Political language – definitions and characteristics

Political language, as serving the purposes of politics, is dependent on the ideas and needs of current political streams in a particular country and its political system. It is meant to fulfill the authorities’ aims and satisfy the citizens’ expectations, or on the other hand, it may ruin the bases of systems and lead to riots if the systems are to be abolished.

Both ideas of political language functions are adjusted to two distant understandings of politics and two various meanings of the notion. According to Chilton:

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On the one hand, politics is viewed as a struggle for power, between those who seek to assert and maintain their power and those who seek to resist it. […] On the other hand, politics is viewed as cooperation, as the practices and institutions that a society has for resolving clashes of interest over money, influence, liberty and the like. (Chilton 2004: 3)

These two contrasting orientations contradict not only on the level of political institutions of the state, parties and professional politicians and other social formations, something that is referred to by Chilton as the “macro-level” in politics (2004: 3-4), but there is also the “micro-level”, comprising conflicts of interest, struggles for dominance and trials to co-operate by individuals and social groups with all the techniques that are used to gain dominance or some other aims – through persuasion, rational argument, irrational strategies, manipulation etc. The micro-level elements are something that can be in fact defined as linguistic action – namely political discourse.

The linguistic effects of authority, legitimacy, consensus etc. are intrinsic to politics (Chilton 2004: 4). To show some particular uses of political language and its typical strategies will be the aim of the subsequent chapter.

3.1 Typical features of political language

Any political activity, as comprising verbal actions, is based on the use of language. Language performs all necessary functions of political background in social behaviours. According to Geis (1987: 2-7), basing his view upon Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the attitude of the so-called Orwellians (scholars following Orwell’s view), the political language might also unconsciously influence political thought, as:

Political language commonly conveys information on two levels. The first is the linguistic meaning of what is said. The second is the body of political beliefs that specific instances of political language presuppose and evoke when used. (Geis 1987:

7)

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The quotation explains a non-distant connection between politics and propaganda and the closeness of languages they use. This concept is observable in Chilton’s conviction that typical features of the political discourse are: choosing a particular ideology and words associated with it, providing evidence, and finally, imbuing utterances with authority and truth to suppress the expectation of untruthfulness on the part of the audience (Chilton 2004: 23).

As Chilton believes:

People often demand or negotiate particular types of evidence, or refer to institutionalized norms […] the social arrangements of natural tendencies – variable ethical norms applied on top of some underlying, fundamental expectation of cooperative truthfulness. (Chilton 2004: 34)

Using reporting structures in political language is a way to show authorities, and how something is quoted directly influences people’s reaction to the quotation contents (Geis 1987: 78-97, 98-107). As Geis writes:

In reporting the speech of politicians and other members of government, the reporter has a number of choices. He or she may choose to identify the speaker […] or not […], may choose to identify the hearer or not, may choose among a wide range of verbs of reported speech (say, muttered, declared, etc.), may put these verbs in the past tense (said) or generic present tense (says), may or may not employ a manner adverbial or other construction that describes how what was said was said (said dolefully), and may choose to quote the speaker directly (with quote marks) or indirectly. (Geis 1987: 13)

Another feature of political discourse is its wide use of implicatures, which enables the speaker to convey more than is actually said. In political discourse some words that

“presuppose a theory”, as Geis puts it, appear and profile a speaker’s or writer’s attitude to things (Geis 1987: 15, 16). Rhetorical questions can also be mentioned as implied messages (Geis 1987: 117). A type of implied communication will be not only verbal information, but also non-verbal like e.g. intonation in someone’s speech, or some pragmatic effects of the typeface used, the organization of text on a page, images etc. (Saussure, Schulz 2005: 128).

But inferences can only arise as the effect of adopting a particular ideology or attitudes and values by the hearer (Chilton 2004: 37). It may also be an effect of human conceptualization, as cognitivists believe, based on innate or acquired mapping expressed through metaphors.

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That way it is possible to draw inferences impossible to be drawn on the basis of direct evidence or experience (Chilton 2004: 203). The use of metaphors is then another important feature of political language, applied especially when the sender wants to arouse emotions among the hearers (Saussure, Schulz 2005: 226), e.g. leadership and political action is often conceptualized by movement or journey metaphors, like “coming to a crossroads”, “moving ahead towards a better future”, or “overcoming obstacles on the way” (Chilton 2004: 51-52).

The same effect – of semantic intensifying, as Saussure puts it (Saussure, Schulz 2005:

253), is ascribed to hyperbolic exaggerations (Saussure, Schulz 2005: 226), which are also mentioned by Borkowski (2003:71). It is connected with another feature of political language – avoidance of bare nouns and verbs and rather using them with appropriate modifiers. They work as intensifiers of some semantic component of the head noun or verb, like in e.g.

“historically unique success”, unchangeable decisions”, “total dedication”, “ruthless fight”

etc. There is also a tendency to use grammatical or lexical comparatives in such cases, like in e.g. “even more impressive results”, “still higher goals”, increasing figures” etc. (Saussure, Schulz 2005: 253).

Performing deictic functions is also observable, e.g. the first person plural pronouns introduce identity, show coalitions, classify as insiders or outsiders. Such a symptomatic use of the first person plural inclusive pronoun (“we” in English, my in Polish), shows then power relations, not just personal distance. The same spatial and temporal indexicals, like “here”,

“now”, can also refer to a neutral physical location, or some other conventional understanding (Chilton 2004: 56),

Apart from acts of solidarity and exclusion, the political discourse uses euphemizing strategies, verbal forms of evasion and denial (avoiding references to threatening referents, Chilton 2004: 40), devices of politeness, and various kinds of omissions. Chilton claims that

“Euphemism has the cognitive effect of conceptually ‘blurring’ or ‘defocusing’ unwanted referents […]. Implicit meanings of various types also constitute a means of diverting attention from troublesome referents” (2004: 46). What often follows such acts of directing people’s attention is “setting agendas, selecting topics in conversation, positioning the self and others in specific relationships, making assumptions about realities that hearers are obliged to at least temporarily accept in order to process the text or talk” (Chilton 2004: 45), which in fact is controlling others’ freedom of thought and speech.

The political discourse is then greatly based on the means of persuasion. An important characteristic of it is modality “attached to concepts such as: social obligation-compulsion,

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certainty-doubt, evidence with credible-incredible source” (Chilton 2004: 202). Borkowski claims that persuasion is the nature of some modal expressions used a lot in political language, like in the case of elements strengthening claims, such as: na pewno (“for sure”,

“surely”), z całą pewnością (“with absolute certainty”), or weakening them, like: podobno, ponoć (“supposedly”), rzekomo (“allegedly”), and also expressions presenting volitional attitude, like: wierzymy, że (“we believe that”), jesteśmy przekonani o (“we are certain that”).

Persuasion can also be observed in expressive vocabulary with clear linguistic or cultural connotations, euphemisms and linguistic labels (Borkowski 2003: 19-20).

The devices mentioned, can often create information, as Chilton puts it, “inadequate for the needs or interests of hearers”, be “simply lying, in its most extreme manifestation“

(2004: 46).

Chilton concludes that:

Power can also be exercised through controlling others’ use of language – that is, through various kinds and degrees of censorship and access control. The letter include the structure and control of public media, the arena in which much political communication takes place. (Chilton 2004: 46)

What the political discourse looked like in the times of the communist rule in Poland will be the concern of the next chapter.

4. The language of media and politics in the totalitarian era in the People’s