Chapter Overview

• • critical stylistics

• • communication in political discourse

• • checklist of critical stylistic categories

• • Obama's statement on the events in Tunisia• critical stylistic analysis of Obama's statement

Introduction

In Chapter 4, we used critical linguistics to investigate ideology and power in fiction. This chapter revisits the concern with ideology but explores political discourse. We use CRITICAL STYLISTICS, which offers a more comprehensive toolkit for the investigation of ideology in language, to analyse a statement by the 44th American President Barack Obama on the events in Tunisia in 2011. Before presenting the findings of the critical stylistic analysis, we will offer an overview of the nature of political communication, sketch out the critical stylistic approach, and suggest a checklist of critical stylistic categories to help you see how I arrived at the findings of the analysis and assist you in making your own critical stylistic analysis of the other statement suggested for further practice in activity 9.1.

Communication in political discourse

Political discourse refers to spoken or written communication (such as debates, statements, press releases, and speeches) by individuals who are professionally engaged in the affairs of government, parliament, and political parties. In other words, it is the text and talk of politicians, political institutions, and ordinary citizens in relation to the use of power to achieve social, economic, and political ends.

Political discourse is a means to an end. Its aim is to spread ideologies, influence behaviours, and win supporters. In order for political discourse to achieve this effect, it employs linguistic means to help achieve its goal. These include, but are not limited to, choice of words, repetition, deletion, the use of metaphors, speech acts and politeness strategies, choice of words and DEIXIS to manipulate the audience's perspectives, change of part of speech to achieve ideological effect (e.g. nominalisation), syntactic subordination (e.g. passivisation), creation of text-specific relationships of opposition and equivalence, manipulation of the speech and thoughts of others, repetition or deletion of parts of the proposition, and the use of metaphors, speech acts, and politeness strategies.

Analysis of how political discourse manipulates the ideological outlook of its recipients necessarily entails analysis of how these linguistic tools are deployed in political text and talk. The present chapter focuses on ten of the tools listed in the previous paragraph, which together form the analytical toolkit of our analytical framework – critical stylistics.