The study of political discourse, like that of other areas of discourse analysis, covers a broad range of subject matter, and draws on a wide range of analytic methods. Perhaps more than with other areas of discourse, however, one needs at the outset to consider the reflexive and potentially ambiguous nature of the term political discourse. The term is suggestive of at least two possibilities: first, a discourse which is itself political; and second, an analysis of political discourse as simply an example discourse type, without explicit reference to political content or political context. But things may be even more confusing. Given that on some definitions almost all discourse may be considered political (Shapiro 1981), then all analyses of discourse are potentially political, and, therefore, on one level, all discourse analysis is political discourse.
This potentially confusing situation arises, in the main, from definitions of the political in terms of general issues such as power, conflict, control, or domination (see Fairclough 1992a, 1995; Giddens 1991; Bourdieu 1991; van Dijk 1993; Chilton and Schaffer 1997), since any of these concepts may be employed in almost any form of discourse. Recently, for example, in a study of a psychotherapeutic training institution, Diamond (1995) refers to her study of the discourse of staff meetings as “political,” simply because issues of power and control are being worked out. They are being worked out at different levels, however: at interpersonal, personal, institutional, and educational levels for example, and in different strategic ways (Chilton 1997). By treating all discourse as political, in its most general sense, we may be in danger of significantly overgeneralizing the concept of political discourse.
Perhaps we might avoid these difficulties if we simply delimited our subject matter as being concerned with formal/informal political contexts and political actors (Graber 1981); with, that is, inter alia, politicians, political institutions, governments, political media, and political supporters operating in political environments to achieve political goals. This first approximation makes clearer the kinds of limits we might place on thinking about political discourse, but it may also allow for development. For example, analysts who themselves wish to present a political case become, in one sense, political actors, and their own discourse becomes, therefore, political. In this sense much of what is referred to as critical linguistics (Fairclough 1992b) or critical discourse analysis (van Dijk 1993; Wodak 1995) relates directly to work on political discourse, not only because the material for analysis is often formally political but also, perhaps, because the analysts have explicitly made themselves political actors (see van Dijk, this volume).
But such a delimitation, like all delimitations, is not without its problems. For example, how do we deal with the work of Liebes and Ribak (1991) on family discussions of political events? Is this political discourse, or family discourse of the political? In one sense it is both – but the issue of which may simply be a matter of emphasis (see, for example, Ochs and Taylor 1992). While delimitations of the political are difficult to maintain in exact terms, they are nevertheless useful starting points. Equally, while one can accept that it is difficult to imagine a fully objective and nonpolitical account of political discourse, analysts can, at best, and indeed should, make clear their own motivations and perspectives. This may range from setting some form of “democratic” ideal for discourse against which other forms of political discourse are then assessed (Gastil 1993) to explicitly stating one's political goals in targeting political discourse for analysis (as in the case of a number of critical linguists: Fairclough 1995; Wodak 1995; van Dijk 1993). It also allows for more descriptive perspectives (Wilson 1990, 1996; Geis 1987), where the main goal is to consider political language first as discourse, and only secondly as politics. The general approach advocated above would respond to the criticism of Geis (1987), who argues that many studies of political language reveal their own political bias. Most of us who write about political discourse may do this at some level, but as long as this is either made clear, or explicitly accepted as a possibility, then this seems acceptable.
The study of political discourse has been around for as long as politics itself. The emphasis the Greeks placed on rhetoric is a case in point. From Cicero (1971) to Aristotle (1991) the concern was basically with particular methods of social and political competence in achieving specific objectives. While Aristotle gave a more formal twist to these overall aims, the general principle of articulating information on policies and actions for the public good remained constant. This general approach is continued today.
Modern rhetorical studies are more self-conscious, however, and interface with aspects of communication science, historical construction, social theory, and political science (for an overview see Gill and Whedbee 1997). While there has been a long tradition of interest in political discourse, if one strictly defines political discourse analysis in broadly linguistic terms (as perhaps all forms of discourse analysis should be defined: see Fairclough and Wodak 1997), it is only since the early 1980s or 1990s that work in this area has come to the fore. Indeed, Geis (1987) argues that his is the first text with a truly linguistic focus on political language/discourse. There is some merit in this argument, but without opening up issues about what is and what is not linguistics, many of the earlier studies in social semiotics and critical linguistics should also be included in a general linguistic view of political discourse (Fowler et al. 1979; Chilton 1990, 1985; Steiner 1985). While language is always clearly central to political discourse, what shifts is the balance between linguistic analysis and political comment. Distinguishing the direction of this balance, however, is not always straightforward.
In more modern times it was perhaps Orwell who first drew our attention to the political potential of language. This is seen in his classic article “Politics and the English Language,” where he considers the way in which language may be used to manipulate thought and suggests, for example, that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible” (1969: 225). His examples are types of inverted logic (reflected in literary detail in his book Nineteen Eighty Four) and they echo through much of the present work on political discourse. Instances include the use of “pacification” to refer to the bombing of defenseless villages, or the use of “rectification of frontiers” to refer to the relocation or simply removal of thousands of peasants from their homes.
Orwell was concerned with a general decline in the use of English, and politicians had a central responsibility for this decline. They have a general reputation for the construction of what Americans call “fog” or the British political gobbledygook (see Neaman and Silver 1990: 320). For example, the American navy have described high waves as “climatic disturbances at the air-sea interface,” while in the 1970s, President Nixon's press secretary coined the phrase “biosphere overload” for overpopulation (also called “demographic strain” by some government officials) (see Neaman and Silver 1990: 317–21). The British are not exempt from such excesses of lexical production, however; an antivandalism committee of the Wolverhampton District Council was given the title, “The Urban Conservation and Environmental Awareness Work Party” (Neaman and Silver 1990: 321).
However, it is not simply manipulation that is at issue in the case of political language; it is the goal of such manipulation which is seen as problematic. Politicians seem to want to hide the negative within particular formulations such that the population may not see the truth or the horror before them. This is the general thrust of Orwell's comments, and it emerges again and again throughout work on political discourse, but with perhaps different levels of emphasis and analysis. The influential work of the political scientist Murray Edleman (1971, 1977, 1988) mirrors Orwell's concerns and looks at the symbolic manipulation of reality for the achievement of political goals. In a more directed political sense Pěcheux (1982, 1978), following Althusser's claim that ideology is not just an abstract system of thought but becomes actualized in a variety of material forms, set about studying discourse as one type of material form. Pěcheux argued that the meanings of words became transformed in terms of who used them, or, in Foucault's (1972) terms, in relation to particular “discourse formations.” Here words (and their interaction) in one formation were differently interpreted within another. Conservative or right-wing views of terms like “social benefit” and “defense spending” may differ radically from interpretations available within a socialist or left-wing discourse (see below).
The general principle here is one of transformation. Similar words and phrases may come to be reinterpreted within different ideological frameworks. Linked directly to this process is the concept of “representation.” Representation refers to the issue of how language is employed in different ways to represent what we can know, believe, and perhaps think. There are basically two views of representation: the universalist and the relativist (Montgomery 1992). The universalist view assumes that we understand our world in relation to a set of universal conceptual primes. Language, in this view, simply reflects these universal possibilities. Language is the vehicle for expressing our system of thought, with this system being independent of the language itself. The relativist position sees language and thought as inextricably intertwined. Our understanding of the world within a relativist perspective is affected by available linguistic resources. The consequences here, within a political context, seem obvious enough. To have others believe you, do what you want them to do, and generally view the world in the way most favorable for your goals, you need to manipulate, or, at the very least, pay attention to the linguistic limits of forms of representation.
While many analysts accept the relativist nature of representation in language, i.e. that experience of the world is not given to us directly but mediated by language, there is a tendency to assume that politically driven presentation is in general negative. In Fairclough's (1989) view of critical linguistics/discourse, for example, political discourse is criticized as a “form of social practice with a malign social purpose” (Torode 1991: 122). The alternative goal is “a discourse which has no underlying instrumental goals for any participant, but is genuinely undertaken in a co-operative spirit in order to arrive at understanding and common ground.”
Examples of this malign social purpose are highlighted in work on the political discourse of what has been referred to as “nukespeak.” As is clear, the very title “nukespeak” is formed on analogy with Orwell's famous “newspeak,” where the assumption was that if one could manipulate or limit what was possible in language then one could manipulate or limit what was possible in thought. Chilton (1985) and others argue, using a range of analytic techniques, that in the political discourse of nuclear weapons efforts are made to linguistically subvert negative associations. An example from Montgomery (1992: 179) highlights this general issue (see also Moss 1985):
Strategic nuclear weapon – large nuclear bomb of immense destructive power
Tactical nuclear weapon – small nuclear weapon of immense destructive power
Enhanced radiation weapon – neutron bomb (destroys people not property)
Demographic targeting – killing the civilian population
In this example Montgomery is performing a type of translation in which he explicitly attempts to show how the language on the left of the dash is manipulating reality as represented by the translation on the right. For Montgomery, the language of nuclear weapons is clearly “obscurantist and euphemistic.”
A similar and related point to that noted in Montogmery's work has been made specifically in the case of syntax (Montgomery 1992; Simpson 1988, 1993; Chilton 1997). The system of “transitivity,” for example (Halliday 1985), provides a set of choices for describing “what is going on in the world.” One such choice is referred to as a “material process,” where what is going on may be described as an action, transaction, or event.
An example from Goodman (1996: 56) clearly illustrates these options:
| Actions | |||
| a. | The solider (Actor) | fired (material process: action) | |
| Transactions | |||
| b. | The soldier (Actor) | killed (material process: transaction) | innocent villagers (goal) |
| Event | |||
| c. | Innocent villagers (goal: material process) | died (material process: event) |
Goodman (1996:57) comments on the possible reasons behind such selections, suggesting:
Writers with a technical interest in weaponry (in a specialist magazine) might have an interest in obscuring the pain and destruction that weapons cause. Writers who are on the same side as the soldiers might also have an interest in obscuring their army's responsibility for the death of innocent civilians.
Although Goodman is writing in 1996, we can note the similarity with Orwell's comments some 50 years previously (see also Chilton 1997; Stubbs 1996). While many of Goodman's claims may be true, Fairclough (1995) notes that such claims are often built around single, isolated utterances, taking no account of the textual or historical context of production. One might, for example, decide to present the sentences highlighted by Goodman by sequencing the events for the listener in very specific ways:
Announcement
Innocent villagers died last night. It was the soldiers who fired on them. It was the soldiers who killed them!
In the first sentence here it is the villagers who are highlighted, not the soldiers. One might argue, as does Goodman, that such a form obscures those responsible. However, not only are those responsible highlighted in the next two sentences, but the very contrast that is indicated by their exclusion from the first and not the following sentences might lead readers back to the first sentence to confirm their originally hidden responsibility. By inviting readers/listeners to revisit the first sentence, this small text may emphasize not only the responsibility of the soldiers, but that they have tried to avoid that responsibility.
Issues of representation, however, need not only revolve around specific syntactic transformations: without any seemingly manipulative intent one can achieve personal and political goals by relatively uncontroversial structural selections. Consider the general area of evidentiality. Evidentiality refers to the way in which forms of evidence become grammaticalized in different languages and to the attitude one takes or adopts toward this evidence (see papers in Chafe and Nichols 1986), since not all evidence is of a similar type. There is a complex interaction here between such things as beliefs, assumptions, inferences, and physical experiences (sight, hearing, smell, touch, etc.): I saw John yesterday; I believe I saw John yesterday; I was told John was seen yesterday; it is possible that John was seen yesterday.
In a study of political discourse just prior to American entry into the 1990 Gulf War, Dunmire (1995) argues that newspaper articles in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and statements made by representatives of the American government, actively assisted the USA in positioning itself for intervention. They did this by shifting their concerns from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait to a series of claims regarding a potential attack on Saudi Arabia. Dunmire argues that, through an increased use of nominal clauses to represent the threat of Iraq's attack on Saudi Arabia, what was speculation came to be accepted as fact.
Equally, it may be that in some cases it is not simply the syntactic form which is chosen, but rather the relative distribution of particular syntactic selections which carries the political implications. Work by Stubbs (1996) on the distribution of ergative forms within two school geography textbooks may be used to illustrate this point. As Stubbs (1996: 133) explains, ergatives are verbs which: can be transitive or intransitive, and which allow the same nominal group and the same object group in transitive clauses and as subject in intransitive clauses: several firms have closed their factories factories have been closed factories have closed
The important point is that ergatives have agentive and nonagentive uses. This allows ergatives, like transitivity in active and passive sentences, to be used differentially depending on the ideological goals of the text.