enfuhrung am Beispiel des Deutschen. Schmidt, Grundlagen der Germanistik 36.

    Chilton, Paul (1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. Peter Lang.

    Scollon, Ron (1998) Mediated Discourse as Social Interactions - A Study of News Discourse. Longman, Language in social life series.

    Sondermann, K. (1997) Reading politically: National anthems as textual Icons. In T. Carver & M. Hyvarinen, eds, Interpreting the Political: New Methodologies. Routledge. 128-142.

    Wodak, Ruth & Meyer, Michael (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER

    Elisabeth Le is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada). She works in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis on the representation of international relations in French, American, and Russian media discourse.