I feel like this is what we need to write about for a final essay for this class. Let's look at the power of Language and the ways that politicians use and direct speech and our attitudes toward speech in order to exert their power and authority. :)
What is it all about?
One obvious feature of how language operates in social interactions is its relationship with power, both influential and instrumental. Neither rule nor law, neither discipline nor hierarchy sanctions influential power (informal) .
- Authority (power backed up by force or threat of force)
- Legitimacy (power backed up by consensus)
- informal (expressed through influence)
- formal (expressed in institutions)
It inclines us or makes us want to behave in certain ways or adopt opinions or attitudes, without obvious force.
It operates in such social phenomena as advertising, culture and the media. (Strictly, we are not coerced into buying what the advertiser shows us, nor will we suffer any penalty for our "sales resistance".)
Instrumental power (Formal) is explicit power of the sort imposed by the state, by its laws and conventions or by the organizations for which we work. It operates in business, education and various kinds of management. (In many, but not all cases, if we resist instrumental power, we will be subject to some penalty or in trouble.)
Politicians & power:
- impose laws, taxes, and bureaucratic systems (instrumental power) but seek to influence us to endorse their policies or turn out to vote for them (influential power). They may wish to influence us to use our collective power to return them to office, where they will use their executive power to direct some aspects of our lives - a curious paradox of our system of parliamentary democratic representation.
- (That is they get us to give them the power to tell us what to do and how to live. And we really do have the choice, collectively, as we show when we vote for a change of government.)
Effective rhetoric is about the
right words, at the right time and in the right place.
- Language is a powerful tool; it can be used as a means of controlling or shaping the thoughts of others.
- Tongtao Zheng of the University of Tasmania writes: “Language is a weapon and a powerful tool in winning public support, especially during the current information revolution period...it is also a powerful weapon in the struggle of community against community, worldview against worldview.” (we certainly saw this in this election)
Propaganda/Rhetoric: The Power to "define":
- Dr Andrew Cline writes: “The power to define, and make it stick, is arguably the premier political power. To control the definitions of terms is to control the debate by bracketing how the audience may think about an issue. To create new terms is to create new realities.”
- "propaganda": He demonstrates the power of creating new terminology with an example from April 12, 2002, when White House press secretary Ari Fleischer introduced the term ‘homicide bombers’ for the Palestinian men and women blowing themselves up in public places. He points out that this change in terms is not politically innocent: any terms created or redefined by a political administration have political importance:
- In this case, the new term helps further delegitimize the bombers. What's wrong with that? Perhaps nothing, except that the term may also further delegitimize the larger cause of the Palestinian people, which is the establishment of an independent state. In other words, this new term might further aggravate the idea of guilt by proximity, as if all Palestinians think and act alike in regard to the violence.Suicide bombers might be fighting for legitimate political ends (establishment of a state) by decidedly illegitimate means (the murder of civilians or non-combatants). A "homicide bomber" is simply a criminal who wishes to kill outside of political goals. While it is possible under some circumstances to condone the violence of a “freedom fighter,” this new term adds further distance between any legitimate concept or action and the actions of the homicide bombers. The new term helps the Bush administration put further pressure on the Palestinian authorities to do more than simply denounce violence; it puts pressure on them to actively stop the lawless action of criminals who have no legitimate political claims. (“'Homicide Bombers' Further Delegitimizes Violence," Rhetorica Network, April 14, 2002) :(
- Peter Beinart writes:…the extraordinary thing about American foreign policy since September 11 is the extent to which it has been shaped by language. In the terrible days after the World Trade Center fell, the Bush administration grasped for words that would capture America's resolve. And it came up with “war on terrorism.”… “Terrorism” meant violence by individuals or groups (but not governments) against civilians, no matter what the cause.
- “War” didn't connote a merely military effort, but it suggested a broad struggle with the urgency, and Manichaean clarity, of a battlefield campaign.
- The phrase soon caught on overseas, and other governments began to use it in order to invest their own conflicts with the same moral authority. Russian called its struggle in Chechnya a “war on terrorism,” as did India with Kashmir, Israel with Palestine, and many others. Beinart points out that partly due to their use of this phrase, US policy swung towards support of the government forces: Russian, India and Israel. However, there are significant differences between the conflicts in these countries and the US fight against Al-Queda. He explains:The critical difference is that the wars in Kashmir, Palestine, and Chechnya are wars of national liberation. The terrorists seek to end a foreign occupation and create an independent state on a defined piece of land. That doesn't make their demands legitimate: Yasir Arafat's definition of a Palestinian state is clearly grandiose and dangerous (especially given that Israel is so small--and therefore particularly imperiled by such fantasies); Kashmir and Chechnya probably shouldn't be independent states at all. And it doesn't make their methods legitimate either: There's no excuse for deliberately targeting civilians. But as a practical matter, wars of national liberation are easier (though certainly not easy) to resolve politically and much harder to resolve militarily than the kind we're fighting against Al Qaeda. (“Word Play,” The New Republic, April 12, 2002) :(
- In a February 24, 2002 article in the New York Times, Mark Lilla, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, describes the negative European reaction to Bush’s phrase “axis of evil” to describe adversary states. He compares Bush’s rhetorical style to that of Ronald Reagan during the cold war era. But while Reagan’s style may have been appropriate at the time, the current situation is quite different:
- When Ronald Reagan addressed the Soviet leadership, he was dealing with functionaries of a highly routinized, if sclerotic, empire, a state where the passions of religion and nationalism played almost no role. The American rivalry with the Soviet Union was likened to a chess game where each party understood the moves and feints of the other. Today, however, the United States is facing adversaries that are wholly unlike our cold war rivals. They are not part of an empire or even an axis; they are regimes as different from each other as we are from them, and there is no shared understanding of the rules of the game. Some are driven by a messianic ideology to seek not temporary advantage or influence, but an impossible transformation of worldly existence. Others are classic tyrannies run by ruthless figures whose moves are wholly unpredictable. And there are states where no one seems in control. Lilla points out that choosing the right rhetorical style can affect the course of events, suggesting as an example, that Bush's “masterly way of reaching out to Muslims at home and abroad has displayed before the world our principles of tolerance.” (“New Rules of Political Rhetoric,” New York Times, February 24, 2002) :(
Euphemisms
- In 1946, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell criticised current use of the English language, particularly in politics. He pointed out the general emptiness of political rhetoric and discussed the increasing use of euphemisms to avoid admissions of possibly controversial actions:
- In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing… Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy…
- In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
- Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. :(
Influential power - politics
The features of political language vary, as do its purposes.
- Where politicians interact with society generally, their purposes may be, to persuade voters with a party loyalty to turn out to vote; to move a floating voter's party allegiance, or to make us adopt general political or social attitudes, so we support a given policy.
- Politicians may also use particular language forms when answering journalists' questions.
- Where politicians engage in language interactions with other politicians, they may use other particular forms - either loosely or under the rule of an arbiter.
- And finally, a contemporary feature of political language use is what is known as "spin" - providing information to the media in such a way as to favor a desired interpretation, not explicitly stated.
Political rhetoric
Persuasive language techniques, especially in speech, take their name from the Greek noun for a professional speaker,
rhetor (the Latin equivalent is
orator). We have ancient records of political speeches, such as those of Demosthenes, that show the use of techniques that are as effective today, as they were in the past. Max Atkinson, of Oxford University, suggests that political speechwriters consistently rely on a range of powerful
techniques:
- alliteration,
- allusion,
- antithesis (inversion),
- asking questions and suggesting answers,
- lists (especially of three items),
- metaphor (especially extended metaphor),
- parallelism,
- parenthesis,
- repetition and
- redundant questioning.
for example....
In John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address from January 20, 1961, we find an extended metaphor (of lighting a fire to give light to the world) and a concluding antithesis:
"The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not, what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
The last two sentences use many of the same
lexemes, but transpose (switch) the subject and the indirect object.
Now look at these longer extracts (from which some of the examples above come), and see if you can find other ways in which the writer (not the same person as the speaker, usually) uses specific techniques to achieve particular effects.
"In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not, what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
John F. Kennedy
"And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance, of expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future and we'll continue to follow them. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God."
Ronald Reagan
Thinking about examples from this election and more recent manipulations by politicians...
Maxims & Conversational Postulates: How we are "Had"
David Crystal (
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p. 378) suggests also that maxims of conversational theory do not apply to parliamentary dialogue.
Other participants or commentators do not assume that speakers are telling the truth, are speaking clearly or with relevance. This may need some clarification. In some ways, debate is like social conversation - people speak in sequence, respond to each other and develop ideas. And outside of occasions when for example British MPs adopt ritual enmities (Prime Minister's Question Time or the presenting of a new draft bill, say), the speakers may follow cooperative rules and observe conversational maxims. But they have other motivations than the success of the conversation - and (in pragmatic terms) may want the exchange not to be successful, that is in coming to an accommodation.
Grice's Maxims
- The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
- The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
- The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
- The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
Meaning is
obtained through inference; it is
indirect. Through inference in the context of utterance, making use of our knowledge of language and the world,
our memory of past experiences, and abstract, unconscious rules of mental
computation, we obtain utterance meaning in different shades:
· explicature (what is explicitly said)
· implicature (what is implied logically from what is said)
· presupposition (what underlies our beliefs in the process of inference)
· illocutionary force (speakers intention) considering
propositional attitude, all of which expressible as individual propositions.
--meaning
in communication is always subject to different interpretations in different
contexts.
Utterance
meaning is never static. It is emergent, dynamic, needing to be
"negotiated" between the parties involved in the communicative act.
Grice asked...How do we
make pragmatic inference? What are the principles in pragmatic inference?
Grice:
Logic and Conversation
- The
Co-operative Principle (CP)
"Make your
conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose and direction of the talk exchange in which you
are engaged"...PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO HONESTLY COMMUNICATE (we assume this in any conversation).
When
we talk to each other, it is assumed that the above principle and maxims are
being unconsciously followed by both the talking parties. This assumption makes
our communication effective and reliable to a great extent. GRICE FELT THAT THIS WAS A SOCIAL CONVENTION.
- Certainly,
we can either ignore the CP or flout the maxims.
- Failing to observe the CP will
lead to unwillingness to communicate, cheating, or irrational behavior.
- Examples can be (A) A government official, when stopped by news reporters,
openly refuses to answer the questions, (B) As a patient, I may decline to
answer the irrelevant questions from the garrulous dentist by pointing to my
fully stuffed mouth, (C) A man suffering from mental disorder may talk in an
abnormal way, (D) Cheating, which does not need illustration.
Flouting
the maxims of conversation ostensibly, yet still observing the CP is a more
interesting case, which happens in political communication and advertising VERY often.
- Grice: entailment (logical) versus implicature
- entailment are the logical "constative" utterances (yes/no) that are required to be true by any locution
- implicature is what is logically implied by any utterance based on our assumptions about cooperative conversations and our shared background knowledge and cultural presuppositions.
- manipulation happens by only taking responsibility for what is ENTAILED, while manipulating what is IMPLIED.
Influential power - media
(broadcast, print, new technologies)
While any text may be influenced by the maker's preconceptions and world view, many media texts arise from an explicit intention of promoting given values or attitudes, whether sincerely, because the author believes in them, or cynically, to attract an audience. As students of language, you have no interest in this -
- your concern is the language features in which these attitudes are embodied or expressed. It may be helpful not to think of these preconceptions as "bias"-They are, rather, the speaker's or writer's outlook, assumptions or editorial stance.
- You should be aware that certain media texts proclaim and admit these underlying attitudes - opinion columns or current affairs broadcasts explicitly adopt such a stance. But others, such as reporting, may aspire to neutrality, yet display the author's value systems by choices of lexis or current metaphors. For example:
- Do we read of refugees, economic migrants or asylum seekers?
- Are they bogus, and are they passing through open (or about-to-be-open) floodgates? (How often do you meet floodgates in a literal, rather than metaphorical sense?)
- Are those who resist the state guerrillas, freedom fighters or terrorists?
- Does a writer introduce ideas of legality to confer (dis)approval, so "legal" intoxicants (alcohol, tobacco) are distinguished from those that are illegal, and so referred to as drugs.
Perhaps influential power (Facebook, etc) is less monolithic, but appears in trends and fashions. Look at the FAKE NEWS outlets as examples of this.
Lexis and semantics in the media and the process of NORMALIZATION
Normalization is the process by which meaning is shifted from a pejorative connotation to a neutral one. It utilizes a number of rhetorical devices. From the perspective of pragmatics, the two main devices are:
- Lexical choices reflect shifts in subjective meaning or connotation or contemporary attitudes, so that they carry a sense of approval (approbation) or disapproval (pejoration). They may also be euphemistic, appearing as an acceptable substitute for some word or phrase that the writer or speaker thinks too strong or direct -
- as when the inadvertent killing of soldiers by their own allies or compatriots is "friendly fire", and the killing of civilians is "collateral damage".
- language like this is NORMALIZING
- Political correctness (as a linguistic rather than social attitude) represents an attempt to find neutral terms. While PC language is often a subject for ridicule, it arises from a sensitivity to the connotations or implications of more common forms.
- language like this is NORMALIZING
Pragmatics in the media
- We can apply the theories of pragmatics to language use in the media - but should note some special features of how they work. A simple example might be a political interview, broadcast on radio or television. What the listener or viewer might miss is an understanding of how far the speakers are aware of the wider audience, and how far the questions and answers are, or are not, spontaneous, as the interviewee may have seen them before the interview is recorded.
- coded language is often understood by only a segment of that wider audience
- Another complicating factor is the effect of editing, where an interview is recorded for later broadcast - this can remove the sense context for interpretation.
Pragmatics in politics
These
include: (Obama)
· Different types of questions, affirmative sentences, reduced and abrupt,
characteristic of colloquial English, elements of the so called “broken syntax” (Rogova, 1975).
They are lively, free in form, not completed, often abounding in ellipses,
parceling and sometimes preferred by the orator.
o You never gave in. You never gave up. And together we made history.
o That’s the project the American people want us to work on. Together.
· Metaphors.
They help the audience catch the connection between what people know and the
new information. They help a listener look at the familiar things the other way
round. They give a possibility to interpret the new information and to come to
a certain conclusion:
o We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but
because they embody the spirit of service.
· Inversion
which removes the informative centre of the utterance and makes it more expressive
and emotional:
o We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can
find and the quality of life those jobs offer. By the prospects of a small
business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise. By
the opportunities for a better life that we pass on to our children.
· Reiteration
– one of the most preferable rhetorical figures of speech which reveals itself
in repetition of identical morphemes, words, sentences, and makes the speech
swift, rhythmical, expressive and emotional and in this way strengthens its
influence upon the electors. For example,
o What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be
determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work
together tomorrow.
o Here we deal with syntactic
parallelism, accompanied by anaphora, and antithesis. The combination of these means
strengthens the impression produced on the addressee.
What’s more, we are the
first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea – the idea that each of us
deserves the chance to shape our own destiny (anadiplosis). No workers – no
workers are more productive than ours (anaphora). Our challenges may be new.
The instruments with which we meet them may be new (epiphora).
· Alliteration
– a special stylistic means aimed at creating additional musical effect
produced by the utterance. The words acquire certain intonational significance
and attract listeners’ attention.
o Because of a diplomatic effort to insist that Iran meets its
obligations, the Iranian government now faces tougher sanctions, tighter
sanctions than ever before.
· Antithesis –
a widespread stylistic means in speeches of political leaders, conveys contrast
of ideas vividly expressed:
o It’ not a matter of punishing their success. It’s about promoting America’s
success.
· Epithets –
attributive words which make the information more exact, precise, accurate. They
help a word or an utterance obtain colorfulness and influence the addressees’
vision of the political and social situation:
o On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and
false promises, worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our
politics.
· Metonymy – a
stylistic means with the help of which the necessary word is replaced by
another, analogous in meaning. It gives an addressee the possibility to see
between lines (Gaines, 1999):
o know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, child
who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.
· Hyperbole –
intentional exaggeration used by politicians to emphasize ideas and to intensify
expressiveness:
o It’s never been harder to save or retire; to buy gas or groceries; and if
you put it on a card, they’ve probably raised your rates.
Personification – transference of certain qualities from animate beings to inanimate ones.
It makes speech more vivid and concentrates attention on the semantic component
of the utterance:
o Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy
jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling.
Gradation –
a synonymic row of words in which every next element is getting more and more
or less and less intensive:
o So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. I
believe we can. And I believe we must.
Polisyndeton
is used to make up a rhythmical picture of speech, underlining the significance
of every element and strengthening its expressivity:
o And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our
classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science
and technology and engineering and math.
