ANALYSING POLITICAL SPEECHES

Also by Jonathan Charteris-Black

Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis

The Communication of Leadership: The Design of Leadership Style

Gender and the Language of Illness (with Clive Seale)

Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor

(1st & 2nd editions)

Fire Metaphors: Discourses of Awe & Authority

Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor

(1st edition)

Analysing Political Speeches

Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor

2nd edition

Jonathan Charteris-Black

© Jonathan Charteris-Black, under exclusive licence to Springer

Nature Limited 2013, 2018

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Contents

List of Core Speeches ix

List of Figures x

List of Tables xi

Introduction xii

Acknowledgements xx

PART I TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO RHETORIC,

ORATORY AND DISCOURSE

1. Classical Rhetoric: Artistic Proofs and Arrangement

1.1 Introduction: rhetoric, oratory and persuasion

1.2 Branches of oratory

1.3 The proofs

8

1.3.1 Ethos: character

1.3.2 Logos: reason

12

1.3.3 Pathos: emotion

16

1.4 Arrangement in classical rhetoric

19

1.5 Summary

27

Essential reading

33

2. Classical Rhetoric: Style and Figures

34

2.1 Introduction: what is style?

34

2.2 Style in classical rhetoric

36

2.3 Figures of speech

43

2.3.1 Schemes

43

2.3.2 Tropes

49

2.3.3 Interaction between schemes and tropes

54

2.4 Summary

58

Essential reading

58

3. Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse

59

3.1 Introduction – what is coherence?

59

3.1.1 Coherence and speech circumstances

59

3.2 What is cohesion?

61

3.3 Grammatical cohesion

62

3.3.1 Reference

62

vi Contents

3.3.2 Deixis

64

3.3.3 Anaphoric reference

67

3.3.4 Cataphoric reference

68

3.3.5 Other reference categories

69

3.4 Lexical cohesion

70

3.4.1 Repetition and reiteration

71

3.4.2 Semantic relations: antonyms and synonyms

72

3.4.3 Collocation
73

3.5 Summary

77

Essential reading

83

PART II CRITICAL APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE

4. Critical Analysis: Context and Persuasion

87

4.1 What is power?

87

4.2 CDA, context and circumstances

90

4.2.1 Stage 1: analysis of speech ‘circumstances’

91

4.2.2 Stage 2: identification and analysis of features

94

4.2.3 Stage 3: interpretation and explanation

97

4.3 Persuasion

99
4.4 Summary

105

Essential reading

108

5. Social Agency and Modality

109

5.1 Agency

109

5.1.1 What is agency?

109

5.1.2 Nominal forms and names

110

5.1.3 Verbal processes

113

5.2 Modality

115

5.2.1 What is modality?

115

5.2.2 Levels of modality

119
5.2.3 Types of modality

121

5.3 Summary

132

Essential reading

132

6. The Discourse-Historical Approach

133

6.1 Introduction

133

6.2 Discursive strategies and intention

137

6.3 Discursive strategies and discrimination

139

6.4 Topoi, warrants and arguments

143

6.4.1 Example 1: traffic congestion

147

6.4.2 Example 2: the case for war

148
6.5 Sample text analysis using DHA

151

Contents vii

6.6 A critique of DHA

157

6.7 Summary

160

Essential reading

161

7. Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods

162

7.1 Introduction – impoliteness in politics

162

7.2 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as entertainment 165

7.3 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as coercion

168

7.4 Corpus methods for exploring the rhetoric of

Donald Trump

173

7.4.1 Introduction and method

173

7.4.2 Trump keywords

175

7.4.3 Adjective-noun patterns: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ groups 178

7.4.4 Negative emotions and ad hominem arguments

181

7.4.5 Size adjectives

185

7.4.6 Verb patterns: ‘attack’ and ‘defend’ strategies

188

7.5 Summary

192

Essential reading

193

PART III CRITICAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS

8. Researching Metaphor in Public Communication

197

8.1 Introduction: Blair and the ‘beacon’ metaphor

197

8.2 Metaphor: definition and appeal

201

8.3 Research design for metaphor in political discourse:

an overview 205

8.4 Metaphor identification and classification

213

8.5 Summary

215

Essential reading

216

9. Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method

217

9.1 Introduction

217

9.2 Metaphor identification in critical metaphor analysis

219

9.3 Case Study 1: identification of metaphor in Obama’s

first inaugural address

225

9.4 Theoretical approaches to metaphor

228
9.4.1 Conceptual metaphor theory applied

229

9.4.2 Conceptual blending theory applied

231

9.5 Case Study 2: interpretation of metaphor in Obama’s

first inaugural address using conceptual metaphor theory

236

9.6 Evaluating conceptual metaphor and blending theory

240

9.7 Summary

241

Essential reading

242

viii Contents

10. Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition

243

10.1 Introduction

243

10.2 The purposes of metaphor

247
10.2.1 General rhetorical purpose: gaining the audience’s

attention and establishing trust

248

10.2.2 Heuristic purpose: framing issues so that they

are intelligible in a way that is favourable to

an argument 249

10.2.3 Predicative purpose: implying an evaluation of

political actors and their policies

251

10.2.4 Empathetic purpose: to arouse the audience’s

feelings in such a way that they will be favourable

to the speaker

254

10.2.5 Aesthetic purpose: creating textual coherence

255

10.2.6 Ideological purpose: to offer a ‘worldview’

257

10.2.7 Mythic purpose

262

10.3 Case Study 3: explanation of metaphor in Obama’s first

inaugural address

262

Essential reading

266

Comments on Exercises

267

Further Reading and References

283

Glossary

289

Index

295

List of Core Speeches

1 Barack Obama, inaugural speech, 20 January 2009

27

2 Tim Collins’ ‘Eve-of-battle’ speech, 19 March 2003

39

3 Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V 53

4 John F. Kennedy inaugural speech, 20 January 1961

78
5 Emma Watson Gender Equality Speech to the United Nations,

20 September 2014

105

6 Tony Blair’s Iraq War speech, March 2003

123

7 Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit Speech, 25 January 2018

152

8 Julia Gillard’s ‘Misogyny’ Speech, 9 October 2012 (extracts)

172

9 Trump’s 2nd Amendment speech, 9 August 2016 (extracts)

183

10 Lady Gaga ‘The Prime Rib of America’, 20 September 2010

(extract) 259

ix

List of Figures

1.1 Branches of oratory

1.2 Structure of a syllogism

13

1.3 Structure of an enthymeme

13

1.4 Reason

13

1.5 Comparison/analogy

13

2.1 Style and branch of oratory

38

2.2 Style types in classical rhetoric

42

3.1 Classes of cohesion

63

3.2 Types of deixis

65

3.3 Categories of reference

68

3.4 Model of cohesion

78

4.1 Stages in critical discourse analysis of public communications

90

4.2 Stage 1: analysis of speech circumstances

91

4.3 Stage 2: identification and analysis of features

94

4.4 Stage 3: interpretation and explanation

97

4.5 Rhetorical means of persuasion in political speeches

100

5.1 The ideological square

112

6.1 Overview of the discourse-historical approach (DHA)

135

6.2 Analysis of argument structure (1)

148

6.3 Analysis of argument structure (2)

150

8.1 Cognitive schema activated by ‘beacon’

199

9.1 Principle stages of critical metaphor analysis

218

9.2 Method for critical metaphor analysis

223

9.3 Conceptual metaphor theory analysis of theatre metaphors

232

9.4 Blending analysis of the ‘theatre’ metaphor

233

9.5 Blending analysis of Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ metaphor

234

9.6 Blending analysis of the visual ‘cross-hairs’ metaphor

236

10.1 Persuasive purposes of metaphor

248

10.2 Myth and argument structure

264

10.3 Rhetorical persuasion and metaphor in Obama’s first

inaugural address

265

List of Tables

1.1 The arrangement of a speech

26
2.1 Adjectival collocations of ‘style’ in the British National Corpus

35

2.2 Classical rhetorical schemes

44

2.3 Classical rhetorical tropes

50

3.1 Categories of conjunction

70

3.2 Collocations of ‘pledge’ and ‘pay’ in COCA (three-word range)

74

3.3 Collocations of ‘tiger’ and ‘prey’ in COCA

76

3.4 Collocations of ‘writ’ and ‘government’ in COCA

76

3.5 Collocations of ‘abolish’ and ‘destroy’ in COCA

77

4.1 Performance and Delivery in Emma Watson’s HeForShe Speech

95

5.1 David Cameron’s Conservative Party conference address, 2012

114

5.2 Modality – degrees of commitment and certainty

120

5.3 Levels of modality

121

5.4 The September dossier, September 2002

130

6.1 Discriminatory names in English

142

6.2 Discourse-historical topoi and #Brexit

144

6.3 Topoi in Rees-Mogg’s Brexit Speech, 25 January 2018 (extracts)

153

6.4 The second part of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit speech (extracts)

156

6.5 Summary of discursive strategies

160

7.1 Context analysis of Trump’s ad hominem arguments

169

7.2 Trump’s keywords

176

7.3 Trump’s ‘positive emotion’ keywords

178
7.4 Trump’s ‘positive people’ phrases

178

7.5 Trump’s ‘negative emotion’ keywords

179

7.6 Trump’s ‘negative people’ phrases

180

7.7 Trump’s ‘size’ markers

186

7.8 Trump’s ‘big’ collocations

186

7.9 Trump’s ‘small’ collocations

187

7.10 Trump’s pattern ‘we (+ x) will + verb + object’

188

8.1 Comparison of published research on metaphors

210

9.1 The ten most common collocates in the position after ‘incendiary’
225

9.2 Psycholinguistic analysis of metaphor in Obama’s

first inaugural speech

227
9.3 Analysis of metaphor source domains in sections 1–10

of Obama’s first inaugural address (Core Text 1)

238

9.4 Analysis of metaphor source domains in Core Text 1

239

9.5 Analysis of target domains and propositions in Core Text 1

239

10.1 Conceptual metaphors and ideology in political speeches

260

xi

Introduction

The aim of the second edition of this book is to further enhance the
reader’s ability to understand the variety of ways in which political
speeches may

excite and inspire, as well as to recognise the various linguistic

means used to misrepresent and manipulate. A political speech is an
orderly sequence

of words delivered by an individual to a physically present audience

assem-

bled for a specific social purpose. It also addresses a wider, remote

audi-

ence via a range of communication media. Analysis of political

speeches
encourages engagement in public communication because
possession of a

linguistic and conceptual framework for investigating persuasion

means

that we do not need to be suspicious of a persuasive speaker.

Suspicion arises from ignorance, and what we don’t understand
frightens us the

most. Hope is a social necessity, and to achieve their purposes,

political

speeches need to satisfy emotional, moral and social needs. In short,

they

need to persuade. The purpose of this book is to help readers

understand

how this is done.

It is hoped that the second edition of this book will encourage readers

to consider how traditional approaches to text analysis, such as

cohesion

and classical rhetoric introduced in the first part, may be integrated

with

‘critical’ approaches in the remaining two parts. I have added a new

chap-

ter on ad hominem arguments and impoliteness (Chapter 7) –

because these characterise much contemporary political rhetoric. In
the new chapter,

I also illustrate how corpus linguistic methods can be utilised to

research political language. Elsewhere in the book, I have sought to
address the rising presence of women’s voices in political language
by including two core

speeches by women – one by Emma Watson and the other by Julia

Gillard –

as well as references to other speeches by women. At the end of the

book,

readers should understand a range of critical discourse theories that

account for relationships between the linguistic features of speeches

and

the social and cultural contexts in which they are spoken. People who
read

a cookery book are neither guaranteed a gourmet result nor will they
nec-

essarily enjoy their food more; however, knowledge of the ingredients

and

the stages of preparing a meal are more likely to produce good

results as

well as to enhance the pleasures that can be derived. Public

speaking is not cookery, and readers are not guaranteed any
improvement in their abilities

as public speakers from reading this book, but it is hoped that by

serving

up a fresh dish, they may better enjoy the flavour of contemporary

political language by alerting themselves to the importance of
entertainment and

performance, as well as by hearing a wider range of political voices.

xii

Introduction xiii

In this preface, I first summarise what is meant by a political speech

and illustrate the main types of such speeches. I then go on to

consider

some of the key ideas regarding success and failure in political

speaking.

The preface ends with an overview of the book. As they enter the
tenth

year of institutionalised ‘Austerity’, people in Western democracies,

have

become frustrated with words as they ask themselves the question

‘Surely

we need action rather than words?’ Although Barack Obama

demonstrated

in his 2007 election campaign that oratory was a sleeping giant, it can
be

argued that his successor, Donald Trump, has substituted the tweet
for the

political speech, and the giant has become an ogre. However, this
would

be to ignore the performance aspects of his political communication –

and

his ability to articulate frustration: ‘We simply need to stop relying on

the politicians who created these problems in the first place. They are
not going to do anything. I call them all talk, no action. That’s what
they are. They are politicians. All talk, no action’.1 To take this at face
value would be naive.

Trump used the collocation ‘talk’ and ‘no action’ no fewer than twenty-
four times in a corpus of eighty-two of his campaign speeches, and
yet it was

through effective talk that he was successful in destroying his

opponent’s

legitimacy in the eyes of some American voters. I demonstrate in

Chapter

7 how rejecting ‘rhetoric’ was part of a strategy for establishing his

own credibility at the expense of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. By
activating

a frame for dishonesty, he was doing something rather similar to what

the supporters of Brexit, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, were doing
in

the United Kingdom when they weaponised language in a metaphoric

war

against the European Union. On both sides of the Atlantic, when

times are

hard, a discourse of rejection – often characterised stylistically by

impoliteness – has become an essential component of political
rhetoric – although

it must also be tinged with hints of a golden age or the prospect of a

new

dawn and delivered in a loud and confident tone of self-

righteousness. But
there are also counter-voices, quieter ones, and often those of
women.

Political speech

I define a political speech as a coherent stream of spoken language

that

is usually prepared for delivery by a speaker to an audience for a

specific purpose on a political occasion. Broadly speaking, there are
two main

classes of political speech: the first is concerned with the making of

political decisions; and the second, with establishing shared values.
We may think

of the first type as policymaking and the second as consensus

building. The first type has been described since classical times as
‘deliberative’, whereas the second type has been called ‘epideictic’.
The speeches analysed in this 1 26 July 2016: Donald Trump VFW
National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

xiv Introduction

book include three of each of these major types of speech: the

policymaking speeches are Tony Blair’s speech advocating war with
Iraq (March 2003),

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s speech on the European Union (January 2018)

and

David Cameron’s speech on the European Union (January 2013); the

consensus-building speeches are Tim Collins’ Eve of Battle speech

(March

2003), John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech (January 1961) and

Barack
Obama’s inaugural address (January 2009). Two further speeches
show

characteristics of both: though apparently epideictic, because they

address the topic of gender equality, they could also be viewed as
deliberative as they are intended to change gender-related behaviour;
these are Emma Watson’s

gender equality speech (September 2014) and Julia Gillard’s

misogyny

speech (October 2012). Reisigl (2008a, 2008b) explores the

interaction

between rhetoric, political science and linguistics in ‘politico-

linguistics’ and offers a detailed account of particular types of political
speech.

The division between these two types of speech is not as clear-cut as

this typology suggests, because a policymaking speech will also

attempt to

establish a consensus, and a consensus-building speech will also be

setting out a framework for future policy. For example, Tony Blair’s
speech in

March 2003 sought to establish a parliamentary consensus around

the

need to invade Iraq, as well as advocating that policy; and Kennedy’s

inau-

gural address also fed into a policy for the United States to build
alliances in the Third World. Perhaps the best way to conceptualise
the distinction

is in terms of their generality: a policy-forming speech necessarily

addresses some specific aspects of policy about which a decision
needs to be made

in the near future: whether to go to war; on what conditions to allow

further immigration; whether Britain should remain in Europe – and if

so,

on what terms. Although the occasion of consensus-establishing

speeches

is very specific – the immanence of military combat, the election of a

president – their content is, by contrast, more general. Presidential
inaugural speeches, or Party Convention speeches, are necessarily
broad ranging,

covering a wide range of policy areas such as foreign policy,

economic

policy and so on, and will view short-term decisions against the
backdrop

of their broader historical origin, the speaker’s ideology and

worldview.

This distinction relates, then, to the underlying contrast of purpose of

these two speech categories: policymaking speeches need by

definition to

point towards a decision so that policy can be made – usually on the

basis

of a vote in the near future. Conversely, consensus-building speeches

are

primarily motivational: they serve to display the shared beliefs of

speaker and audience so that a feeling of unity can underlie future
policy.
Success and failure in political speaking

The iconic figures of Western politics have laid claim to power

because of

their success in communicating with large audiences: Winston

Churchill

Introduction xv

and his combination of erudition and earthiness; Margaret Thatcher

and her talent for rebuking her opponents and turning the rhetorical

tables; and the charm and self-conviction of Tony Blair. Great

American

rhetoricians such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton

and Barack Obama have all inspired their followers by reviving differ-

ent versions of the American Dream and offering hope to a suffering

world. By contrast, Joseph ‘Joe’ McCarthy, Ronald Reagan and

George

W. Bush appealed to the need for strength and unity in a frightening

world. Donald Trump sought to offer his version of the American

Dream

on the back of a strongly demonising and divisive discourse. We can

identify common themes in all of these speakers: an appeal to

underlying

mythic thinking about good and evil, the ability to establish political

legitimacy by creating social and moral purpose, and to inspire

through
the creative power of language. The purpose of critical analysis is to

understand how public communication contributes to the ‘power’ that

arises from connecting with audiences, and we can do this as much

by

considering failure as success.

Political speakers should always have the audience in mind, and their

choice of language will be influenced by their assumptions about that

audience’s current state of knowledge. The success of political

slogans

provides evidence of whether or not assumptions are shared with the

electorate. For example, in the 1978 election campaign, the

Conservative

Party developed the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. This correctly

assumed that many people knew that there was a high level of unem-

ployment, for which the Labour government of the time could be held

responsible. By contrast, in the 2005 election campaign the

Conservatives

used the slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ – a rather
indi-

rect reference to immigration intended to highlight how it had become

a

taboo topic in British politics. Their failure in that election implied that
they had made the wrong assumption because at that time the
majority of people were not preoccupied by immigration (though they
were soon

to be). It also perhaps implied a dystopic futuristic world in which the

agents of power already knew what we were thinking before we

thought

it. The subsequent escalation of immigration up the political agenda

fol-

lowing the global financial collapse of 2008 demonstrated that in a

sense

they had read the future and were ahead of their time. But a
misjudgement about the current preoccupations of the audience
undermined the persuasiveness of their rhetoric.

Another example of such a misjudgement was when David Cameron

coined the phrase ‘Big Society’ to refer to self-initiated social action

by individuals acting in the public interest. Although it was not used in
the

election campaign – perhaps because it did not clarify the

assumptions it

was making, it was subsequently reintroduced by the prime minister.

The

phrase sought to address people’s belief that Conservative

governments

did not care about ‘society’ because of Margaret Thatcher’s famous

xvi Introduction

statement: ‘There is no such thing as society’.2 Perhaps Cameron

also wanted to distance himself from Reagan’s ‘Small Government’ –
meaning a low

degree of government control over business. Political advisers and

speech-

writers consider what their prospective readers and listeners know

before

deciding on an appropriate form for their slogans. Then, more

recently, in

her own words Hillary Clinton misjudged the mood of the electorate:

There was a fundamental mismatch between how I approach politics

and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I’ve learned that

even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when
people are

disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with

politicians.

When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t

want to hear your 10-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They

want you to be angry, too. (Clinton, 2017, p. 398)3

It was Donald Trump who was more successful in giving voice to this

anger by finding relatively soft targets on which he could sharpen his

rhe-

torical knife: immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims.

Increasingly, successful political speaking needs an understanding of

the
media through which a speech will be transmitted in order to attain
max-

imum effect. Although in ancient civilisation it was assumed that

oratory

would be conducted in face-to-face settings, in the modern period

symbolic

resources have been enhanced significantly through the development

of

telecommunication media, and politicians often succeed or fail

through

their expertise (or lack of it) in social media. For some in the
audience, it is the intensity of effect that comes from listening to the
radio; for others it is more the intimacy offered by the visual close-up;
and for others it will be through the symbolic effect of physical
performance, engaging in some

form of sport, or of dynamic display in what I have referred to as

symbolic actions (Charteris-Black, 2007). For Donald Trump, it has
been his use

of Twitter that has given his followers the feeling that they are actively

engaged in the political process: the demos are involved in decision-

making while even his opponents await the next Tweet with eager
anticipation: this direct access to the leader has created a more
intimate relationship between politician and ‘follower’ that can be
relied on with face-to-face audiences as well as with online ones.

A present-day example of awareness of visual media occurred when

the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on being struck in

the

face and injured by a souvenir model of a building, got out of the car
he was travelling in to display his injuries to the media – aware of how
the event might have a negative impact on the ‘character’ of his
opponents,

2 Interview, 23 September 1987, quoted by Douglas Keay, Woman’s

Own, 31 October 1987, pp. 8–10.

3 H. R. Clinton (2017) What Happened, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Introduction xvii

whom he accused of whipping up hatred against him. As a media

mogul,

Berlusconi was aware of the power of the media to enhance his

persona

as someone who was an innocent victim rather than a perpetrator of

elite

power structures. As I write he is once again making a comeback: the

81

year old is forming a coalition that is influencing the 2018 Italian

election.

Another example is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who,

judging by

his attempts to undermine democracy in both his own country and

abroad,

has little interest in the democratic process; nonetheless, he sustains

popular appeal through images of himself in heroic masculine roles
such as

riding a horse bareback in Siberia. In January 2018, he celebrated

the feast of Epiphany by following a Russian Orthodox tradition by
stripping himself to the waist and entering the freezing water of Lake
Seliger – broadcast on Russian TV – since water blessed by a priest
during Epiphany is considered to have healing powers. Having
arrested his most credible challenger,

Alexei Navalny, he subsequently won the Russian election in March

2018.

We should not forget that, in a world increasingly dominated by tech-

nologically mediated communication – often by groups of performers,

musicians, sports teams, or the use of dual announcers – the

individualistic nature of a public speech retains a strong appeal. The
world of entertainment is based around a range of competitive
popular self-promotional

genres – performances of singing and dancing ( The X Factor),

getting a job ( The Apprentice), being a businessman ( Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire? ), cooking ( The Great British Bake Off) or just
‘being’ ( Big Brother). To compete with these genres, politicians need
to maintain their immediate

and ongoing presence through social media sites – in particular

Twitter.

Although a speech is a socially produced text, when it comes to

delivery,

it is a live performance. The Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, co-

founder of the Five Star Movement in Italy, is a successful comedian
and actor, and

this reflects a wider tendency for actors to become political.

Politics does not exist outside of society and is influenced by techno-

logical changes in how people interact. Social media provide the

means by
which individuals may post their views either anonymously or by
using an

invented identity (‘tag’), with the knowledge that they are unlikely ever
to meet those about whom they express strong opinions. Social
media sites

such as Twitter provide individuals with the opportunity to ‘follow’ poli-

ticians and gain insight into their ongoing thoughts and views on
political topics. Many social media sites provide platforms for the
discussion of

political issues – usually with those who share similar views – as well
as

with politicians themselves. Social media interactions are the least

likely to be constrained by face-saving considerations – whether
individual,

interpersonal or group related. Impolite language in face-to-face

political genres such as televised debates may to some extent reflect
general trends

in contemporary online communication. Nigel Farage speaks to full

houses

and has 1.14 million followers on Twitter; this compares with the
current

prime minister, Theresa May, who has 476,000 followers. Part of the

xviii Introduction

entertainment value of public speaking lies in observing how a

particular

individual responds to the demands of high-stakes, pressurised

situations.
Armed as a speaker may be with a set of notes or an autocue, he or
she has

to perform at the designated time in a highly constrained social

situation in which he or she is the focus of attention – but having won
audiences, needs to sustain them via social media.

The minimum requirements for persuasion in public communication

are fluency, a high level of confidence, authenticity, spontaneity and

the

ability to inspire trust. These are acquired through proficiency with

lan-

guage, experience in its delivery and an awareness of how to perform

in

public and how to sustain a presence by social media. Fluency

implies skill with language, swiftness of thought and the ability to
convey ideas – all

leadership qualities. Similarly, confidence implies a strong sense of

iden-

tity, which is also an attribute of leadership. Authenticity is the ability

to speak from the heart and is about having good intentions: when
intentions

are believed to be both good and genuine, so much else can be

forgiven.

Spontaneity is the hallmark of authenticity, and the ability to dispense

with a prepared script is a sign of this. Both authenticity and
spontaneity can be developed through social media. This expressive,
performative dimension

may not come from study and erudition. It could be that the opposite
is the case: the more analytical, the less authentic a speaker may
seem. So formal oratorical analysis – for example studying lists of
figures of speech as in the rhetorical schools of ancient Greece –
may have exactly the opposite

effect to the one intended, as by over-intellectualising the speaker

may lose authenticity. The key to successful performance is
awareness of what is

happening now, in real time, and when orators go off script, they may
be

demonstrating their skill in authentic interaction with audiences. When

the appearance of artifice and manipulation disappear, the ghost of
the pup-pet master is no longer present, and an audience offers that
most essential precondition for persuasion – their trust.

Overview

What is distinctive about the approach taken here is that it does not
restrict itself to a single theoretical approach. Just as rival schools of
rhetoric –

Gogias, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle – emerged in ancient Greece,

so a

rich diversity of approaches has developed in the contemporary

period.

These range from the work of Norman Fairclough, drawing on

systemic-

functional linguistics (Fairclough, 1989, 1995, 2003, 2010); Teun van

Dijk’s extensive work on racist discourse (van Dijk, 2008) and Paul

Chilton’s (2004) and Ruth Wodak’s (Wodak and Meyer, 2015)

analysis of
ideology and political discourse. More recently, critical metaphor
analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2011, 2013) has received support
from, amongst

other, Goatly (2007), Musolff (2006, 2010) and Semino (2008). No

single

Introduction xix

approach offers an authoritative view of successful public

communication.

The purpose of illustrating and evaluating different approaches is to

gain

the benefits of triangulation. Just as we learn about a sculpture by

walk-

ing around it, so we learn about speeches by viewing them from

multiple

perspectives. It may ultimately depend on the characteristics of a

particular speech as to which approach is the most insightful, but
knowledge of more

than a single approach improves the quality of our methodology.

The book is divided into three parts, which are organised chronolog-

ically. Part I describes traditional approaches to oratory and

discourse,

as follows: Chapters 1 and 2 provide an overview of classical rhetoric,

and Chapter 3 examines the key concepts from traditional discourse
analysis that developed in the 1970s and 1980s: ‘cohesion’ and
‘coherence’. Together, these three chapters cover some essential
background in
understanding how speeches work from classical and traditional
linguistic

perspectives. Part II describes critical approaches to discourse and

public communication from the 1990s onwards. It is divided into four
chapters

– Chapter 4 discusses power, develops a model for analysing context

and

presents a theory of persuasion with reference to Emma Watson.

Chapter

5 examines how critical linguists draw on concepts such as modality

and

transitivity to analyse social agency. Chapter 6 offers an account of

one of the most well-known critical linguistic approaches – the
discourse-

historical approach (DHA). Chapter 7 discusses the ad hominem

attack in

the context of politeness theory and demonstrates how political

language

may be researched using corpus methods. Part III provides a

compre-

hensive account of Critical Metaphor Analysis. Chapter 8 provides an

introduction to metaphor studies and considers methodological issues
of

metaphor research. Chapter 9 includes a new section that compares

and evaluates conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory.
Chapter 10

further illustrates the author’s own critical approach to metaphor.

Each chapter starts by providing an overview of a theoretical
approach

to discourse analysis, supported by figures and diagrams and

illustrated

in model analyses of selected speeches. At the end of each chapter,

there

is a list of recommended readings. The speeches chosen to illustrate

par-

ticular discourse theories are seminal ones by British and American

politi-

cians, military leaders and actors, and are referred to as ‘core texts’.
New speeches that I have included in the second edition are those by
Emma

Watson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Julia Gillard, Donald Trump and Lady

Gaga.

All speeches concern contemporary issues of social, cultural and

political

importance, and illustrate effective persuasive strategies. Within the

chapters, structured exercises invite readers to check their
understanding of

key concepts, often by analysing additional speeches. Comments on

these

exercises are provided after the final chapter, and there is a glossary
at the end of the book.

Jonathan

Charteris-Black
Acknowledgements

Many of the extracts in this book come from the speeches of well-
known

orators. I would like to acknowledge both the orators and their speech

writers. In particular, I would like to thank Tim Collins and his

publisher, Lucas Alexander Whitley Ltd, for permission to use his
Eve-of-Battle

speech (core text 2). I would also like to thank Ruth Wodak and
Michael

Meyer and their publisher, Sage, for permission to use the discursive
strategies in Table 6.5 (reproduced by permission of SAGE
Publications from

Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis by Wodak and Meyer ©

Sage, 2009) and Teun van Dijk for permission to use his diagram
known as the

ideological square (Figure 5.1). I would also like to thank Mark Davies

for making accessible material in the British National Corpus and the

American Corpus of Contemporary English and Palgrave Macmillan

for

permission to use Figure 4.5 that originally appeared in my book

Politicians and Rhetoric (2011). In addition, I thank the anonymous
authors of the Grammar Lab for making available a corpus of
Trump/Clinton campaign

speeches.4 Finally, I acknowledge the various reactions of my

students at

the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

This book is dedicated to students of English Language and
Linguistics at

the University of the West of England, Bristol. Many past students

have

contributed by engaging with these speeches in a way that has been

enquir-

ing, inspiring and, usually, insightful. It is hoped that future students

will continue to do so.

4 www.thegrammarlab.com/?nor-portfolio=corpus-of-presidential-
speeches-

cops-and-a-clintontrump-corpus

xx

PART I

Traditional Approaches

to Rhetoric, Oratory and

Discourse

Chapter 1

Classical Rhetoric: Artistic Proofs

and Arrangement

1.1 Introduction: rhetoric, oratory and persuasion

Rhetoric is the formal study of persuasive communication and is

described

by Aristotle as the art of discovering all the available means of

persuasion in any given case. Classical rhetoricians were interested
in how speakers achieve their desired effects on audiences in
particular contexts, and

viewed rhetoric as an art capable of influencing civic life and shaping

society. Classical rhetoric trained speakers how to persuade in public

forums and institutions such as courtrooms and assemblies.

Developments

in communication technology have led to a convergence between the

styles

of written and spoken language. Contemporary professions that place

high

value on communicating persuasively include public relations, the

law,

marketing and advertising. Entrants to professions such as the law

employ

training methods that trace their origin to classical rhetoric, such as

practice in debating competitions (moots) that simulate authentic
scenarios.

It is worth asking why it is that ‘rhetoric’ has sometimes developed

a negative meaning in contemporary English – almost as a synonym

for

‘spin’, ‘manipulation’ or even ‘coercion’. For example, if we look in the

British National Corpus (Davies, 2004) we find that the most common
adjectives that precede ‘rhetoric’ are ‘political’, ‘public’, ‘mere’,
‘radical’,

‘empty’, ‘official’, ‘populist’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘revolutionary’. Others

include ‘simplistic’, ‘violent’, ‘hostile’ and ‘tub-thumping’. A very
common pattern is to contrast ‘rhetoric’ with ‘reality’, as in the
following extract: Mr Baker: That is the trouble with the Labour party:
one has to distinguish between its rhetoric and reality when it comes
to law and order.

This morning, the right hon. member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr

Hattersley) said that he wanted to see more policemen on the beat,

yet

when he was a member of the last Labour Cabinet he cut the number
of

policemen and left the police force under strength. (House of

Commons

Debate, 23 June 1992 [emphasis added])

All quoted speeches in this book were taken from the Hansard
Corpus, British Parliament,

Samuels Proect 2014–2016, www.hansard-corpus.org/x.asp.

4 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

This illustrates a typical semantic pattern in which ‘rhetoric’ is equated

with hypocrisy or falsehood, and ‘reality’ with truth. Does this just
reflect contemporary scepticism towards politicians because of their
poor track

record in resolving society’s woes? Well, up to a point, but in reality

the origin of this opposition between reality and rhetoric has deeper
roots
and can be traced back to a dispute between Plato and the Sophists
over

whether argument should be based primarily on dialectic or on

rhetoric.

The purpose of dialectic, as advocated by Plato, was the discovery of

knowledge, whereas the interest of rhetoric was in how persuasive

effects

could be achieved in specific circumstances – rather than in an

abstract

concept such as ‘Truth’. Plato believed that the purpose of philosophy

was to discover knowledge that was independent of any special

calcu-

lation of interest; he was suspicious of any approach that questioned

the primacy of Truth and placed this above all other considerations.
By

contrast, although rhetoric was not unconcerned with truth, its focus

was different: it was concerned with how certain ways of using

language

contributed to beliefs about what was true in political and judicial

circumstances.

An opposition therefore developed between rhetoric and dialectic:

dia-

lectic gave equal weight to both sides of an argument and proceeded

by
contrasting these with each other, whereas rhetoric was concerned
with

persuasion from a particular perspective, rather than giving both

sides of

the argument. A dialetical method of reasoning was by putting

forward an

argument, identifying a contradiction or inconsistency in the argument

so

that the original argument could be modified. For Plato, rhetoric

therefore was inherently deceptive because it only gave the
perspective that reflected the speaker’s point of view, and ignored
inconsistencies. However, for

rhetoricians, logical methods were just one of the means of

persuasion.

Plato would sympathise with the disdain towards rhetoric that is fre-

quently shown in public communication, as in the following from a

Trades

Union Congress:

John Major himself, when they put adverts in every press in Europe,

Come to Britain, our employees have no rights and they are cheap

labour. So it’s not rhetoric, it’s truth … The Thatcherite experiment

was a failure, no nonsense, a failure. There was no economic
miracle.

Britain’s industry is weaker now than it was fifteen years ago, and

sure as anything Britain is a much nastier place to live in. Forget the
rhetoric about the enterprise economy. Forget the bullshit about the
Citizen’s Charter. If you want to find the reality of Britain today, after
fourteen years of Conservatism, go to a DSS [Department of Social

Security] office, or a Job Centre, or a Citizens Advice Bureau, and

look at the misery of a country that will not provide sustenance and

dignity for its people. (Trades Union Annual Congress, 6 June 1993

[emphasis added])

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 5

Here, Plato would focus on the argument: the claim that things had
got

worse because of the Thatcherite experiment. But a rhetorician would

con-

sider how impassioned and self-righteous anger is communicated by

word

choices such as ‘cheap’, ‘failure’, ‘nonsense’, ‘weaker’, ‘nastier’,

‘bullshit’

and ‘misery’. Plato resisted the idea of persuasive appeals to interest

groups because he believed in a permanent and abstract truth – one
that would be

to the benefit of all: Thatcherism would be either right or wrong,

irrespective of whether one was speaking to a group of businessmen
or to a trade union.

But a rhetorician would demonstrate how, by showing his anger, the

speaker

is both establishing himself as a man with moral judgement and

conveying
commitment to an argument that is likely to win over a trade union
audience.

Aristotle restored the position of rhetoric as the counterpart of

dialectic by arguing that persuasion was an essential part of civic life

and that rhetoric co-ordinated human action by allowing people the

opportunity to debate alternative policies: this was preferable to

having

a specific policy forced upon them, and therefore rhetoric contributed

to democracy. He claimed that the origins of rhetoric are closely

related

to the origins of democracy because, if power was to be negotiated

and distributed to the people, there would need to be those who were

skilled in persuasion. Rhetoricians such as Aristotle and Quintilian

rec-

ognised that different contexts required different methods of

persuasion:

influencing political decisions would not require the same methods as

arguing legal cases or commemorating fallen heroes. Rhetoric

therefore

involved identifying, analysing and understanding the available

means

of persuasion, and working out which were appropriate in particular

circumstances. Rhetoricians still sought to distinguish between truth

and manipulation. But the development of rhetorical theory in ancient

Greece was motivated by the idea of a truth that varied according to

time, place and situation, rather than Plato’s idealised and permanent
truth. Aristotle also assumed that rhetoric could be learnt, which is
why he wrote The Art of Rhetoric.

Audiences are only persuaded when the speaker’s rhetoric is

successful.

In classical antiquity, the definition of rhetoric was ars bene dicendi,

‘the

art of speaking well in public’ (Nash, 1989). This definition assumed

that some people spoke better than others – the same assumption
that underlies debating competitions, parliamentary debates and
debates between

candidates for president or prime minister-or even Twitter debates.

The

most rhetorically successful speech is the most persuasive one, as

meas-

ured by audience response – which in the long run, in democracies,

is by

voting. Rhetoric may be said to have failed when an audience

expresses

opposition to the speaker’s underlying purposes. Western thought

has

oscillated between, on the one hand, the Platonic tradition – based on

an

abstract notion of truth – and, on the other, a ‘rhetoric’ that is

concerned with how truth can be represented so that it persuades.
Both Platonic and
Aristotelian traditions survive.

6 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Exercise 1.1

➢ Write a definition of rhetoric based on your own understanding of

the concept, using web-based and library sources.

➢ Undertake a search of the word ‘rhetoric’ in the Corpus of

Contemporary

American English (Davies, 2008). Note whether collocates of

‘rhetoric’ (i.e.

the words found in close proximity to ‘rhetoric’) are more or less

negative than those in the British National Corpus (Davies, 2004).
Explain why you

think this is the case.

1.2 Branches of oratory

Classical rhetoricians identified three branches of oratory:

deliberative,

forensic/judicial and epideictic. These can be differentiated by

analysis of circumstances, so the typical context of deliberative
oratory is in parliamentary or local governmental meetings; the typical
context of forensic/judicial oratory is in law courts; and the typical
context of epideictic oratory is in ceremonial events such as public
commemorations or funerals.

Deliberative oratory is delivered to a decision-making body with the

gen-

eral purpose of establishing the benefit or harm that may be expected

from
a certain course of action. Deliberative rhetoric considers different
possible outcomes from different courses of action and arrives at a
recommendation as to decisions about future action. The orator
seeks to recommend a

particular argument, drawing on whatever means of persuasion are

appro-

priate to win support for the action he or she is advocating. According

to

Aristotle, deliberative speeches typically consider one of the following

subjects: whether to go to war or to make peace, defence, imports
and exports.

The general purpose ( skopos) of a deliberative speech is to judge

the course of action that would be most likely to enhance human
happiness. Aristotle

went on to propose that what are useful or advantageous are the

measures

for achieving happiness; these can be understood in terms of actions

that

contribute to socially valuable outcomes.

Forensic speeches are addressed to a court or legal assembly that

requires judgements to be made about guilt or innocence in relation

to past actions, such as a crime. The orator seeks to accuse or

defend

a suspect by drawing on evidence and arguments for either upholding

or rejecting an accusation of guilt. Forensic rhetoric considers

different
possible interpretations of evidence to arrive at a recommendation as
to

the guilt or innocence of those on whom judgement is being passed.

So a

typical forensic speech is that made by the counsel for the

prosecution in

a courtroom. The purpose of forensic oratory is to arrive at a just

deci-

sion in keeping with the law.

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 7

Originating from the Greek word for ‘show’ or ‘display’, epideictic

oratory is addressed to an audience that is not required to make a

decision but is assembled to honour or commemorate a particular
individual, or

individuals, in an event such as a death or a marriage. The orator

seeks

to display his own eloquence in evaluating another by praise or

criticism,

and to arouse the emotions that are appropriate to the ceremonial

occa-

sion. We may think typically of funeral eulogies or speeches

remembering

the war dead as typical of this genre. But there are other types of
epid-

eictic speech, such as motivational talks given by chief executives to

their employees, or by head teachers in schools, or speeches given
by recipients

of awards – such as Oscars.

The three branches of oratory vary in three ways:

◇ The types of response they expect of the audience – voting

(deliberative), passing judgement (forensic) or applauding
(epideictic).

◇ Their social purpose – for example, whether they are concerned

with

influencing policy (deliberative), ensuring justice (forensic) or

celebrating someone’s life (epideictic).

◇ Their time orientation – towards the future (deliberative), the past

(forensic) or the present (epideictic).

It follows that the methods of persuasion need to be modified in

keeping

with what is most likely to be effective in the specific speech context.

Consideration of effect or impact makes speech-making an art rather

than

an exercise in philosophical enquiry, and speech-making could both

create

a reputation for the speaker and influence the social world. Figure 1.1
summarises the branches of oratory according to classical rhetorical
theory:

Branches of

oratory
Deliberative

Forensic

Epideictic

Figure 1.1 Branches of oratory.

What is interesting about the identification and analysis of branches

of

oratory is how closely they relate to modern ways of thinking about

how

language is influenced by considerations of social purpose and

context.

The division between these branches could be modified to reflect

blending

between these genres, as a speech can be oriented towards a future

course

of action (deliberative) but at the same time honour the contribution of

an

8 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

individual (epideictic). However, overall these three branches of

oratory

have stood the test of time quite well, as they highlight how a speech
event can be classified according to its social purpose, its audience
and the role played by this audience.

Exercise 1.2

Draw a table with three columns, giving each one a heading with one
of the
branches of oratory. Now position the following speeches in the table:

➢ An Oscar awards acceptance speech (a)

➢ An objection to an application at a council planning meeting (b)

➢ A pre-match address by a coach to his team (c)

➢ A defence speech given by Tony Blair at the International Criminal

Court (d)

➢ A speech given at a college prize-giving (e)

➢ A post-match address to the team by the coach (f)

1.3 The proofs

Irrespective of the branch of oratory, Aristotle proposed a distinction

between artistic and inartistic proofs. The inartistic proofs were not
based in language at all, but in sources of persuasion that existed
before oratory, such as laws or evidence from witnesses, evidence
taken under oath or even

evidence from slaves obtained by torture. The artistic proofs were

known

as ethos, logos and pathos, and these were created through oratory.
From

these terms, we derive the words ‘ethical’, ‘logical’ and ‘empathetic’,

which provide insight into these appeals. As with the tripartite
classification of speech types, Aristotle’s identification of three artistic
proofs has generally been accepted by classical scholars and is still
considered relevant in understanding persuasive language and
rhetoric. The type of appeal that was to
be employed was likely to depend on the type of speech, its position
in the speech and the style that the orator was adopting. We shall
now consider

each of the artistic proofs in turn.

1.3.1 Ethos: character

Initially, when an orator is seeking to establish a relationship with an

audience, the appeal should be based on the character of the
speaker: that is,

his or her ethos – practical wisdom, goodwill and virtue – which

together

would contribute to his or her overall ethical credibility. For example,

when an orator commences a speech by rejecting the eulogies with
which he has

been introduced, he displays the virtue of modesty. Or when an orator

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 9

argues a case for a course of action ‘because it is right’ (as did

Thatcher, Blair and Cameron), he is assuming a set of values that are
shared with the audience. Demonstrating ethical credibility is
necessary to establish trust, and trust is an equivalent in
contemporary oratory to ‘goodwill’ in classical oratory. Both ‘goodwill’
and ‘trust’ are based in a belief that someone in a position of authority
is concerned primarily with the interests of the people he or she is
representing rather than his or her own personal interests, since only
then will they be persuaded by his arguments. Politics is about
building trust, and because of an increasing awareness of
manipulation of public opinion through media presentation and the
‘massaging’ of consent, trust

has become a rare commodity in democracies. Orators need to

convince
followers that they and their policies can be trusted. I shall illustrate
this with reference to two contemporary examples: one from British
and one

from American politics.

When announcing his candidacy for the Labour Party leadership in

May 2007, at a critical point near the beginning of the speech Gordon

Brown made an appeal to ethos:

For me, my parents were – and their inspiration still is – my moral

compass. The compass which has guided me through each stage of
my life.

They taught me the importance of integrity and decency, treating peo-

ple fairly, and duty to others. And now the sheer joy of being a father

myself – seeing young children develop, grow and flourish – like for
all

parents, has changed my life. Alongside millions juggling the

pressures

of work, I struggle too to be what I want to be – a good parent.

(Speech

announcing candidacy for Labour Party Leadership, May 2007

[empha-

sis added])

By using the phrase ‘moral compass’, Brown represents himself as

someone

motivated by a desire to pass on the legacy of good parenting he has

inher-
ited from his parents. This is an appeal based on moral character, to
imply that he shares the same values as the British people. But ethos
is established in different ways according to the political style of the
individual and their culture; the British politician Boris Johnson seeks
to establish trust through humour, because in Britain audiences tend
to trust someone who they can

laugh with. Consider the following:

Over the last couple of months I have sat in all kinds of EU meetings
vast

and ruminative feasts of lunch or dinner in the castles of Mitteleuropa

washed down with the finest wines known to man and on one
occasion

a splendid breakfast that seemed to stretch, for course after course,

from

8 am to 11 and I have enjoyed them all. I have made friends,

alliances

and had wonderful conversations in my various euro-creoles but I

have

to tell any lingering gloomadon-poppers that never once have I felt

that

10 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

this country would be in any way disadvantaged by extricating our-

selves from the EU treaties and indeed there are some ways in which
we

will be liberated to be more active on the world stage than ever before

because we are not leaving Europe. (2 October 2016)

By contrast with Brown’s ‘moral compass’ Johnson represents himself

humorously as the beneficiary of extravagant hospitality consumption,

because his image is not that of the high moral ground. He coins new

expressions while making a serious point to enhance his credibility by

not

appearing to be too serious a person. Later he continues:

I am not going to pretend that this country is something we are not.

Every day I go into an office so vast that you could comfortably fit two

squash courts and so dripping with gilt bling that it looks like
something

from the Kardashians …

He appeals to ethos by being frank about the material benefits of his

position – while maintaining a humorous tone.

A major argument of Obama’s criticism of the preceding presidency

was

that the Iraq War had cost so many lives and resources that it had led
to a loss of trust by the American people in their elected leaders:

When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and
assurances,

for waiting and patience, is over. Too many lives have been lost and
too

many billions have been spent for us to trust the president on another

tried and failed policy opposed by generals and experts, Democrats

and
Republicans, Americans and many of the Iraqis themselves. It is time

for us to fundamentally change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their

country back. And it is time to re-focus America’s efforts on the chal-

lenges we face at home and the wider struggle against terror yet to
be

won. (30 January 2007)

The need to regain trust, then, became a major theme of Obama’s

election

campaign; for example:

We can seek to regain not just an office, but the trust of the American

people that their leaders in Washington will tell them the truth. That’s

the choice in this election. (22 April 2008)

Making an explicit statement about his own moral character would

have

undermined the appeal of virtue, since immodesty is not compatible

with

humility. So his strategy was to imply that he had a better character

than the present leader, because Bush could not be trusted.

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 11

A similar appeal to ethos was made by Trump in his election

campaign

when he presented an image of himself as a much more reliable and

trust-

worthy individual than Hillary Clinton:

If we let the Clinton cartel run this government, history will record that

2017 was the year America lost its independence. We will not let that

happen. It is time. It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, DC.

This is why I’m proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our

gov-

ernment honest once again. (18 October 2016)

His major argument was that his major rival for office was dishonest

and, by contrast, he embodied honesty. He used the expression

‘drain the

swamp’ at least 62 times in his campaign speeches and it became a

meta-

phor that symbolised his claim to ethos. For example, supporters

would

write the slogan on a sign:

Drain the swamps, you’ve gotta ‘drain the swamp’ sign back there;

we’re going to drain the swamp, believe me. (27 October 2016)

Trump was alert to the potential of the phrase ‘drain the swamp’ for
interacting with audiences and his use of it grew in both length and
frequency through his campaign until it became his prime metaphor
for establishing ethos:

My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end

government

corruption. I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear

the
words we are all about to say. When we win on November 8th, we are

going to drain the swamp. I keep telling people, I hated that

expression.

I said it’s so hokey. And then one group heard it, they went crazy.
Another group heard it, then we had a big, big rally in Florida. They
went crazy

about it, and now I love it. It’s true. It’s very accurate. (28 October
2016) Notice how the image of ‘draining a swamp’ is a synonym for
‘end government corruption’ but also how he claims to have disliked
the phrase

initially, and only come to love it because of its popular appeal. This
implies that he is a leader who establishes credibility by not allowing
personal preferences to override popular choice. In subsequent
campaign speeches he

further elaborated the theme of adaptability to the people’s taste in

imagery: I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear
and heed

the words we all are about to say, we all – you ready? Isn’t it amazing

how this phrase has gone up? I didn’t like it. I thought it was corny.

I thought it was really sort of a corny phrase – I didn’t like it. When we

win on November 8th, we are going to Washington, DC, and we are

going to drain the swamp. I thought it was corny, and then I went to

one rally and another, and they’re all screaming, “Drain the swamp.”

12 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

But Frank Sinatra didn’t like ‘My Way’ – he didn’t like it until he sang
it – the audience went crazy, sang it again, became number one. All
of

a sudden, he loved it very much. (4 November 2016)

The phrase established Trump’s ethos in two complementary ways: in

terms

of semantic content, the idea of draining the swamp refers to actions

that

improve the moral basis for government.1 At the same time, the
catchphrase

shows him as credible because he accommodates to popular style:

by ‘doing it his way’ he is also doing it the way that his supporters
prefer. Situations that lead rapidly to loss of trust are corruption
scandals, when politicians siphon off public funds or make unjustified
expense claims or use their positions to earn sexual favours. These
are especially damaging for orators, since they

imply that they are acting in their own self-interest rather than in the
interests of the group. Trump was able to reject accusations of self-
interest by attributing these entirely to his rivals. But ethos is an
appeal in which behaviour has to match language and subsequent
criticisms of Trump have sought to

undermine his ethos by arguing that he is morally contaminated –

both by his chauvinism and by claimed collusion with Russia to win
the election.

Exercise 1.3

Read the first and last two paragraphs of Barack Obama’s inaugural
speech (see Core Text 1 at the end of the chapter), and identify any
appeals to ethos (the character of the speaker; his wisdom, goodwill
and virtue). Discuss these values.

1.3.2 Logos: reason

Logos, or the appeal to arguments based in reason, was the second
of the

artistic proofs. As we shall see when looking at ‘arrangement’,

argument

was the only obligatory stage in a speech according to Aristotle. It is

also central to the rhetorical canon of invention, as it is necessary to
have ideas that are based on arguments grounded in reason. Logos
represents a proposition so that it can be judged according to
whether it accords with everyday experience. The most persuasive
means of arguing is by a syllogism; this is a structure in which there is
a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. For a conclusion
to be accepted, both premises need to be things that

the audience already accept as true. Figure 1.2 illustrates a typical

syllogism

to support an argument on the financing of university education.

Acceptance of the conclusion is only possible if the audience accepts

an

ideal of social equality, and the proposition that a graduate tax is

socially equitable. One way of attacking the logical structure of this
syllogism

would be to challenge the assumptions behind one of the premises.

For

example, the assumption that social equality is desirable could be

rejected on the grounds that it encourages a lack of effort and a
tendency to rely

1 see p. 234 for a detailed analysis of the phrase as a metaphor.

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 13

on others; this might lead to the counterargument that universities
should

be financed entirely by the students. Conversely, someone could

attack the

idea that a graduate tax is socially equitable, because if everyone in

society was to benefit from higher education it could be argued that it
is more

equitable to have a completely free system of education.

Classical rhetoricians preferred to use incomplete syllogisms by

leaving

part of the argument unstated, as this could draw the audience into
making

an inference in the conclusion. This type of argument based on an

incom-

plete syllogism is known as an enthymeme. Figure 1.3 illustrates this.

[Major premise] Universities need a socially equitable means of

funding.

[Minor premise] A graduate tax is a socially equitable method of

funding.

[Conclusion] Therefore universities need to support a graduate tax.

Figure 1.2 Structure of a syllogism.

[Premise] Universities need a socially equitable means of funding.

[Conclusion] Therefore universities need to support a graduate tax.

Figure 1.3 Structure of an enthymeme.

Here the audience is implicitly invited to supply, or infer, the missing

premise: ‘A graduate tax is a socially equitable method of funding’.

The rhetorical effect is that the audience believes they have arrived at
the conclusion on their own, rather than because of an argument
supplied by the orator.

Logical argument can be strengthened by backing up one of the

prem-

ises with a persuasive reason; so the enthymeme in Figure 1.3 could

be

modified as in Figure 1.4.

[Premise] A graduate tax is a fair way of funding universities.

[Reason] After all, with taxation, the more you earn, the more you
pay.

[Conclusion] So people should support a graduate tax.

Figure 1.4 Reason.

Here the reason explains the principle of progressive taxation to

justify why a graduate tax might be viewed as socially equitable.
Figure 1.5 shows another

way of strengthening an argument – that is, by some kind of

comparison.

[Premise] Universities need a socially equitable means of funding.

[Reason] After all, with taxation, the more you earn, the more you
pay.

[Analogy] Graduates pay tax, just like everyone else in employment.

[Conclusion] So people should support a graduate tax.

Figure 1.5 Comparison/analogy.

The analogy here removes any distinction between graduates and

non-graduates when it comes to taxation.

14 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

1.3.2.1 Refuting arguments

A common way to refute and reject an argument is by presenting an

opponent’s argument in the form of a counterposition as a preliminary

to

refuting it with a counterargument. This also provides an opportunity

to

introduce an alternative position.

Here is an example of a typical way of refuting an argument:

1 Present a counterposition

It might be thought that higher tuition fees and putting universities

completely into a free market situation is the only way they can get
sufficient funding.

2 Refute the counterposition

But in reality that is not the case, because there are other ways of
funding universities.

3 Offer an alternative position

They could be funded entirely through general taxation, through a

com-

bination of general taxation and lower fees, or by a graduate tax.

I shall illustrate refutation in the context of the second American presi-

dential debate on 9 October 2016; two days before the debate, the
2005

Access Hollywood Tape was released, which records Trump having

made

lewd comments about women: ‘You know I’m automatically attracted

to

beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t
even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it – you can do
anything …

grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.’ The recording became
a

topic in the debate and was introduced by the moderator:

MODERATOR: We received a lot of questions online, Mr Trump,

about the tape that was released on Friday, as you can imagine. You

called what you said ‘locker room banter’. You described kissing

women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual

assault.

You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you under-

stand that?

TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I don’t think you understood what

was – this was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologise to my

family. I apologise to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of

it. But this is locker room talk.

In his refutation, Trump first denies the accusation, then mitigates the

original offence by contextualising it as ‘locker room talk’; the

metonym

of the ‘locker room’ implies that in all-male environments such

language

is normal; he does not deny the offence, but apologises before

returning to a defence based on the ‘locker room’ euphemism.
Seeking to develop the

opportunity offered her, Hillary Clinton developed the attack on

Trump’s

character by refuting his defence:

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 15

What we all saw and heard on Friday was Donald talking about

women, what he thinks about women, what he does to women, and

he

has said that the video doesn’t represent who he is. (1)

But I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it, that it represents exactly
who he is. Because we have seen this throughout the campaign. We
have seen

him insult women. We have seen him rate women on their

appearance,

ranking them from one to ten, we’ve seen him embarrass women on
TV

and on Twitter. We saw him, after the first debate, spend nearly a
week
denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal
terms. (2) So, yes, this is who Donald Trump is. But it’s not only
women, and

it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be our

president. Because he has also targeted immigrants, African

Americans,

Latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims and so many others.

(3)

Here she refutes his self-defence by:

1 Presenting a counterposition – She puts forward the

counterposition that Trump denies that this is a fair representation of
him and implies that

he has changed.

2 Refuting the counterposition – She puts forward the premise that he

insults women. She then provides reasons in the form of examples of

how he has not changed: during the campaign he has rated women
on

their appearance, embarrassed them and insulted a former Miss

Universe.

3 Offering an alternative position – Clinton develops her alternative

position by extending the premise that he insults women to other
groups, including

immigrants, non-whites, disabled people, Muslims, and so on. By

broaden-

ing the claim, she seeks to undermine his ethical credibility through
reasoned argument. In terms of logical argument, she is persuasive,
but although she may have been winning in the appeal to reason
through logos, she was losing the appeal to the emotions, and it is to
these that I turn next.

Exercise 1.4

Analyse the structure of this syllogism by identifying (1) the major

premise, (2) the minor premise and (3) the conclusion:

Going to university requires young people to take on a large debt.

It is unwise for young people to go to university.

It is unwise for young people to take on large debt.

➢ Rewrite the syllogism in the form of an enthymeme.

➢ Add a further reason in support of the argument.

➢ Add an analogy to support the argument.

➢ Now write a refutation of the argument.

16 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

1.3.3 Pathos: emotion

Aristotle emphasised the importance of making appeals based on

emotion,

and described these as the artistic proof of pathos. Emotions could

be

aroused by evoking fear of injury, sympathy with an aggrieved party

or

anger arising from an insult. Aristotle’s definition of emotion was that

it was characterised by pleasure (e.g. happiness) and by pain (e.g.
anger and
fear). His view of emotions is that they are cognitive in nature
because they have a cause, such as a source of fear or anger, and
because they lead us

to make evaluations which in turn influence our opinions and

judgements.

He identified emotions as having an object and a ground

(Fortenbaugh,

2007, p. 117), this means that they are directed towards something,
so, to use a contemporary example, someone might be angry with
the North

Korean leader (the object) because of his testing of nuclear weapons

(the

grounds for feeling angry). But emotions could also be aroused

through

humour; a good example of this was when Ronald Reagan was

asked

by Bob Hope what it felt like to be president. He replied, ‘It’s not a lot

different than being an actor, except I get to write the script.’ The
arousal of emotion was a controversial issue in classical rhetoric, as
rhetoricians debated the extent to which it was acceptable in
developing arguments.

Perhaps the most eloquent case arguing for the connection between
lan-

guage and emotion occurs in the speech Praise of Helen by Gorgias:

Speech is a great prince, with a tiny body and strength unseen, he

per-
forms marvellous works. He can make fear case, take away pain,
instil

joy, increase pity … For just as various drugs expel various humours

from the body … Some speeches give pain, some pleasure; some
fear,

some confidence. (Konstan in Worthington, 2007, p. 413) As we have

seen, Plato believed the purpose of philosophy was to discover

the truth, and he saw emotion as opposed to reason because it was

likely

to impair judgement. By contrast, Aristotle argued that because

emotional

responses could be influenced by reason – for example when

someone is

upset about the irrationality of an argument – so it was also

acceptable that rational argument could be influenced by the
emotions, and so pathos was

acceptable as an artistic proof. As Fortenbaugh (2007, p. 117) puts it:

‘An orator of wisdom, virtue and goodwill advances reasonable
arguments, and

in doing so, he excites emotional responses that are appropriate to

the situation.’ Aristotle therefore held that cognition and emotion were
not independent of each other, but interrelated: because thought
could cause emotion, so emotion could reciprocate by contributing to
an intelligent response to an

argument. This recognition that emotional appeals could also be

reasonable

ones was an important development.

This can be illustrated with reference to the Brexit debate in the
United

Kingdom: while some supporters of Brexit based their arguments on

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 17

reasonable claims, overall emotional ones were more significant:

these

included the emotions aroused by the idea of being ‘free’ or

‘independent’

from an external source of power, the emotion of fear of being

overwhelmed

by immigration from Europe and emotional antipathy towards the

bureau-

cratic style of the EU and the claimed arrogance of its leaders. The
pro-Leave supporting Boris Johnson is a politician whose reputation
was established

primarily through his appeal to pathos by humour as in the opening to

a

speech during the referendum campaign to the big business logistics

group,

Europa:

Well thank you very much, Andrew, and good morning everybody.

What a pleasure, what a privilege to be here at this incredible firm

Europa, which of course is the single market. This is it; this is the
abso-
lute quintessential British success in Europe and will remain so in or
out

of the European Union. I apologise for being late—we need to take

back

control of Southeast trains [LAUGHTER], apart from anything else

and

about time [that] TFL [Transport for London], about time TFL were

given the run around. (11 March 2016)

Here he commences by implying that leaving the European Union

does

not equate with leaving the single market, he then alludes

humorously to

the most effective of the Brexit campaign’s slogans ‘Take back

control’ –

eliciting laughter from the audience. A further illustration of his

command of pathos is in the following:

If we vote to leave the EU, we will not be voting to leave Europe. Of

all

the arguments they make, this is the one that infuriates me the most.
In a

hotly contested field [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE], I am a child

of Europe. I am, as I say, a liberal cosmopolitan; my family is a

genetic

equivalent of the UN peacekeeping force. I can read novels in French

—
I think I’ve even read a novel in Spanish—and I can sing the ‘Ode to
Joy’ in German [audience shout encouragement for him to sing and
laughter] and

I will; if you keep—if you keep accusing me of being a Little

Englander,

I will. [Three-second pause] Hang on, Freude, schoener

Goetterfunken.

[Laughter] Anyway, you know it—you know it. (9 May 2016)

Laughter and other forms of approval indicate that the audience’s

emo-

tions were aroused by his choice of language and his singing

performance.

Conversely, although some opponents of Brexit were emotionally

allied to

a European identity, a greater number relied on arguments based on

rea-

son: the threat that loss of trade with Europe presented to the
economy and the danger of loss of cheaper labour for specific
industries such as vegetable and fruit picking and in the National
Health Service. The success of the

Brexit campaign therefore illustrates the primacy of arguments based

on

pathos over those rooted in appeals to logos.

18 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Pathos was also employed directly after the Leave campaign won the
referendum in Nigel Farage’s stinging rebuke delivered to the
European

Parliament:

Funny, isn’t it? Funny, isn’t it? Thank you very much for that very
warm

welcome. Funny, isn’t it? When I came here 17 years ago, and I said

that I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the EU, you
all

laughed at me. Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?

This rebuke was followed later by a personal attack on the MEPs:

I know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your

lives or worked in business or worked in trade or, indeed, ever

created

a job, but listen, just listen. [Jeering from other MEPs (members of
the

European Parliament)] (28 June 2016)

However, his real audience comprised remote supporters whom he

knew

would hear the speech if he was sufficiently provocative, there is no

doubt that many of these would have found the criticism of MEPs
amusing in the

intensity of its satire. I will discuss Farage’s rhetoric further in relation

to the theme of impoliteness as entertainment in Chapter 7.

Exercise 1.5
Examine the following extracts from Donald Trump’s inaugural
speech, and

decide what emotions are being aroused:

1. For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the
rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
Washington flourished

– but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered –
but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment
protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories
have not been your victories.

Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they
celebrated in

our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families
all across our land.

2. That all changes – starting right here and right now, because this
moment is your moment: it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone
gathered here today

and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is
your

celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country. ...

3. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this
day

forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first. …

4. A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights, and heal our
divisions.

It’s time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget:
that
whether we are black, or brown, or white, we all bleed the same red
blood

of patriots. …

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 19

1.4 Arrangement in classical rhetoric

The five canons of rhetoric were invention, arrangement, style, mem-

ory and delivery. Initially there is a need to gain hold of the audience’s

attention through heurisis (‘discovery’) and then to develop or ‘invent’

arguments in the way that is described in the section on logos. This

sec-

tion focuses on arrangement, or taxis. We may think of arrangement

in terms of the distinct stages or parts of a speech and how the
sequence

of these parts could influence an audience. It was at the planning

stage

of a speech that orators would need to consider the sequence of the

various arguments they had identified at the invention or heurisis

phase, and which artistic proofs would be most persuasive for each
part. There

were discrepancies among classical orators as to the number of parts

into which a speech might be divided and what types of appeal might

be most effective in each of these. In the fourth and fifth centuries,

there was a division into four parts, however, and in the standard
work on
rhetoric in Renaissance times, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, there
were six parts. In my account below, I take a compromise position by
outlining five parts.

Although there is no generally agreed canonical order, according to

Aristotle, speeches required a minimum of four parts: an introduction

(known in Greek as prooimion and which I shall refer to as the

‘prologue’) and a narrative phase followed by a proof and a
conclusion (or epilogue).

The form of the narrative would vary according to the branch of

oratory;

for example, an epideictic speech would require only a narration,

whereas

a deliberative speech would require an argument, and a forensic

speech

would require proof in support of an argument. In forensic speeches,

there

would also be a part where the opponents’ arguments were rejected

(refu-

tation). More important than enumerating parts is the rhetorical

purpose

of each part and how this contributed to the overall argument, as I

illus-

trate below.

1 The Prologue (prooimion)

The first part was a prologue, in which the orator sought to create
rapport with the audience and to arouse interest. Some techniques,
such as flattery or an appeal to goodwill, were directed towards the
audience; others, such

as a confession of inadequacy or of a lack of expertise on the part of

the

speaker, were directed more towards establishing the ethos or

character of

the orator. Frequently, an orator would establish empathy by

demonstrat-

ing that he shared the same values as the audience by using the first
person plural pronoun, ‘we’, and by displaying his humility towards
the audience.

Interest could be aroused by emphasising the importance of the topic

of

the speech or creating surprise; consider the opening to Obama’s

speech

against the Iraq War, given in October 2002:

20 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all

circum-

stances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it

was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes,

that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of
slavery

from our soil.

The decision regarding whether to go to war is probably the most
impor-

tant of all topics of deliberative speeches, and Obama, who had

become

associated with opposition to the Iraq War, starts by refuting the

argument that he is opposed to all war. The directness of the opening
arouses interest in the audience, and the statement of ethical position
seeks to establish

common ethical ground with his listeners. He shares with them a

favour-

able disposition towards war in some circumstances and that he is

not a

pacifist, and refutes a possible counterargument to the main

argument of

his speech that opposes the war in Iraq.

An attention-arousing prologue also characterises Trump’s speeches;

these frequently commence with a direct attack on the present

government

policy:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. So amazing. Rudy just left. He

just

said, ‘I don’t believe this. This is unbelievable.’ Nobody believes it.

The crowds we’re getting – I’m the messenger, but I’ll tell you what,
the
message is the right message. We’re tired of incompetence. We’re
tired

of not taking care of our military. We’re tired of not taking care of our

vets, who are being taken care of very poorly. (9 August 2016)

A similar highlighting of failings of the current government occurs at

the

start of a speech:

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political

establish-

ment with a new government controlled by you, the American People.

There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they

will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense.

(13 October 2016)

This style of prologue anticipates the narrative and reflects politeness

norms in which it is acceptable to go directly to the crux of the

argument rather than paying extended attention to the face of the
audience: it contributed to ethos by avoiding the accusation of being
obsequious. It is

driven by the desire to hold attention by not beating about the bush
and

the demands of competing forms of interest on contemporary

audiences

who do not have the time to listen to extended appeals to their

goodwill.
Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 21

2 The Narrative (narratio)

The purpose of the narrative is to outline the main arguments by

setting

out the central facts of a case; the way these facts were laid out
would

frame whatever arguments might follow, so the orator uses the

narrative to

establish key information in a way that will provide a springboard for

his

main argument. Unlike the prologue, which is usually oriented

towards the

orator, the narrative is directed towards the events that it is claimed

have occurred or will occur, and which will form the topic of the
argument.

In a Democratic National Convention speech, Obama continued a

brief

autobiographical account with the following:

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American

story,

that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no

other country on Earth is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather

to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our

skyscrapers or the power of our military or the size of our economy.

Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a
declara-

tion made over 200 years ago, ‘We hold these truths to be self-
evident,

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator

with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness.’

Notice how Obama frames his argument in support of Democratic

policies

within a epideictic ‘grand’ narrative that makes the transition from his

personal life story – ‘my story’ – to ‘the larger American story’; he

then

frames this larger, social story by quoting a section from the American

Declaration of Independence, which it is assumed that all his

audience

will both recognise and support. He argues that such a transition is

only

possible in America because the country is founded on ideals of

equality.

Trump’s narrative in his campaign speeches was to outline the dual

argu-

ments that internally America was suffering from corrupt government

and

that externally it was being cheated by overseas governments –

either by
unfair trade arrangements, or by relying on the US economy for its
defence

protection. This is evident in extracts 1 and 3 shown in exercise 1.5

above.

It also occurs elsewhere:

The Washington establishment, and the financial and media

corporations

that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. …

But the central base of world political power is here in America, and it
is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind
the

efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working

people. Their financial resources are unlimited. Their political

resources

are unlimited. Their media resources are unlimited. And, most impor-

tantly, the depths of their immorality is unlimited. (13 October 2016)

22 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

In his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention:

Tonight, I will share with you my plan for action for America. The most

important difference between our plan and that of our opponent is

that

our plan will put America first.

[APPLAUSE]

Crowd: USA. USA. USA. USA. USA.

[APPLAUSE]

Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led

by

politicians who will not put America first, then we can be assured that
other nations will not treat America with respect. The respect that we
deserve.

[APPLAUSE]

The American people will come first once again.

My plan will begin with safety at home. Which means, safe neighbor-

hoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be

no prosperity without law and order! (Speech to Republican National

Convention, 21 July 2016)

Trump’s narrative is one in which it is ethically right both to put a

unified and homogeneous ‘people’ as the centre of policy and for
nation states

to put their own interests first: whatever differences exist within a

single nation are backgrounded while differences of interests
between nation states are foregrounded.

The Proof

Following the narrative (or sometimes integrated with it) is the ‘proof’
– a part in which the orator identifies whether the argument will draw
primarily on the artless or artistic proofs and which of the artistic
proofs are most likely to be persuasive. The proof is at the very kernel
of a speech,

and its nature varies according to the speech circumstances. In the

Party
Convention speech, Obama’s proof of his argument that social need
should

override individual interest took the form of citing a number of cases

that illustrated human interdependence:

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the

south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s

not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for

her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent,
that

makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an

Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney

or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamen-

tal belief – I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 23

makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual

dreams yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E

pluribus

unum.’ Out of many, one. (Speech to Democratic National

Convention,

27 July 2004)

By personalising the argument in this way, he is appealing to pathos.

In his campaign speeches, Trump’s proof took the form of elaborating
the theme

of government inefficiency or corruption:

The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group

responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigra-

tion and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country

dry.

The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our

factories, and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other coun-

tries all around the world. …

It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic deci-

sions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its

wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large
corpo-

rations and political entities. …

This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. And this will be our
last chance to save it. (13 November 2016)

While arousing the emotions, Trump’s appeal is also rooted in

appeals to

ethos as he represents himself as a saviour of the people who will

end pol-

icies whereby large corporations drive government policy. In his

inaugural

speech, he puts forward proof that America’s national interests have

not

been upheld by the policies of previous governments:

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of

American industry, subsidised the armies of other countries while

allow-

ing for the very sad depletion of our military. We’ve defended other

nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own. And we’ve spent

trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure

has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich

while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has

dissipated

over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our
shores

with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American

workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has
been

ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.
But

that is the past, and now we are looking only to the future. (Inaugural

Address, 20 January 2017)

24 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

By arousing anger in the harm that has been done to America, Trump
seeks

to further establish his ethos as a leader who can project American

interests and overcome the harm that has been done.

3 The Refutation
The refutation can either be treated as part of the proof (as we saw in

the discussion of Obama’s proof) or as a separate part, where the

orator

tackles his opponents’ arguments; this can involve naming the

opponent,

attacking his character or ethos and presenting an opponent’s

argument

prior to its rejection. Obama used an interesting strategy for refutation

in the 2008 election campaign to refute the policies of his opponent:

We already know what we’re getting from the other party’s nominee.

John McCain has offered this country a lifetime of service, and we

respect that, but what he’s not offering is any meaningful change from

the policies of George W. Bush (1). John McCain believes that

George

Bush’s Iraq policy is a success, so he’s offering four more years of a

war

with no exit strategy; a war that’s sending our troops on their third
tour, and fourth tour, and fifth tour of duty; a war that’s costing us
billions of dollars a month and hasn’t made us any safer … (2) We
already know

that John McCain offers more of the same. The question is not
whether

the other party will bring about change in Washington – the question
is,

will we? (3) (Pennsylvania, Indiana, 22 April 2008)

In (1) Obama rejects an appeal based on attacking his opponent’s
war

record, because it was known that McCain had had a successful

military

career; instead, Obama establishes his own ethos by showing himself

to be

above making cheap personal gibes. This allows him in (2) to put
forward a

counterargument that ‘McCain believes that Bush’s Iraq policy is a

success’

followed by refutation based on the proof of logos. The general

argument

is that similar policies to those of George W. Bush would be

continued

by John McCain. He provides three reasons why the war is

unsuccessful:

(i) there is no plan for ending it; (ii) it is expensive; and (iii) it has not
achieved its objective of ensuring security. In (3) he links his
opponent

very clearly with a widely discredited George W. Bush by assuming

that

McCain’s reluctance to withdraw from Iraq implies a continuation of

Bush’s policies. The Democrats offer more possibility of change

because

Obama has proved in the foregoing argument that McCain will simply
con-
tinue with previous (discredited) Republican policies. Notice how,
through

repetition of McCain’s name, he keeps the focus of his attack in clear

sight, but it is an attack based on ethos and logos rather than on
pathos.

In section 1.3.2.1, we saw examples of how Trump refuted the claims

that he supported sexual harassment of women and then how, in

turn,

Clinton refuted his claim to have changed in his behaviour.

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 25

4 The Epilogue

Lord Mancroft made an insightful and imaginative analogy to

emphasise

the skill required in the epilogue: ‘A speech is like a love affair. Any
fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill’ ( Reader’s
Digest, February 1967). Rhetorical theory proposed that the purpose
of the epilogue was to bring the focus of the speech back to the
orator by summa-

rising or recapitulating the main arguments and by an arousing

appeal to

the audience’s emotions. This was especially important in situations

where

an audience might be taking a decision following the speech – for

example

a vote in a deliberative speech, a verdict in a forensic one or

applause in an epideictic one. Consider how Obama ends the
Pennsylvania campaign
speech:

It is now our turn to follow in the footsteps of all those generations

who

sacrificed and struggled and faced down the greatest odds to perfect
our

improbable union. And if we’re willing to do what they did; if we’re

willing to shed our cynicism and our doubts and our fears; if we’re
will-

ing to believe in what’s possible again; then I believe that we won’t

just

win this primary election, we won’t just win this election in November,

we will change this country, and keep this country’s promise alive in
the

twenty-first century. Thank you, and may God Bless the United States

of America. (Indiana, 22 April 2008)

The purpose of this ending was to motivate Democratic activists in

the

final stage of an election campaign with the prospect of the longer-

term idealistic benefits of a Democratic success. It is noticeable how

he uses the collective pronoun ‘we’; this is in contrast to Trump’s

epilogues that typically project himself personally as the catalyst of

social change:

My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty

pledge.
It reads, ‘I’m with her.’ I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge

reads, ‘I’m with you, the American people.’

[APPLAUSE]

I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and
every

child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I
am

with you. I will fight for you. And I will win for you.

[APPLAUSE]

To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and in all of our towns, I

make this promise: We will make America strong again. We will make

America proud again. We will make America safe again. And we will

make America great again. God bless you, and good night. I love
you.

(21 July 2016)

26 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

A similar egocentric style based around the cult of the individual

occurs in the following:

Our great civilization has come upon a moment of reckoning. I didn’t

need to do this, folks, believe me. I built a great company and I had

a wonderful life. I could have enjoyed the fruits and benefits of years

of successful business deals and businesses for myself and my

family.
Instead of going through this absolute horror show of lies, deceptions,

malicious attacks, who would have thought?

I’m doing it because this country has given me so much, and I feel so

strongly that it’s my turn to give back to the country that I love.

I’m doing this for the people and for the movement, and we will take

back this country for you and we will make America great again.

(13 October 2016)

Consciously or unconsciously, Trump positions himself deictically at

the

centre of his speeches: for him politics is about personalities and

deal-making more than it is about abstract ideas such as freedom,
equality, justice and democracy and a ‘we’ politics readily shifts over
to a ‘me’ politics.

Table 1.1 summarises the parts in the arrangement of a speech and

shows Aristotle’s advice on the type of artistic proof that was likely to
be most persuasive in each part.

Table 1.1 The arrangement of a speech

Part

Rhetorical Purpose

Artistic Proof

Prologue

Introduces the topic to the audience; Conciliation by appeal to

establishes a relationship between

ethos through character

orator and audience to make the

audience well disposed towards the

speaker, attentive and receptive

Narrative

Sets out the facts of the case from a Appeals can be made by

perspective favourable to the orator

ethos or logos

Proof

Presents arguments in favour of the Conviction by argument

speaker’s case

by appeal to ethos, pathos

or logos

Refutation

Rejecting opponents’ arguments

Appeals could be based

(could be incorporated with Proof)

on logos or ethos

Epilogue

Summarises the most persuasive

Emotional appeals to

points in the previous parts so

audience (pathos) prior to

that the audience is left with a

an outcome

favourable disposition towards the

speaker and his or her arguments

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 27

Exercise 1.6

1. Analyse the parts of core text 1 (below). Try to identify transition

points between parts, and do not feel that the patterns will necessarily
correspond directly with those shown in Table 1.1.

2. Decide which artistic proof predominates in each part of the

speech.

3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the speech with reference to the

artistic proofs and the arrangement.

1.5 Summary

In spite of disparaging contemporary uses of the term ‘rhetoric’, the

con-

cept provides the basis for much of our current understanding of how

persuasion operates in language. A classical framework for oratory

still

contributes to how speeches are classified in terms of three major

types:
deliberative, forensic and epideictic. These can be differentiated by
analysis of the speech circumstances, taking into account the types
of responses

they evoke, their social setting and their orientation towards time.

Following Aristotle, persuasive appeals can be made on the basis of

the

three artistic proofs of ethos, logos and pathos. These are,

respectively,

appeals grounded in the speaker’s morality, in his or her ability to

form

rational arguments, and in his or her ability to arouse the emotions of

the audience. Arguments can be analysed in terms of their logical
structure by

identifying syllogisms comprised of a major premise, a minor premise

and a

conclusion, though to stimulate inference on the part of an audience

the minor premise may be omitted. Where this occurs, it is known as
an enthymeme.

The arrangement of a speech may be analysed into a sequence of

parts,

commencing with a prologue, continuing with a narrative, then a proof

fol-

lowed by a refutation, and concluding with an epilogue. There are

variations according to the branch of rhetoric, because, for example,
a refutation is

more likely in forensic oratory although this may not occur in an

epideictic (i.e. ceremonial) speech. Speeches may be analysed by
matching the artistic proofs with the parts of a speech, so, for
example, appeals to emotion are

likely to be especially effective in the epilogue, whereas the prologue

needs to establish the speaker’s credibility by appealing to the
audience’s ethos.

Core Text 1: Barack Obama, inaugural speech,

20 January 2009

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before (1)

us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sac-

rifices borne by our ancestors (1). I thank President Bush for his

service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation

he has shown throughout this transition (2).

28 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath (1). (2)

The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity

and the still waters of peace (2). Yet, every so often the oath is

taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms (3). At these

moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill

or vision of those in high office, but because ‘We, the People’,

have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true

to our founding documents (4). So it has been. So it must be with

this generation of Americans (5).

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood (1). (3)

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence

and hatred (2). Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence

of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our

collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation

for a new age (3). Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses

shuttered (4). Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too

many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use

energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet (5).

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics (4)

(1). Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confi-

dence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is

inevitable and that the next generation must lower its sights (2).

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real (1). They (5)

are serious and they are many (2). They will not be met easily or

in a short span of time (3). But know this, America – they will

be met (4). [CHEERS]

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, (6)

unity of purpose over conflict and discord (1). On this day, we

come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false prom-

ises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too

long have strangled our politics (2).

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the (7)

time has come to set aside childish things (1). The time has

come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better

history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea,

passed on from generation to generation: the God-given prom-

ise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to

pursue their full measure of happiness (2).

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that (8)

greatness is never a given (1). It must be earned (2). Our journey

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 29

has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less (3). It has not

been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure

over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame (4).

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things –

some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their

labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards

prosperity and freedom (5).

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled (9)

across oceans in search of a new life (1). For us, they toiled in

sweat-shops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip

and plowed the hard earth (2). For us, they fought and died, in

places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn (3).

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed (10)

and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a

better life (1). They saw America as bigger than the sum of our

individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or

wealth or faction (2).

This is the journey we continue today (1). We remain the most (11)

prosperous, powerful nation on Earth (2). Our workers are no less

productive than when this crisis began (3). Our minds are no less

inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last

week or last month or last year (4). Our capacity remains undi-

minished (5). But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow

interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely

passed (6). Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves

off, and begin again the work of remaking America (7). [CHEERS]
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done (1). The state (12)

of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act –

not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for

growth (2). We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids

and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together (3).

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technolo-

gy’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost (4).

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our

cars and run our factories (5). And we will transform our schools

and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

All this we can do. And all this we will do (6).

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – (13)

who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans

(1). Their memories are short (2). For they have forgotten what

this country has already done; what free men and women can

30 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and

necessity to courage (3).

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted (14)
beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have con-

sumed us for so long no longer apply (1). The question we ask

today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but

whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent

wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified (2).

Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward (3). Where

the answer is no, programs will end (4). And those of us who

manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend

wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of

day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a

people and their government (5).

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for (15)

good or ill (1). Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is

unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful

eye, the market can spin out of control – and that a nation cannot

prosper long when it favors only the prosperous (2). The success of

our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross

Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability

to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but

because it is the surest route to our common good (3). [APPLAUSE]

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between
(16)

our safety and our ideals (1). Our Founding Fathers, faced with

perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the

rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the

blood of generations (2). Those ideals still light the world, and

we will not give them up for expedience’s sake (3). [APPLAUSE]

And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching

today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my

father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation

and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace

and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more (4). [CHEERS

and LONG APPLAUSE]

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism

(17)

not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and

enduring convictions (1). They understood that our power alone

cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please (2).

Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use;

our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of

our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint (3).

➜

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 31

We are the keepers of this legacy (1). Guided by these principles (18)

once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even

greater effort – even greater cooperation and understanding

between nations (2). We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to

its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan (3).

With old friends and former foes, we’ll work tirelessly to lessen

the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet

(4). We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver

in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by

inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now

that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot out-

last us, and we will defeat you (5). [CHEERS and APPLAUSE]

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a (19)

weakness (1). We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews

and Hindus – and non-believers (2). We are shaped by every

language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and

because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation,

and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united,
we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday

pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world

grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that

America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace (3).

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on (20)

mutual interest and mutual respect (1). To those leaders around

the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills

on the West – know that your people will judge you on what

you can build, not what you destroy (2). [APPLAUSE] To

those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and

the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side

of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to

unclench your fist (3). [APPLAUSE]

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you (21)

to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish

starved bodies and feed hungry minds (1). And to those nations

like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer

afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can

we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect (2).

For the world has changed, and we must change with it (3).
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with
(22)

humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour,

patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains (1). They have some-

thing to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper

32 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

through the ages (2). We honor them not only because they are

guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of

service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than

themselves (3). And yet, at this moment – a moment that will define

a generation – it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all (4).

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately (23)

the faith and determination of the American people upon which

this nation relies (1). It is the kindness to take in a stranger when

the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather

cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us

through our darkest hours (2). It is the firefighter’s courage to

storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willing-

ness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate (3).

Our challenges may be new (1). The instruments with which we (24)
meet them may be new (2). But those values upon which our

success depends – honesty and hard work, courage and fair play,

tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are

old (3). These things are true (4). They have been the quiet force

of progress throughout our history (5). What is demanded then

is a return to these truths (6). What is required of us now is a

new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every

American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the

world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize

gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying

to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to

a difficult task (7).

This is the price and the promise of citizenship (1). This is the source
(25) of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape

an uncertain destiny (2). This is the meaning of our liberty and our

creed – why men and women and children of every race and every

faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a

man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been
served

at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred

oath (3). [CHEERS and APPLAUSE]

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and (26)

how far we have travelled (1). In the year of America’s birth, in

the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying

campfires on the shores of an icy river (2). The capital was aban-

doned (3). The enemy was advancing (4). The snow was stained

with blood (5). At a moment when the outcome of our revolution

was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be

read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world … that in the

Artistic Proofs and Arrangement 33

depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive

… that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger,

came forth to meet it (6).’

America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of (27)

our hardship, let us remember these timeless words (1). With

hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and

endure what storms may come (2). Let it be said by our children’s

children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey

end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with

eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried
forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future

generations (3).

Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United States of (28)

America. [CHEERS and APPLAUSE]

Essential reading

Braugh, M. de (2007). ‘The parts of the speech’. In I. Worthington

(ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Malden, MA, and Oxford:
Blackwell), pp. 187–252.

Fortenbaugh, W. W. (2007). ‘Aristotle’s art of rhetoric’. In I.

Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Malden, MA, and
Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 107–23.

Gunderson, E. (ed.) (2009). The Cambridge Companion to Ancient

Rhetoric (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell).

Konstan, D. (2007). ‘Rhetoric and emotion’. In I. Worthington (ed.), A

Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell),
pp. 411–26.

Müller, J.W. (2017) What is Populism? (London: Penguin Random

House), pp. 1–40.

Reisigl, M. (2008a). ‘Analyzing political rhetoric’. In R. Wodak and

N. Krzyz˙anowski (eds), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social

Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 96–120.

Chapter 2

Classical Rhetoric: Style and

Figures
2.1 Introduction: what is style?

‘Style’ is a notoriously elusive word to define. The word has a broad

range of meanings that have largely positive associations in a wide
range of creative areas of human activity such as art, architecture,
fashion, literature and leadership – as well as in language use. The
origin of the word is in the Latin

‘stilus’ – an instrument for writing on a wax tablet (with a sharp end

for

inscription and a blunt one for erasure) – which suggests that ‘style’
was used in relation to language before it was used in these other
expressive domains.

The largely positive connotations of ‘style’ are evident from

considering its

common uses in the British National Corpus (see Table 2.1).

Style refers to how distinct meanings are created; collocations such

as

‘new’ and ‘old’ imply a contrast with what has gone before, and
‘different’,

‘particular’, ‘personal’, ‘distinctive’, ‘individual’ and so on imply

distinctiveness. Style is therefore closely related to ‘identity’, being a
manner of self-expression that marks an individual as distinct.
Collocations such as

‘Italian’, ‘French’, ‘English’ or ‘Western’ are ways of creating

distinctiveness through affiliation with a group identified by its location
– though in such uses geographical location also represents the
culture and history of

people who originated in this location.

The difference between style and delivery is that style covers a range
of modes of communication, whereas delivery is restricted only to the

voice. When analysing style, we might consider a range of semiotic

modes

such as physical appearance, dress, body language, artefacts or

symbolic

action. For example, Charteris-Black (2007) analyses how these

modes are

employed by a range of non-Western leaders. However, analysis of

deliv-

ery restricts itself to language alone – though often in practice style

and delivery go hand in hand. For example, Martin Luther King’s style
can be

described as ‘African-American liturgical’, and this blending of

locations

referred to the shared historical and cultural experience of slavery

through which group identity was formed among Americans of African
origin. His

appearance clearly indicated that this was his ethnicity, and his
delivery

reflected an African-American tradition. For example, call-and-

response

exchanges were a feature of delivery that had frequently been used

by black 34

Style and Figures 35

Table 2.1 Adjectival collocations of ‘style’ in the

British National Corpus

1

New style

167

Old style

88

Gothic style

73

Traditional style

60

Different style

59

Particular style

57

Personal style
41

Fine style

39

Italian style

39

10

Classical style

38

11

Modern style

36

12

Architectural style

33

13

American style

33

14
Distinctive style

30

15

English style

29

16

French style

25

17

Continental style

24

18

Individual style

24

19

Political style

23

20

Romanesque style

23
21

Grand style

22

22

Similar style

22

23

Western style

22

24

High style

21

pulpit preachers to interact with listeners – by inviting them to

participate.

These exchanges would commence with familiar phrases from hymns

or the Bible, to which the audience would respond and collaborate in

a

co-constructed rhythmical discourse. However, King also added his

own

personal style of delivery by the slow timing of his speech, the

resonance

of his voice and a distinct intonation pattern, each of which are

instantly recognisable. Politically, the motive for the creation of an
African-American identity was to create a sense of shared social
purpose.

The rhetorical effects of delivery are achieved by combining features

that make an orator sound unique with others that imply a shared set

of values. So style is a complex interaction between personal choice

and

social meaning, and between the spoken mode and other means of
com-

munication. It is the semiotic effect attained by individual features of

36 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

delivery and style that convey socially shared meanings. A further

exam-

ple of this would be the Shi-ite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who
rarely talked above the level of a whisper. This style of delivery
differentiated

him from other ayatollahs in Iraq, who had a more aggressive, ranting

style; it also ensured that the audience had to strain to hear him as
well as giving the impression of saintliness – spiritual values therefore
formed the basis of a social meaning that was shared between leader
and followers.

Another example of style of delivery is that of the white rapper

Eminem,

whose style features, such as the use of humour and multisyllabic

rhymes,

are combined with features of delivery such as clear diction, complex

rhythm, melody and syncopation (Edwards, 2009). Although many of

these features arose from imitation of previous rappers, Eminem

combined

these features in a unique way to demonstrate that he shared the

same

experiences as many of his audience – family breakdown, drug

addiction

and a shared identity of resistance to the mainstream. His style

therefore

marked him out both as part of a group but also as distinct: style is
per-

suasive when it integrates personal and social meaning.

Exercise 2.1

➢ Check in the Oxford English Dictionary for definitions of the word

‘style’

and compare how these match with the evidence of its meaning in
the British National Corpus. (You may also wish to compare the
adjective collocates of

style in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.)

➢ Analyse the style of the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson –

consider both verbal and non-verbal semiotic modes.

➢ Analyse the style of a speech, song or other text produced by a

celebrity of your choice; see if you can distinguish between style and
delivery choices.

Discuss how judgements of occasion might have influenced these

choices.
2.2 Style in classical rhetoric

Classical rhetoricians differentiated between style and delivery by

treating

‘style’ as actual word choices and ‘delivery’ as the control of the voice
and other performance-related aspects such as gesture and facial
expression.

As I suggested above, a contemporary interpretation of this is to

restrict

‘delivery’ to spoken language alone and ‘style’ to a range of

communica-

tion modes. In ancient Greece, the term for style was simply lexis –
style was equated with the selection of words (rather than other
modes), and

a major consideration was finding the right balance between clarity

and

elevation. Clarity derived from the complexity of word choices:

ordinary

words and simpler phrases led to a plain style, whereas less familiar
words and more elaborate expressions led to an elevated style.
Simpler words

encouraged ease of comprehension, and more complex words,

though less

easily understood, encouraged admiration and wonder. The simple

style

Style and Figures 37

was commonly known as the ‘Attic’ style, while the elevated style was
known as ‘Asianic’ because of the influence of Asian rhetoric once
the

Greek states had expanded into Asia. There was also a middle style
that

integrated both plain and elevated language.

For Aristotle, style drew on the aesthetic resources of language – the

choice of words and delivery – to ensure their maximum

psychological

effect. A persuasive delivery conceals the presence of a text that had

been prepared in advance by the skilful use of memory, and is
accompanied by

appropriate non-verbal gestures and mannerisms. Choice of style

would

be influenced by the branch of oratory; forensic rhetoric required

clarity

and attention to detail, whereas a more elevated style would be

suitable for epideictic rhetoric. Figures of speech with potential for
elaboration, such as metaphor, would be more appropriate in
epideictic rhetoric, whereas

simpler figures such as antithesis and isocolons (about which more

later)

would be more appropriate in forensic rhetoric.

However, such generalisations are problematic, as rhetoricians such

as

Aristotle emphasised that the most essential consideration was the

need to fit the style to the occasion, so there is only a partial
correspondence between stylistic choice and the branch of oratory.
To use a contemporary example,

an appeal to pathos might be made in a plain style when discussing

the

financing of state pensions, while an elevated style might be used at

a commemoration ceremony for those who lost their lives in Arabic
struggles for

democracy in recent years. Evidence of this is that these democratic

move-

ments are collectively referred to using a more elevated choice of

language

– a metaphor – ‘The Arab Spring’. This metaphor originated in the

Western

media and then became the standard way of referring to these

events; in

Arabic this is Arrabia al Arabi (Arrabia = spring; al Arabi = Arab).

There was also the consideration of timing – kairos – which literally

translates from ancient Greek as ‘opportunity’; so finding the most
opportune moment for a particular phrase would contribute to its
success. Using

more contemporary terms, we might think of it as the ‘critical moment’

–

for example, a crisis of some kind – when a particular argument

would be

most persuasive. Considerations of kairos form part of the judgement

as to what are the most effective circumstances in which to make a
speech on
a particular topic, as well as rhetorical judgements of when to
introduce a particular appeal into a speech. For example, during the
2016 US election,

the FBI launched an enquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private

email

server. This gave considerable credibility to Donald Trump’s

accusations of her dishonesty and corruption. Trump tweeted ‘Russia,
if you’re listening,

I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think
you

will probably be rewarded mightily by our press’.1 Although no

charges

were brought against her, and there was Russian collusion, the fact of
the

FBI investigation at a highly sensitive time contributed significantly to

her 1 Ashley Parker; David E. Sanger (27 July 2016), ‘Donald Trump
Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails’, New York
Times.

38 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

election defeat, turning away the tide of popular opinion that had
been

swaying towards her during her strong performance in the TV

debates.

On 16 February 2018, a federal grand jury in Washington, DC,

indicted

13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of

conspiracy
to defraud the United States in connection with the 2016 United
States

national elections. The indictment cites the illegal use of social media
‘to sow political discord, including actions that supported the
presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and disparaged his
opponent, Hillary Clinton’.2

Style

Deliberative:

Epideictic:

elaborate and

Forensic:

elevated, grand

complex

precise, simple

style

Figure 2.1 Style and branch of oratory.

Figure 2.1 summarises some general principles of style choice in

branches of oratory, though the rules of style in classical rhetoric offer

guidelines rather than a straitjacket.

Issues of style and timing are crucial in all types of public speaking,
including speeches by individuals who are not politicians. This is
particularly the case with motivational speaking to audiences who are
facing imminent danger as a result of decisions taken by politicians,
as is the case with ‘eve-of-battle’
speeches by those in positions of military command. As the executive
arm

of government, military leaders need to combine a range of aesthetic

and

psychological strategies to produce a style that is fitting to the

occasion. An understanding of how speakers adapt their rhetoric to
audiences that are

under pressure because they are faced by a threatening event, for

example an imminent battle, provides insight into how more non-
military civilian audiences might respond to speeches given by
politicians in times of crisis.

The speech we examined at the end of Chapter 1 – Barack Obama’s

inaugural speech – was given at a time when Western leaders were

just

becoming aware of the gravity of the effects of the 2008 financial

crisis, and as a result has the style of an eve-of-battle speech. This
shows both in the choice of sombre weather metaphors: ‘Yet, every
so often the oath is taken

amidst gathering clouds and raging storms’ and in the ‘call to arms’
style that is intended to unify, motivate and raise morale: ‘Today I say
to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and
they are many. They will

2 Sharon LaFraniere (February 16, 2018), ‘13 Russians Indicted by

Special Counsel in First Charges on 2016 Election Interference’. The
New York Times. www.nytimes.

com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-
interference.html, retrieved

February 20, 2018.

Style and Figures 39

not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America –
they will be met.’ A combination of a mood of uncertainty (here from
the metaphors) and the certainty that a challenge will be faced up to
with courage characterises both speeches that address political
crises and eves of battles because of the overlap between the
psychological states of their audiences.

It is therefore relevant to consider the motivational effect of style

choices in two well-known examples of this sub-genre: the speech by
a British military leader in Iraq – Lt. Col. Tim Collins (Core Text 2),
and the other by Henry V

in Shakespeare’s play of that name (Core Text 3).

Let’s begin as usual with a brief analysis of circumstances: Collins

gave his speech to his troops just prior to military engagement in
March 2003, when

British forces had embarked on a military campaign to remove the

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. Collins was nicknamed
‘Nails’ by his men – a

metaphor based on qualities of character such as being hard,

unyielding and direct – so they would be expecting a tough and direct
style. As indicated by the naming of the sub-genre, issues of timing
are crucial in an eve-of-battle speech: it is designed to motivate, but
also – in circumstances where there is a significant difference in the
quality of weaponry and training available to the conflicting sides – to
urge caution in the event of victory so as to win the hearts and minds
of a defeated enemy. The objectives of military leaders in modern
conflicts in the Muslim world are political as much as they are military
– the aim of a global policeman in the ‘war on terror’ is to ensure
success in the long-term ideological struggle as much as victory on
the battlefield. Collins’ speech is a fine example of how the style of a
modern military leader is adapted to reflect these complexities arising
from a combined military and political role in the field of conflict. The
speech was delivered to the 800 soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Royal
Irish Regiment, most of whom were young men with

little previous experience, and apprehensive about the imminent

conflict. It was given at a military base in the Kuwaiti desert 20 miles
south of the Iraqi border. The speech was improvised – with minimal
preparation – and was

recorded in shorthand by a journalist (see Core Text 2).

Core Text 2: Tim Collins’ ‘Eve-of-battle’ speech,

19 March 2003

We go to liberate, not to conquer (1). We will not fly our flags in (1)

their country (2). We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the

only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own (3).

Show respect for them (4).

There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive (2)

shortly (1). Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will

not send (2). As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.

Wipe them out if that is what they choose (3). But if you are fero-

cious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory (4).

40 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Iraq is steeped in history (1). It is the site of the Garden of Eden, (3)

of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham (2). Tread

lightly there (3). You will see things that no man could pay to see

and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, gen-

erous and upright people than the Iraqis (4). You will be embar-

rassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing (5).

Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country

(6). Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know

that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you (7).

If there are casualties of war, then remember that when they (4)

woke up and got dressed in the morning, they did not plan to die

this day (1). Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly,

and mark their graves (2).

It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out (5)

alive, but there may be people among us who will not see the end

of this campaign (1). We will put them in their sleeping bags and

send them back (2). There will be no time for sorrow (3).

The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and (6)

that we are bringing about his rightful destruction (1). There

are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls,

and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam (2). He and his

forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done
(3). As they die, they will know their deeds have brought them to

this place (4). Show them no pity (5).

It is a big step to take another human life (1). It is not to be done (7)

lightly (2). I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other

conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon

them (3). If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have

that right in international law, and ensure that one day they go

home to their family (4).

The ones who wish to fight – well, we aim to please (1).

(8)

If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in (9)

killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer

(1). You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest,

for your deeds will follow you down through history (2). We will

bring shame on neither our uniform nor our nation (3).

It is not a question of if: it’s a question of when (1). We know he (10)

has already devolved the decision to lower commanders, and that

means he has already taken the decision himself (2). If we survive

the first strike, we will survive the attack (3).

➜
Style and Figures 41

As for ourselves, let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a bet-

(11)

ter place for us h aving been there (1).

Our business now is north (1).

(12)

Source: © Tim Collins, 2003. Reproduced with kind permission of

Lucas Alexander Whitley Ltd.

Generally, the speech is given in simple, direct language that

characterises the hard-talking style of a military officer addressing his
men – in keeping with his nickname ‘Nails’. It is impersonal, with only
one use of a

first-person pronoun (‘my’ in paragraph 5); the institutional authority

and discipline that contribute to a military ethos are better evoked by
an impersonal style than by the expression of raw personal emotion –
though the

situation was one where a mixture of excitement and fear of death

would

be likely. There are also some elements of an elevated style that fit
with

the speech’s epideictic role in a ritual of military engagement; since

time immemorial, it has been the norm for a commander to inspire
and motivate

his men prior to engagement to make victory more likely. Collins

evokes
a sense of Iraq’s history – though without going into detail – and
colours

his language with references to the Garden of Eden, Abraham, Cain

and so

on; religious discourse is relevant in situations where there is the

possibility of death. But we should note that references to the Old
Testament imply a

shared cultural tradition between Muslims and Christians – something

that

would have not have been the case had any reference been made to
Jesus.

The combination of ancient history and religion adds grandeur to

ideas of

national and regimental pride that are crucial to motivation in a

military

setting. The activation of religious schema seems a prelude to

framing

the rules of combat within broader humanist ethical principles. These

are

made explicit when he warns about the consequences for those who
do not

comply with such principles: ‘It is a big step to take another human
life.

It is not to be done lightly’ and ‘If you harm the regiment or its history

by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family

who
will suffer.’ His ability to address the long-term political consequences
of military combat reinforce his absence of doubt as to the likelihood
of victory: without being sure of victory, there would be no reason to
consider

its consequences.

Stylistically, there is a mixture of plain and elevated styles; this

speech could be taken to represent Isocrates’ so-called ‘middle style’.
This was

characterised by smoothness and balance that arose from:

◇ consistency;

◇ the use of parallelism to create rhythmic balance; and

◇ the use of periods to create a complex sentence structure.

42 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

The speech has all these features – there is a very clear instance of
parallelism within a sentence’s structure in 10.1:

It is not a question of if;

it’s a question of when.

It occurs again in (7.1) and (7.2):

It is a big step to take another human life.

It is not to be done lightly.

A more complex use of periods occurs in paragraph 3, where there

are a

series of interlinked, co-ordinated, descriptive sentences (3.4–3.6) to

provide an account of the complex emotions that will be evoked by
experience

of the Iraqi people. The alternation of shorter with longer, more

complex

sentences corresponds to the mixed emotions that the soldiers will

feel.

Another more complex example occurs in the matching of

grammatical

structures illustrated by using the style features in 6.1 and 6.2:

The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that
we are bringing about his rightful destruction.

There are many regional commanders who have stains on their

souls,

and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam.

Here there is a rhythmic balance of structural elements, with two

phrases

linked by a co-ordinating conjunction. The speech has consistency of

style in the sincerity of the tone with which he advocates ethical
behaviour to ensure that the code of war is respected; there is
consistency in its content through its emphasis on the significance of
the event in an unfurling course of history and its tender recognition
of the emotions and fears of young recruits.

It is these features – as originally identified by Isocrates – that has led

to the speech’s seminal status in contemporary oratory. Its success
dispels the idea that a large amount of time is necessary to prepare a
good speech, though it also implies that extensive experience of both
language and military combat

are necessary to deliver one. Style choices are summarised in Figure

2.2.
Style type

Attic (plain style)

Asianic (grand style)

Simplicity implies

Middle Style

Display excites

sincerity

e.g. Isocrates

admiration

e.g. Lysias

e.g. Cicero

Figure 2.2 Style types in classical rhetoric.

Style and Figures 43

We now need to consider in more detail the sorts of choices of lexis

and

grammar that allow us to analyse the style. We have seen in this

introduc-

tion that ‘style’ is concerned with creating an impression of

distinctiveness; but when we move to examine a speech as a set of
strategies employed by a

speaker, we then need to consider what it is in language that gives

rise to this impression. The selection of figures of speech is an
essential component of style, and in the remainder of this chapter I
describe a range of schemes and tropes, and the interaction between
them, that give rise to the impression of style. This is not to assume
that these strategies can necessarily be taught or learnt, but there
was an assumption behind the classical schools of rhetoric that they
could be studied and that this study would have practical benefits.

I share that belief, and I believe that readers of this book do too.

2.3 Figures of speech

Classical rhetoric distinguished between two major categories of

figurative language: schemes and tropes:

◇ A scheme (from Greek skheˉma, ‘form’ or ‘figure’) is a figure of

speech in which there is some modification to the normal or expected
sequence

of words and so affects grammatical structure; the rhetorical effect is

achieved by a rearrangement of word order that may also have an

aes-

thetic appeal. Examples of schemes include chiasmus – the reversal

of the

order of words in adjacent clauses, as in Kennedy’s famous ‘Ask not

what

your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your
country’;

and parallelism – the use of similar structures in two or more clauses.

◇ A trope (from the Greek trepein, ‘to turn’) is a figure of speech in

which words are used with senses that differ (or ‘turn away’) from
their literal

senses, so the sense of words in metaphors, metonymys, allusion,

irony,
hyperbole and so on diverge from their normal, literal senses.

So schemes involve grammatical choice, and their syntax can be

analysed

for patterns such as repetition or word order reversal, whereas tropes

in-

volve the choice of lexis and can be analysed through lexical

semantics for features such as polysemy (multiple meaning). Both
schemes and tropes

influence ‘meaning’ and contribute to persuasive effect, but schemes

origi-

nate in syntactic patterning, whereas tropes originate in lexical

semantics.

2.3.1 Schemes

The following table summarises a few of the most important schemes

of

the many identified by classical rhetoricians; I have tried to be

selective, as rival schools of classical Greek oratory competed on the
number of figures

of speech they could identify, and these later formed the basis of
handbooks

44

not

what’s

. Our

is enough’
doesn’t know

Eight

doesn’t care

the threats of the future,

(contrasts past and future).

(Sarah Palin; the reversal is

what makes us strong

. We have the most powerful

each of us has the freedom to make of

the market should reward drive and

the ideas of the past

4th, we must stand up and say: ‘

what makes us rich

keeps the world coming to our shores

Example (from Obama unless otherwise indicated)

It’s a promise that says

our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation

to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It’s a promise that says

innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live

up to their responsibilities.

1. Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain

going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he

(contrasts caring and knowing, i.e. feeling and thinking).

2. We need a president who can face

keep grasping at

Some people use ‘change’ to promote their careers; other people

use their careers to promote change

an implied criticism of Barack Obama, who was campaigning

on ‘change’).

On November

(‘years’ is omitted but is retrievable, as the audience know that

George Bush was elected for two presidencies of four years each).

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but

that’s not

military on Earth, but that’s not

universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s

not what

Definition: A figure in which there is …

repetition of a phrase at the start of a unit

(anaphora leads to anticipation, which involves an

audience cognitively and emotionally).

a semantic relation of opposition or contrast (time

is quite often the basis of comparison in political

rhetoric where this is a criticism of past performance

and promise of a better future).

the word order of the second part is the reverse of

the word order in the first part (the primary appeal

is the aesthetic one of balance).

omission of a word or phrase (assumes that the

meaning is retrievable from context)

repetition of a phrase at the end of a unit (the

repetition need not be identical).

Classical rhetorical schemes

2.2

Table

Scheme

anaphora

antithesis
chiasmus

ellipsis

epiphora

45

have

We

CHEERS

are

folks.

2015).

. A nation of

more

a wall,

a moment when our

to build

have

of you have lost your homes,

‘a nation of whiners’

once more.

we
More

the change we need doesn’t come from

(this could also be analysed as parallelism).

] We have to do it. Have to do it. [Audience:

Americans are out of work and

are watching your home values plummet

USA! USA!] …

more

more

(This is also a rhetorical question.)

USA!

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better

country than this

We have to stop illegal immigration. We have to do it. [

AND APPLAUSE

USA!

to build a wall. All you have to do is go to Israel and say, ‘How is

your wall working?’ Walls work (Trump, September

Tonight,

working harder for less.

and even

(comparison between present and past).

You have shown what history teaches us – that at defining

moments like this one,

Washington. Change comes to Washington.

… was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said

that we were just suffering from a ‘mental recession’, and that

we’ve become, and I quote,

whiners?

We meet at one of those defining moments –

nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American

promise has been threatened

use of two parts of similar lengths (From the Greek,

‘of equal members or clauses’).

the placing of clauses or phrases one after another

to create a build-up.

a comparison between two entities (both entities

need not be mentioned as one can be inferred from

the other).

the use of similar (‘parallel’) structures in two

or more clauses (syntactical repetition often also

involves lexical repetition).

repetition of a word or phrase (repetition always

adds emphasis and so intensifies meaning).

use of three parts of equal length (often signals the

closure of a topic).

isocolon

parataxis

parison

parallelism

repetition

tricolon

46 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

on classical rhetoric. Those selected here are the ones that my

previous analysis has shown to be the most pervasive (Charteris-
Black, 2011). For most

of the schemes, I have selected an example from Barack Obama’s

accept-

ance speech at the 2008 Democratic Party Convention in Denver

(unless

otherwise indicated) and put the scheme in italics (see Table 2.2).

The distinction between schemes and tropes is a valuable one,

because
the type of aesthetic appeal they make differs. Schemes contribute to
the

rhythm, balance and timing of sections of a speech; for example, the

use

of anaphora is often a strategy associated with a style of delivery in

which the speaker begins slowly and then accelerates into a
crescendo to create

a powerful emotional effect. This has been described as a calm-to-

storm

delivery style and was used frequently by Baptist preachers and

adopted by

Martin Luther King. Watch Obama’s acceptance speech for the

nomina-

tion of the Democratic Party on YouTube, and note how repetition of

the

phrase ‘now is the time’ and the resulting effect on speech pace and
rhythm leads to audible audience responses:

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible

health care for every single American. [CHEERS] If you have health

care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able

to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give

them-

selves. [CHEERS] And as someone who watched my mother argue

with

insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make
certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are
sick

and need care the most. [LOUD CHEERS and WHISTLING]

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family
leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between
keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent. Now is
the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are
protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social
Security for future

generations. And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for
an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly
the exact

same opportunities as your sons. [LOUD CHEERS and WHISTLING]

(28 August 2008)

You will have noted that the phrase is repeated at increasingly shorter

intervals, and this ratchets up audience responses in the form of

cheers and whistles of increasing audibility. The use of timing, rhythm
and intensity

can be traced to how rhetorical features originating in African-

American

culture are merged with those of classical rhetoric such as anaphora

and

epiphora. This combination of schemes originating in ancient Greece

with

the interactional style of African-American oratory is highly motivating

to followers: the repetition of formulaic phrases at various intervals
signals
Style and Figures 47

to the audience the opportunities at which participation is actively

encouraged. This is an empowering use of style because it creates a
co-constructed speech event. Listen to the start of the Iowa Caucus
night speech

(3 January 2008) on YouTube (preferably with a script of the speech

to

hand) and notice what figure precedes an audible audience reaction;

it

starts with two consecutive anaphoric tricolons (in italics):

You know, they said this day would never come. [CHEERS]

They said our sights were set too high. [CHEERS]

They said this country was too divided; too disillusioned to ever come
together around a common purpose.

But on this January night – at this defining moment in history – you

have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. [CHEERS] You have
done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days. [CHEERS

and APPLAUSE] You have done what America can do in this New
Year,

2008. [CHEERS and APPLAUSE]

Notice how his delivery emphasises the anaphoric tricolons by

drawing out the time it takes to say the repeated elements and how
this evokes cheers.

This sets up nicely a call-and-exchange routine through which

audience
involvement is sustained. By setting up a style of interaction through

anaphora, Obama is drawing on the most appropriate aesthetic

appeal –

pathos – for a speech whose primary purpose is to motivate followers

for

the remainder of his election campaign. The rhythmic effect arising

from

these figures is further intensified when they occur in the epilogue of

this speech, leading to a calm-to-storm climax and evoking a powerful
audience response.

... you’ll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the

moment when it all began. [CHEERS]

This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington

always said was inevitable.

This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided
us for too long – when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a
common cause; when we finally gave Americans who’d never
participated in

politics a reason to stand up and to do so. [CHEERS]

This was the moment when we finally beat back the politics of fear,
and doubt, and cynicism; the politics where we tear each other down
instead

of lifting this country up. This was the moment. [CHEERS]

48 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Obama’s rhetoric communicated commitment to a cause and
prophet-like

certainty that contributed to a consistent and coherent style. As

particular speeches are adapted to specific occasions and audiences,
it is the enduring features of style that form political identity; part of
this was a preparedness to engage in forceful rhetorical combat – a
characteristic that returns oratory to its classical origins, where it was
employed in judicial and forensic debates as well as in deliberative
ones. The combative style is evident in

the use of another scheme – antithesis – a figure where two

contrasting

positions are juxtaposed: typically, one position is represented as

legitimate while the other is illegitimate. I will illustrate this with
reference to a speech he gave in June 2008, entitled ‘Renewing
American Competitiveness’.

He began by contrasting an ongoing theme in American foreign policy

–

isolationism – with internationalism:

There are some who believe that we must try to turn back the clock
on

this new world; that the only chance to maintain our living standards

is to build a fortress around America; to stop trading with other coun-

tries, shut down immigration, and rely on old industries (1). I disagree

(2). Not only is it impossible to turn back the tide of globalization, but

efforts to do so can make us worse off (3). Rather than fear the
future,

we must embrace it (4).

In the first sentence, he puts forward a counterposition: that America

should become isolationist (1). He explicitly refutes this position in (2)

and then employs antithesis to introduce a counter-presentation in
(3). In (4) he introduces an opposite position to the one stated in (1) –
arguing that protectionism, associated with the past, should be
rejected and replaced in the future with its antithesis – free trade.
There are effectively two contrasts: between protection and free
trade, and between the past and the future; the two are
interconnected to strengthen the argument.

A warning about the use of schemes such as the tricolon is that they

must be completed in order to be effective. An important part of

delivery

is memory, and if orators embark on three-part lists, it is essential that

they are able to complete them. A good example of the negative

effect that

poor delivery can have occurred in a televised debate for the

Republican

candidacy in November 2011, in which Rick Perry stated that he

would

close three government agencies – unfortunately he could not

remember

the third agency he would close down; this lapse of memory

undermined

his candidacy and ensured the safety of the agency concerned.

Exercise 2.2

Identify the schemes in the speech by Tim Collins given in Core Text
2.
Style and Figures 49

2.3.2 Tropes

Tropes influence an audience by turning the senses of words away

from

what is expected to draw attention to other possible meanings. Such

use

of language is valuable when the orator wants to evaluate positively

or

negatively or to intensify an appeal – usually to pathos – by drawing

on

the rich associative power of language. When directed towards the

speaker,

they evoke positive emotions and values such as pride, honour,

courage

and solidarity, but when directed towards political opponents, they

evoke

negative emotions and values such as fear, shame, estrangement

and

ostracism. Table 2.3 summarises some of the most important tropes,

with

illustrations of each trope in italics.

When an elevated style is required, Obama typically uses metaphor,

and he does so to contribute to the arrangement of his speeches:

meta-
phors occur much more often in the epilogues of his speeches.
Aristotle

claimed that the epilogue has a high impact in deliberative oratory, as

the last words the audience hears before taking a decision are the
most persuasive. He proposed that the artistic appeal that is the most
persuasive

for the epilogue is pathos, since it is crucial to arouse the emotions

when concluding a speech. Obama used a complex cluster of
metaphors to do

this at the end of his first inaugural speech, given on 20 January

2009:

In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship,

let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us

brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may
come.

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested,

we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did

we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon

us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to
future generations. Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the
United States of America.

The metaphors (in italics) are from the semantic fields of weather
(‘winter’,

‘storms’ etc.), water (‘currents’) and journeys (‘turn back’). They

arouse
emotions of fear and courage that are connected to unify the
audience

towards a common purpose. These metaphors contribute to the

aesthetic

arrangement of the speech because they are from the same semantic
fields

as those that were used in the prologue:

The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the
still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst
gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has
carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high
office, but

because we, the People, have remained faithful to the ideals of our
for-

bearers, and true to our founding documents.

50

, and

a King’s

more

2007, alludes to

– a moment

once
. (Thatcher,

February

speak of his dream. (Obama,

economy is in turmoil

defining moments

, our

no mean achievement

. (Obama, 10

2008)

’ over the last seven years. (Obama,

August

2008, refers to Martin Luther King, who came

nation is at war

2008, gives an opinion that he does not share.)

1982)

great progress

we landed a man on the moon, and we heard

August

American promise has been threatened

April
Example

call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness

like a mighty stream

Martin Luther King and, indirectly, to the Bible.)

And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought

Americans from every corner of this land to … hear

young preacher from Georgia

28

from Georgia.)

We meet at one of those

when our

the

(Obama, 28

What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick

explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and

pretty soon they were too complicated. (Saul Bellow,

Henderson the Rain King)

John McCain said that George Bush’s economic policies have

led to ‘
22

But because Russia and the West know that there can be no

victory in nuclear war, for 37 years we have kept the peace

in Europe, and that is

October

litos

: ‘over’ or

hyper

Definition: A figure in which …

indirect evocation of another well-known textual or

cultural reference.

a person’s name is replaced by an epithet (similar to

periphrasis, but referring to a person).

a word or phrase is deliberately exaggerated to

intensify the meaning (Origin Greek

‘beyond’).

a speaker directly provides an answer to his or her

own question.

(Also ‘antipophora’ or ‘anthypophora’ differs from a

rhetorical question by providing an answer.)

a meaning that is the opposite of what is conveyed

literally by these words (differs from sarcasm in that

the tone can be humorous rather than bitter).

a word or phrase that makes a deliberate

understatement and confirms a positive idea

indirectly, by negating its opposite (origin Greek

‘plain’/‘meagre’).

Classical rhetorical tropes

2.3

Table

Figure

allusion

autonomasia

hyperbole

hypophora

irony

litotes

51

brick
. (Obama,

Blue

. (Obama,

2008)

and

August

Red States

improbable quest

2008 – this is also ironic)

2007 – freedom is personified as a baby)

2008 – ‘ brick’ and ‘block’ stand for

put their hands on the arc of history and

August

2008)

2007)

usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth

February

2008 – red is worn by Republicans and blue by

January

, we are the United States of America. (Obama,

? (Obama, 28

November

January

and if you will join me in this

February

the same message we had when we were up and when

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long

by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what

we can achieve to

bend it once more toward the hope of a better day

because we are not a collection of

States

Democrats, so colour stands for political party).

10

Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates

who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the

one who travelled the farthest – a champion for working

Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours

– Hillary Rodham Clinton (Obama, 28

Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to

be done, and

(Obama, 10

Senator McCain likes to talk about judgement, but really,

what does it say about your judgement when you think

George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the

time

we were down; the one that can change this country

by brick, block by block, calloused hand by calloused hand

(Obama, 3

building and ‘hand’ for the builder)

a shift in the sense of a word or phrase from its

earlier more concrete or more embodied sense to a

later sense that is more abstract or less embodied.

an attribute of an entity is used to refer to another

entity to which it is closely related in our experience

(unlike metaphor, where the two entities that are

related are distant from each other).

two ordinarily opposing terms are placed adjacent to

one another (often an adjective and a noun).

the use of more words than is necessary to express

a meaning. (It often produces a more formal register

suitable for epideictic speeches.)

human qualities are ascribed to non-human entities.

(This is a type of metaphor – anthropomorphisms

usually arouse more empathy.)

a question that is grammatically interrogative but for

which the answer, already known, is offered (so is not

a genuine question).

a part of an entity refers to, or stands for, the whole

entity.

(It is a type of metonymy.)

metaphor

metonymy

oxymoron

periphrasis

personification
rhetorical

question

synecdoche

52 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

The matching of metaphor in the prologue and the epilogue shows

the

aesthetic appeal of arrangement, as in musical theory the coda is a

section in which there is a return to the major theme. In language, this
aesthetic

appeal is created here by metaphor to produce an elevated style that

is

appropriate to the main theme of his speech, which is the need for a
heroic narrative of nation.

It is interesting to compare this coda with the use of metaphor (in

italics) in his acceptance speech for the Democratic party nomination:

‘ We cannot walk alone,’ the preacher cried. ‘And as we walk, we

must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot
turn

back.’ America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be

done.

Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care

for.

Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save.
Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend.
America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this
moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the
future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and, in
the words of Scripture,

hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess. Thank you,

and God Bless the United States of America. (28 August 2008)

Here there is an extended metaphor using words from the semantic

fields

of creation (‘rebuild’, ‘mend’) and journeys (‘turn back’, ‘walk alone’,

‘march’ etc.). These are oriented to the rhetorical purpose of the

speech,

which is to motivate and inspire. The epilogue has the purpose in an

epid-

eictic speech of arousing emotions that are appropriate to an

occasion – in this case, emotions of enthusiasm and social effort that
are implied by a

journey in the company of others. The use of journey metaphors

alludes

to the heroic rhetorical style of Martin Luther King that created a

highly

persuasive messianic myth (see Charteris-Black, 2011, Chapter 4):

And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us; if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off
our slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we
owe past and future generations, then I’m ready to take up the cause,
and march with you, and work with you. Together, starting today, let
us finish the work that

needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth.

(10 February 2007)

Here metaphors are drawn from the domains of journeys, sleep,

finance and

war, and there are personifications of ‘destiny’ and ‘freedom’. The

dense

use of metaphor contributes to an elevated style intended to motivate

hearers to the actions necessary to bring about the anticipated

outcomes,

so ‘war’ metaphors imply struggle and effort, and sleeping is equated

with

Style and Figures 53

inaction. Metaphor is therefore the prime rhetorical figure for evoking

emotions appropriate for the political purpose of motivating social

action.

Obama has been likened to the classical orator Cicero, and we might

wonder why it is that his rhetoric evokes the rhetoric of ancient

Greece

more than, say, his predecessor George Bush, or many other

American

presidents? We have seen from the above analysis that one reason
for this

is that figures of speech are not employed just to add colour and
interest

to his style, or to fit with an ethnically defined rhetorical tradition, but

also contribute systematically to an aesthetically pleasing
arrangement by

clustering in particular sections of the speech.

Exercise 2.3

➢ Identify the tropes in the eve of war speech by Tim Collins (Core
Text 2).

➢ Identify the tropes in the speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V

(Core Text 3).

➢ Compare the use of schemes (which you identified earlier in the

Tim Collins eve of war speech) and tropes in the two speeches.

➢ Consider how the use of schemes and tropes contributes to the

time view-

point of the speaker in each speech.

➢ Consider the linguistic means for communicating social relations in

the two speeches.

Core Text 3: Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V

1 This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.

2 He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

3 Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

4 And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

5 He that shall live this day, and see old age,

6 Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

7 And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’

8 Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

9 And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

10 Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

11 But he’ll remember with advantages

12 What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

13 Familiar in his mouth as household words,

14 Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter,

15 Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

16 Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.

17 This story shall the good man teach his son;

18 And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

19 From this day to the ending of the world,

20 But we in it shall be remembered –

21 We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

22 For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

54 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

23 Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

24 This day shall gentle his condition:

25 And gentlemen in England now a-bed

26 Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

27 And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

28 That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

2.3.3 Interaction between schemes and tropes

In this section, I suggest that middle and higher styles are often
characterised by an interaction between tropes and schemes; this is
effective, as it combines the resources of lexical semantics and
syntax. I will also suggest interacting figures avoids the audience’s
attention being drawn too heavily to any particular figure and so has a
more general rhetorical impact than

one that relies exclusively on a single dominant and readily

identifiable

figure. Obama’s rhetoric often uses antithesis (a scheme) in

combination

with a metonym (a trope), as in the following, where he contrasts

‘Wall

Street’ with ‘Main Street’:

It’s not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic
poli-

cies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers,

or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college – policies

that

have lowered the real incomes of the average American family,

widened

the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children
with
a mountain of debt. (3 June 2008)

The metonym here arises from a street standing for the activities that
occur there, which in turn stand for the value system underlying those
activities –

so ‘Wall Street’ is a metonym for corporate values (via big business in

the American metropolis), while ‘Main Street’ is a metonym for
community

values (via small business in the American small town). His own
policies

will reconcile differences between the two value systems:

Put simply, we need tougher negotiators on our side of the table –

to strike bargains that are good not just for Wall Street, but also for
Main Street. And when I am President, that’s what we will do.

(16 June 2008)

The use of antithesis is also associated with a style of communication

characterised by a very high level of certainty (see Chapter 5 for a
discussion of modality). By simplifying issues into contrasting
positions, he is able to represent himself as being confident about his
own position and as someone who

can overcome conflicts between social groups in a way that appeals

to ethos.

Obama’s metaphors typically occur in combination with a wide range

of schemes – antithesis, parallelism, anaphora, epiphora, isocolon

and

chiasmus – and in combination with other tropes such as allusion. An

Style and Figures 55

important contribution to his rhetorical success arises from the verbal

interaction of metaphor with schemes and other tropes. It is rare to

find

isolated figures of speech, and his rhetoric is characterised by a high

density of such features that are rhetorically coherent. Figurative
clustering contributes to an elevated style that is persuasive because
no single figure stands out as being readily identifiable when
rhetorical features are

rich and multiplex, making analysis more difficult, as in the following

(metaphors in bold, repetitions in italics and metonyms underlined):

… the same message we had when we were up and when we were

down; the one that can change this country brick by brick, block by
block,

calloused hand by calloused hand – that together, ordinary people

can do extraordinary things; because we are not a collection of Red
States

and Blue States, we are the United States of America. (3 January

2008) There are metonyms for the Republican and Democratic states
based on

the political allegiances that the colours symbolise. There are also the
synecdoches ‘brick’, ‘block’ and ‘hand’, that stand for the activity of
building, which in turn stands for productive activities in general (as
building is a prototypical purposeful activity). The whole argument is
structured by several antitheses: ‘up’ is contrasted with ‘down’;
‘ordinary’ with ‘extraordinary’; and ‘Red’ with ‘Blue’. These antitheses
themselves occur in a triplet, and this is juxtaposed with a tricolon
(syntactic repetition) of syntactically equivalent phrases, beginning
with ‘brick by brick’. There are other

repeated words, such as ‘States’. The section ends with a unifying

appeal
to patriotism and national identity. You will notice when listening to the

speech that this section is followed by cheers, applause and even

chanting.

As argued in the discussion of schemes, an important part of

Obama’s per-

suasive appeal is because he is able to integrate rhetorical features

originating in African-American rhetoric with those of classical rhetoric
– as we saw with the use of anaphora contributing to a calm-to-storm
delivery. To sound convincing as a leader, it was also necessary for
him to demonstrate a high level of sophistication in his command of
classical rhetoric; he does this by integrating a range of schemes and
tropes, usually at high impact points in a speech. The following
speech ending has parallelisms (in italics) and metaphors (in bold):
And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West; as we
learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not
so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the
hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the
same as the

dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will

remember that there is something happening in America; that we are
not as divided

as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation;
and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American
story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to
shining sea – Yes. We. Can. (8 January 2008)

56 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Numerous syntactically equivalent phrases are interspersed with

meta-

phors. The parallelism arising from the schemes gives the speech a
rhyth-
mic balance that is aesthetically satisfying and, like the movement of
tides, sets up expectations that are then fulfilled – culminating in the
epiphoric

‘Yes. We. Can.’ There is a progression in the metaphors from a hope

as a

dream to history as a book and the phrase ‘American story’ blends

together

the ‘hope’ and ‘history’ conceptual frames; the metaphor of words that

‘ring’ is then added to this (it is also an allusion to Martin Luther

King’s ‘let freedom ring’); like religious language, his oratory is
steeped in metaphor, and this contributes to an elevated style
suitable to convey aspiration.

It is the blending of rhetorical traditions of black and white that char-

acterises the formula that eventually became the slogan for his
successful

political campaign – ‘Yes We Can’. The repetition of this phrase could

be

analysed either from the black rhetorical tradition as a ‘call-and-

response’

routine or from the classical tradition as anaphora and epiphora – the

repetition of a phrase at the start and end of sentences, respectively;

in the speech epilogue the slogan (in capitals) is combined with
parallelism (in

italics) and metaphor (in bold):

YES WE CAN. (BREAK FOR CHEERING) YES WE CAN. (BREAK

FOR CHEERING) YES WE CAN.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the
destiny of a nation.

YES WE CAN.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail

towards freedom through the darkest of nights.

YES WE CAN.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and
pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

YES WE CAN.

It was the call of workers who organised; women who reached for the
ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a
King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the
Promised

Land.

YES WE CAN to justice and equality. YES WE CAN to opportunity

and

prosperity. YES WE CAN heal this nation. YES WE CAN repair this
world. YES WE CAN.

(8 January 2008)

It is not entirely clear whether ‘YES WE CAN’ serves as an answer to

an

implied question (in which case it would be epiphora) or as preceding

the

Style and Figures 57

actions in the following section (in which case it would be anaphora).
In

a sense, it is a ‘rhetorical answer’ because, just as a rhetorical

question does not require an answer, so his rhetorical answer does
not require a

question to be asked. The syntactically repeated elements of

parallelism

(in italics) create structural patterns into which the trope of metaphor
can be slotted; the parallelisms introduce a mythic account of
American history by integrating the founding fathers (white) with the
struggle of slaves (black), the pioneers of the West and the space
race (largely white) and

the Civil Rights Movement (black). The metaphors heighten the

appeal

to pathos through describing the various examples of the aspirations

of

whites and blacks.

It is a message that is communicated through both the content of

the discourse, but also rhetorically, because of the combination of

features from the classical and African-American rhetorical traditions.

From the classical tradition, there are a range of schemes and tropes,

while from the African-American rhetorical tradition there is the ‘call-

and-response’ interaction, and the ‘calm to storm’ delivery; there is

the

crescendo effect from the decreasing distance between the ‘Yes we

can’s
in the final part of the speech. Rhetorical density and figurative
cluster-

ing are hallmarks of Obama’s elevated style and often occur at salient

sections of the speech – the prologues and epilogues. The response

they

evoke shows that although the appeal is partly cognitive, it is primarily

emotional.

The blending of rhetorical traditions is especially convincing, because

it is consistent, both because Obama refers explicitly to it and

because it can be inferred from his elevated rhetorical style; above
all, it is because it comes from a man who can lay claim to both
traditions in his DNA.

Any potential conflict between the two traditions is reconciled through

the emphasis on a shared Christian faith that unites the ‘white’ and
‘black’

traditions, and evidence for this is in the choice of the word ‘creed’ in
‘Yes we can. It was a creed written into the founding documents that
declared the destiny of a nation.’ It is a return to religious faith that is
rhetorically the means for overcoming political and ethnic divisions –
a fundamental

purpose in American political discourse.

Exercise 2.4

➢ Is there any evidence of interaction between tropes and schemes

in the Tim Collins speech? Identify the different figures of speech and
the effect of such interaction (if identified).
➢ How far has your analysis of the figures of speech in the Tim
Collins speech and Shakepeare’s Henry V speech led you to identify
similarities and differences in the style of the two speeches?

58 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

2.4 Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the concept of style and considered

how it

arises from semiotic forms of expression – mainly, but not exclusively,

verbal ones – that create an impression of uniqueness but also
accommodate

to social identities. We saw that classical rhetoric distinguished

between

three types of style – the elevated, the plain and the middle style –
and these styles were evident in the extent to which figures of speech
were used and

also influenced the types of figure of speech that would be chosen.

Equally important are considerations of the opportune moment, or
kairos – as in Donald Trump’s unexpected election success. We
examined schemes that involve the arrangement or sequence of
words and tropes in which the meaning of a word (or words) actually
changes, as in metaphor. We identified these in speeches by Tim
Collins and in Shakespeare’s Henry V.

We saw how Barack Obama drew on both schemes and tropes to

create a

blended rhetorical style that integrated features of both African-

American

and classical rhetoric. At all times we emphasised the need to adapt

style to speech circumstance, and in particular the purpose of the
speech – whether
to motivate or to celebrate, to attack or to defend.

Essential reading

Charteris-Black, J. (2007). The Communication of Leadership: The

Design of Leadership Style (London/New York: Routledge), Chapters
2 and 3.

Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive

Power of Metaphor, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
Macmillan), Chapters 1

and 2, pp. 1–50.

Edwards, P. (2009). How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop
MC

(Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press), p. 88.

Lancaster, S. (2010). Speechwriting (London: Robert Hale).

Leith, S. (2011). You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

(London: Profile Books).

Chapter 3

Coherence and Cohesion in

Discourse

3.1 Introduction – what is coherence?

In the first-ever televised presidential debates in 1960, a suntanned

John

F. Kennedy – concealing his ill health behind his resemblance to a

Greek
god – came across as a stylish and vigorous leader. In contrast,
Richard

Nixon, with his tense facial expression and perspiration-stained,

car-salesman suit, looked something of a loser. Kennedy’s use of lan-

guage reinforced the impression given by his appearance and

manner

that he was a valiant, vigorous and heroic leader rather than a victim
of

illness. In this chapter, I demonstrate how analysing Kennedy’s

inaugu-

ral speech (generally held to be the greatest of all inaugural

speeches),

using traditional concepts of discourse analysis such as coherence

and

cohesion, can contribute to an understanding of its success. I

interpret

the speech with reference to its circumstances – especially its

historical

setting – and discuss how these influenced assumptions about

audience

knowledge and contributed to its success. In the first section, I

discuss

coherence and speech circumstances; I then analyse cohesion –

con-

sidering first grammatical and then lexical cohesion. I argue that the
close correspondence between coherence and cohesion contributes
to

an explanation of the status of Kennedy’s address in the pantheon of

great speeches.

3.1.1 Coherence and speech circumstances

Coherence is the impression a text leaves of being unified in some

way –

but not through explicit cohesive relations; it arises when a hearer or

reader understands the writer’s communicative purpose, as a result

of

shared background knowledge of the world or frames of reference.

Though

less measurable empirically than cohesion, coherence is no less

influential in contributing to the meaning of a text. In the context of
oratory, we

might say that coherence is the understanding that arises when there
is a

convergence between the audience’s and the speaker’s knowledge of

the

world. The knowledge that Kennedy assumed his audience had when
he

gave his first inaugural address was that the United States was
struggling

59

60 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

with the Soviet Union for a position of global supremacy. To
understand

his speech, we need to have some global-political knowledge of the

type

that Kennedy would have assumed among his audience, and this
might be

as follows: the Second World War had led to the break-up of the
colonial

government by European powers – in particular, Britain and France –

as

they could no longer resist the pressure for independence from the
col-

onised powers. With Europe’s resources directed largely into post-

war

reconstruction, there was an opportunity for a new dominant power to

emerge. As part of this struggle, the United States and the Soviet
Union

were both seeking to develop networks of alliances with Third World

countries that had formerly been colonies. Neither aspiring

superpower

had a clear lead in terms of technological supremacy or military force,

so

they were in competition with each other.

Within the context of American politics, neither Democrats nor

Republicans were dominant, and both parties had relatively young
lead-

ers. Kennedy had emerged as the younger representative of a

powerful

political family, and needed a rhetoric that would establish him as a

leader in his own right. Since the election had been won only
narrowly,

the speech, as with all inaugural addresses, needed to appeal to

former

political opponents as well as to supporters. It needed to reach out to

Republicans as well as satisfying the expectations of Democrats.

More

than this, given the international setting described above, it also

needed

to reach out to an audience of potential supporters among the former

colonies of European powers. In this respect, the audience was

interna-

tional as well as national. With technological developments in

communi-

cations, this global audience was coming within reach for the first
time.

The speech was perhaps the first truly modern piece of political
oratory

in its recognition of multiple audiences – and the particular challenge

that they present to coherence, as it is evidently much easier to
establish shared perspectives with a homogeneous audience. For
this reason, it

could be argued that it is the first genuine example of worldwide

public

communication.

The coherence of a speech relies on how far it fits with the reader’s

expectations and assumptions, and the preceding paragraphs

provide the

knowledge context that would have been shared by Kennedy with his
audi-

ence. The full text of Kennedy’s speech is given at the end of this
chapter; it is divided into numbered paragraphs, and each paragraph
is divided

into sentences (although the text was written to be spoken, for ease
of

cross-reference I use the terms ‘sentence’ and ‘paragraph’). The

altruistic tone that characterises the speech begins in paragraph 4,
where Kennedy

addresses ‘every nation’ with a proclamation ‘Let ... know’. The

proposi-

tions he makes have what is known as illocutionary force. This is the

force behind a speaker’s utterances that corresponds with his or her
underlying

intentions, such as a warning, promise or command – even though

these

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 61

so-called ‘speech acts’ may be done indirectly. Kennedy makes
commit-

ments to those countries that are potential allies of the United States
(commitments that will later impose their own obligations), and he is
offering

an alliance with any nation that is prepared to resist the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union is not mentioned at all, but communism is referred

to

in 8.1, and the Soviet Union is implied by ‘iron tyranny’ in 7.1. This is

because ‘iron’ alludes to the ‘Iron Curtain’ – Churchill’s phrase

referring to the division in Europe arising from the Soviet Union’s
occupation of much

of Eastern Europe. This implied meaning contributes to the

coherence of

the speech – it gives clues as to intentions.

We should recall that the speech was co-authored with Ted Sorenson
–

Kennedy’s speechwriter – who became famous for his authorship, but

always emphasised Kennedy’s own contribution. The commitments

made

by Kennedy (and his speechwriter) are described as ‘pledges’ in

para-

graph 5, and the analysis of the speech circumstances explains the

motive

for the ‘pledges’ referred to in paragraphs 5.1–11.1. For the speech to

become fully meaningful, we need to know why pledges were being
made and to whom they were being made; it is the analysis of such
relevant knowledge frame that contributes to the ‘coherence’ of the
speech. It

is worth noting that contemporary readers may no longer be aware of

the Cold War, and so their interpretation of the text relies more
heavily

on analysis of the linguistic features of cohesion than would that of

the

audience for whom it was originally written. The original audience

would

have been able to rely more on shared knowledge frames. Yet the
speech

has stood the test of time, and an audience of young people today
can still access the speech because its coherence also arises from
cohesion; this is what requires analysis in the next section.

Exercise 3.1

Write a definition of ‘coherence’, and explain how and why it arises.

3.2 What is cohesion?

Cohesion is a crucial concept in the traditional analysis of texts – both

written and spoken – and is concerned with the linguistic means

through

which a speech gives the impression of being unified (Halliday and

Hasan,

1976). It contrasts with coherence, which is concerned more with the

other types of cognitive and schematic knowledge that are identified
when analysing the speech context. Different parts of a text can be
related to one

another by various lexical and grammatical relationships, which

contribute

to the impression of wholeness. When we analyse cohesion, we

identify

62 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

what it is in language that forms the relationships between the

different

sentences of a text and creates its interrelatedness. Without cohesion

we

would not be able to understand how two adjacent sentences belong

to the

same text. The analysis of cohesion, as undertaken in the classic

work by Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, was concerned
with providing a ‘grammar’ of texts, to enable a text to be analysed by
analogy with the

grammatical structure of a sentence to identify a unit above the level

of the sentence – a text. The idea of cohesion can be illustrated first
by considering a few extracts from the speech:

(4.1) Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we

shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support

any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the

success of liberty.

(5.1) This much we pledge – and more.

We are able to relate 5.1 to 4.1, because ‘this’ (5.1) directs the reader
to something to which reference has already been made; without the
list of actions in 4.1 (‘pay any price’ etc.) ‘this’ would not make sense,
because

‘this’ is only interpretable with reference to something that has

already been stated. The connection that is formed between the two
sentences is

known as a cohesive tie, and the type of cohesion where the hearer
refers back to something that has already been mentioned is known
as anaphoric

reference (see below). Grammatically, ‘this’ is a demonstrative

adjective, and we can describe ‘this’ as an ‘anaphoric demonstrative
reference’. The

linguistic means by which cohesion is created is usually analysed in

terms

of grammatical and lexical cohesion, and these are examined in the

fol-

lowing sections.

3.3 Grammatical cohesion

Grammatical cohesion was one of two main classes of cohesive

relation

identified in Halliday and Hasan (1976), as shown in Figure 3.1.

3.3.1 Reference

To understand grammatical cohesion, we need to understand the

concept

of reference. Many words only take on a meaning in a text because of

their
relationship with other words that also occur in the text (as with ‘this’
in 5.1) and entities external to the text. The concept of reference is
concerned with how these connections and relationships are
established. To help

with understanding this, here I first discuss the concepts of exophoric

and endophoric reference, and then deixis.

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 63

Cohesion

Grammatical

Lexical

Figure 3.1 Classes of cohesion.

Source: Halliday and Hasan (1976).

Words that refer to entities external to the text are known as

exophoric

references, whereas words that refer to other words that occur

elsewhere

within the text are known as endophoric references. The following

exam-

ples illustrate this distinction:

(1.2) For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same
solemn oath

our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.

(2.3) And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears

fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights
of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the

hand of God.

When ‘forebears’ occurs for the first time (in 1.2), it refers to the
founders of the American Republic – who have not yet been referred
to in the

speech – and so this is an exophoric reference to the founding

fathers,

from the Greek prefix exo¯ , ‘outside’. However, when ‘forebears’ is

repeated in 2.3, it refers to the same word in 1.2 (we assume the
‘forebears’ referred to in 2.3 are the same people as the ‘forebears’ in
1.2),

and so this is an endophoric reference. The term ‘endophoric’

originates

from the Greek prefix endon, meaning ‘within’. Other phrases in 2.3,
such as ‘revolutionary beliefs’ and ‘rights of man’, have not previously

been referred to in the text, and so are exophoric references because

they refer to ideas that are external to the text. Exophoric reference

relies on schematic knowledge that we can describe as ‘cognitive cir-

cumstances’: in this case ideas that emerged in the Enlightenment

period

that contributed to the French Revolution and the American struggle

for

independence.

64 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Exopohoric references are words that can only be explained with
refer-

ence to the external social or political circumstances of the text – its

discourse world. These include the list of former presidents and other
members of the audience (1.1); ‘victory’ (also in 1.1) is exophoric, as
it refers to the recent election in which Kennedy had defeated Nixon.
‘Same solemn oath

our forebears prescribed’ (1.1) is an exophoric reference to the

historical event in 1789 when George Washington first took the
presidential oath.

Exophoric reference is used in this speech to make the case for

political allegiances with the recently independent countries in Africa
and Asia; this is on the grounds of a shared interest in freedom from
oppression – ‘To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of
the free’ (7.1); the United States

has always seen itself as the prototype for freedom as it was the first
nation to break away from British Imperial rule. In public
communication, there

are appeals to various social groups to persuade them to shift their

loyalties; representing former opponents as potential supporters
through effective use of exophoric reference provided an incentive for
them to become allies.

This section ends with two further examples of endophoric reference:

(20.1) All this will not be finished in the first 100 days.

(20.2) Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of
this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.

‘This’ in (20.1) and ‘it’ in (20.2) are both endophoric references,

because they refer to all the policy objectives and ideals that
Kennedy outlined in the previous section of the speech.
3.3.2 Deixis

Deixis comes from the Greek word for ‘pointing’ and is a term used
for

words whose meaning arises by referring to some aspect of the

context

in which they are spoken. The speaker views him- or herself as being
at the deictic centre, and other entities are positioned in relation to
who and where he or she is, and when he or she is speaking. Deictic
references are the words the orator uses for pointing to the various
aspects of the context in which he or she is located in time and
space. The three primary elements to which the speaker at the deictic
centre can refer are people (persons),

place and time, as summarised in Figure 3.2.

Considering each of these in turn: ‘people’ means the human partici-

pants. Typically, this will be the speaker him- or herself, supporters,

opponents and other members of the audience; so ‘person’ deixis is
typically

realised through the pronoun system and encodes the identity of

participants in the speech by pointing to individuals. So, when
Kennedy says: (21.1) In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than
mine, will rest the

final success or failure of our course.

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 65

Deixis

person

place
time

Figure 3.2 Types of deixis.

‘In your hands’ is person deixis, as it points to his audience: American

citizens. Rhetorically, these empowering words imply that he is a

democrat-

ically elected leader who will follow the will of the people. Earlier, he
says: (11.1) Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our
adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request.

Here ‘those’ is person deixis and refers to the governments of

countries

that are allied with the Soviet Union rather than the United States.

Analysing ‘those’ as person deixis assumes that ‘nation’ really stands

for

leaders or governments of a geographical area – that is, it is a

metonym.

If we analysed ‘nations’ as a geographical location, we would classify

it

as place deixis. Throughout the speech, Kennedy uses the first

person

plural pronoun, ‘we’, (as in 11.1) to point to a range of different

people: himself; his political party, the Democrats; but also to
American citizens, as he is also the head of state – a role he makes
clear when he addresses

them as ‘my fellow Americans’ in 25 and ‘citizens of America’ in 27.

These are all examples of person deixis, and the first person plural,
‘we’, (as in 11.1) is always a significant pronoun in persuasive
language as

it is deliberately unclear as to whom it refers exactly; ‘we’ gains power

through this imprecision and invites hearers to ally themselves with

the

speaker. Followers are loosely defined in political speeches since,

ideally, if rhetoric is successful, this group expands to include those
who were

previously opponents.

‘Place deixis’ means all the spatial relations that are referred to in the

speech and is typically realised by demonstrative adjectives – words

such

as ‘here’, ‘there’, and so on – that encode spatial relations relative to

the location of the speaker; but it can also be words or expressions
that point to a location. For example consider the following rhetorical
appeals:

(9.1) To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special

pledge: to convert our good words into good deeds, in a new

alliance for progress, to assist free men and free governments in

casting off the chains of poverty.

66 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

‘South of our border’ uses the compass point ‘south’ and spatial
location

‘border’ to point to the Central American states, which Kennedy

viewed
as potential allies; circumstantial knowledge tells us this was against

the danger of Cuba, which since the Castro revolution was allying
itself

with the Soviet Union. Sometimes place and person deixis work in

combination:

(8.1) To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe strug-

gling to break the bonds of mass misery.

There is deictic reference specifically to ‘peoples’, who are defined by

their location ‘in the huts and villages’, and it is interesting that the
choice of

‘huts’ and ‘villages’ relies on the cognitive knowledge that American

citi-

zens live in houses and towns, so the reference is to those living in

Third World countries. ‘Across the globe’ reinforces this interpretation
through

place deixis; notice again the imprecision of the location; the

rhetorical

appeal does not restrict itself to a particular geographical area, but

could be anywhere there is poverty.

Time deixis encodes time relations relative to when an utterance is

spoken, so words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ point to a time:

(1.2) For I have sworn before you and almighty God the same solemn

oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quar-

ters ago.
(2.1) The world is very different now.

‘Now’ and ‘ago’ are both instances of time deixis, as they contrast the

present time with the past, relying on the historical knowledge of what

happened 175 years before. His audience may infer that he is

referring to

the American Declaration of Independence. Kennedy hopes to ally

these

fathers of independence to his cause. He continues:

(3.1) We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first

revolution.

‘Today’ is time deixis that reinforces the continuity between a time of

heroic struggle – the ‘first revolution’ – and the present, when he is

speaking. Time deixis is rhetorically important because many of his
audience will know that ‘the first revolution’ refers to the struggle for
independence from colonial Britain. This identifies ‘America’ as a
nation that has also been colonised – an important rhetorical move to
win support from those nations

that had been colonised much more recently. As noted above,

America sees

itself as the founding father of freedom. Deixis in all its forms –

person, place and time – contributes to underlying rhetorical
purposes and therefore to the overall coherence of the speech.

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 67

Exercise 3.2
➢ Identify examples of reference in Core Text 4 (p. 78). Try to
categorise these by deciding whether the reference is exophoric or
endophoric.

➢ Analyse deixis in the Kennedy inaugural speech.

➢ Discuss whether it relies primarily on person, place or time deixis.

3.3.3 Anaphoric reference

Anaphoric reference arises when a hearer understands a word by

referring

back to something previously said. The term originates from the

Greek ana meaning ‘up’, because a reader looks upwards to find the
referent. We find

that the majority of endophoric references are also anaphoric; for

example: To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the
free, we

pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have
passed

away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny (7.1). We shall

not always expect to find them supporting our view (7.2).

‘Them’ in 7.2 refers anaphorically to ‘those new states’ in 7.1; we can

only understand the meaning of 7.2 with reference to 7.1. ‘We’ in 7.1

refers back to ‘we’ in 5.1, and in 6.1–6.3 we assume that each use of
‘we’

refers to the same group of people of whom the speaker is one. But
‘we’ is
deliberately imprecise in political rhetoric and it could also be
interpreted in a critical analysis as referring to different entities – for
example, the government, Americans and so on, in which case it
would be analysed as

exophoric reference. The speech continues:

But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own

freedom – and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly

sought

power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside (7.3).

Here, ‘them’ refers back to a sub-section of ‘those new states whom

we

welcome to the ranks of the free’, so anaphora can stretch back over
more

than one sentence. Notice that there is a contrast between ‘them’

referring to all the newly independent nations towards which Kennedy
is reaching out and ‘those who foolishly sought power by riding the
back of the tiger’.

The audience may wonder if this is the same ‘those’ as in ‘To those

peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break
the

bonds of mass misery’ (8.1). The answer is no because ‘those’ in 7.3

refers to potential US allies who made the wrong choice by backing
the Soviet

Union.

Why is the encoding of meaning so potentially ambiguous? First,

because
the purpose of the speech was not to antagonise the Soviet Union –
as already

68 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

noted, no reference is made to the Soviet Union, only indirectly to the

ideology of communism. This deliberate imprecision reflects also in
expressions

such as ‘allies’, ‘countries to the south of our border’ and so on.

Indirectness in political rhetoric shows concern for the ‘face needs’ of
the hearer – that is, showing respect so that they don’t ‘lose face’: we
do not insult potential allies outside our group, nor do we seek lifelong
enemies. By allowing meaning to

be inferred, rhetoric gains a more subtle influence than if everything

that was intended was made explicit and evident from the surface of
language.

3.3.4 Cataphoric reference

The other type of endophoric reference is cataphoric reference; this is

when a word refers forward to something that will follow in the text. It

originates from the Greek prefix cata meaning ‘downwards’, because

when reading the text, the referent would be lower down the page.
Consider, for

example, ‘This much we pledge – and more’ (5.1); ‘and more’ refers
to the

pledges in the subsequent six sentences and so is an example of

cataphoric

reference. It signals the start of a series of pledges and contributes

strongly to the overall rhetorical purpose of the text. Cataphoric
reference is much less common than anaphoric reference, but its
scarcity can enhance its
potential for creating rhetorical effect.

Endophoric references can be analysed as either anaphoric or cata-

phoric, as shown in Figure 3.3.

Reference

Exophoric

Endophoric

Anaphoric

Cataphoric

Figure 3.3 Categories of reference.

As well as distinguishing between ‘backward’ or ‘forward’ directions,

we can refer to the grammatical function of reference, using parts of

speech or other grammatical terms. We have already seen how
‘those’ can be

described as a ‘demonstrative’ reference; perhaps the most frequent

type of anaphoric reference is formed through the pronoun system:

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

(24.1). I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it (24.2).

‘It’ in 24.2 refers anaphorically to ‘the role of defending freedom in its

hour of maximum danger’ in 24.1 and is a pronoun, so this could be
described

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 69

as ‘anaphoric pronominal reference’. Though it is also endophoric,
this

does not need to be stated, because it may be assumed that when

reference

is anaphoric, it is necessarily endophoric as well.

3.3.5 Other reference categories

The other three types of grammatical cohesion identified in Halliday

and

Hasan (1976) were substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, and I shall

illus-

trate each of these briefly next.

Substitution

This is a relationship where one word takes the place of a phrase. So,
for

example, in ‘If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it
cannot save the few who are rich’ (8.2), ‘the many’ is a substitution
for ‘the many people’. In practice, this category does not occur very
frequently, and you will do well if you can find other examples in the
speech.

Ellipsis

This is a cohesive relation in which a word or phrase is omitted but

would

need to be supplied by the hearer in order to understand the text. It is

sometimes known as ‘substitution by zero’. Consider:

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished
in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even

perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin (20).

‘ Let us begin’ could be expanded to include the various aspirations

referred to in previous sentences, such as: ‘let us begin to explore
what problems

unite us’, ‘let us begin to explore the stars, conquer the deserts etc.’;
in these cases the verb phrases are omitted because they are taken
for granted and so can be analysed as ellipsis.

Conjunction

Halliday and Hasan (1976) used an established grammatical term for

words that connect various sentences. Although conjunctions are

usually

found within sentences, they are only relevant for the analysis of
cohesion when they join separate sentences:

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort

from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost of

mod-

ern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly

atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that
stays

the hand of mankind’s final war (13.1).

Here ‘but’ is a conjunction that contrasts the preceding emphasis on

strengthening the US nuclear deterrent in 12.2 with 13.1, which

outlines
70 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Table 3.1 Categories of conjunction

Type

Logical Relationship

Examples

additive

add/give an alternative

and, or, furthermore, in addition,

likewise, in other words

adversative

opposition

however, but, yet, (even) though, on

the contrary, on the one hand … on

the other hand

causal

one idea/event causes

because, so, then, for this reason,

another

consequently, it follows that, as a result

temporal
one event follows

one day, then, finally, up to now, the

another in time

next day

continuative

please continue to

well, now, of course, anyway, surely,

follow the text

after all

the dangers of a nuclear arms race. Conjunctions contribute to

cohesion

through various forms of logical relationships between clauses; Table

3.1

summarises these relationships.

A large number of conjunctions in English express various types of

lo gical relation between clauses: adding further information,

expressing

logical opposition by contradicting what was said previously, and

express-

ing causal relationships – either by giving an effect followed by a

cause, or a cause followed by an effect.

Exercise 3.3
➢ For each of the references you analysed as endophoric in the
previous exercise, decide whether it is anaphoric or cataphoric.

➢ Now analyse other types of grammatical cohesion (substitution,

ellipsis, conjunction). What percentage of all the examples of
grammatical cohesion

did you classify as reference?

➢ Can you think of certain types of text that may rely more on a
particular type of grammatical cohesion?

➢ What groups of learners of English may encounter difficulty with

grammatical cohesion?

3.4 Lexical cohesion

The type of cohesion that is created by the related senses of words is

known as ‘lexical cohesion’, and is perhaps the primary means for
creating cohe-

sion. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), there are only two
main

types of lexical cohesion: repetition and collocation. However,

subsequent

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 71

work has extended the number of categories of lexical cohesion; for

exam-

ple, Hoey (1991) developed four categories of lexical cohesion:

simple and complex repetition, and simple and complex paraphrase.

Difficulties emerge in the analysis of lexical cohesion over the degree

of
lexical or semantic variation that is permitted between two words that
it is claimed form a cohesive tie. For example, a word can be
repeated exactly,

or another part of speech (using the same root form) or a synonym

could

be used. Reiteration is sometimes used for a word that is a closely

related but not identical in form. Semantic relations can arise from
synonyms,

antonyms, hyponyms or superordinates (these terms are described

below).

However, semantically based cohesion differs from the other type of

lex-

ical cohesion first identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976):

collocation.

The current understanding of this concept is that two or more words

are

related simply because they often occur together, not because they
are

related semantically. We see evidence of this in fixed phrases. For

example,

‘sex’, ‘drugs’ and ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ are semantically unrelated, but
because they are associated in experience they became collocates
for ‘baby boomers’.

This means that when one of the words occurs (e.g. ‘sex’), there is a
like-

lihood that another one of the group will also occur (e.g. ‘drugs’),
though there is no explanation in the semantic system – having sex is
different
from taking drugs, but because people who take drugs sometimes do
so to

enhance sexual experience, the two words became associated in the

expe-

rience of baby boomers and therefore in meaning.

While Halliday and Hasan (1976) is considered to have provided a

thor-ough analysis of grammatical cohesion, it is less successful in its
account of lexical cohesion. In the following analysis, I identify three
main categories of lexical cohesion: repetition, semantic relations and
collocation. A sum-mary of my analysis of lexical cohesion in the first
half of the speech, using these categories, is presented at the end of
this chapter. The full version of the speech is shown there for use in
the exercises.

3.4.1 Repetition and reiteration

Perhaps the simplest and most frequent type of lexical cohesion is

repeti-

tion – this is when exactly the same word is repeated in another

sentence.

In the analysis of the speech at the end of this chapter, repetitions are

shown in bold; the first is ‘forebears’, which repeats a word first

mentioned in (1.2). When the repetition has some morphological
variation from a

root form, this is one type of ‘reiteration’; for example, ‘revolution’ in

3.1

reiterates ‘revolutionary’ in 2.3 – clearly the reference is very similar

and contributes to cohesion. Another example occurs in 11.1, where
‘anew’ is
cohesive with ‘new’ in 9.1, and both are cohesive with ‘renewal’ in
1.1.

Hoey (1991) distinguishes between ‘simple repetition’ for repetition of

an identical form, and ‘complex repetition’ where there is repetition of
a word

72 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

that shares the same root. I would like to illustrate how repetition
organ-

ises whole sections of the speech by considering 6.1:

(6.1) To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share,

we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends.

The word ‘pledge’ in 6.1 refers back to the same pledge in 5.1, so this
is

an example of lexical cohesion through repetition. ‘Pledge’ in 5.1 is

also

repeated in 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1 and 11.1; each time we come to one of
these words, it refers back to both the previous occurrence and all the
previous

occurrences of ‘pledge’ to create a lexical chain. This increases the

rhetorical effect, as the repetition of a word reinforces the speaker’s
conviction: the initial ‘pledge’ in 5.1 is not just a one-off pledge, but is
part of a series of American commitments. Although repetition is
simple, it is also very

effective; in the same way that water dripping on a stone can

eventually

wear it away, it gains its effect through each successive reiteration

and
conveys determination and strength of purpose. These were
important

for a young leader, especially one uncertain about his health and
physical

stamina. Analysis of lexical chains is therefore important in identifying

major themes in a speech.

3.4.2 Semantic relations: antonyms and synonyms

Words occurring in different sentences of a speech can be related

accord-

ing to their place in the semantic system of English. The most

common

type of semantic relation is synonymy – when words have similar

senses.

A simple test is to substitute one word with another to establish

whether

the meaning is changed; if it is not, then we have a pair of synonyms.

The more the meaning stays the same, the more the words can be
con-

sidered as synonyms; for example, if we substituted ‘globe’ in 2.3 with

‘world’ from 2.1, to produce ‘And yet the same revolutionary beliefs

for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the world’, this

would not change the meaning of the utterance. Sometimes the

substitu-
tion produces a form that is not quite as felicitous in terms of style as
the original; for example, if in 3.1 we replace ‘today’ with ‘now’ to
produce

‘We dare not forget now that we are the heirs of that first revolution’,

the style is less acceptable, but the meaning is hardly affected. Quite
often a synonym is used to avoid repetition and enhance style; for
example, at

the end of 4.1, ‘to assure the survival and the success of liberty’
sounds

better than ‘to assure the survival and the success of freedom’,
because

‘freedom’ has already been used in 1.1 and occurs four other times in

the speech, whereas this is the only use of ‘liberty’. Such lexical
varia-

tion enhances a speech: ‘liberty’ will have more impact when used
only

sparingly.

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 73

Antonyms are words that have an opposite sense, for example:

United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures

(6.2). Divided, there is little we can do – for we dare not meet a

power-

ful challenge at odds and split asunder (6.3).

‘United’ has the opposite sense to ‘divided’. Bringing the two

adjectives to the front of each sentence gives them more prominence
and emphasises the

contrast between them. There are other instances of lexical cohesion

between 6.2 and 6.1, including lexical repetition of ‘there is little’ and
other words that contribute to semantic opposition: ‘cannot do’
contrasts with ‘can do’; and

‘cooperative ventures’ contrasts with ‘split asunder’. The semantic

relation here is more complex, because ‘cooperative ventures’ is a
noun phrase whereas

‘split asunder’ is a verb phrase. But they have opposite senses that
contribute to the lexical cohesiveness between the two sentences.
We could test the

semantic relation by replacing ‘split asunder’ with ‘not co-operate’;

this would not change the meaning but would be less stylistically
attractive. Given their parallel structure – syntactically and lexically –
we might expect to find these two sentences next to each other in the
text and to be tightly bonded by lexical cohesion. Both synonyms and
antonyms are types of lexical reiteration.

Sometimes the relations between antonyms may be more ones of

contrast

than opposition; for example, is ‘heirs’ really the opposite of

‘forebears’, or are they contrasted with each other? There is also a
semantic distinction

between gradable and non-gradable antonyms; gradable antonyms

such as

‘wet’ and ‘dry’ can be put on a scale, so there are degrees of wetness
or dry-ness that can be contrasted with each other. Conversely,
‘dead’ and ‘alive’

cannot be positioned on a scale; they are opposite states, because

you cannot be ‘more’ or ‘less’ dead (other than figuratively). In the
speech, we might consider ‘united’ and ‘divided’ as gradable, as there
are degrees of unity

and division. In Hoey (1991), antonyms are termed ‘complex

paraphrases’, though here I am describing synonyms and antonyms
as types of ‘reiteration’.

Exercise 3.4

➢ Analyse the second half of the speech for examples of repetition.

➢ Now analyse it for reiteration (synonyms and antonyms).

➢ Which occurs more frequently: repetition or reiteration?

3.4.3 Collocation

Apart from lexical repetition, the other main type of lexical cohesion is

‘collocation’; this is the frequency with which words are found

together,

or co-occur. Words related by collocation arise from patterns of

language

74 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

use; for example, there is a connection between ‘pledge’ in 5.1 and

the verb phrases ‘pay any price’, ‘bear any burden’, and ‘support any
friend’ in 4.1.

This is a different type of lexical relationship from repetition because it

is based on the idea of ‘pledging’; there is a range of patterns of
‘pledge’

that link its meaning to situations when pledges are made – such as
when friends need support or are short of money. We make pledges
to protect
us against the possibility of times being hard because of poverty,
illness, loneliness and so on.

How might we go about proving this semantic relationship? It is possi-

ble to identify collocation by using a corpus (an electronically

searchable database of language). Since this is an American speech,
it would be more

reliable to search the Corpus of Contemporary American English

(COCA).

When searching the corpus, it is possible to vary the range over

which two

words co-occur; for example, Table 3.2 shows collocations of ‘pledge’

and

‘pay’ within a space of three words.

It is evident that ‘pledge’ and ‘pay’ often occur together in American

English. The corpus data show there is a phrase ‘pledge to pay’,

though

Table 3.2 Collocations of ‘pledge’ and ‘pay’ in COCA (three-word

range)

Now that the financial markets are beginning to stabilise and the big
Wall Street players pledge to pay back their bailout billions, they are
digging in against fundamental change.

[A]nd wonder why county prosecutors are rebelling at President Todd

Stroger’s reneging on his pledge for a pay raise.

[T]alk about money, but the difference between actually getting

people to pay after they pledge is a big difference.
Eventually he withdrew his pledge to pay for the church’s
construction.

Medical students from Lesotho must pledge to pay back their

education [costs]

with years of service back home.

[S]eems perfect – until his niece is accepted at Harvard and reminds

him of a pledge he made to pay her tuition.

The rankings can change on the hour as companies pledge to pay.

Here’s how the new deal works: the Hawks have made an unsecured
pledge to pay the $12.5 million in annual debt service if arena
revenue falls short.

Such principles might include a pledge to pay the U.S. minimum

wage at Mexican operations.

[S]ay they will not agree to take the necessary environmental actions
unless the developed nations pledge in advance to pay for them.

[A]greed to undertake the project itself, and in August 1972 California

rescinded its earlier pledge to pay for it.

Source: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 75

it can occur with other variations. These lines were from the
‘newspaper’,

‘magazine’ and ‘spoken’ sections of the corpus, and we could limit the

search to a particular section of the corpus, such as spoken

language.

The claim made by Halliday and Hasan is that when these two words
occur in different sentences, they retain a link with each other
because they commonly occur together in the language. What this
means is that part of our understanding of speeches depends on how
words are normally used – as well as their isolated meaning when
taken out of context; these ‘normal’ meanings also contribute to the
cohesion of the speech.

Large corpora, such as the COCA, were not available until relatively

recently, so Halliday and Hasan were not able to test the concept of

collocation. We are now in a position where it is feasible to do so and

to find out how cohesion is formed by lexical patterns in general in

language.

The corpus provides a useful resource for testing other cohesive ties
that

I have analysed as collocations; for example, I suggest that

‘revolutionary’

(2.3) collocates with ‘renewal’ (1.1). In the academic section of

COCA, we

find evidence of this collocation:

The Choctaws took advantage of the American Revolution to renew

the

‘play off’ system, this time vacillating between the American–French–

Spanish alliance and the English.

Americans often mistrust or do not have much interest in traditional

cultures, even those in the throes of revolutionary renewal.

Another collocation is between ‘prey’ in 9.2 and ‘tiger’ in 7.3; Table
3.3

shows collocations of these two words within a range of only two

words

in COCA.

There is evidence from the natural history and bioscience sections of

the

corpus that these words often occur together; therefore, when we

come

across them in separate sentences of a speech, they form a cohesive

relation.

The colourful metaphor in 7.1 warns those nations who are consider-

ing allying with a dangerous ally (by inference, a communist one),

and is

extended into 9.2 by repeating this warning to ‘our sister republics

south

of our border’. We saw when analysing cognitive circumstances that

this

refers to nations that were considering following Cuba by forming alli-

ances with the Soviet Union. A corpus can be genuinely helpful in

testing

candidate collocations; for example, when I initially relied on intuition,

I assumed that ‘writ’ in 10.1 might be cohesive with ‘government’ in

9.1; but Table 3.4 shows that the corpus provides evidence that they
are collocates.
To give a final example of a collocation – consider ‘destruction’ in 11.1

and ‘abolish’ in 2.1; an initial search of the corpus did not produce
any

76 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Table 3.3 Collocations of ‘tiger’ and ‘prey’ in COCA

… the trees in Amur tiger range. The pines’ cones are critical food for
tiger prey such as wild boar.

The delta still has enough healthy tugai to offer cover to good
numbers of tiger prey such as wild boar.

‘This delta still has enough healthy tugai to offer cover to good
numbers of tiger prey,’ Pereladova says. ‘Without prey, there can be
no tigers.’

The Asian traditional medicine trade in big cat organs and bones and
the decline of tiger prey species, and better protect habitat.

The tiger was found by field workers conducting a survey of tiger

prey species.

Aside from minor abrasions from the snare cable, the tiger was …

Then, just as the stranger pounced on his unhappy prey, Tiger

leaped out.

The mouse darted away, but Tiger kept a firm grip …

… for grazing their animals, thick forests for gathering firewood –

enhanced the habitat for tiger prey such as deer and wild pigs. It
wasn’t until demographic pressures began …

… of work. Unsanctioned traffic in animals and animal parts – birds of

prey, tiger skins, tiger bones and bear gallbladders out of Russia;
rhino horns and elephant …
Source: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Table 3.4 Collocations of ‘writ’ and ‘government’ in COCA

President Hamid Karzai’s government currently faces: extending the

reach and writ of the government in Kabul across the full extent of
Afghan territory and directing it toward effective governance.

[E]ventually, not only to ease US pressure but also to reestablish the

writ of government. But Pakistan’s military leaders may confront the
Afghan Taliban eventually, not only to ease US pressure but also to
reestablish the writ of government.

… and its prime minister, Ismail Haniya of Hamas, and named a new
emergency government whose writ runs only in the West Bank. Mr.
Abbas says he can no …

… headquarters, ceding control of much of the country-side to the

Maoists.

The government’s writ hardly extends beyond the capital and other
district centers. The Maoists control …

Source: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

matches of these two words; however, Table 3.5 shows what

happens

when they are both changed to the verb form.

The collocation of ‘destruction’ and ‘abolish’ seems quite important

in creating cohesion because, though many cohesive ties are in

sentences

that are close together in the text, these are nine paragraphs apart;
yet the

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 77

Table 3.5 Collocations of ‘abolish’ and ‘destroy’ in COCA

Disgruntled students carry signs saying ‘BAN Social Security!’ Words

like

abolish and destroy are bandied about. Says one student, ‘We’re
just trying to get …

… our position for the last 40 years has been to abolish and destroy
both nuclear tests and nuclear weapons … we shall …’

Source: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

idea introduced in 11, ‘before the dark powers of destruction

unleashed

by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-

destruction’,

seems to fit well with the rather menacing claim of nuclear danger at
the

very start of the speech: ‘For man holds in his mortal hands the
power

to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life’
(2.2).

I could claim that the semantic relation between ‘abolish’ and

‘destruc-

tion’ is synonymy, but the reason I did not do so is because one is a

verb

and the other a noun, and it is therefore rather hard to substitute one
for the other. However, there is scope for discussion over this type of
lexical relation, and Hoey (1991) refers to it (along with antonymy) as
‘complex paraphrase’.
Exercise 3.5

➢ Calculate the total number of instances of each type of lexical

cohesion in paragraphs 1–13. What conclusions do you draw from
this?

➢ Analyse the second half of Core Text 4 (14 onwards) for examples
of collocation: draw a table showing the two words that collocate with
each other

and their location in the speech.

➢ What do you notice about the distance over which cohesion

operates?

➢ What is the value of identifying lexical cohesion?

3.5 Summary

Coherence depends on cognitive knowledge of what is normal in

one’s expe-

rience of the world. This varies according to considerations of

experience

and knowledge; for example, someone with historical knowledge of

post-war

international politics will bring more schematic knowledge to the

Kennedy

speech. This explains why readers vary in their estimate of

coherence, whereas cohesion is more objectively present in the text.
This can be proved empirically as, if a model is applied consistently,
different readers would come up with the same categories and the
same number of cohesive ties.
Figure 3.4 summarises the main cohesion categories from the
Halliday and Hasan approach.

78 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Cohesion

Grammatical

Lexical

Reference Substitution

Ellipsis

Conjunction

Collocation

Repetition

Figure 3.4 Model of cohesion.

Source: Based on Halliday and Hasan (1976).

Core Text 4: John F. Kennedy inaugural speech,

20 January 1961

Key: Bold – repetition

Bold italics – synonyms and antonyms (= reiteration)

Italics – collocation

Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. 1 Lexical choices in the first
para-Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice

graph introduce themes that will

President Nixon, President Truman, rev-

be returned to through cohe-

erend clergy, fellow citizens, we observe

sive ties in the remainder of the

today not a victory of party, but a celebra-

speech; in particular ‘renewal’

tion of freedom – symbolising an end, as

and ‘forebears’.

well as a beginning – signifying renewal,

as well as change (1). For I have sworn

before you and Almighty God the same

solemn oath our forebears prescribed

nearly a century and three-quarters ago

(2).

The world is very different now (1). For 2 ‘now’ ANTONYM ‘ago’ (1.2)
man holds in his mortal hands the power

to abolish all forms of human poverty

COLLOCATION

‘ renewal’

and all forms of human life (2). And yet

(1.1)
the same revolutionary beliefs for which

REPETITION ‘forebears’ (1.2)

our forebears fought are still at issue

SYNONYM ‘world’ (2.1)

around the globe – the belief that the

REPETITION ‘man’ (2.2)

rights of man come not from the gener-

REPETITION ‘hands’ (2.2)

osity of the state, but from the hand of

REPETITION ‘God’ (1.2)

God (3).

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 79

We dare not forget today that we are the 3 SYNONYM ‘now’ (2.1)

heirs of that first revolution (1). Let the

ANTONYM ‘forebears’ (2.3)

word go forth from this time and place,

REPETITION ‘revolutionary’

to friend and foe alike, that the torch

(2.3)
has been passed to a new generation

of Americans – born in this century,

REPETITION ‘century’ (2.2)

tempered by war, disciplined by a hard

COLLOCATION ‘ forebears’

and bitter peace, proud of our ancient

(2.3)

heritage – and unwilling to witness or

REPETITION ‘rights’ (2.3)

permit the slow undoing of those human

rights to which this Nation has always

REPETITION ‘world’ (2.1)

been committed, and to which we are

committed today at home and around

the world (2).

Let every nation know, whether it 4 REPETITION ‘nation’ (3.2)

wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay

any price, bear any burden, meet any

SYNONYM ‘freedom’ (1.1)

hardship, support any friend, oppose

any foe, to assure the survival and the

success of liberty (1).

This much we pledge – and more (1).

5 COLLOCATION ‘ pay’ (4.1)

To those old allies whose cultural and 6 SYNONYM ‘friend’ (3.2)

spiritual origins we share, we pledge the

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (5.1)

loyalty of faithful friends (1). United,

REPETITION ‘friend’ (3.2)

there is little we cannot do in a host of

ANTONYM ‘united’ (6.2)

cooperative ventures (2). Divided, there

REPETITION ‘there is little’

is little we can do – for we dare not meet

(6.1) COLLOCATION

a powerful challenge at odds and split

‘ disciplined’ (3.2)

asunder (3).

ANTONYM ‘cooperative

ventures’ (6.2)

To those new States whom we welcome 7 SYNONYM ‘nation’ (4.1)

to the ranks of the free, we pledge our
REPETITION ‘freedom’ (1.1)

word that one form of colonial control

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (5.1)

shall not have passed away merely to

be replaced by a far more iron tyranny

REPETITION ‘support’ (4.1)

(1). We shall not always expect to find

them supporting our view (2). But we

REPETITION ‘supporting’ (7.2)

shall always hope to find them strongly

REPETITION ‘freedom’ (1.1)

supporting their own freedom – and to

ANTONYM ‘forget’ (3.1)

remember that, in the past, those who

foolishly sought power by riding the

back of the tiger ended up inside (3).

80 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

To those peoples in the huts and villages 8 COLLOCATION ‘ allies’

(6.1) across the globe struggling to break the

REPETITION ‘globe’ (2.3)

bonds of mass misery, we pledge our

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (7.1)

best efforts to help them help them-

selves, for whatever period is required

– not because the Communists may be

doing it, not because we seek their votes,

but because it is right (1). If a free soci-

REPETITION ‘rights’ (3.2)

ety cannot help the many who are poor,

REPETITION ‘free’ (7.1)

it cannot save the few who are rich (2).

SYNONYM ‘misery’ (8.1)

ANTONYM ‘misery’ (8.1)

To our sister republics south of our 9 SYNONYM ‘States’ (7.1)

border, we offer a special pledge – to

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (8.1)

convert our good words into good deeds

REPETITION ‘word’ (7.1)

– in a new alliance for progress – to

COLLOCATION ‘ right’ (8.1)

assist free men and free governments in

REPETITION ‘new’ (7.1)

casting off the chains of poverty (1). But

REPETITION ‘allies’ (6.1)

this peaceful revolution of hope cannot

SYNONYM ‘support’ (4.1)

become the prey of hostile powers (2).

REPETITION ‘free’ (8.2)

Let all our neighbors know that we shall

REPETITION ‘man’ (2.2)

join with them to oppose aggression or

COLLOCATION ‘ break’ (8.1)

subversion anywhere in the Americas (3).

SYNONYM ‘bonds of mass

And let every other power know that this

misery’ (8.1)

Hemisphere intends to remain the master

REPETITION ‘peace’ (3.2)

of its own house (4).

REPETITION ‘revolution’ (3.1)

REPETITION ‘hope’ (7.3)

COLLOCATION ‘ tiger’ (7.3)

COLLOCATION ‘foe’ (3.2)

REPETITION ‘power’ (7.3)

COLLOCATION ‘ friends’ (6.1)

REPETITION ‘let … know’ (4.1)

COLLOCATION ‘ allies’ (6.1)

REPETITION ‘oppose’ (4.1)

COLLOCATION ‘ tiger’ (7.3)

REPETITION ‘Americans’ (3.2)

REPETITION ‘let … know’ (9.2)

COLLOCATION ‘ globe’ (8.1)

REPETITION ‘power’ (2.2)

COLLOCATION ‘ power’ (2.2)

COLLOCATION ‘ hut’ (8.1)

To that world assembly of sovereign 10 REPETITION ‘world’ (3.2)

states, the United Nations, our last best

SYNONYM ‘governments’ (9.1)

hope in an age where the instruments of

REPETITION ‘states’ (7.1)

war have far outpaced the instruments of

REPETITION ‘united’ (6.2)

peace, we renew our pledge of support – to

REPETITION ‘nations’ (4.1)

prevent it from becoming merely a forum

COLLOCATION ‘ good’ (9.1)

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 81

for invective – to strengthen its shield of

REPETITION ‘hope’ (9.2)

the new and the weak – and to enlarge the

REPETITION ‘war’ (3.2)

area in which its writ may run (1).

REPETITION ‘peaceful’ (9.2)

REPETITION ‘renewal’ (1.1)

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (9.1)

REPETITION ‘support’ (4.1)

REPETITION ‘new’ (9.1)

COLLOCATION ‘ south of the

border’ (9.1)

COLLOCATION

‘ governments’ (9.1)
Finally, to those nations who would make 11 REPETITION ‘nations’
(10.1) themselves our adversary, we offer not

SYNONYM ‘foe’ (4.1)

a pledge but a request: that both sides

REPETITION ‘offer’ (9.1)

begin anew the quest for peace, before the

REPETITION ‘pledge’ (10.1)

dark powers of destruction unleashed by

COLLOCATION ‘ any friend

science engulf all humanity in planned or

… any foe’ (4.1)

accidental self-destruction (1).

REPETITION ‘new’ (9.1)

COLLOCATION ‘ seek’ (8.1)

REPETITION ‘peace’ (10.1)

REPETITION ‘power’ (9.4)

COLLOCATION ‘ abolish’

(2.1)

REPETITION ‘human’ (3.2)

We dare not tempt them with weakness 12 REPETITION ‘weak’

(10.1) (1). For only when our arms are sufficient
COLLOCATION ‘ shield’

beyond doubt can we be certain beyond

(10.1)

doubt that they will never be employed (2).

But neither can two great and powerful 13 REPETITION ‘powers’

(11.1) groups of nations take comfort from our

REPETITION ‘nations’ (11.1)

present course – both sides overburdened

REPETITION ‘sides’ (11.1)

by the cost of modern weapons, both

SYNONYM ‘arms’ (12.1)

rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the

SYNONYM ‘arms’ (12.1)

deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that

REPETITION ‘hand’ (2.3)

uncertain balance of terror that stays the

REPETITION ‘war’ (10.1)

hand of mankind’s final war (1).

COLLOCATION ‘ humanity’

(11.1)

So let us begin anew – remembering on both 14

sides that civility is not a sign of weakness,

and sincerity is always subject to proof (1).

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let

us never fear to negotiate (2).

Let both sides explore what problems 15

unite us instead of belaboring those prob-

lems which divide us (1).

82 Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse

Let both sides, for the first time, for- 16

mulate serious and precise proposals

for the inspection and control of arms

– and bring the absolute power to

destroy other nations under the abso-

lute control of all nations (1).

Let both sides seek to invoke the won- 17

ders of science instead of its terrors (1).

Together let us explore the stars, conquer

the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the

ocean depths, and encourage the arts and

commerce (2).

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners 18

of the earth the command of Isaiah – to

‘undo the heavy burdens … and to let the

oppressed go free’ (1).

And if a beachhead of cooperation may 19

push back the jungle of suspicion, let both

sides join in creating a new endeavor, not

a new balance of power, but a new world

of law, where the strong are just and the

weak secure and the peace preserved (1).

All this will not be finished in the first 20

100 days (1). Nor will it be finished in

the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of

this Administration, nor even perhaps in

our lifetime on this planet (2). But let us

begin (3).

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more 21

than in mine, will rest the final success

or failure of our course (1). Since this

country was founded, each generation of

Americans has been summoned to give

testimony to its national loyalty (2). The

graves of young Americans who answered

the call to service surround the globe (3).

Now the trumpet summons us again – 22

not as a call to bear arms, though arms

we need; not as a call to battle, though

embattled we are – but a call to bear the

burden of a long twilight struggle, year in

and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in

tribulation’ – a struggle against the com-

mon enemies of man: tyranny, poverty,

disease, and war itself (1).

Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse 83

Can we forge against these enemies a grand 23

and global alliance, North and South, East

and West, that can assure a more fruitful

life for all mankind? Will you join in that

historic effort (1)?

In the long history of the world, only a few 24

generations have been granted the role of

defending freedom in its hour of maximum

danger (1). I do not shrink from this respon-

sibility – I welcome it (2). I do not believe

that any of us would exchange places with

any other people or any other generation

(3). 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 (4).

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not 25

what your country can do for you – ask

what you can do for your country (1).

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not 26

what America will do for you, but what

together we can do for the freedom of

man (1).
Finally, whether you are citizens of 27

America or citizens of the world, ask of us

the same high standards of strength and

sacrifice which we ask of you (1). With

a good conscience our only sure reward,

with history the final judge of our deeds,

let us go forth to lead the land we love,

asking His blessing and His help, but

knowing that here on earth God’s work

must truly be our own (2).

Essential reading

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. (London:

Longman).

Hoey, M. (1991). Patterns of Lexis in Text. (Oxford: Oxford University

Press),

Chapter 3.

Jones, R.H. (2012). Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for

Students. (London/

New York: Routledge), Section B2.

Mullany, L. and Stockwell, P. (2010). Introducing English Language: A

Resource Book for Students. (London/New York: Routledge), pp. 20–
23.

PART II
Critical Approaches to

Discourse

Chapter 4

Critical Analysis: Context and

Persuasion

4.1 What is power?

In this part of the book, I first examine, in this chapter, two concepts
that are central to all critical analysis of discourse: context and
persuasion. I present a theory of persuasion and illustrate how this
works with reference to a speech on gender equality by the British
actress Emma Watson, who became famous

as Hermione in several Harry Potter films (see Core Text 5 at the end
of the chapter). In Chapter 5, I analyse the verbal processes of
modality and transitivity that are employed in critical linguistics and
illustrate this with reference to the arguments that were put forward in
support of the case for the invasion

of Iraq that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein. I follow this in Chapter
6 with an account of one of the most well-known critical linguistic
approaches – the discourse-historical approach. I illustrate how
naming choices reflect underlying value systems, as well as
integrating within this chapter a discussion of argument theory
drawing on the work of Stephen Tolmin with reference to

a speech by the Conservative politician and staunch Euro-sceptic

Jacob Rees-Mogg. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is concerned
with how arguments

are constructed – giving a point of continuity with classical

approaches to rhetoric. I begin by considering a topic equally
important to critical discourse: the question of power.
Critical discourse analysts believe that language is crucial in
determining social power relationships. They identify how differences
in power and knowledge are created by inequalities in access to
linguistic resources – for example by inequality of access to higher
education – and how we can identify these imbalances of power by
the analysis of language. CDA is concerned with the

abuse of social power by a social group, so we should remember

that:

◇ Relations of domination are studied from the perspective of, and in

the

interests of, the dominated group, on the assumption that the

powerful

do not need the help of linguists.

◇ It can be shown that the discursive actions of the dominant group

are

illegitimate; this means that they do not have the right to use
language

to enforce their power.

87

88 Critical Approaches to Discourse

◇ There are also viable alternatives to the discourses of the

dominant, and that the use of these alternatives could benefit the
dominated

group(s).

Critical linguists ask themselves why, of all possible language uses,

one particular language feature is chosen from an almost unlimited
range
of options, and the effect of this feature on social relations. Language

represents a state of affairs ‘in such a way that it either reflects, more
or less closely, the social relations of the participants, or it projects –
more or less plausible – versions of such a relation. The motivating
dynamic

for the choice of one form rather than another is a power-difference’

(Kress, 1992, p. 89). This point of view assumes that power is not dis-

tributed equally in society and that language is central to how this

power

is enforced. Rogers (2011) provides an excellent theoretical introduc-

tion to CDA – organised around the work of James Paul Gee,

Norman

Fairclough and Gunther Kress. Gee (2011) places especial

importance on

the influence of context, which he analyses in terms of ‘situated

mean-

ings’, and ‘figured worlds’.

Power is a central notion in CDA and can be taken to mean the way
that

a particular social group is able to enforce its will over other social
groups.

Power is when a powerful social group (A) persuades another social

group

(B) to do things that are in A’s best interests, and prevents B from
doing
the things that are in B’s best interests. We should also distinguish
between legitimate and illegitimate forms of control: that is, between
power and the abuse of power, as van Dijk (2008a, p. 9) puts it:
‘Traditionally, control is defined as control over the actions of others. If
such control is also in the interest of those who exercise such power,
and against the interest of those who are controlled, we may speak of
power abuse.’ CDA is interested in

the detailed analysis of social and political relations of power,

dominance and inequality, and in the role of discourse in their
reproduction in, and

permeation through, society. Social variables such as gender, race,

ethni-

city, region, social class, sexual orientation or physical body/capability

are all potentially of relevance in working out how power is distributed
and

exercised in a society.

However, all societies are formed around power relations – as good

parents should have legitimate control over their children and are
criticised when they do not, so teachers have legitimate authority over
their students, and in general society has legitimate forms of control
over those who commit crimes. Some inequalities are normal or
legitimate because without

them society could not operate. In CDA, we are interested in the

abuse of language and power: that is, when power is being used
illegitimately. But

how do we know when power is being used illegitimately, and who is

to

decide whether it is or not? Reisigl’s (2008a) answer to these

questions is that texts are illegitimate when they have negative
mental consequences –
that is, they contribute to disinformation, stereotypes and prejudices.

Context and Persuasion 89

Such power can be described as ‘coercive’ because it forces people

to do

things that they would not otherwise do and which are bad for them to

do. However, decisions about when power is coercive will depend on

the

individual’s ability to demonstrate and to argue that they are. So CDA

sees texts as a site of contestation or struggle – in only a few cases
would all analysts agree that a text has a negative consequence. In
the majority of

cases, it is up to the analyst to demonstrate that a particular use of

lan-

guage is illegitimate and that there is a preferable alternative; even

then, a case still needs to be argued as to the perspective from which
this alternative is deemed preferable.

One major means by which discourse is controlled is through access

to,

and control over, particular types of text, or genres. It is not always

easy to identify powerful groups, but they probably include politicians
because

they make laws, lawyers who interpret them, and the policemen who
have

the authority to enforce them should they so wish. But money

symbolises

power as much as does the legal system, and so those who control
money,
such as chief executives of financial institutions and insurance
companies, and traders in stocks and shares, are also powerful.
Those who control

access to information through technology, such as leaders of large

social

media companies, are also powerful. In reality, it is often quite hard to

gain access to forums of power, because restricted access to

information is a key means of social control. Then there are other
groups whose power

is perhaps more symbolic than substantial; these include journalists

who write news stories; makers of TV and radio programmes; writers,
artists,

directors – maybe even university professors: all these groups

influence our values, beliefs and ideologies through their
representations of social reality.

Because these symbolic elites contribute to the making of public

knowl-

edge, their texts are often more readily accessible to analysts.

We should always be aware of whose voices we are hearing and who

has access to the public mind – usually through some type of
privileged access

to the media. Politicians speak as representatives of political parties,

and so their speeches reflect the perspective of their party as much
as themselves as individuals; they also contain a range of voices –
usually those of the

various audiences to whom they appeal. There is, of course, a wide

range
of sub-genres of speeches, and Reisigl (2008a, 2008b) provides a
valuable overview of these. Political speeches constitute a highly
accessible source of data because, once spoken, political speeches
are in the public domain.

Exercise 4.1

➢ Write your own definition of ‘power’.

➢ Write three examples of legitimate uses of power, and give three

examples of illegitimate uses of power.

90 Critical Approaches to Discourse

4.2 CDA, context and circumstances

One of the hallmarks of CDA is close attention to social context: the

iden-

tity of the relative social positions of speaker and addressee, and the
role of language in constructing these relationships. Critical analysis
of public communication maps out correspondences between
particular language

and other semiotic choices, and the underlying purposes and

intentions that provide an explanation of these choices. This mapping
and explanation

involves identifying the speaker’s choices and relating these to the

particular social context in which the speech was made, and the
speech’s impact,

allowing us to infer the speaker’s purposes – which may not be

evident from an analysis that does not refer to a social context. We
need to observe and record key event details around a speech, such
as when, where and to whom

it was made. Analysis of circumstances involves identifying the

speaker’s
beliefs and his or her purposes in making a speech, as well as
identifying

the audience’s beliefs, how these influenced the speech and how
they were

influenced by it. The defining characteristic, then, of discourse

analysis is close attention to ‘context’; however, this term seems to
conceal the fact

that in CDA we need to analyse a range of ‘contexts’, which is why I

prefer the more general term ‘speech circumstances’. These are the
situations in

which a speech was given, the cognitive states of the speaker and
audience, the processes through which a speech was generated and
those involved in

its delivery. It is motivated by the idea that analysing the reasons

behind language choices helps us to understand how the social world
is created.

Figure 4.1 summarises the stages involved in CDA. The diagram

shows

three stages in analysing public communication: analysis of the

speech

1.

Analysis of

2.

speech

Identification

circumstances
and analysis of

and an

features

3.

Interpretation

and

explanation

Critical discourse analysis

Figure 4.1 Stages in critical discourse analysis of public

communications.

Context and Persuasion 91

1.

Analysis of

2.

situational

Analysis of

circumstances

cognitive

cog

circumstances

ances
3.

Analysis of

process

circumstances

Speech circumstances

Figure 4.2 Stage 1: analysis of speech circumstances.

circumstances; analysis of linguistic and performance features; and

inter-

preting and explaining these with reference to the speech

circumstances.

Each of the three stages is explained in more detail below, starting

with the

analysis of speech circumstances, as summarised in Figure 4.2.

Analysing speech circumstances involves the following stages:

consid-

ering the situation in which a speech was given and the states of
mind of

both speaker and audience; and consideration of both the process

through

which a speech was produced and the processes involved in its

delivery.

These stages are summarised below.

4.2.1 Stage 1: analysis of speech ‘circumstances’

◇ Situational circumstances
• Speech setting – speaker, location, date, occasion and audience

◇ Cognitive circumstances (‘background knowledge’)

• Speaker’s beliefs, assumptions and purpose

• Audience’s beliefs, assumptions and purpose

• Interaction between speaker and audience’s beliefs, assumptions

and

purposes

◇ Process circumstances

• Interaction between speaker and speechwriter

• Norms of interaction between speaker and audience

Each of these is considered in more detail below and illustrated with

reference to Core Text 5 – Emma Watson’s speech.

92 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Situational circumstances

In the first stage, we analyse the circumstances in which the speech

was

given. Situational circumstances concern details of the speech

setting, such as the social identity of the speaker and where, when, to
whom and on what

occasion the speech was given. Other information that could be

recorded

is the duration of the speech (measured in time or number of words),

and
situational information such as dominant current issues of concern
that

are part of general knowledge, including what has happened in the

world

in the days or hours leading up to the speech. I illustrate the

situational circumstances with reference to Core Text 5. Emma
Watson is a very successful British actress who appeared in all eight
of the Harry Potter films during the period 2001 to 2011. Although
primarily known for her acting,

she is also an activist on gender issues. After hearing Watson’s

speech, the young Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai told Watson in
2015 that she

had decided to describe herself as a ‘feminist’. The speech was given

at a

special event to launch the ‘HeForShe’ campaign at the Headquarters

of

the United Nations in New York on 20 September 2014 in her role as

‘UN

Women Goodwill Ambassador’. In the speech, Emma Watson offered

an

account of her own ‘journey’ to feminism and invited men and boys to
join

with her in promoting gender equality. Her immediate audience

comprised

the attendees at the event, including various UN officials, but the

speech

was publicised on social media and extensively viewed on YouTube.

Cognitive circumstances

Cognitive circumstances concern details of the state of knowledge of

the

participants and interaction between their states of knowledge.

Although

cognitive circumstances could be referred to as ‘background

knowledge’,

I have not used this term because it is not really clear whether the
source of this knowledge is in the mind of the speaker, the audience
or the

person reading the analysis; it is also not clear in what sense it is in

the

‘background’. It is important to consider the speaker’s pre-existing

beliefs, prejudices and knowledge frames, and how these interact
with those of

the audience and other parties. For example, an audience that listens
to

a speech by a far-right speaker will know that the speaker is likely to

have a strong negative view of immigration, and the speaker will

know

that the audience may have experienced some negative effects from
this

(or believed themselves to have done so) – and a person reading a

critical

analysis of the language of the far right will know both angles. It is the
interaction between audience’s and speaker’s beliefs that determines
the

choice of words such as ‘flood’, and metaphors relating to pressure,

stress and burdens.

We should be wary of simplification. For example, when analysing

audience beliefs and assumptions, we should remember that the

audiences

addressed by political orators are often not homogeneous – in Britain,

they are typically multi-ethnic and socially mixed – so that we may
expect to

Context and Persuasion 93

hear a range of different voices. Most of the information necessary for

the speech situation is more readily available than cognitive
information that

relies on sources such as biographies and more complex contextual,

often

historical and cultural, knowledge. For example, Core Text 5 took as a

premise that many arguments for gender equality had, in the past,
been

based on hatred of men; she takes issue with this position by arguing
that

men and boys should be treated as the allies rather than the
opponents of

gender equality. She is therefore assuming that the audience is

familiar with the expression of strong anti-male sentiment by some
advocates of gender
equality. The other aspect of cognitive circumstances is knowledge of
her

record as an actress, to which she makes explicit reference in the

speech:

‘You might be thinking, “Who is this Harry Potter girl, and what is she

doing speaking at the UN?” And it’s a really good question.’ As well
as

humour, she shows awareness of both her relatively young age and
the fact

that she is known for her role in films made primarily for children. In
the word of thanks following the speech, the UN representative – in
an attempt

at humour – makes a rather patronising allusion to her age: ‘What a

beau-

tiful speech, what a beautiful thought – Emma, pay attention’. By

using a

phrase traditionally used by teachers to their pupils, the UN

representative is making a rather patronising allusion to her age.

Process circumstances

Process circumstances concern the processes between the

participants in

the production and delivery of a speech. Often the speechwriter may

be

unseen, because his or her presence would undermine the

authenticity of
the speech, and there is a tension between the speechwriter, who is
aware

of the social context of the speech, and the politician, who is more
con-

cerned with issues such as image and persona. For this reason a
political

orator may give an extemporary speech – improvised in response to

a

sense of mood. Information about this process is only available

retrospec-

tively from biographical accounts of retired politicians and

speechwriters.

Nevertheless it is an important consideration and is becoming more

acces-

sible as speechwriters are gaining prominence in their own right.

Process

circumstances also include knowledge of speech forms, of political

events

and the norms of interaction between an orator and an audience; for

exam-

ple, whether cheering is permitted.

Emma Watson’s speech was based on a carefully pre-prepared and

self-authored ‘script’, and her delivery was equally well rehearsed –

as

one would expect from an experienced actress. The audience

responds
formally, although there are three extended periods of applause
during

the speech (see Core Text 5) and a few audible whoops. There is
also

extended applause and cheering following its termination; many (but

not

all) audience members rose to their feet to give her a standing

ovation. The speech was published on the United Nations’ YouTube
channel and other

social media sites and had a very positive response from a wide
audience.

94 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Evidence of the 395 tweets posted under the HeForShe hashtag in

the

24 hours following the speech, nearly all offer some form of

compliment

to the speaker and the sentiments expressed.

Exercise 4.2

Undertake an analysis of the situational, cognitive and process

circumstances of a speech of your choice.

4.2.2 Stage 2: identification and analysis of features

The second stage, summarised in Figure 4.3, involves the

identification and analysis of language and performance features,
which could be at a number

of different levels (language itself is a set of interlinking systems). We

could analyse any of the following:
◇ Smaller units, such as lexical choices

◇ Larger units, such as the syntactic patterns of sentences

◇ Stylistic features that permeate a whole speech, which can include

lexis and syntax, metaphor and tone of voice, and, as we see later in
the next

chapter, command of the modal system of English.

When analysing words, we might consider to which semantic fields

these

words belong (e.g. ‘war’ or ‘the family’), what parts of speech they are
and whether their associations are usually negative or positive. When
analysing 1.

Analysis of

2.

language:

Analysis of

Identification

lexis

performance:

and analysis of

grammar

gra

appearance,
features

style

manner and

manner and

gesture

gesture

Analysis of features

Figure 4.3 Stage 2: identification and analysis of features.

Context and Persuasion 95

syntax, we might consider whether language is dense or simple, the

extent

to which agency is concealed by the use of noun forms, and the

passive

voice in preference to verb forms and the active voice. Stylistic

features also include how certain a speaker is about the claims being
made – typically

through the use of modality (see Chapter 5). Of necessity, these

levels of analysis interact with each other: for example, if a speaker
expresses certainty during a speech by using forms such as ‘must’ or
‘necessarily’, this also affects the syntax of individual sentences. In
Core Text 5, of particular interest are the artistic proofs and the
figures of speech through which they are realised; appeals are made
primarily to ethos but also to pathos
and logos, and I identify these in more detail in the analysis of
rhetorical resources in section 4.3. Analysis could also be made of
particular tropes

such as rhetorical questions.

As well as the language that is used, equally, if not more, important

are

aspects of performance and delivery. When analysing performance

and

delivery, we could examine any of the following:

◇ Bodily appearance – hairstyle and eyes

◇ Bodily performance – eye movements and hand gestures

◇ Dress – formal or informal

◇ Voice – prosodic features such as accent and voice quality

◇ Use of notes, teleprompts or technology related to voice projection.

Semiotic aspects, such as head position, eye contact or voice quality,

may

have a subliminal effect on a television audience. They have come

increas-

ingly to the fore with the introduction of adversarial style pre-election

TV debates, in which audiences are influenced by each speaker’s

body

position, gaze, smile, use of pointing and other hand gestures as well
as
by tone of voice and the emotional mood that is conveyed. However,
to

illustrate performance and delivery, Table 4.1 shows some semiotic

aspects of Core Text 5:

Table 4.1 Performance and Delivery in Emma Watson’s HeForShe

Speech

Performance Feature

Illustration

Bodily appearance

Her brown hair was swept tightly back into a

ponytail with a centre-parting; her make-up was

understated and subtle.

Bodily performance

She moves in a youthful and vigorous manner,

walking swiftly up the podium, with a light

swaying of the hips. She looks towards the

dignitaries when addressing them and otherwise

towards the audience while speaking. She

accentuates key phrases with slight movements of

the eyebrows. Her delivery is controlled,

96 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 4.1 continued

Performance Feature

Illustration

with controlled hand gestures for emphasis. But

her face and head movements are expressive

and well co-ordinated with what she says. She

breaks into a smile when saying: ‘You might be

thinking, “Who is this Harry Potter girl, and

what is she doing speaking at the UN?”’ She

shrugs when saying: ‘Statesman Edmund Burke

said, “All that is needed for the forces of evil

to triumph is for good men and women to do

nothing.’”

Dress

An elegant white dress with fitted blazer and

a broad pleated skirt with a thin metallic belt

and conservative black pumps. She wore the

HeForShe badge on her lapel. She looks demure –

like a very young teacher on her first day in a

new job.
Voice

She pauses and breathes deeply before starting,

creating a sense of expectancy. Initially, her

delivery is a little hesitant, and her voice

quavers. This gives the impression that she is

slightly nervous and invites the audience to

feel empathetic towards her plight. At no times

is her delivery hurried or rushed, allowing

time for the significance of her words to be

absorbed.

She places particular emphasis on keywords; to

illustrate this, the duration of pauses in seconds

has been inserted in the following extract:

‘Apparently, I am among the ranks of women

whose expressions are seen as too strong (2), too

aggressive (2), isolating (1), and anti-men (2).

Unattractive even (3).’

She also pauses to allow cheering when

it occurs.

Her accent is the British Received Pronunciation.

Use of notes and technology Initially, she looks down to a teleprinter
to ensure that she makes no mistake in using the titles of

the various UN dignitaries to whom the speech is

formally addressed. Subsequently, her eye contact

is constantly with the audience, indicating that

she has memorised the speech.

Context and Persuasion 97

This highlights an important practice in CDA: although much purely

textual material is available via the internet, so too are recordings of

the speech delivery that allow us to match the non-verbal features
with the

linguistic ones. We should never forget that politics is a theatrical

domain and that the skills of the actor become more prominent in a
media-driven

culture.

Exercise 4.3

Watch a video of Emma Watson’s HeForShe Speech, and use Table

4.1 to identify features of her performance and delivery (see Core
Text 5).

4.2.3 Stage 3: interpretation and explanation

The third stage of Figure 4.1, summarised in Figure 4.4, aims to

produce an understanding of the social world by interpreting the
persuasive effect

and social purpose of the speech; it explains how the situational and
cog-
nitive circumstances interact with the linguistic and performance
features, and process circumstances to realise socially persuasive
outcomes. These

outcomes are described by van Dijk (2008a), using the concept of

‘social cognition’. Stage 3 is an account of what motivates choices,
and assumes

that the language features observed in Stage 2 are not arbitrary, but
moti-

vated by the circumstances of the speech.

So views about immigration commonly arise through an act of social

cognition in which an orator says what she, or he, believes an

audience

1.

Interaction

2.

between

Norms of

speaker and

interaction

speech writer

between

spee

speaker and
speaker and

audience

Interpretation and explanation

Figure 4.4 Stage 3: interpretation and explanation.

98 Critical Approaches to Discourse

wants to hear: discourse arises from an interaction between speaker

and

audience knowledge structures (e.g. frames and schemata) and

beliefs. For

example, hearers will have a pre-existing template formed through

stereo-

typical media representations of an immigrant whose primary purpose

in

travelling to a Western country is to obtain access to its welfare

services without working. The Conservative Party sought to activate
this schema

in their 2005 campaign by using the poster slogan ‘Are you thinking
what

we’re thinking?’ as it relied for its interpretation on a pre-existing

schema relating to anxiety about immigration (one that it turned out
the electorate did not have – at that time). The most powerful form of
control over others is control over their minds – how people think as
individuals is strongly

influenced by the language employed to describe social relations,

because
language contributes to individual mental representations – beliefs,
atti-

tudes, ideologies and so on – that we have about the world. An

example

of the sorts of questions that arise when interpreting a speech is

provided by the notion of ‘recontextualisation’ (which Fairclough
borrowed from

Bernstein [1990]):

◇ Which elements of the event (or events in a chain of events) are

present/

absent, prominent/backgrounded?

◇ What is the degree of abstraction/generalisation from concrete

events?

◇ How are events ordered?

◇ What is added in representing events –

explanations/legitimisations

(reasons, causes, purposes), evaluations?

(Fairclough, 2003, p. 139)

Reactions to speeches do not necessarily determine how we think, as

people also have their own attitudes and beliefs (based on their
experiences) that influence how they critically evaluate texts as
individuals.

Explanation involves analysis of the interaction between the speaker

and

other parties involved in producing a speech, such as the

speechwriter
and the audience. These can concern speech authorship – how far, in

what ways and with what effect does an orator discuss his or her
speech

with the speechwriter? How does the speaker interact with an

audience?

Typically, a speech exists in some form, usually written, prior to the

time when it is delivered. It will usually be multi-authored, though
individual politicians vary in how far they adapt the texts their
speechwriter(s)

supply. Speechwriters often have a clearer notion of the audience for

the speech in mind; they make assumptions about the listeners’ state
of

knowledge, and this influences the choice of words, grammatical

patterns

and other language features, such as how complex or dense the

speech is,

the appropriateness of humour and so on. Individual politicians are

often

more concerned with projecting an image that differentiates them

from

other politicians, since the creation of style is crucial in developing

their public persona.

Context and Persuasion 99

Emma Watson’s speech enhanced the profile of the HeForShe

campaign
by gaining extensive media coverage; for example, using the Nexis
data-

base, there were 216 news stories (hardcopy and online) in which
both

Emma Watson and HeForShe occur in the one-year period following

the

speech; of these, 126 included reference to Emma Watson in the

headline –

indicating the level of her personal impact on the media. There were
256

newspaper stories on HeForShe that included Emma Watson in the

head-

line in the period between when the speech was made and February
2018:

this indicates longevity in the impact of the speech. However, there

has

been criticism on the grounds that HeForShe shows a binary view of

gender

that is not accommodating individuals who are not comfortable with

such

a view. Other critics noted that the campaign was run by privileged
women

who had not themselves endured many of the effects of gender

inequality.

In this section, I have illustrated how a discourse-based critical

analysis requires attention to three phases: the analysis of speech
circumstances,
analysis of linguistic features, and finally interpretation and
explanation.

Within each of these phases are embedded phases; for example, the
analysis of speech circumstances requires attention to three aspects
of circumstance: situational, cognitive and process. But to understand
discourse, it is also necessary to consider the intentions that underlie
a political speech –

in this respect, then, we need to consider the notion of persuasion. I

do

this in the next section before going on to illustrate how the

interaction

between circumstance and intention unfurls in actual language use.

This

occurs in the next chapter by considering how persuasive language

relies

on a command of modality.

Exercise 4.4

Undertake an interpretation and explanation of Emma Watson’s

HeForShe

speech.

4.3 Persuasion

Charteris-Black (2011) outlines an approach to persuasion which I

summarise here. When we say that someone has been persuaded,
we usually mean

that they have changed their point of view about a topic according to
the
influence of a persuasive agent, and that this changing of mind might
be

marked by an expression such as ‘You’re right’. In this sense, there is

no such thing as unsuccessful persuasion. Effectively, ‘being right’ is
central to persuasion, and I suggest that there are five primary
rhetorical resources by which an orator can get audiences to believe
that he or she is right; these are by

◇ having the right intentions;

◇ thinking right;

100 Critical Approaches to Discourse

◇ sounding right;

◇ telling the right story; and

◇ looking right.

Not all are likely to occur when a particular speech is made, but in
most

cases a speaker will rely on more than one of these methods. The
means of

persuasion are summarised in Figure 4.5.

1. Establishing

integrity ( ethos)

‘Having the right

intentions’

5. Appearance,
2. Expressing

hair, dress and

political arguments

gesture

( logos)

‘Looking right’

‘Thinking right’

Persuasion

‘Being right’

4. Mental

3. Heightening

representations,

emotional impact

myths, frames

( pathos)

and schemata

‘Sounding right’

‘Telling the right

story’

Figure 4.5 Rhetorical means of persuasion in political speeches.

Source: Based on Figure 1.1 in Charteris-Black (2011, p. 14).

The Emma Watson speech soon went viral, and here I draw on the

395 tweets that were posted in the twenty-four-hour period

commencing

21 September 2014, to make inferences regarding the rhetorical

resources

to which tweeters responded. Some tweeters actually indicated that

they

believed her to be simply ‘right’:

Emma Watson has it exactly right.

Everyone needs to hear Emma Watson’s speech about gender

equality.

She is so right.

Context and Persuasion 101

She’s right, equality isn’t anti men.

Emma Watson Says That The View Feminism Is “Man Hating” Has

To Stop.

When Watson says, ‘I have realised that fighting for women’s rights
has

too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I

know for certain, it is that this has to stop’, she appears sincere and
as

‘having the right intentions’; she is acknowledging that in the past

some
proponents of women’s rights have exhibited an aggressive attitude

towards ‘men’ in general, and are in themselves sexist. She rejects

partisan or biased positions and, because she is a woman, is in a
better position to do so since, were the same argument presented by
a man, it would appear

self-interested. Classical rhetorical theory recognised the importance

of the orator establishing his moral character or ‘ethos’; in a sense an
audience

can only ever be persuaded by someone they respect, so this is a

necessary

prerequisite for the other artistic proofs. Here Watson displays such
ethos by rejecting a self-interested position while also explaining how
it is one derived from her own experience.

Ethos expressed itself through demonstrating wisdom and expertise;

through virtuous behaviour; and by demonstrating goodwill towards

an audience. The measure of a speaker’s ethos would be whether he

or she prioritised his or her own interests or those of the public. Here

the speaker was demonstrating good intentions towards men as well

as

towards women – thereby extending the range of her audience,

although

I could only attribute a definitely male identity to 38 of the 395 tweets

–

less than 10 per cent – using a combination of Twitter name and

thumb-
nail image. Some of these tweets were explicitly to counter an ethos-
undermining hacker who claimed to have nude photographs of Emma

Watson:

Go Emma Watson! Loved the speech. Fuck all the basement dwellers

that think you can use her pictures as a weapon to get her to stop.

Preemptive apology on behalf of all men to Emma Watson if she

really

does get photo-hacked. Not all men want that.

I almost pity the trolls threatening Emma Watson. They must be very

sad, lonely little woman-haters.

The availability of the nude images was publicised by some news

stories

that related more generally to the issue of phoning and the

distribution

of images of naked celebrities via social media. Male tweeters – keen

to

demonstrate their right intentions – were taking on a fairly traditional

male role as the defender of female virtue while inadvertently
broadcasting the

102 Critical Approaches to Discourse

availability of such images. However, other tweeters seem to indicate

that

it is her ethos that they find persuasive:

I’ve come to the conclusion that Emma Watson is very close to
perfect

in everything she does.

Emma Watson is such a wonderful, inspiring human being. Her

speech

about the HeForShe campaign is brilliant.

Emma Watson is the best woman in the planet, she’s intelligent.

Her appeal to ethos is also strengthened by allying herself with others

who have taken an ethical stance in relation to issues of her time,
particularly when she quotes Edmund Burke: ‘All that is needed for
the forces of evil

to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.’

‘Thinking right’ implies stating an argument and providing relevant

evidence to support it, as well as the necessary logical transitions. In

paragraphs (10) and (11) in Core Text 5, she illustrates various
disadvantages

that are experienced by men as a result of gender stereotypes,

thereby pro-

viding further evidence of the need to dispense with them. In (15),

she provides statistical claims as regards the negative effect on
women that doing nothing will have. Some tweeters clearly
responded to her right thinking:

Was incredibly moved by Emma Watson’s speech advocating for the

rebrand of feminism. She put all of my thoughts into words.

Of course as well as right thinking, this tweet also indicates a strong

emotional response – ‘sounding right’ requires the ability to evoke
some

emotional response from an audience. In (13), Watson asks, ‘You

might be

thinking, “Who is this Harry Potter girl, and what is she doing
speaking

at the UN?” And it’s a really good question. I’ve been asking myself
the

same thing. All I know is that I care about this problem and I want to
make it better.’ Here she sounds right because she is both amusing
and shows

herself as not taking herself too seriously; as noted above, it is

accompa-

nied by broad smiling while she delivers this part. Many tweeters
attested

to the emotional impact of the speech:

Emma Watson’s gender equality speech just had me in tears

The speech given by Emma Watson is powerful, emotional, and

nothing

but true. Gender inequality is horrifying, and despicable.

I am moved to tears by Emma Watson’s speech about the HeForShe

campaign at the U.N. She continues to be a radiant role model. So

proud.

Context and Persuasion 103

Some tweeters specifically picked up on this element of sounding
right in

terms of sounding adult:

Go Emma Watson! Not just Hermione anymore

She is not a politician, but she is nonetheless making a political

speech,

and one indicator of this is how she uses rhetorical questions to

combine

thinking right with sounding right; the following questions seem to

engage

her audience both in terms of thought, by encouraging reflection, but

also

emotionally since the effect of the reflection is to bring about a

change in the state of the feelings:

Why has the word (feminist) become such an uncomfortable one? (5)

How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited
or

feel welcome to participate in the conversation? (8)

“Who is this Harry Potter girl, and what is she doing speaking at the

UN?” (13)

If not me, who? If not now, when? (14) – repeated in (16)

The strategic positioning of the questions stimulates reflection on the

key issues of her speech, and these thoughts can then lead to
corresponding
emotions. Finally ‘sounding right’ can also be expressed by
phonological

features such as accent; she comes over as educated, charming,

humble yet

fully committed to the cause of gender equality. The combined effect

of her appeals leads to adulating tweets:

Emma Watson’s speech was brilliant and I can’t wait to see more

women in her position of fame and power continue to speak out. I’ve

come to the conclusion that Emma Watson is very close to perfect in

everything she does.

The young orator then raised the empathetic appeal further by

showing the

efforts she has needed to make to overcome her nervousness:

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, I’ve

told myself firmly: if not me, who? If not now, when? If you have sim-

ilar doubts when opportunities are presented to you, I hope that those

words might be helpful. (14)

‘Telling the right story’ means providing a set of frames or schemata

that

fit with the audience’s assumptions about how the world works. In the
case

of the Emma Watson speech, she chooses to tell her own

autobiographical
story about how she came to be a feminist (see paragraph 4). Here,
the

104 Critical Approaches to Discourse

emotional impact is heightened by kairos: the argument that the time

for action is now because it reflects her immediate opportunity to
reach a wide audience. The rhetorical catchphrase ‘if not me, who? If
not now, when?’

(14) soon went viral and was tweeted over 1,000 times in the week
follow-

ing the speech.

Equally important is ‘looking right’, and as we saw in the analysis of

performance and delivery (Table 4.1) here the orator looked precisely
that –

dressed demurely in a longish white dress, and white black pumps,

she is casting herself in a new role: that of responsible young adult
seeking to improve conditions for both women and men.

Apart from Twitter, how else might we know when public communica-

tion is successful? The effect(s) of a speech can be judged in real

time by audience reactions during a speech, such as applause.
Consider the duration of the applause that follows these extracts:

I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own

body. (6), (10-second applause).

Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invi-

tation. (9), (12-second applause).

It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two
sets

of opposing ideals. (11), (9-second applause).

As noted above, the audience stood and applauded at some length at

the

end as the speaker received various acknowledgements and

congratulations

from audience members.

I have undertaken quite a detailed discussion of the rhetorical

resources

that account for the persuasiveness of a particular speech on gender

quality by Emma Watson. However, individual contributions and texts
are part of

a wider social and historical movement. The current year of writing,

2018,

has been marked by a range of celebrations of women obtaining

suffrage

for the first time in the United Kingdom. More internationally, it has
been coloured by the fallout from the allegations of sexual
misconduct against

the American film and TV producer Harvey Weinstein. These have

led

to the invitation for other women to come forward about such issues
by

using the Twitter hashtag ‘MeToo’; the phrase was initiated by the
activ-
ist Tarana Burke and has become a focal point for the sharing of
stories

about alleged sexual misconduct – usually by men on women.

Although

these need to be viewed separately from political speeches, it is likely

that the syntactic pattern of the HeForShe hashtag (pronoun +
preposition)

had some influence on the development and proliferation of the

MeToo

hashtag – especially give the importance of female celebrities from

the

domain of film production. Alongside the renowned speech by Malala,

a dis-

course has developed for gender equality that includes formal

speeches, such

Context and Persuasion 105

as the one analysed here, but also a wide range of spoken and
written genres including TV and radio debates, legislative debates as
well as social media.

Exercise 4.5

➢ Select a speech of your choice, and analyse it terms of the

rhetorical means

of persuasion summarised in Figure 4.5.

➢ Is there any evidence on Twitter of the effectiveness of these

rhetorical means for persuasion?

Now that we have seen how persuasion works within a social context,
we need to consider in the next chapter a method for analysing the
linguis-

tic features of the language that occurs in speeches – and primary

among

these is exploitation of the modal resources of English.

4.4 Summary

In this chapter, I began by defining ‘power’. I demonstrated how CDA

requires the context of speeches to be analysed, and how this in turn

requires attention to speech circumstance by analysis of linguistic

and

performance features, followed by interpretation and explanation of

these

with reference to the speech circumstances, using Core Text 5 to

illustrate this. I then outlined a theory of persuasion and suggested
that a crucial

persuasive strategy in speeches is the expression of a high degree of

self-

conviction. Various linguistic means can contribute to how convincing,

and how convinced, a speaker sounds through the presentation of

opinions

as ‘fact’; this is done by, for example, the use of the simple present
tense, the use of short sentences, and by drawing on other modal
resources of

English to produce ‘Conviction Rhetoric’ – a concept that is discussed

more fully in the following chapter.

Core Text 5: Emma Watson Gender Equality Speech to

the United Nations, 20 September 2014

Your Excellencies, UN Secretary-General, President of the (1)

General Assembly, Executive Director of UN Women, and dis-

tinguished guests. Today we are launching a campaign called

‘HeForShe.’ I am reaching out to you because we need your help.

We want to end gender inequality, and to do this we need every-

one involved. This is the first campaign of its kind at the UN. We

want to try and galvanise as many men and boys as possible to

be advocates for change. And we don’t just want to talk about it.

We want to try to make sure that it’s tangible.

106 Critical Approaches to Discourse

I was appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women six (2)

months ago and the more I’ve spoken about feminism, the more

I have realised that fighting for women’s rights has too often

become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I

know for certain, it is that this has to stop.

For the record, feminism by definition is the belief that men (3)

and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is

the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the

sexes.

I started questioning gender-based assumptions a long time ago. (4)

When I was 8, I was confused at being called ‘bossy,’ because I

wanted to direct the plays that we would put on for our parents,

but the boys were not. When at 14, I started being sexualised by

certain elements of the media. When at 15, my girlfriends started

dropping out of their beloved sports teams because they didn’t

want to appear muscly. When at 18, my male friends were una-

ble to express their feelings.

I decided that I was a feminist, and this seemed uncomplicated (5)

to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has

become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify

as feminist. Apparently, I am among the ranks of women whose

expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating and

anti-men. Unattractive even.

Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one? (5) I am

from Britain, and I think it is right that I am paid the same as

my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to

make decisions about my own body. [APPLAUSE] I think it is

right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and

decisions that will affect my life. I think it is right that socially, I

am afforded the same respect as men.

But sadly, I can say that there is no one country in the world (6)

where all women can expect to receive these rights. No country

in the world can yet say that they have achieved gender equality.

These rights I consider to be human rights. But I am one of the

lucky ones.

My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less

because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because

I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume that I would go less far

because I might give birth to a child one day. These influences with

the gender equality ambassadors that made me who I am today.

Context and Persuasion 107

They may not know it, but they are the inadvertent feminists

who are changing the world today. We need more of those.

And if you still hate the word, it is not the word that is important. (7)

Its the idea and the ambition behind it. Because not all women

have received the same rights that I have. In fact, statistically, very
few have been.

In 1997, Hilary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about (8)

women’s rights. Sadly, many of the things that she wanted to

change are still true today. But what stood out for me the most,

was that less than 30 per cent of the audience were male. How

can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited

or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?

Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your for-

(9)

mal invitation. [APPLAUSE] Gender equality is your issue too.

Because to date, I’ve seen my father’s role as a parent being val-

ued less by society despite my needing his presence as a child, as

much as my mother’s.

I’ve seen young men suffering from mental illness unable to (10)

ask for help for fear it would make them less of a men or less

of a man. In fact, in the UK suicide is the biggest killer of men

between 20 and 49, eclipsing road accidents, cancer and coro-

nary heart disease. I’ve seen men made fragile and insecure by a

distorted sense of what constitutes male success. Men don’t have

the benefits of equality either.

We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereo-

types, but I can see that they are and that when they are free, things

will change for women as a natural consequence. If men don’t have

to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel com-

pelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t

have to be controlled.

Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men (11)

and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all per-

ceive gender on a spectrum, instead of two sets of opposing ideals.

[APPLAUSE] If we stop defining each other by what we are not and

start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer, and this

is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom.

I want men to take up this mantle so that their daughters, sisters (12)

and mothers can be free from prejudice. But also so that their

sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too, reclaim

those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so, be a

more true and complete version of themselves.

108 Critical Approaches to Discourse

You might be thinking, ‘Who is this Harry Potter girl, and what
is she doing speaking at the UN?’ and it’s a really good question.

I have been asking myself the same thing. All I know is that I care

about this problem and I want to make it better. And having seen

what I’ve seen and given the chance, I feel it is my responsibility

to say something.

Statesman Edmund Burke said: ‘All that is needed for the forces (13)

of evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.’

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, (15)

I told myself firmly, ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’ If you

have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you, I

hope that those words might will be helpful. (14) Because the

reality is that if we do nothing, it will take seventy-five years, or

for me to be nearly 100, before women can expect to be paid the

same as men for the same work. Fifteen and a half million girls

will be married in the next 16 years as children. And at current

rates, it won’t be until 2086 before all rural African girls will be

able to receive a secondary education.

If you believe in equality, you might be one of those inadvertent (16)

feminists that I spoke of earlier, and for this I applaud you. We

are struggling for a uniting word but the good news is that we
have a uniting movement. It is called HeForShe. I am inviting you

to step forward, to be seen and to ask yourself, ‘If not me, who?

If not now, when?’

Thank you very, very much. [APPLAUSE]

(17)

Essential reading

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for

Social Research (London: Routledge), pp. 1–18.

Fairclough, N. (2006). ‘Global capitalism and critical awareness of

language’. In A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds), The Discourse
Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge).

Richardson, J.E. (2007). Analysing Newspapers (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan),

Chapter 1.

Rogers, R. (2011). Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd edn

(New York/

Oxford: Routledge), Chapter 1.

Thomas, L. (2004). Language, Society and Power, 2nd edn

(London/New York: Routledge), Chapter 1.

van Dijk, T. (2008a). Discourse and Power (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan),

Chapter 1.

Chapter 5

Social Agency and Modality

5.1 Agency

5.1.1 What is agency?

In this chapter, I consider how agency is communicated through the

choice

of nouns and names and through the choice of verbs and verbal
processes.

I then go on to analyse the grammatical system of English, to

evaluate

how political agents express uncertainty or, more commonly,

conviction,

through using the system of modality. The chapter therefore shifts

from the broader concepts of context and persuasion to a more
detailed analysis of

the actual language through which speakers become persuasive by

finding

the right words for a particular set of speech circumstances.

A major contribution of critical linguists (e.g. Fairclough, 2003) has

been to explore how language is used in the representation of social
agents so that the presence of an agent can either be ‘foregrounded’
– brought

to the front of our attention; or ‘backgrounded’ – that is, pushed

further

from the attention of the reader. The term ‘agent’ refers to the person
or

entity that performs an action described by a verb or a process. An

agent
is therefore typically a person who is named individually, though an
agent

could also be a social category, such as ‘investors’, ‘welfare

claimants’ or

‘scroungers’. Both the presence and the identity of social agents can
either be made very clear by using language that states plainly who is
doing

what to whom, or it can be obscured so that the subject–object

relations

in a process are unclear. Typically, speakers foreground their own

role in

relation to events that they think will be evaluated positively, and their

opponents’ role in relation to events that they anticipate will be

evaluated negatively. For example, following their election in 2010,
the Conservative Party sought to foreground the agency of the
previous Labour government

in relation to the cause of the financial crisis of 2008 and to

background

their own role in contributing to this through their policies of public

spending reductions:

Who busted our banks, who smothered our businesses, who wracked
up

our debts, who, wrecked our economy, who ruined our reputation,
who

risked our future. Who … did this? – Labour did this – and this
country

should never forget it. (David Cameron, September 2012)

109

110 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Conversely, speakers will background their own role in events that

may

be evaluated negatively, and their opponents’ role in events that may

be

evaluated positively. For example, in the same speech, Cameron

said:

Though the challenge before us is daunting, I have confidence in our

country. Why? Because Britain can deliver. We can do big things. We

saw it this summer. The Jubilee, the Olympics, the Paralympics …

Here the fact that much of the planning for the Olympics had been
done

by the previous Labour government is not mentioned because the

speaker

hopes that the success of the event will be related to the

Conservative government that was in power when it took place.

There are a number of ways in which agency can be manipulated in

lan-

guage to give such positive or negative representations of political

actors.

I begin here by summarising two broad linguistic categories that

influence

representation:
◇ Nominal forms (i.e. involving nouns): methods of foregrounding or
backgrounding social agency by referring to social actors. These
include

the use of pronouns, individual names and social or professional

roles

or collective nouns.

◇ Verbal processes: methods of foregrounding or backgrounding

social agency by using verbs in the active or passive voice, or by
using transitive and intransitive verbs.

Halliday (1994) identified the importance of such nouns and verbs in

influencing how processes are represented. According to his
functional

grammar, which was adopted later by critical linguists such as

Norman

Fairclough, there is a primary distinction between participants and

pro-

cesses, as follows:

◇ The participants are the people who are involved in a process. We

can distinguish between actors who are the ‘doers’ of actions, and
‘patients’ –

the people who are affected by what is done. The participants will
either

be present in the form of nouns or concealed when it does not fit an

author’s intentions to make their identity explicit.

◇ The process is what happens, and is indicated by the verb. What is

brought to our attention also depends on how verbs are employed to
represent participants as being present or absent; as active or
passive.

To understand how participants are represented, I first consider

nominal

forms and names.

5.1.2 Nominal forms and names

Initially, a speaker has to choose between a noun and a pronoun, and

if

a pronoun is selected, which person it will reflect; typically, in political

Social Agency and Modality 111

rhetoric, speakers use ‘we’ in a rather loose way that could refer
either

to the speaker alone, to his or her party or to any group who he seeks
to represent himself as speaking for – such as the nation or even the

whole of humanity. Therefore, it is always crucial to work out to whom

‘we’ refers in each context that this pronoun is used. For example, in

his 2012 party conference speech, David Cameron uses ‘we’ to refer
to

a number of different groups. First, to the government (rather than all

members of the Conservative Party): ‘We knew then that it was not
just

the ordinary duties of office that we were assuming.’ Soon after this,
‘we’
refers to the British public: ‘All of my adult life, whatever the
difficulties, the British people have at least been confident about one
thing: we have

thought we can pay our way.’ And later, ‘we’ refers to all members of
the

Conservative Party: ‘Since we gathered here in Birmingham on

Sunday,

British aid money has vaccinated 130,000 children around the world.’

Although the party is the most common referent of ‘we’, Cameron

later

uses ‘we’ to refer to him and his father: ‘When I was a boy, I
remember

once going on a long walk with him in the village where we lived.’ The

use of pronouns typically has a vagueness that is valuable to

politicians,

who need to make appeals to different audiences according to the

topic

they are addressing.

When nouns are used to refer to the participants, the identity of

agents

can either be revealed explicitly by using their names or concealed by

using a collective noun that refers to their institutional role or

profession (e.g. ‘lawyer’) or nationality (e.g. ‘an Afghan soldier’, ‘a
Kurdish asylum seeker’ etc.). When individuals are named
specifically, it is either to foreground the positive actions of supporters
or negative actions of opponents.
For example, it has become a characteristic of public communication
to

introduce and name individuals who are known to be supporters of

the party

and who are physically present in an audience. On other occasions,

agents

are referred to collectively using a very general noun (in the example
above, Cameron referred to ‘the British public’). Sometimes individual
identity is concealed by referring to a person by his or her role in
representing an institution – for example ‘a spokesman for British
Gas/Scottish Power’ and so on.

I shall illustrate how naming contributes to ideology, and propose that

they are closely interlinked because relationships of power between

dif-

ferent social groups are often realised in language through the

selection

of names. Three questions arise in the creation of difference through

the

naming of groups of people:

◇ What values are attached to particular groups – are they positive or

negative?

◇ How do these names arise?

◇ Are they acceptable or not?

The analysis of naming involves identifying the system of values that

underlies the choice of a name and how such a choice creates,
constitutes and
112 Critical Approaches to Discourse

reinforces a particular perspective or point of view. This involves

identifying the names themselves, the traits that are associated with
them, and the perspectives they imply. The naming of a social group
entails some form

of social differentiation – that is, the creation of differences between

some people and others on the basis of social class, gender,
ethnicity, religion or any other identifiable variable that contributes to
social identity. The notion of ‘difference’ depends on two things: what
is being taken as the

base line for ‘normality’ or ‘homogeneity’; and to what this is

compared.

For example, professional footballers often find they have more in

common with other professional players – even though they may be

from different racial and ethnic backgrounds – because they are

doing

the same type of job. This identification may exceed what they have
in

common with others who share the same ethnicity but have a
different

educational background or are from a different social class.

Footballers

may have more similarities when compared with other footballers

than

they do when compared with people from the same ethnic origin who
are
not footballers. The search for sameness and difference is crucial to
how

people create social meaning. Inevitably, this is inter-discursive,

because each time a name is used in a positive (or more likely a
negative) way, it

relates to the other occasions on which the name is used. It is

through

intertextual and interdiscursive relations over time that stereotypes

are

created by names.

The media play a vital role in arbitrating between various social

agents –

mainstream or minority groups or institutions – by deciding which

names will be employed in news stories. Lexical decisions made by
the media can

be organised into a quadrangular diagram that involves two scales:

one for

emphasis and one for positive/negative characteristics. The values on

the

emphasis scale are: ‘+ or – emphasis’ and values on the

characteristics scale are ‘good or bad characteristic’. So both good
and bad features can either

be highlighted or hidden, as summarised in Figure 5.1.

Emphasize

De-emphasize

our positive
their positive

characteristics

characteristics

De-emphasize

Emphasize

our negative

their negative

characteristics

characteristics

Figure 5.1 The ideological square.

Source: van Dijk (1998, p. 267).

Social Agency and Modality 113

When a group in power is referred to as ‘a regime’, this de-

emphasises

the positive characteristic of legitimacy that is implied when it is

referred to as a ‘government’. Conversely, when it is referred to as an
‘elected government’, this emphasises the positive characteristic of
being democratic. If it is referred to as a ‘fascist regime’, this
emphasises its negative characteristics. Use of the term ‘regime’ is
often a type of coded threat that ‘military intervention’ is being
planned. Use of ‘military intervention’ de-emphasises the negative
aspects of using armed force. Conversely, the term ‘invasion’

emphasises the negative aspects of using force.

5.1.3 Verbal processes

Verbal processes are crucial in foregrounding or backgrounding
actors,

and in highlighting or concealing agency. Typically, agency can be

present

when the active voice of verbs is used or absent when the passive
voice is

used or when a material process is used, especially in the transitive

form so that there is a clear distinction between a subject and an
object. To clarify these terms, we need to go over some background
grammar. There are four

types of verbal process in English:

1 Verbal processes: for example, speaking, shouting, declaring

2 Mental processes: for example, thinking, reminding, deciding

3 Relational processes: for example, verbs such as ‘have’ and

‘seem’,

which involve an agent and an attribute, for example, ‘the nation is

bankrupt’

4 Material processes: physical actions that are divided into transitive

actions which involve two or more participants: for example, ‘Britain
invaded Iraq’; and intransitive actions with only one participant: for
example, ‘Iraqi resistance collapsed’

Transitivity refers to the relationship between participants and the

roles

they play in processes; it communicates the representation of actors,

actions and those acted upon: what kinds of actions there are, who
acts and who is
affected by their actions – so transitivity concerns the relationship
between active agents and the entities they act upon. Transitivity
choices also have an important effect in representing a situation from
a particular perspective.

An important distinction in English is between intransitive verbs –

which

do not take an object, and transitive verbs – which do take an object.

For example, the verb ‘die’ is intransitive because it only requires a
subject

(who died) and so highlights only one participant; whereas the verb
‘kill’ is transitive because it requires a subject and an object –
therefore highlighting two participants in a process.

Table 5.1 is an extract from David Cameron’s 2012 party conference

speech; the verbs are shown in italics, and their classification

according

to the verbal process and transitivity is in the right-hand column. The

114 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 5.1 David Cameron’s Conservative Party conference address,

2012

Britain on the Rise

Big, Conservative things – delivered (1) by this

(1) Material transitive

government; made (2) possible by this party.

(2) Material transitive

We can deliver. (1) We can do (2) big things.

(1) Material transitive

(2) Material transitive

The Olympics reminded (1) us how great it feels (2)

(1) Mental

to be successful.

(2) Mental

But we mustn’t let (1) that warm glow give (2) us a

(1) Material transitive

false sense of security.

(2) Mental transitive

All around the world, countries are (1) on the rise.

(1) Relational

Yes, we’ve been hearing (1) about China and India

(1) Mental

for years …

… but it’s hard to believe (1) what’s happening (2) in (1) Mental
Brazil, in Indonesia; in Nigeria too.

(2) Material intransitive

Meanwhile, the old powers are (1) on the slide.

(1) Relational

What do the countries on the rise have (1) in common?

(1) Relational

They are (1) lean, fit, obsessed with enterprise,

(1) Relational

spending money on the future – on education,

incredible infrastructure and technology.

And what do the countries on the slide have (1) in common? (1)
Relational They’re (1) fat, sclerotic, over-regulated, spending

(1) Relational

money on unaffordable welfare systems, huge pension

bills, unreformed public services.

I sit (1) in those European Council meetings where we (1) Material

intransitive talk (2) endlessly about Greece …

(2) Verbal

… while on the other side of the world, China is

(1) Material intransitive

moving (1) so fast it’s creating (2) a new economy the (2) Material
transitive size of Greece every three months.

I am not going to stand (1) here as Prime Minister

(1) Material intransitive

and allow (2) this country to join (3) the slide.

(2) Material transitive

(3) Relational
My job – our job – is to make (1) sure that in this

(1) Material intransitive

twenty-first century, as in the centuries that came

(2) Relational

before, our country, Britain, is (2) on the rise.

And we here know how that is done. (1)

(1) Material transitive

It is (1) the collective result of individual effort and

(1) Relational

aspiration …

…the ideas you have, (1) the businesses you start, (2)

(1) Relational

the hours you put in. (3)

(2) Material transitive

(3) Material transitive

Aspiration is (1) the engine of progress.

(1) Relational

Social Agency and Modality 115

brief analysis in this table shows that mental verbs are used to
indicate
areas of shared knowledge between speaker and audience; for
example,

‘The Olympics reminded us how great it feels to be successful.’ When

Cameron wants to represent the attributes of countries, relational

verbs

are used – though these attributes can be positive or negative (and

they

are contrasted with reference to metaphors of health). When talking

about those of countries that he admires, such as China, material

verbs

are used to represent actions as real and concrete. He also uses

material

verbs when giving prominence to his own active role in leading

Britain:

‘I am not going to stand here as Prime Minister and allow this country
to join the slide.’ He avoids the passive voice because he wants to
give prominence to his own agency, and that of his party, in improving

Britain’s standing in the world. This use of material transitive verbs in

the active voice occurs later in the speech, when emphasising

concrete

achievements:

We’re making things again.

In the last two years, Google, Intel, Cisco – the big tech firms –
they’ve

all set up new bases here.

And we are selling to the world again.

They saw the huge gap in the market – and they started a mobile

banking firm.

I visited a business the other day that wanted to open a big factory
just

outside Liverpool.

In newspaper headlines, intransitive verbs can be used in place of

transitive verbs to conceal who did what to whom, whereas,
theoretically, transitive verbs could have been used in place of a
relational verb to reveal who did what to whom. When analysing
transitivity it is important to identify all the participants, processes and
circumstances and then to evaluate the

effect of this angle of viewing and what other linguistic means could
have

been employed to describe the same event.

5.2 Modality

5.2.1 What is modality?

When we think of a politician, we usually have an image of someone

who is very convinced that what he or she is saying is true, perhaps

with

a finger raised to the heavens, claiming divine authority! Politicians

are rarely hesitant or doubtful for very long because, like astrologers,

racing tipsters or surgeons, their role requires them to sound

convincing
116 Critical Approaches to Discourse

and authoritative. One way to do this is by speaking with a high level

of

conviction to make what is possible appear certain. As with other

types

of persuasive speaker – estate agents, horoscope writers or

purveyors

of alternative medicines – they are unlikely to air serious doubts

about

the likelihood of their predictions coming true, and when they do so,

this is usually for an ulterior rhetorical purpose – such as changing

the

mood. When orators are seeking to convince audiences, they

inevitably

draw on the complex system of modality characterised by modal

verbs

such as ‘should’ and ‘might’ as well as many other features that are

discussed here.

The projection of a powerful and convincing image when speaking is

sometimes referred to as ‘conviction rhetoric’; this is where a speaker

conveys a strong sense of purpose and self-belief through a range of

word choices, figures of speech and delivery features such as

fluency,

volume and intensity of expression. The combined effect of these rhe-

torical features is to convey certitude and authority. Conviction
rhetoric

appeals to ethos and pathos; the conviction originates in a sense of

moral purpose and is emotionally intense because ethical beliefs

require

passionate commitment if they are to be realised. When speakers

express

strong emotions, it is usually because they hope to evoke similar

emo-

tions in their audiences, but the first person they have to convince is

themselves.

Charteris-Black (2011) argues that Tony Blair drew on conviction

rhetoric to reformulate his beliefs about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ into powerful

myths of creation and destruction. It came readily to him because his

Christianity provided a strong ideological basis for his views on

interna-

tional affairs, especially in relation to the weapons of mass

destruction

(WMDs) that he claimed Iraq was concealing. His self-righteous wrath

at

Saddam Hussein’s duplicity contributed to arguments as to why

Saddam’s

‘regime’ should be ended. Blair often talked about morality in terms of

conflict, and conflict in terms of morality. For example, he used
personifications to provide self-representations as a moral arbiter,
and chose verbs that implied the use of force, such as ‘seize’, ‘strip
away’ and ‘expose’.

But there are dangers in using conviction rhetoric to demonise

political

opponents, because when views are expressed with such force, they

become irreversible – ignoring actualities and evidence. The

unswerving

commitment to an unpopular war in Iraq eventually led to Blair’s

down-

fall. Other politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher (whom he admired)

showed a similar sense of self-assurance and moral certainty – and

with

a similar outcome.

Political language looks to remove doubt because people expect

their leaders to present a plan of well-defined future actions rather

than a set of hypothetical abstractions. Sounding convincing about

the

future means knowing what action to take now so that the future is

Social Agency and Modality 117

represented as something within reach. The way that leaders

commu-

nicate this state of knowledge, truth and conviction is by drawing on

the modality system of English. I shall illustrate this with the rhetoric

around a key political decision: whether to take military action against

another state; this is likely to be recommended in language that

empha-

sises that this state presents a real material threat – not just a hypo-

thetical one. Consider the following transcript of a speech by

Margaret

Thatcher (the style features in the extract will be cross-referenced in

the analysis that follows):

We in Europe have unrivalled freedom. But we must never take it for

granted. The dangers to it are greater now than they have ever been
since 1945. The threat of the Soviet Union is ever present. It is
growing continually. Their military spending goes up by 5 per cent a
year. A

Russian nuclear submarine is launched every six weeks. Every year

the

Russians turn out over 3,000 tanks and 1,500 combat aircraft. Their

military research and development is enormous.

The Soviet forces are organised and trained for attack. The Russians

do not tell us why they are making this tremendous and costly effort
to increase their military power. Heaven knows, they have enough to

do on the consumer side. But we cannot ignore the fact that this
power

is there and growing. So far, the North Atlantic alliance has

preserved our freedom. But in recent years the Soviet Union’s
growing strength

has allowed it to pull ahead of the Alliance in many fields. We and our

allies are resolved to make the effort that will restore the balance. We
must keep up all our defences, whether nuclear or conventional. It is
no good having first-class nuclear forces if we can be overwhelmed
by

an enemy’s conventional forces. Deterring aggression cannot be

piece-

meal. If it is, our effort is wasted. (Speech to the Conservative Party,

12

October 1979)

Margaret Thatcher was arguing a strong case for increasing military

expenditure, on the grounds that the Soviet Union presented a major

threat; she does this in different ways, as follows:

◇ She emphasises obligation through short, clear statements using

phrases

with the modal verb ‘must’ (in italics).

◇ She communicates the truth of what she is saying by using the

simple

present tense (underlined): for example, ‘the dangers to it are

greater’,

‘the threat … is ever present’ etc.); the present tense is often used
with

factive verbs to represent beliefs as objective facts.

◇ She provides evidence in the form of lists of weaponry, statistics
and

so on.

118 Critical Approaches to Discourse

◇ She uses continuous or progressive forms (in bold) to describe

processes that are ongoing; for example, ‘growing’ is repeated to
emphasise that

the Soviet threat is increasing.

◇ She uses closely related present participles (‘deterring aggression’)

and the present perfect for actions continuing right up to the present
(‘have

ever been’; ‘has preserved’).

◇ Some of the verbs are in the passive voice: ‘is launched’, which is
often used when the subject of an action is unknown or not relevant.
It does

not matter particularly who launched the nuclear submarine: it is the

actuality that is the focus.

The overall rhetorical effect of Thatcher’s use of verbs is to express

with certainty and conviction the point of view that the Soviet Union
presents

a serious threat, and something needs to be done about this. The fact
that

this is a point of view is concealed – it is presented as a state of

affairs rather than as a leader’s opinion.

The linguistic term that describes how certainty and conviction are
expressed is ‘modality’; this is the linguistic means for conveying how
sure someone is about what he or she is saying. It assumes a basic
distinction between (i) what is said; and (ii) what the speaker thinks
about what is

said. So it describes how people communicate the relationship

between the things they are saying and their own mental state: how
they use language to give a perspective on their utterances. It
indicates the speaker’s stance, attitude or position towards what he or
she is saying, and in particular the extent to which he or she believes
it is

◇ true;

◇ necessary or obligatory; or

◇ desirable or undesirable.

All of these convey how far the speaker is committed towards the
truth of

what he or she is saying. In the above example, Thatcher argues that

the

Soviet Union is truly a threat, and therefore it is necessary, obligatory

and desirable to do something about it.

Since CDA is concerned with representations of states of knowledge

and belief, the analysis of modality is essential. Commitment is an

impor-

tant part of how a speaker represents his or her thoughts to others.

As

Lyons (1977, p. 725) notes: ‘When we communicate some

proposition to another person, we do so, normally, because we wish
to influence in some
way his beliefs, his attitudes or his behaviour’. In this respect,
modality can be equated with a speaker taking a particular stance or
position on

what he or she is saying by providing an ongoing commentary about

what is probable, or morally necessary. In the above example,

Margaret

Thatcher wanted to make as strong a case as possible for raising the

level

Social Agency and Modality 119

of military investment on the basis that (i) there was evidence of a

real

threat; and (ii) this was the right thing to do, so she uses language to

reduce the subjective element in her representation of the Soviet

Union –

so that it is no longer seen just as a representation of a state of

affairs, but as a reality; no longer subjective, but objective. As Palmer
(1986,

p. 16) put it:

Modality in language is concerned with subjective characteristics of

an utterance, and it could even be further argued that subjectivity is

an essential criterion for modality. Modality could, that is to say, be

defined as the grammaticalisation of a speaker’s (subjective) attitudes

and opinions.

5.2.2 Levels of modality

In the discussion over whether to go to war with Iraq in 2003, the
British

government produced a lengthy ‘dossier’ investigating the evidence

that

Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; however, to strengthen the

support

for their claim that Iraq presented a serious threat to world peace,
certain modifications were made to this dossier. Consider the effects
of changing

the modality in the following:

Original text:

Iraq may be able to deploy weapons of mass destruction to attack

British bases within 45 minutes.

After editing:

Iraq is able to deploy weapons of mass destruction to attack British

bases within 45 minutes.

In the original text, a modal verb is used (‘may’), and in the edited
version this is replaced by a verb in the simple present tense (‘is’);
‘may be able to’ expresses a considerably lower level of commitment
to the truth than

‘is able to’. This, of course, heightened the threat posed by Iraq (as
Mrs

Thatcher’s speech did for the Soviet Union) and therefore

strengthened the

grounds of the argument for military action.

A high degree of commitment to the truth of a claim implies that the

speaker is authoritative because he or she has evidence for what he

or she is claiming, and that subjective opinion is based on objective
evidence.

A lower degree of commitment to truth status implies a degree of

uncer-

tainly, perhaps because there is less evidence or because the

outcome of

an action is less sure. This means that modality can be used to

represent

events that are uncertain (when viewed objectively) as if they were

cer-

tain, and events that are certain (objectively) as if they were

uncertain.

120 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 5.2 Modality – degrees of commitment and certainty

must, have to, will, ought

Highest degree of commitment to truth

or obligation

may, might, could, should, should not

Low degree of commitment to truth or

obligation

could not, must not

Negative degree of commitment to

truth or obligation

This is very important in influencing perceptions of the truthfulness or

rightfulness of utterances, as degrees of certainty can be manipulated

for

rhetorical effect.

Modality can be conveyed to express ideas about truth and obligation

using a range of modal forms that can be positioned on a scale

according

to the level of the commitment they express, as shown in Table 5.2.

So, when Thatcher said, ‘We must keep up all our defences, whether
nuclear

or conventional’, she was expressing the highest degree of

commitment

by emphasising obligation. And when she said, ‘We must never take
it for

granted’, she was expressing a negative degree of commitment to

obligation. As well as using modal verbs such as ‘must’, or ‘should’,
the speaker may also vary the level of certainty or commitment to the
truthfulness of

an utterance through the lexical choice of various mental state verbs,

as in the following list:

◇ ‘I think that …’ or ‘I reckon that …’ indicates that someone is

speculat-ing about a personal view.

◇ ‘I conclude …’ or ‘I claim that …’ indicates that the speaker has

deduced something from objective or empirical evidence.
◇ ‘X has told me that …’ or ‘it is said that …’ indicates that the
speaker has verbal evidence because he or she has heard
something.

◇ ‘It seems that …’, ‘it appears that …’ or ‘I believe that …’ indicates
a personal view based on some evidence.

Modality can also be communicated by using phrases containing

adverbs

or abstract nouns, as follows:

Adverbs:

certainly, necessarily, possibly

Abstract nouns: it is necessary to …; it is a possibility that …; it is a

certainty

The speaker makes choices according to the level of truth or

obligation

that he or she wishes to communicate. Although there are many

points on

a scale of conviction, these levels of modality might be simplified by

sum-

marising them into three levels, as shown in Table 5.3.

Social Agency and Modality 121

Table 5.3 Levels of modality

Truth

Obligation

Modal Verb
High

certainly

required to

must/have to

Medium

probably

supposed to

could/would/

should

Low

possibly

allowed to

may/might

Exercise 5.1

Read the following two extracts by female celebrities discussing

gender-related issues, and identify which expressions convey
modality. Now analyse the level and type of modality expressed (see
section 5.2.3).

1. I’m allowed to stand in line next to other men and women. I’m
allowed to get shouted at and shoot a gun to protect myself and my
nation. But when

it’s time to order my meal, when it’s time to benefit from the freedoms
of
the constitution that I protect and I fight for, I have to pay extra. I
shouldn’t have to pay extra. I should have the ability, the opportunity,
the right, to enjoy the same rights, the same piece of meat, that my
fellow soldiers, fellow straight soldiers, already have included in their
meal of rights. (Lady Gaga) 2. I am from Britain, and I think it is right
that I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that
I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is
right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and
decisions that will affect my life. I think it is right that socially I am
afforded the same respect as men. But sadly, I can say that there is
no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive
these rights.

No country in the world can yet say that they have achieved gender
equality.

(Emma Watson)

5.2.3 Types of modality

There are two main types of modality, epistemic and deontic.

Epistemic modality

Epistemic modality refers to the level of commitment a speaker can

express

in relation to the truth, accuracy or certainty of what he or she is

saying.

So epistemic modality is concerned with how possible or how

probable or likely it is that something has happened, is happening, or
will happen.

According to Coates (1983, p. 18) epistemic modality is not only

‘concerned with the speaker’s assumptions or assessment of
possibilities’ but
also ‘indicates the speaker’s confidence (or lack of confidence) in the
truth of the proposition expressed’.

122 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Deontic modality

Deontic modality expresses a speaker’s beliefs about the ‘necessity

or

possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents’ (Lyons,

1977,

p. 823). So deontic modality expresses the extent that the speaker is

obliged to do something, or needs to do something, or has

permission to

do something. Ideas about obligation, necessity and permission

assume that there are shared norms for evaluating behaviour as right
and wrong

without necessarily making these norms explicit. For this reason,

deontic

modality is also rhetorically influential.

I shall illustrate the difference between the two main types of modality

and how they often interact with each other by analysing them in
Core

Text 6: the crucial speech made by Tony Blair entitled ‘We face a
tough and stark choice’. The speech was given in the House of
Commons on

18 March 2003, because Blair needed to obtain some political

backing for
his recommended strategy of supporting George W. Bush in an
invasion

of Iraq. There was a great deal of opposition to this, both in Britain

and

internationally, including the largest-ever demonstrations in London,

so in this respect Blair was fighting for support for his policy from the
elected representatives as well as for his own political survival as he
had become

personally associated with this policy. It was a long speech, and I

have edited it down to 1,380 words from the original 4,700 words
(Core Text

6 below).

It was a masterful and convincing speech, and Blair won the vote
con-

vincingly. What contributed to his persuasiveness was how he

integrated

claims made on the basis of epistemic modality with deontic modality.

His

use of epistemic modality shows in the evidence that the WMDs have
not

been destroyed, though he lowers the level of modality when

describing the

reports of the weapons inspectors in line with what they actually

reported.

But he does not make explicit the difference in expression of levels of

certainty between his views and those of the inspectors. Then there is
the
claim that the decision taken will influence international politics for a
long time (something he was right about).

The shift to deontic modality comes in two forms: first, the evidence

that Saddam is deliberately deceiving the inspectors. This introduces

a

frame of cheating, lying and immorality that places an obligation on

Blair to do something because Saddam is not following the same

ethical

code. Then the linking together of Islamic terrorism and WMDs; this

was part of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ that had become official US

policy after the events of 9/11: because these two are connected
(though

no evidence of this connection is given), it is morally necessary to act

now.

There are other deontic arguments developed from this: that there is
a

moral necessity for the allies to act now in order to prevent both a
worse

international situation developing (the fact that Blair generalises from

123

bio
➜

and

chemical

listing

by

upheld

Analysis of modality

1 DEONTIC MODALITY

It is necessary and morally right to

have this debate.

2 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

It is certain (i.e. true) that what hap

pens now will determine international

politics for a long time.

3 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

‘It became clear’ implies that it is

known beyond doubt. Notice the

impersonal use of ‘it’ (rather than,

say, ‘I believe’). The truth of the claim

is
logical weapons.

He is certain that the counter-claim

that the weapons have been destroyed

is false.

Iraqi

inspec

develop

of the

the

the

destruction]

future

mass

century;

of

March 2003
than the

thought. When

[weapons

more

twenty-first

hitherto

speech,

the

of

WMDs

than

the

threat

that

Iraqi regime and

extensive

War

security

more

Blair’s Iraq War

Gulf

far

fate of the

the

central

were

the

6: Tony

after

Iraq

than the

clear

of

more

confront

Core Text

became

The speech

At the outset I say: it is right that this House debate this issue and
pass judgement.
That is the democracy that is our right but that others struggle for in
vain. And again I say: I do not disrespect the views of those in
opposition to mine. This is a tough choice. But it is also a stark one:
to stand British troops down and turn back; or to hold firm to the
course we have set. I believe we must hold firm (1).

So, why does it matter so much? Because the outcome of this issue
will now deter mine

people, for so long brutalised by Saddam. It will determine the way

Britain and the world

ment of the UN; the relationship between Europe and the US; the
relations within the EU and the way the US engages with the rest of
the world. It will determine the pattern of international politics for the
next generation (2).

It

ambitions

tors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for: 10,000 litres of anthrax;

a far-reaching VX nerve agent [nerve gas] programme; up to 6,500

chemical muni tions; at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, and possibly
more than ten times that amount; unquantifiable amounts of sarin,
botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons; an entire Scud
missile programme.

124

Iraq to

rhetor
repeats

He

that what forced

force.

of

threat

Analysis of modality

4 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

Although its length is taken to be

proof of its accuracy, when he quotes

from the inspectors’ report there is

only mid- level modality – ‘suggests’,

‘may still exist’ and ‘could have been’

imply that this is possible, but by no

means certain. However, the modality

increases with ‘strong presumption’.

5 DEONTIC MODALITY

Blair is certain that there is an obli

gation on the Security Council to

pass the second resolution because of

Saddam’s repeated deception.

6 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

It is certain

accept the weapons’ inspectors was

the

ical questions (three times) and gives

the same answer.

we

had

basis,

this

On

(4).

exist’

still

may

and

destroyed
not

Based on unaccounted-for growth media, Iraq’s potential pro…

was

anthrax

of

The speech

We are now seriously asked to accept that, in the last few years,
contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, he decided
unilaterally to destroy the weapons.

Such a claim is palpably absurd (3).

On 7 March, the inspectors published a remarkable document. It is

173 pages long, detailing all the unanswered questions about Iraq’s
WMDs. It lists 29 different areas where they have been unable to
obtain information. For example, on VX, it says:

‘Documentation available to UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring,

Verification and Inspection Commission] suggests that Iraq at least
had had far-reaching plans to weaponise VX

duction of anthrax could have been in the range of about 15,000 to

25,000 litres Based on all the available evidence, the strong
presumption is that about 10,000

litres

meant what we said in [the UN] Resolution 1441, the Security Council
should have convened and condemned Iraq as in material breach (5).
What is perfectly clear is that Saddam is playing the same old games
in the same old way.
From December 1998 to December 2002, no UN inspector was
allowed to inspect anything in Iraq. For four years, not a thing. What
changed his mind? The threat of force. From December to January,
and then from January through to February, concessions were made.
What changed his mind?

125

now,

act

not

do

with WMDs

we if

gimes

that

l re

ALITY

certain is

rannica

7 EPISTEMIC + DEONTIC

MOD
It

then future action will need to be

greater. So we should act now, and

such action will be necessary.

8 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

He knows that Islamic terrorism and

WMDs are closely connected in that

they both cause chaos. The phrase

‘Ty

links to Iraq in 7.

we

can use

limit,

WMDs.

the

with

to

regime

they think they

pushed

only

fact,

the

in

not

Dangerous if

is

when

Iraq

incapacity;

impact.

disbelieve us.

its in

permanent

total

such regimes

for

more

war
bigger,

dangerous if

against

The threat of force. And what makes him now issue invitations to the
inspectors, discover documents he said he never had, produce
evidence of weapons supposed to be non-existent, destroy missiles
he said he would keep? The imminence of force (6). The only
persuasive power to which he responds is 250,000 allied troops on
his doorstep.

It is

our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our

democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day
they will mistake our innate revul sion

will act. But then when we act, after years of pretence, the action will
have to be harder,

But back away now from this confrontation and future conflicts will be
infinitely worse and more devastating (7).

Confidence is the key to prosperity.

Insecurity spreads like contagion.

So people crave stability and order.

The threat is chaos.

And there are two begetters of chaos.

126

-
way

by list

our

to DEONTIC

certainty

of

threatens

shift a

as it

level

then

raises

is

terrorism

Analysis of modality

9 Use of factive verb ‘know’ and

pronoun shift from ‘I know’ to ‘we

know’:

ing ‘facts’.

There
MODALITY on the obligation to

resist

of life.

per

serious

suffered

who profess a

have

groups

nations

terrorist

different

20

extreme

and
around

years,

two

with WMDs

last

the

regimes

in

as

Just

The speech

Tyrannical

verted and false view of Islam (8).

Let me tell the House what I know.

I know that there are some countries or groups within countries that
are prolifer ating and trading in WMDs, especially nuclear weapons
technology.

I know there are companies, individuals, some former scientists on

nuclear weap ons programmes, selling their equipment or expertise.

I know there are several countries – mostly dictatorships with highly

repressive regimes – desperately trying to acquire chemical
weapons, biological weapons or, in particular, nuclear weapons
capability. Some of these countries are now a short time away from
having a serviceable nuclear weapon. This activity is not dimin ishing.
It is increasing.

We all know that there are terrorist cells now operating in most major
countries (9).

terrorist outrages. Thousands have died in them. And these two

threats have dif ferent motives and different origins but they share
one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and
tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life.

127

+ DEO

10 DEONTIC MODALITY

It is necessary and right to act now

because not to do so is more danger

ous, as it would undermine the status

of the UN.

11 DEONTIC MODALITY

It is morally right to act now.

12 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

TIC MODALITY

It is certain that if we do not take mil

itary action, it will improve Saddam’s

position and embolden both him and

other terrorist states. This will be mor

ally wrong.

I have come to the conclusion after much reluctance that the greater
danger to the UN is inaction: that to pass Resolution 1441 and then
refuse to enforce it would do the most deadly damage to the UN’s
future strength, confirming it as an instru ment of diplomacy but not of
action, forcing nations down the very unilateralist path we wish to
avoid (10).

But there will be, in any event, no sound future for the UN, no
guarantee against the repetition of these events, unless we recognise
the urgent need for a political agenda we can unite upon.

I have never put our justification for action as regime change. We

have to act within the terms set out in Resolution 1441. That is our
legal base.

But it is the reason, I say frankly, why if we do act we should do so

with a clear conscience and strong heart (11).

We must face the consequences of the actions we advocate. For me,

that means all the dangers of war. But for others, opposed to this
course, it means – let us be clear – that the Iraqi people, whose only
true hope of liberation lies in the removal of Saddam, for them, the
darkness will close back over them again; and he will be free to take
his revenge upon those he must know wish him gone.

And if this House now demands that at this moment, faced with this
threat from this regime, that British troops are pulled back, that we
turn away at the point of reckoning, and that is what it means – what
then?

128

now

happens

what

that

certain is

Analysis of modality

13 EPISTEMIC MODALITY

It

will determine international politics

for a long time.

the

of

challenge

global

this
recognise

to

strength

the

summon

we

whether

The speech

What will Saddam feel? Strengthened beyond measure (12). What

will the other states who tyrannise their people, the terrorists who
threaten our existence, what will they take from that? That the will
confronting them is decaying and feeble.

Who will celebrate and who will weep?

This House wanted this decision. Well, it has it. Those are the
choices. And in this dilemma, no choice is perfect, no cause ideal.

But on this decision hangs the fate of many things (13).

Of

twenty-first century and meet it.

Of the Iraqi people, groaning under years of dictatorship.

Of our armed forces – brave men and women of whom we can feel
proud, whose

morale is high and whose purpose is clear.

Of the institutions and alliances that will shape our world for years to
come.

Social Agency and Modality 129

a particular situation, Iraq, to the global situation is concealed) and to

prevent greater action being necessary later. It was the subtle

interplay

between claims made on the basis of truth and evidence (e.g. the
listing

of weapons, detailing past infringements of the inspection regime)

with

those made on the basis of obligation (if we don’t do something,

things

will only get worse) that proved to be so convincing. His audience

would

find it difficult to unpack the rhetorical use of modality and were also

strongly influenced by the level of commitment in his impassioned

and

fluent delivery. There is little doubt that Blair believed himself – even if
not many others did – and this was sufficient to embark on a war that
caused

an immense amount of suffering. As with all history, we never know

what

might have happened, but it is hard to imagine it being any worse

than the

events that did happen.

There is a further type of modality known as ‘dynamic modality’; this

expresses the speaker’s ability, such as ‘I can speaker Arabic’, or

willingness, as in ‘I will help you’. But as Palmer (1990, p. 36) notes,
because

dynamic modality is concerned with ability or volition, it is not subjec-

tive like other modalities, and so is not typical of modality – nor is it as

relevant to political persuasion as the types that I have analysed in
this

chapter.

Exercise 5.2

Weapons of Mass Distraction

In an early morning broadcast of the BBC’s Today programme on 29

May 2003, the journalist Andrew Gilligan made the controversial
claim that the

government ‘ordered [the September Dossier, a British Government

dossier on WMDs] to be sexed up, to be made more exciting, and
ordered more facts to

be … discovered’. The broadcast was not repeated.

Table 5.4 shows the changes that were made between the original
Joint

Intelligence Committee (JIC) assessment of the threat posed by Iraq

to the eventual published dossier which formed the textual basis for
the decision by the British government to go to war with Iraq in March
2003. Critically analyse these changes by doing the following:

➢ Identify the differences between the drafts.

➢ Decide how you could describe these differences through an
analysis of

modality (distinguishing between epistemic and deontic modality).

➢ Then discuss their rhetorical effect on a political audience.

The United States abandoned its search for WMDs in Iraq on

12 January 2005.

130

3 of the dossier]

Chapter

Published Dossier

Title:

Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction

This chapter [

sets out what we know of Saddam’s

chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic

missile programmes, drawing on all the

available evidence.

The intelligence picture … is extensive,

detailed and authoritative. (Blair in

House of Commons)

Intelligence shows that Iraq has covert

chemical and biological weapons

programmes, in breach of UN Security

Council Resolution 687.

Intelligence also shows that Iraq is

preparing plans to conceal evidence of

these weapons, including incriminating

documents, from renewed inspections.

Draft Dossier

Title:

Iraq’s Programme for Weapons of Mass

Destruction

This section sets out what we now

know of Saddam’s chemical, biological,

nuclear and ballistic missile programmes,

drawing on all the available evidence.

Intelligence confirms that Iraq has

covert chemical and biological weapons

programmes, in breach of UN Security

Council Resolution 687.

Recent intelligence indicates that Iraq

has begun dispersing its most sensitive

weapons, equipment and material

because Saddam is … preparing plans to

conceal evidence of its weapons of mass

destruction from any renewed inspection.

– Possible Scenarios

The September dossier, September 2002

JIC Assessment

Title:

Iraqi use of Chemical and Biological

Weapons

We … know little about Iraq’s CBW

[chemical and biological weapons] work

since late 1998.

Intelligence remains limited … much

of this paper is necessarily based on

judgement and assessment.

We continue to judge that Iraq has an

offensive chemical warfare programme,

though there is very little intelligence

relating to it.

Recent intelligence indicates that Qusay

Saddam Hussain has directed the Military

Industrialisation Commission to ensure

that all sensitive weapons and chemical

technology were well hidden in case of

further UN inspections.

Table 5.4

131

… intelligence indicates that as part

of Iraq’s military planning, Saddam is

willing to use chemical and biological

weapons.

We judge that Iraq has developed

mobile laboratories for military use,

corroborating earlier reports about the

mobile production of biological warfare

agents.

… the Iraqi military are able to deploy

chemical or biological weapons within 45

minutes of an order to do so.

What I believe the assessed intelligence

has established beyond doubt is that

Saddam continues in his efforts to

develop nuclear weapons.

] sic

Recent intelligence indicates that Iraq has

acquired mobile laboratories for military

use, corroborating earlier reports [

about the mobile production of biological

warfare agents.

The Iraqi military may be able to deploy

chemical and biological weapons within

45 minutes of a decision to do so.

Main conclusion: Iraq continues to work

on developing nuclear weapons.

Intelligence suggests that Saddam has

already taken the decision that all

resources, including CBWs [chemical and

biological weapons], be used to defend

the regime from attack.

Recent intelligence indicates that Iraq has

developed for the military, fermentation

systems which are capable of being

mounted on road trailers or rail cars.

Intelligence also indicates that chemical

and biological munitions could be with

military units ready for firing within

20–45 minutes.

We judge but cannot confirm that Iraq is

conducting nuclear related research and

development into enrichment of uranium

and could have longer-terms plans to

produce enriched uranium for a weapon.

6
7

132 Critical Approaches to Discourse

5.3 Summary

In this chapter, we explored the resources within English grammar for

expressing either how agency is revealed and emphasised, or

concealed. We

have done this by considering ideas related to participants and

processes.

Participants are represented by the choice of nouns, pronouns and

names,

or may be concealed by the use of either the passive voice or

intransitive

verbs that require no subject.

We have also seen how a speaker can communicate his or her level

of commitment or conviction by drawing on the system of modality to

express his or her own stance regarding the claims being made.
There are

different levels of modality that can be used to convey the extent to

which the speaker holds his or her claims to be true, necessary or
desirable.

Various linguistic means are used to convey these shades of

conviction,
including verb forms such as ‘think’, ‘appear’ and ‘seem’, but also the

system of modal verbs that is unique to English. These provide a rich

yet subtle resource for expressing possibility, probability, obligation

and necessity, using forms such as ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘can’, ‘could’ and
‘should’.

Modality can be analysed according to level (high, medium and low)

and

by distinguishing between epistemic and deontic modality.

Epistemic modality is concerned with expressing states of belief as to

how true or false a claim is, whereas deontic modality is concerned

with

expressing states of belief concerning the rightness or wrongness of

claims.

We have explored how changes in level of modality in the various

drafting

stages of political documents can have a profound effect on their

meaning,

with serious consequences that have the potential to affect many

lives.

Now that we have established what is meant by a ‘critical’ approach,

the

next chapter considers perhaps the earliest of the ‘critical’

approaches – the discourse-historical approach.

Essential reading
Coates, J. (1983). The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries (London:
Croom Helm).

Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing Political Discourse (London/New York:

Routledge),

Chapter 4.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for

Social Research (London: Routledge), pp. 105–20, 164–90.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press).

Palmer, F. R. (1986). Mood and Modality (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press).

Chapter 6

The Discourse-Historical Approach

6.1 Introduction

The discourse-historical approach (DHA) is associated primarily with

the

work of Ruth Wodak and originates in a focus on political power

differ-

ences and the historical context in which they have emerged.

Drawing on

a range of authors, Wodak and Meyer (2009, 2015) and Wodak

(2011)

have developed it more broadly into offering a methodology for

analysing
discriminatory language in fields of action that are related to the
distribution of power in society. Discourse is believed to be essential
in establishing power relationships and can only be fully understood
by paying attention

to the historical context and the social and political setting. It is by

understanding how language contributes to the formation of social
relations that we understand how power is realised in and through
discourse. In the context of this book, DHA is a politico-linguistic
approach to the analysis of speeches. Critical approaches, rather
than treating language as a separate

cognitive domain, explore the relationships between linguistic choices

and

social contexts. The DHA explains how power relationships are

consti-

tuted by the use of language that has political implications.

DHA claims that prevalent ideologies accounting for injustices and

relations of domination can be changed by understanding their

rhetorical

basis. Since power relations have a historical origin, they can also be
challenged, because there is a dynamic interaction between social
relationships and discursive practice. Just as existing power relations
influence how talking is currently done, so changes in our
understanding of the relationship between language, social relations
and power can influence how talking

will be done in the future. Therefore, it is claimed, DHA can contribute

to social change. DHA brings together areas of knowledge that are

often

considered to be separate: Linguistics and English Language;

Sociology and
Social Psychology; Political Science and History. As its authors
summarise: The discourse-historical approach attempts to integrate a
large quantity of available knowledge about the historical sources and
back-

ground of the social and political fields in which discursive ‘events’

are embedded … it analyses the historical dimension of discursive

actions by exploring the ways in which particular genres of discourses

133

134 Critical Approaches to Discourse

are subject to diachronic change … we integrate social theories to be

able to explain the so-called context. (Wodak and Meyer, 2001, p. 65)

Evidently, DHA is ambitious, because its scope is so broad and

students

may feel they lack the relevant ‘background knowledge’ to fully under-

stand the social, political and historical context of discourse. The

approach entails a broad analysis of what I referred to earlier as the
‘speech circumstances’. Chilton, Reisigl and Wodak (2009, p. 93)
analyse context at four different levels, as follows:

1 The other language in the text, or co-text of the practice.

2 The evocation of other texts leading to intertextual and inter-

discursive relationships, as it is often similarity between utterances in
different texts that creates genres and discourses.

3 The particular extra-linguistic context of situation (such as the

institution where this discursive practice occurs).

4 The broader sociopolitical and historical context of the practice.

Additionally, analysis of context encourages analysis of ‘recontextual-

isation’, which is when a text is taken out of one context and placed in

another – for example, when a politician’s ‘tweet’ is reported in a

debate

in the House of Commons.

In terms of its methods, DHA first requires the identification of a ‘field

of action’ – either an institutional setting for language such as the

House of Commons, or an area of language use such as political
marketing, where

the media project a persuasive self-representation. The principles of

data

collection emphasise the need for triangulation (the use of diverse

sources of data regarding the same phenomenon), including
participants’ own

interpretations of texts, to provide multiple perspectives on the same

topic of enquiry. Theory and method interact in DHA by identifying
discursive

strategies for making an argument (known as ‘topoi’); this may lead to

further theories, which are explored using an additional set of data.

This

interaction between theory and data is sometimes known as

abduction.

A better understanding of the linguistic means through which relations

of

power and dominance are executed is seen by its proponents as an

empow-
ering form of knowledge. This should serve as motivation to acquire
both

contextual and rhetorical knowledge of how arguments are

constructed.

In Figure 6.1, I have sought to explain my own understanding of DHA.

In Figure 6.1, the broad arrows represent influences and show an

interactive relationship between societal power relations and
discursive

practice, or ways of using language in institutional and other settings:

how, over time, social relations influence discursive practices which,

in

turn, influence social relations, and so on. The solid lines represent
interdependencies between particular epistemologies and
methodologies. The

figure shows a distinction between society (social knowledge and

practice),

The Discourse-Historical Approach 135

EPISTEMOLOGY: CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Understanding

Understanding

political context

historical context

Social practice and

relations of power
Diachronic change

Discursive practices in

institutional and societal

fields of action

Identification of

Identification of

discursive strategies

arguments – ‘topoi’

(discourse analysis)

(rhetorical analysis)

METHOD: RHETORICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Figure 6.1 Overview of the discourse-historical approach (DHA).

analysed as ‘Context’ in its upper part, and language practice

(discursive

strategies and arguments), shown in the lower part as rhetorical and

lin-

guistic analysis.

It is worth pointing out the difference between DHA and

sociolinguistics –

since relations between language and sociable variables such as

age, gen-

der, social class and ethnicity are conventionally explored in

sociolinguistics. However, there are at least two features that
distinguish DHA from

sociolinguistics. The first is describing power relations, so that DHA

and

other critical linguistic approaches are concerned with social relations

of domination and subordination – this is not the case with
sociolinguistics.

Second, critical approaches seek to bring about social change, so

their

136 Critical Approaches to Discourse

explanations take a social, ethical and political perspective, with the

aim of influencing social behaviour. Although DHA takes a politico-
linguistic perspective, the approach is concerned with social theory
and takes a utili-tarian methodological approach, arguing that utility is
the most important

consideration for the selection of conceptual tools. Exponents draw

on

whatever discursive and rhetorical theories prove to be the most

revealing

of discriminatory uses of language.

Summary of the approach

◇ A range of different genres and types of text and fields of action

are

studied in an empirical approach involving fieldwork and ethnography

◇ A range of different disciplinary frameworks are drawn on

(including

sociology, history, politics and psychology)

◇ A particular focus is given to historical context, because many
discriminatory practices have their origin in history

◇ The approach is oriented towards solving social problems – hence

its

concern with injustice, corruption and discrimination

◇ There is constant interaction between investigations of data, theory

and further hypotheses that emerge from the interaction between
data and

theory

◇ Central to the method of analysing language is the identification of

topics or ‘topoi’ that constitute the basis of how arguments are
constructed.

Exercise 6.1

Reisigl (2008a, pp. 98–9) provides the following list of fields of action:
1 Law-making procedure

2 Formation of public attitudes, opinions and will

3 Party-internal formation of attitudes, opinions and will

4 Inter-party formation of attitudes, opinions and will

5 Organization of international and interstate relations

6 Political advertising

7 Political administration

8 Political control

Give an example of a speech that might be given in each of these

fields of action; an example, of ‘political advertising’ would be an
acceptance speech on election day.

We have seen that the analysis of ‘Context’ is crucial to DHA;

however, we

also found from Chapter 4 that the term ‘context’ is very broad and
includes

many different features. Write a list of as many different features of

the context that you can think of that should be considered when a
female celebrity gives a speech relating to gender issues.

Why is it important to identify audience characteristics?

The Discourse-Historical Approach 137

Discussion point

Proponents of DHA claim that greater awareness of how language is

used

in society can perpetuate, challenge, transform or destroy the status

quo.

Do you agree with this?

6.2 Discursive strategies and intention

As Reisigl (2008a, p. 100) notes: ‘The starting point of the research is

the awareness of a social or political problem that possesses
linguistic aspects.’

There is perhaps a risk of tautology, because if a problem arises from

lan-

guage that is then defined as problematic, how do we know that the

prob-
lem exists outside of language? Inevitably, some form of extra-
linguistic

knowledge is necessary. For example, it may be generally accepted

that any form of genocide is highly problematic – but this is, of
course, an extreme case so, for example, interpretation of ‘human
rights’ varies according to

historical and cultural circumstance. Initially, DHA considers the

general

question: Is there any evidence that a particular speech shows

evidence

of discrimination? This is not necessarily easy to answer with

reference

to purely linguistic considerations. Much work in DHA focuses on

right-

wing politicians and their negative attitudes towards social groups

such

as asylum seekers, immigrants, Muslims and so on. It could

potentially be

applied to other social groups who are believed to be discriminated

against, such as those receiving welfare payments, or single or young
unmarried

mothers.

As we can see from the lower left-hand box in Figure 6.1, at the core
of DHA is the identification of a range of linguistic features that
characterise how relationships of dominance and subordination arise.
These ‘discursive strategies’ are analysed subsequently in terms of
‘topoi’ or arguments (which are treated as one of the discursive
strategies). A ‘strategy’ is a plan of practice consciously adopted to
achieve a certain political, social or psychological aim. The term
‘strategy’ has a military origin, from the Greek

strategia, ‘generalship’, and we still speak of strategy in relation to

armed conflict and sport. An examination of the concordances of
‘strategy’ in the British National Corpus (BNC) indicates that these
military contexts have

largely been replaced by the use of ‘strategy’ in management and

business

contexts; common collocates include ‘economic’, ‘marketing’,

‘corporate’

‘industrial’, ‘global’ and so on. ‘Strategy’ also collocates with ‘tactics’,

and this takes us back to the original military sense in which there is a
distinction between an overall aim and the specific means (‘tactics’)
through

which it is realised.

Wodak and Meyer (2001) is a little ambiguous as to how far linguistic

strategies identified by DHA are intentional. It seems to me that

the notion of ‘strategy’ – along with related notions such as ‘plan’ and

‘aim’ – implies that linguistic behaviour is intentional when it is based

on

138 Critical Approaches to Discourse

conscious reflection. However, this is not the same as saying that

some

types of discriminatory language used do not have unconscious

motiva-

tion. For example, it was unlikely that Diane Abbot (Tweet, 6 January
2012) was being intentionally racist when she said ‘White people love

playing divide and rule’ – since much of her political position is based

on resistance to racism; however, there may have been some

unconscious

motivation behind the use of an ethnic stereotype such as ‘white

people’.

The remark provoked some public debate leading to accusations of

rac-

ism; for example, a newspaper columnist wrote that it was ‘an

extraor-

dinary statement for someone who has built her entire political career

on fomenting, exacerbating and inculcating racial differences’ (Abhijit

Pandya, Daily Mail, 8 January 2012). Since Diane Abbot apologised,

this implies that she recognised that her remark – when taken out of
context –

could be interpreted as having an unconsciously racist motivation,

although this was apparently not her intention. Intentionality, then, is

problematic, and we should be conscious that when we use

‘strategy’, we

are implying an intentional language use.

Sometimes there is the potential for tension between intentions and

unintended outcomes; for example, when in the UK people are invited

to
categorise themselves ethnically. When applying for a membership
card

at my local swimming pool, I was invited to identify myself as one of

19 different ethnic categories, including ‘White British’, ‘Black African’,

‘Black Caribbean’, ‘Black other’, ‘Black British’ and ‘Black Somali’ (in
that order); the form indicated that this would assist the Council ‘to
ensure that the facilities are accessible to everybody’ (without any
indication of how

they might do this). Although the intention behind ethnic

categorisation is to ensure equal opportunities, it may also,
unintentionally, contribute to

seeing the world through an ethnic lens. Typically, the focus of

discrimi-

natory language is where a minority group – often ethnically identified

– is perceived as being vulnerable to negative representation by a
dominant

group. There is, perhaps, an unstated assumption that ‘minority’

refers to a demographically small number, whereas ‘majority’ refers to
a demographically large number – but we also need to consider the
area over which the

number is being counted, since ‘whites’ form a minority in some

inner-city

areas, but not in Britain as a whole; this also needs the consideration
of

national context because, for example in Syria, an ethnic Shia Alouite

minority dominates a Sunni majority.

When we consider the upper part of Figure 6.1, we may note that
some

form of understanding of political and historical issues is a preliminary

for the identification of discursive strategies. In the case of the
comment by

Diane Abbot, knowledge of processes of colonisation and

decolonisation is

essential to interpretation; she claimed de-contextualisation in her

defence:

‘Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th-century

European

colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters’ – it is worth noting

that the tweet to which she was responding related to a debate over
the judicial

The Discourse-Historical Approach 139

decision on the Stephen Lawrence case – a racially motivated fatal

attack.

She was recontextualising a particular judicial decision about a racist

event into the whole history of colonialism.

Evidently, then, the political and historical context determines the

nature of the problems that DHA addresses, and offers a way out of
tautology.

Topics such as immigration, asylum seeking and benefit fraud, which

are

often positioned by the media as being issues of public concern, form

the
basis of DHA topics because they are defined by the media as
‘problems’.

However, it is worth noting that a common strategy by those opposed

to

immigration is to associate it with a list of other issues to which it is

only marginally related, such as asylum seeking. One of the risks of
defining

a particular social phenomenon as ‘problematic’ is that it

unconsciously

links it with all the other social issues that are categorised in this way.

I shall first examine the more general notion of discriminatory

discursive

strategies and then explore in more detail the specific topoi or

argument

schemes which form one of these discursive strategies.

6.3 Discursive strategies and discrimination

In identifying discriminatory discourses, a number of research

questions

can be used by proponents of DHA, as follows:

1 How are people named linguistically? (Nomination)

2 Which traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to

them? (Predication)

3 From which point of view are these nominations and attributions

expressed? (Perspective)
4 Are the respective discriminatory utterances articulated overtly or
are

they softened? (Intensification and mitigation)

5 By means of which arguments and argumentation schemes do

specific

persons or social groups try to justify and legitimate exclusion,

discrim-

ination and exploitation of others?

This list of questions could be integrated into a single question: ‘How

is

the system of language employed to enforce, and constitute, the

ideology

of a particular group?’ I shall examine this by considering how

ethnicity

is used in naming practices. With the increased geographical mobility

arising from colonialism, decolonisation and globalisation, ethnicity

has

become one of a range of social variables contributing to the

formation of

a social identity. The term ‘ethnic’ itself originates in the Greek

ethnos, or

‘nation’ – a community that shares a common history, cultural tradition

and language – and the desire for things ‘ethnic’ may reflect a
nostalgia
for a time when history, culture and language converged, creating
less

complex social patterns and an assumed homogeneity among

members of

140 Critical Approaches to Discourse

a particular ethnic group. Unlike other variables that might contribute

to

the creation of a personal identity – such as supporting a football

team,

having a religious belief, or a particular sexual orientation – ethnicity

is highly visible and arises from the perceptions and reactions of
others; this often involves the positioning of a minority ethnic group in
terms of how

it diverges from the mainstream or majority ethnic group (bearing in

mind

the constraints on simply comparing percentages, as discussed

above).

The naming practices for ethnicity are often compound adjectives that

combine aspects of race and ethnicity such as Afro-Caribbean;

sometimes

these may be combined with religion as, for example, in white Anglo-

Saxon Protestant (motivated mainly by the derogatory acronym

WASP

that this term creates). The name that is used to refer to a particular
social group often does not correspond with the ideological outlook
held by the
group to which the name is applied. In line with other critical
approaches, DHA seeks to raise awareness of what the use of a
name may imply for the

named group and how it contributes to ‘us and them’ relations. For
exam-

ple, in Germany, Turkish immigrant workers who arrived from the

1950s

onwards have been referred to as Gastarbeiter, or ‘guest workers’;

this term denied them the status of being full German citizens, as it
implied they would return to Turkey and that they might outstay the
welcome of their

German ‘hosts’. However, the identification of this name as

problematic

would probably never have occurred without some background

knowl-

edge of Nazism and how the identification of a group of people as not

fully German had disastrous consequences in modern European

history. In

this respect, there is an interdiscursive aspect to the use of

Gastarbeiter –

evoking at some level German nationalism.

DHA assumes that language is an area of contestation in which

social

groups compete for power, and that the situation is likely to be

unstable

as names shift through the exertion of political power. As we saw in

Figure 6.1, there is a circular and interactive process between
discursive

practice and social practice. This linguistic and discursive struggle is

often where social groups arm themselves with strategies such as
humour and

irony. Groups that experience pejorative naming can turn this around
by

using derogatory names to refer to each other ironically – thereby tak-

ing ownership of their opponents’ linguistic weapons to create a

group

identity.

For example, the racially based term ‘nigger’ was used in the United

States as a derogatory expression in the 1960s and 1970s; however,

in

ghetto and street culture in the 1980s, African-Americans began to

use

‘nigger’ ironically to refer to other African-Americans. Though ‘African-

American’ remained the standard high status term and implied

acceptance

of a citizenship defined in terms of both ethnicity and nationality,

‘nigger’

continued as an alternative in-group marker. This shows how groups

employ naming practices – interdiscursively – as a way of embracing

The Discourse-Historical Approach 141

particular identities. A similar process has taken place with the use of

‘chav’ as form of in-group marker. The analyst needs to identify the

naming practices, and examine who uses them and with what
intention.

The intention behind naming practices can often only be established

by

qualitative methods such as interviewing.

There is an ongoing interaction between a mainstream culture that

develops negative names for a minority group on the basis of

whatever it is that marks it out as different, and how the group
responds to such negative naming. This is an example at the lexical
level of an angle of telling – a way of representing a particular group
to reinforce a particular perception of

that group. The mainstream culture creates one set of perceptions

through

naming, while the named group retaliates either by creating an

alternative

set of names or by shifting the perspective implied by these names

through

irony, and so reversing the values attached to them. In this way,

intertex-

tual references – how the use of a name on one occasion relates to

its use

on another – contributes to interdiscursive relations – the evolving

and

shifting social perception of a group.

An example of this process is the name ‘pikey’, which is a derogatory

name originally used for ‘travellers’ or gypsies, but there is some

uncer-

tainty about its exact denotation, as indicated in the following from a

conversation about cooking in the BNC:

Do you want me to go and get something cos it’s cheaper? What’s

cheaper? Ah you, you can’t. Bloody lucky, though. You pikey! Typical!

Pikey? Pikey! What’s pikey? What does pikey mean? I dunno. Crusty.

I’ve heard of crusty, but not … Don’t you know what pikey means?

Pikey? You don’t know what pikey means. I’ll get us there, there for
half past.

‘Pikey’ – along with ‘crusty’ – has broadened its meaning to refer to

anyone from a very low social class. Its productivity is shown in its
extension to different parts of speech; for example, it can be an
adjective, as in ‘pikey estate’, or a verb, as in ‘someone has piked my
bike’. As a discursive strategy ‘pikey’ is a name that marks someone
as an out-group member and

is associated with negative traits associated with low social class,

such as lack of money, dirty clothes and so on. ‘Pikey’ could also be
analysed as a form of intensification. However, ‘pikey’ also provides
an example of how

groups reverse the negative connotation of a word by using it

ironically.

Fans of Gillingham football club refer to themselves as the ‘Pikey

Army’ –

in the same way as other fans use ‘Red Army’ and ‘Blue Army’. As an
interdiscursive strategy, this reframes, or recontextualises, the name
as a marker of in-group solidarity.

The key issue to establish is who controls the process and whose
perspective a name reflects: when the majority group imposes a
name this

142 Critical Approaches to Discourse

is from an external perspective, but when a minority groups

deliberately

self-selects a name as an identity marker, it becomes an internal

perspec-

tive. Taking ownership of names by relabelling is a form of

empowerment

because it reinforces group solidarity. We should also consider the

role

of official bodies and institutions in the selection and choice of names

–

for example, in legal and official documents. Think again of the Equal

Opportunities forms mentioned above, where people self-select an

ethnic

identity as part of an administrative process, though this might have

the

unintended consequence of creating a world view where ethnic

categorisa-

tion is regarded as normal. Table 6.1 shows some discriminatory

naming practices classified by variable, the bottom row shows some
that are
directed towards white Westerns.

Table 6.1 Discriminatory names in English

Ethnicity

Social Class

Sexuality

Other

Pickaninny

Pleb

Tranny

Lame (disability)

Yid

Toff

Trap (trans woman with Yob (behaviour)

male genitalia)

Paki

Pikey

Nancy boy

Nerd (obsession)

Polack

Trailer trash (US)

Dyke

Towel head

(religion)

Gringo

WASP (White Anglo WAGs (wives &

Kaafir (religion)

Saxon Protestant)

girlfriends of high

profile sportsmen)

Exercise 6.2

➢ Look at Table 6.1 and add any further names from your own
discourse commu-

nity that could be interpreted as discriminating against a particular

social group.

Consider for each one whether discrimination is on the grounds of

ethnicity, social class, sexuality, or some other variable such as
religion. Use the table to discuss the discursive strategies that are at
work in relation to the name ‘chav’.

➢ Think of a minority social group that has both a negative and a

positive name. Consider the origins of these names (perhaps using a
corpus for

evidence of their productivity). Discuss the contrast between positive

and
negative names in terms of the discursive strategies of nomination,
predi-

cation and framing.

➢ Think of a name that was originally intended pejoratively but

whose meaning has since changed because those to whom it
referred have adopted it as a

form of identity marker. Try to identify the stages through which this
process has occurred, and discuss in terms of the interdiscursive
strategies of framing and reframing.

The Discourse-Historical Approach 143

6.4 Topoi, warrants and arguments

The term ‘topos’ (plural ‘topoi’) literally means ‘place’ or ‘location’ (as
in topography); however, it is used rather differently in DHA from how
it is

used in classical rhetoric. In classical rhetoric, it referred to

commonplace arguments such as ‘Everything comes to an end’ or
‘’Tis an ill wind that

blows no good’, and this sense is retained in the notion of ‘place’ in

‘commonplace’. In DHA, ‘topos’ refers to an argument scheme that
allows a

conclusion to be derived from certain premises, as indicated in the

follow-

ing definition:

topoi can be described as parts of argumentation which belong to the

required premise. They are the formal or content-related warrants or

‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument(s) with the conclusion,

the claim. As such, they justify the transition from the argument(s) to

the conclusion. (Kienpointer, 1992, p. 194; Chilton et al., 2009, p.

110)

We can see from the quotation that ‘topoi’ are treated as being
equiva-

lent to ‘formal or content-related warrants’. This treatment of ‘topos’

has been criticised as unclear because it treats ‘formal’ rules as being
identical

to ‘content-related’ rules (Žagar, 2010). ‘Warrant’ is a term introduced

by Toulmin (2003) for that part of an argument structure that enables
a transition to be made from evidence or data to a conclusion or
claim. As

Toulmin argues, we need facts to back up a statement, and they

answer

the question ‘What have we got to go on?’ So a claim such as ‘traffic

congestion is a problem’ might offer as evidence some of its negative

con-

sequences such as delays in arriving at a destination, air pollution,

and

so forth. However, as well as data that shows ‘what we have to go

on’, a

warrant should also answer the question ‘How do you get there?’ It
may

be conceptualised as a ‘step’ that allows a transition from the

evidence

or data to the claim. In the case of traffic congestion, a warrant might

be a general hypothetical statement such as ‘There are so many cars
on the

road’; as with a commonplace, it is a sort of truism that is difficult to

challenge because it draws on the everyday experience of space on
the roads

being limited.

A further distinction has been made between field-dependent

arguments

and semantic arguments (Kienpointer, 1992, p. 178). Field-dependent

arguments are those that depend on their situational context,
whereas

semantic arguments are characterised by the semantic properties

that link

the premises to the conclusion. In this section, I shall use Toulmin’s

(2003) term ‘warrant’ when identifying the argument’s form, their
semantic arguments – here the insertion of a ‘commonplace’ about
cars – and Wodak

and Meyer’s term ‘topoi’, to refer to the content of an argument – their

field-dependent arguments. The aim is to create a distinction between

Toulmin’s use of ‘warrant’ and Wodak’s use of ‘topos’, between

semantic

144

-tweets)

knees.

on its

Example
Let’s just stick with the facts, migrants contribute

more than they take out the system #BBCDebate

#VoteRemain #Euref (95 re-tweets)

I see absolutely no upside in #Brexit. The only

‘sovereignty’ we will regain controlled by right wing

Conservative rump, UKIP, and far right. (155 re-tweets)

White, middle class leftists attack black #VoteLeave

supporters for handing out leaflets, label them ‘Nazis’.

(363 re-tweets)

Migrants attack British fans returning from France and

stone their cars. (212 re-tweets)

Oh dear. @BorisJohnson defending Tate and Lyle’s

#VoteLeave stance, a company made rich by slavery

#BBCDebate (28 re-tweets)

Be clear: terror message of Jo Cox’s fascist killer was

‘vote remain & you’re a dead immigrant-loving traitor’.

Resist his hate: #VoteRemain

Our best chance for freedom, for sovereignty, for

control, for our own democracy. Let’s do it. Vote Leave

#Brexit #EURef (126 re

LIKE THIS #Brexit to be fair stay or go the country is

well and truly

– if there are positive

Explanation/Definition

Indicating an advantage

consequences of an action or decision, then one should

perform/accept it.

Indicating a disadvantage – if there are negative

consequences of an action or decision, the action/

decision should be rejected.

If an action, a thing or a person is named/designated as

X, the person or group so named carries the qualities,

attributes or traits contained in the literal meaning of X.

If a political action or decision bears specific dangerous

or threatening consequences, one should not perform it.

If a political action does not conform with human

rights and humanitarian values, it should not be

performed.

Idea of equal rights for all

Because a state is responsible for the emergence of

problems, it should act to find solutions.

If X is burdened by a problem, one should act to

diminish the burden.

Discourse-historical topoi and #Brexit

Table 6.2

Content-related

Topoi

Usefulness

Uselessness

Definition/naming

Danger and threat

Humanitarianism

Justice

Responsibility

Burdening,

weighting

145

‘Jerusalem’ on the piano its very

It’s NOT free when you pay £10bn, give up your legal

and parliamentary sovereignty, and have open borders!

#VoteLeave

#Brexit basic stance:

(1) All immigration is evil (except our ancestors).

(2) #Brexit will stop all immigration.

Also, pigs will fly.

Quotas that are fished by #EU owned vessels. Our

waters, our fish, our trawlers. Not #EU’s choice #brexit

I’m Dutch and I endorse #Brexit because we can be

united only in freedom, sovereignty and rule of law.

Today is the Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, this

week we face our 2nd Waterloo, the EU referendum

#Brexit (344 re-tweets)

My brothers playing

Brexit.

The blond guy on the pic is leading UK towards #Brexit

to defend the working class against Brussels’ elite,

right? (Picture of Boris Johnson dressed for Bullingdon

club dinner). (11 re-tweets)

Break out of your chains #Brexit. Be brave & vote

for the #Brexit. Stand up to the fear mongering and

beLEAVE. (63 re-tweets)

To all intents and purposes, @nigelfarage could be King

Arthur, risen from his slumber at the time of greatest

need #VoteLeave

If something costs too much or causes a loss of revenue,

one should perform actions that diminish the costs or

avoid the losses.

Because reality is like X, then Y should be done.

If the numbers prove a specific topos, a specific action

should be performed.

If a law allows X, then Y can be done.

Because history teaches that specific actions have

specific consequences, one should allow or forbid a

specific action in a comparable situation.

Because the culture of a specific group of people is as it

is, specific advantages or disadvantages arise.

Because people are exploited by those in power, action

should be taken against the powerful.

If the people favour/refuse a specific action, the action

should be performed/not performed.

If danger is to be expected and A has saved us in the

past, then A could save us again.

Finances

Reality

Numbers

Law and right

History

Culture

Exploitation

People

Saviour

146 Critical Approaches to Discourse

and field-dependent arguments. It seems that the idea of general

‘conclu-

sion rule’ applies equally to Toulmin’s warrants as it does to Wodak’s

topoi. Formal, semantic warrants are likely to be more limited in

number,

whereas since field-dependent arguments and topoi are influenced by

their

context, they are likely to proliferate according to the range of

situations where they occur, although there may be overlap between
these situations.
For example the topos of ‘people’ could be used in both an
immigration

speech and in a speech on national sovereignty.

Table 6.2, based on Wodak’s categories of topoi (Wodak and Meyer,

2009; Wodak, 2015), provides a brief definition and explanation of

topoi along with some examples of arguments taken from tweets
posted in the

week before the UK Referendum on membership of the European

Union

on 23 June 2016 – along with the number of ‘re-tweets’ where

relevant.

Following changes in Wodak and Meyers’ various editions of

Methods of

Critical Discourse Analysis (2001, 2009, 2015) some changes to the

topoi given in the first edition of this book: ‘abuse’ has been replaced
by my

own suggestion, ‘Exploitation’ and, following Wodak (2015), ‘People’

and

‘Saviour’ have been added.

We might notice some overlaps between the content-related topoi of

uselessness, finance and burdening; in the context of immigration, all

are potentially relevant when analysing arguments based on the

possible

social cost of immigration. For example, the increased demand for

housing
could imply that the housing system does not work (i.e. it is
‘Useless’); or that a financial cost for housing was incurred, more
expensive to operate

(‘Finance’); or that the increased demand for housing places a burden

on

the existing housing stock (‘Burden’). ‘Uselessness’ and ‘Burden’ are

both

more general concepts that say ‘Finance’ or ‘Numbers’. ‘Reality’

seems an

even more general existential concept. ‘Justice’ and ‘Abuse’ were in

earlier versions of the topoi but are absent in later ones, presumably
because they overlap with ‘Law and right’ and ‘Humanitarianism’.
Similarly ‘History’

and ‘Culture’ seem to overlap in the following tweet posted on 19

June

2016 before the UK referendum: ‘No good father can sit quietly while
a

mass invasion of anti-western muslims are coming to destroy our

culture

and country #Brexit #MAGA [Make America great again]’; reference

is

made to culture but it is also intended to evoke historical memories of

the Crusades. Generally, in the context of the Brexit debate as
discussed on

Twitter, there were large variations in the type of topos on which

tweeters relied: strong supporters of Brexit made more appeals to
‘History’ and to
‘Culture’ (and often to both), whereas supporters of Remain tweeted
more

arguments based on ‘Usefulness’.

As discussed above, because DHA describes ‘topoi’ as equivalent to

Toulmin’s ‘warrants’, there is a debate over whether topoi should be a

term reserved for formal logical relationships (Žagar) rather than
given a looser interpretation that equates it with ‘warrants’ (Wodak); I
discuss this further in the last section of this chapter. As a warrant
provides the grounds

The Discourse-Historical Approach 147

or premises of an argument , it is more likely to be signalled by a

discourse marker rather than a fully stated ‘conclusion rule’ that relies
on inferencing for its comprehension. I illustrate warrants in Example
1 below, with reference to the discussion about urban traffic
congestion introduced above.

6.4.1 Example 1: traffic congestion

Consider a statement that might be made in a debate to support the

claim

(in bold) that there is traffic congestion:

The problem of congestion is experienced by many of us on a daily

basis: it takes a long time to get anywhere in a city; there are traffic
jams and it is difficult to find parking.

This could be analysed using the DHA topos of ‘uselessness’, as the

argu-

ment is based on stating negatively evaluated and socially

disadvantageous
results of congestion. The data (in italics) are the effects of traffic
congestion. To strengthen the argument, we might wish to insert a
bridging

statement, or ‘warrant’ (in bold underlined) that connects the data

with

the claim (in bold):

The problem of congestion is experienced by many of us on a daily

basis: it takes a long time to get anywhere by car, there are traffic
jams

and it is difficult to park as there are thousands of cars on the

road, since there is the problem of traffic congestion.

Drawing on Toulmin’s approach, the specific warrant is the statement

(underlined) that allows the move from the evidence to the claim,
which might be referred to as ‘causation’ because it is the volume of
traffic that causes congestion. The reference to quantity (so many) is
an argument that

could be described using DHA as ‘the topos of numbers’. The

connection

between the causes of traffic congestion and the number of cars can
be

shown using an abstract representation, as in Figure 6.2.

Using Wodak’s terminology, the ‘topos’ is the actual content of the

argument – references to the number of cars implied by ‘traffic jam’
and

the negative social outcomes arising from congestion (‘uselessness’).

However, since the topos of ‘numbers’ (so many) and ‘uselessness’

are logically related in terms of cause and effect, a formal relation of

causality could be captured by a warrant such as ‘Causation’. This

would be a more formal use of ‘warrant’ to refer to the formal

statement of an argument: here too much of something causes a
negative effect. This would seem to provide a semantic conclusion
rule as it

addresses the underlying cause of congestion: too many cars, buses

and lorries. Differentiating between warrants (semantic argument

schemes) and topoi (the content-related fields of an argument) allows

148 Critical Approaches to Discourse

DATA

CLAIM

It takes a long time to

SO

get anywhere by car,

Traffic congestion is

traffic jams, air pollution,

a problem

parking problems, etc.

Warrant:

SINCE

There are thousands of

cars on the road

Warrant: ‘Causation’

If there is too much

DHA topos :

of something a problem

1. Uselessness

will arise

2. Numbers – too many

Figure 6.2 Analysis of argument structure (1).

us to differentiate between the form and content of arguments. It may

be helpful to provide a further illustration of this in Example 2, which

is from a ‘high-stakes’ oratorical setting: Tony Blair’s speech to the

House of Commons, arguing the case for the invasion of Iraq to

remove

Saddam Hussein.

6.4.2 Example 2: the case for war

We are now 12 years after Saddam was first told by the UN to

disarm;

nearly six months after President Bush made his speech to the UN

accepting the UN route to disarmament; nearly four months on from

Resolution 1441; and even now today we are offering Saddam the
pros-
pect of voluntary disarmament through the UN.

I detest his regime. But even now he can save it by complying with

the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to

achieve disarmament peacefully.

I do not want war. I do not believe anyone in this House wants war.

But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam’s active

The Discourse-Historical Approach 149

co-operation. Twelve years of bitter experience teaches that. And if

he refuses to co-operate – as he is refusing now, and we fail to act,

what then? Saddam in charge of Iraq, his WMDs intact, the will of the

international community set at nothing, the UN tricked again, Saddam

hugely strengthened and emboldened – does anyone truly believe

that will mean peace? And when we turn to deal with other threats,

where will our authority be? And when we make a demand next time,

what will our credibility be? This is not a road to peace, but folly

and weakness that will only mean the conflict when it comes is more

bloody, less certain and greater in its devastation.

There are at least four argument schemes or topoi in this extract:

1 The danger of inaction

2 Numbers that emphasise the duration of the period when Saddam

has
been a threat by failing to disarm

3 The uselessness of the UN policy of voluntary disarmament

4 Responsibility: that it would be irresponsible for the international

community not to act, as this in itself would embolden Saddam

These topoi are reinforced by repetition and rhetorical questions.

Figure 6.3

shows the argument scheme using Toulmin’s ‘warrant’.

Using Wodak’s approach, ‘And when we turn to deal with other

threats’ can be interpreted as a topos of ‘danger and threat’. The

topos

of numbers is indicated lexically by 12 years (repeated), six months,

four months and so on; the uselessness of disarmament is implied by

the

long duration of peaceful pressure, and ‘Saddam hugely

strengthened

and emboldened’ implies that it would be irresponsible to do nothing.

Using Toulmin’s approach, the warrant can be identified by formally

paraphrasing Blair’s argument that Iraq should be invaded because of

what might happen if we do not act now – a type of ‘slippery slope’

argument. Though Blair avoids this metaphor in other expressions of

this argument, speakers might rely on such a commonplace, which is

what I refer to as a ‘metaphor warrant’. The ‘bad outcome’ warrant

can be reformulated semantically as a generalisation – if someone
does

something bad, then there is an obligation not to allow a continuation

of that action. I suggest that we could describe this bad outcome
warrant

as ‘just consequences’.

We might notice from these examples that actual words in the text
may

correspond directly with the naming of a topos (in the second

example,

the word ‘threat’ is actually used) but need not necessarily do so – for

example, ‘numbers’ is a superordinate term for 12, 6, 4 and so on, but

the

word itself does not occur. The topos of responsibility arises from a
series of rhetorical questions about hypothetical future scenarios from
which we

150 Critical Approaches to Discourse

DATA

CLAIM

Evidence in numbers

SO

of how Saddam has

The West should use

refused UN orders to
military force to disarm

disarm

him

Warrant:

SINCE

If we fail to act now, the military confrontation

later will be more devastating and less certain

as we will be less credible than if we act now

Warrant

Just consequence

If someone continues to

Topos:

do something wrong

1. Numbers

after being warned

2. Danger and threat

against doing this, they

3. Uselessness of disarmament

should be prevented

4. Responsibility
from continuing to do so

Figure 6.3 Analysis of argument structure (2).

can infer that action is necessary. Similarly, Blair does not state that
disarmament is ineffective, but implies this. So words may correspond
with a

warrant (as in Example 1) but need not necessarily do so when the

formal

structure of an argument is paraphrased (as in Example 2) rather

than

stated explicitly. The overlaps noted in Table 6.2 between topoi, such
as

‘uselessness’, ‘disadvantage’ and ‘burdening’ might be removed by

naming

them using formal, semantic terms such as ‘Causation’ (Example 1)

or ‘Just

Consequence’ (Example 2).

Although DHA has been used to explore other problematic issues,

such as climate change (Wodak and Meyer, 2009), there has been a
strong focus on immigration, and with good reason, because it

necessarily requires a historical knowledge of colonialism,

decolonisa-

tion and more recently globalisation to fully understand the dynamics

of immigration. The embrace of ‘third way’ neo-liberalism in the 1990s

accelerated the speed of immigration as many sought to escape low-

wage
economies by moving to higher-wage ones – frequently using
established

patterns of migration to assist with this. Social disaffection associated

with higher unemployment in areas populated by immigrants has

been

accompanied by a growth of the far right and expansion of

nationalism

and populism across Europe. For this reason, I illustrate DHA in the

next section using an example from a speech given by the

Conservative

MP Jacob Rees-Mogg that provides a nationalist argument in favour

of

Brexit.

The Discourse-Historical Approach 151

6.5 Sample text analysis using DHA

I begin by providing some background on the political and historical

con-

text, then continue with an analysis of the discursive strategies and

topoi in this speech (using the list of topoi given in Table 6.2).

Speech circumstances

Ever since Britain voted in favour of remaining a member of what was

then

known as the ‘Common Market’ in June 1975 membership was a

source of
contention – especially (but not exclusively) among the political right
that had never accepted the loss of national power that this implied. A
group

of Conservative MPs, along with the UK Independence Party led by

Nigel

Farage, continued to oppose British membership of the European

Union (EU).

During a long period of liberal dominance based on economic

marketisation

and globalisation between 1997 and 2007, these views were very
much on

the political margins. The widely accepted beliefs in the ‘New Labour’
period were that more trade, the lowering of tariffic barriers, combined
with open-minded policies towards multiculturalism and immigration
would benefit all

and bring about the end of poverty and of violence in a world of

growing –

and seemingly limitless – global prosperity. However, the financial

crisis of 2007–8 has been followed by a long period of economic
‘Austerity’ characterised by lower public spending per capita and
growing economic inequalities

creating a political climate in which national identity could re-emerge

as a political force across Europe and the United States in a number
of different forms. These ranged from the rise of far right anti-
immigrant groups to more moderate political affiliations that allowed
national identity to co-exist with other more ‘hip’ identities based on
sexual orientation, ethnicity and gender.

It was as a response to these changes that David Cameron

announced
in his Bloomberg address that the United Kingdom would have a
referen-

dum on continued membership of the EU. To his astonishment and

that of

most political observers, in June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to

leave

the EU. This signalled the start of a period of political uncertainty. An

election held in June 2017 was intended by Prime Minister Theresa

May

to consolidate her bargaining position with the European leaders but

had

the opposite effect: the Conservative Party suffered losses and could
only

form a minority government dependent on the small Democratic

Unionist

Party; by contrast the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn gained 30

seats.

This uncertain outcome contributed to a division within the

government

between those who were having doubts as to the economic perils of

Britain

completely leaving the EU and those, such as Boris Johnson and

Michael

Gove, who wanted a strong form of Brexit. The former group – while

accepting the need for political sovereignty – were happy to pay the
price
for maintaining tariff-free access to the EU, whereas the strong
Brexiteers were prepared for Britain to leave the Customs Union and
the Single

Market. Jacob Rees-Mogg emerged as a significant figure among this

group of staunch supporters of what has been described as a ‘hard’

Brexit.

152 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Peoples’ views on narratives of the nation generally depend on their

particular geographical locations, personal and historical experience

of

invasion, threat of invasion and war. A perspective of national distinc-

tiveness should not necessarily be equated with nationalism. There is

a

difference between views of nationhood that imply a sense of social

iden-

tity as expressed by a common set of social practices; cultural values;

and preferences in food, drink, sport and, perhaps, language, and
nationalism

as a political philosophy that assumes the supremacy of one nation

over

another. To feel proud of one’s country can be a ‘natural’ search for a

collective identity, a sense of belonging to a ‘tribe’ that is rooted in a
common history and in shared memories that stretch across time.

Historical memories form part of what van Dijk (1998) refers to as

‘social
cognition’ – long-term mental representations arising from social
experience.

Social cognition is reinforced by social practice, so, for example, in

Britain there is a sense of a shared history as a nation that has
defended itself from foreign invasion, and this cognition is collectively
invoked at annual commemorations of Armistice Day on
Remembrance Sunday when national

dignitaries take part in a ceremony for the War Dead at the Cenotaph
in

London – and in other cities. The concept of Britain as a sovereign

nation

in its modern form began during the Napoleonic wars and resistance
to

Napoleonic expansion: the Battle of Trafalgar and Waterloo

symbolised the

power of a nation that was able to resist threats of revolutionary

fervour and invasion from abroad. They are commemorated in
national consciousness

in the naming of iconic London locations: Trafalgar Square and

Waterloo

Station. This national consciousness continued throughout two World

Wars

and was temporarily – and somewhat artificially – revived (perhaps

for

political reasons) in the Falklands War and subsequently in the two

Gulf and Afghan Wars. Such elements of national identity contributed
to the cognitive circumstances of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s speech.

Core Text 7: Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit Speech,

25 January 2018

Analysis of topoi shows that several arguments are recycled in the

speech; the advantages of a clean break with the European Union

(see

1, 5, 8 and 14) are contrasted with the disadvantages of staying in the

Customs Union and Single Market (see 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12 and 13) –

twice as many topoi emphasise the disadvantages of staying in these

entities. There is a major secondary argument that Britain not only

owes it to itself to have a complete break with the European Union

but also to the rest of the world, who would benefit from a new, more

internationally based interpretation of free trade. It is worth noting that

arguments based primarily on economic grounds avoid specific
figures

or facts altogether. This may be because such figures were the

source

The Discourse-Historical Approach 153

of much controversy during the referendum campaign, when the

calcu-

lation at the basis of the claim that Britain would benefit £350 million

per week only included its payments to the European Union and not
the
payments it received in the form of grants from the EU: it was
therefore

a gross rather than a net figure. By not specifying figures, Rees-Mogg

guarded against subsequent challenges to their accuracy.

Table 6.3 Topoi in Rees-Mogg’s Brexit Speech, 25 January 2018

(extracts)

Speech

Analysis of topoi

There is a great Brexit opportunity and some

1 Usefulness: general claim

really obvious benefits that we can get that

for advantages of Brexit.

improve the condition of the people.

This is currently at risk. The negotiations

2 Uselessness: disadvantages

that are about to begin sound as if they aim

of leaving the EU but

to keep us in a similar system to the Single

staying in the Single Market

Market and the Customs Union. ‘Close

and Customs Union.

alignment’ means de facto the Single Market;

it would make the UK a rule taker like

Norway, divested of even the limited influence

we currently have.

No sensible nation would negotiate with the

3 Burdening: if we stay in the

UK for a marginal gain when we would merely

Single Market, we will be

be a vassal of the EU.

exploited (no voting rights

is understood).

The Customs Union is worse. It protects

4 Danger and threat: staying

industries that we often do not have and

in the Customs Union

helps continental producers on the back of

would harm the UK

UK consumers. The EU-funded CBI, that

economy by protecting EU

lover of vested interests, wants it to favour

producers at the expense of

inefficient encumbrance against poor consumers.

UK consumers.

Whether it is ‘a’ or ‘the’ Customs Union, it is a

This could also be

protectionist racket that damages the interests of

analysed as ‘Uselessness’,

the wider economy.

as it profiles negative

consequences of remaining

in the Customs Union. And

it could possibly also be

analysed as ‘Burdening’.

The first gain that we can have is by removing 5 Usefulness and

People: the all the tariffs on those goods which the UK

poorest in society would

does not produce, thus giving a real terms

benefit from cheaper foreign

income boost, most of all

imports.

➜
154 Critical Approaches to Discourse

to the poorest in our society. To that group of

Presumably this could also

people who Theresa May spoke about during

be analysed as ‘Finance’,

her famous speech on the doorstep of Downing

as it is an argument based

Street, when she had just kissed hands and

on tariff rates.

become Prime Minister. Just the people that

Mrs May wanted to help.

We are also an open and welcoming nation,

6 Initially this is ‘Finance’

not least to foreign investment. We have both

as an argument based on

a large stock and regular inflows of foreign

foreign investment; then it

investment coming into this country, by some

shifts to ‘Responsibility’,

measures second only again to the United

as Britain is responsible

States and even bigger than China (excluding

for showing the world the

Hong Kong and Macau). Such a nation should

benefits of free trade.

take responsibility for its own future and

become a role model for the rest of the world.

Our system cannot be tied to regulations

7 Uselessness: the EU

that stifle innovation. At the moment, the

economy is inefficient.

UK, in the European context, is the best

Could also be analysed as

of a bad bunch. Europe lags far behind

‘Burden’ as it represents

other comparable regions in the Global

EU membership as anti-

Entrepreneurship Monitor’s ranking of the rate

enterprise. There is the

of business start-ups. All we manage is to be

familiar illness metaphor

the best in a sclerotic Europe.

for the EU – ‘sclerotic’ (see

Charteris-Black, 2017b,

for a discussion).

The jobs that people, as opposed to Artificial

8 Usefulness: Britain will

Intelligence, will do will be in precisely the

benefit from free trade

space where Britain has the greatest advantage.

because it is has people

This does not mean a nation of computer

who are skilled in

scientists. Innovation and creativity can be

innovation.

applied to the leading edges of any industry,

and it is these leading edges that Britain is in a

position to capture.

Taiwan has developed a system of growing

9 Initially this is potential

vegetables in a water solution rather than

‘Usefulness’ but then

soil, using a patent formula of antagonist

becomes ‘Burdening’, as

microorganisms which boost production with

trade barriers prevent

low nitrate levels. It wants to develop this

Britain from benefiting

in York and should be encouraged to do so.

from innovation.

Unfortunately, in the United Kingdom there are

barriers which may prevent us getting to this

bright future.

It is all very well for UK Ministers to extol the 10 Reality: the reality is
that virtues of artificial intelligence and high tech as

other countries will not

they are doing now, almost

take our commitment to

The Discourse-Historical Approach 155

as we speak, amongst the panjandrums in

innovation seriously if we
Davos. But no one will take them seriously if

are in the EU. Perhaps

they do not have the ability to set their own

it also emphasises the

regulations in this area.

‘Responsibility’ of UK

ministers to embrace new

technology.

As Michael Gove has put it: The EU is

11 Definition/naming: the EU

analogue in a digital age.

is defined as ‘analogue’.

There are disturbing signs that the EU’s

12 Uselessness: the EU cannot

position on a host of internal market

compete in the new world.

distortions will mean that it is unable to play in

Possibly also ‘Danger and

this new world.

Threat’.
For the United Kingdom, dependent as she is

13 This is a negative appeal

on our service exports and the creation and

to ‘Responsibility’: as we

realisation of ideas, it would be foolish indeed

have a service economy, it

to put our future into such constrained hands

is irresponsible to remain

in the EU. Perhaps the

topos of ‘Responsibility’

needs also to refer to

‘Irresponsibility’?

Competition allows aspirational societies to

14 Usefulness: there are

be formed where people truly believe that

advantages to competition

they succeed or fail on their own merits and

from which Britain can

not some crony interest. Britain’s success as

gain by leaving the EU.

a nation can be attributed to the application

However, since the

of this competitive principle. It has been

arguments are mainly

translated through free trade and free markets

financial, then also

and has allowed people to come together to

‘Finance’.

meet each other’s needs in voluntary exchange.

We have reached the portals of tremendous

15 Humanitarianism: all

possibility. If the UK is to execute an

mankind will benefit by

independent trade policy, then it can play a

Britain demonstrating a

role in ensuring that there is an injection of

global free trade policy.

wealth into the global economy. This will

improve the lot of all mankind and we, the

British people, will be propelled forward

on this rising tide. To paraphrase Pitt the

Younger, we will have saved ourselves by our

exertion, and we will have saved the world by

our example.

If, on the other hand, this possibility is taken

16 Law and right: if Brexit

off the table, then Brexit becomes only a

does not deliver free trade,

damage limitation exercise.

the people will not get

what they voted for.

156 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 6.4 The second part of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Brexit speech

(extracts)

The British people did not vote for that. They did not vote for the

17

management of decline. They voted for hope and opportunity, and

politicians must now deliver it.

We have our future and our destiny in our hands. To embrace the
world

18
boldly with this new policy is not a foolish leap into the unknown.

Sometimes the bold move is the safest one.

As Sir Walter Raleigh said: “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.” For

19

too long our negotiators seemed to have been cowed by the EU.
Their

approach seems to be that we must accept what the EU will allow us

to

do and build from there. This is no way to negotiate, and it is no way

for

this country to behave.

We must also not confuse the EU’s opening bid with its bottom line; it
is

20

not Holy writ.

I have talked about who we can be as a nation. We must also

understand

21

our particular role in the world at this critical time.

The world’s economic architecture is stuck, and the UK is expected

by the

22

rest of the world to advocate policies that will release its energy.
There
has been no concluded WTO [World Trade Organization] round for

twenty-three years, while indicators show that actual industrial output

and global trade are stalled.

If the UK is unfettered by the deadweight of the EU, then it will play a

23

role in jump-starting the global economic system. This will unblock

many

initiatives that have been gummed up for too long

We are coming to a fork in the road. We can take the familiar path
that

24

leads to a gradual erosion of our wealth, our success and ultimately

our

values, by staying close to the EU and aligning our regulations to

theirs.

We could simply manage decline.

Or we could take another road that may look to us now like an

25

unfamiliar one. In which case our best days lie before us.

From the Agricultural Revolution to the repeal of the Corn Laws, to

the

26
birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, to being co-architect of the
post-

war system, the UK has led the way. Britain has been called on to be
a

shaper not only of our destiny but that of the whole world.

If we get it right by opening up our markets, seeing the benefits of

free

27

trade and regulations that encourage enterprise, others will follow.

The EU has too many pen-pushers to dare; the US is too big to care.

28

Only a medium-sized, flexible economy can lead the way, and the
next

29

great economic revolution should be made in Britain for the benefit of

the

world.

The Discourse-Historical Approach 157

The second part of the speech (from 15 onwards) becomes more

emo-

tional, as there are more appeals to arguments relating to historical

identity with references to Pitt the Younger, Sir Walter Raleigh, the
Corn Laws and
the Industrial Revolution. This gives the impression of arguments
based on

a sense of a historic national identity that projects forwards into the

future.

Exercise 6.3

➢ Analyse the second part of the speech in Table 6.3 by identifying

the topoi

that are used.

➢ Examine how appeals to ‘Britain’, ‘people’ and ‘nation’ are used

through the whole speech. What does this show about the discursive
strategies of predication and perspective?

6.6 A critique of DHA

DHA needs to respond to some of the criticisms that have been made
in

general about CDA, such as the following:

The producers and consumers of texts are never consulted, thus no

attempt is ever made to establish empirically what writers might have

intended by their texts. Their intentions are vicariously inferred from

the analysis itself, by reference to what the analyst assumes in

advance

to be the writer’s ideological position. Nor is there any consultation

with the readers for whom texts are designed. Their understanding

is assigned to them by proxy, which in effect means that the analysts

use the linguistic features of the text selectively to confirm their own

prejudice. (Widdowson, 1998, p. 143)

An example of this is that DHA’s fields of action are selected by the

analyst as being areas that are ‘problematic’ and that could be from
their own political perspective rather than from any independent
standpoint. It could be

argued that DHA begins with an assumption that some discourse is

discrim-

inatory and then looks for evidence in the form of strategies to

support this point of view. Often the basis for this assumption is in
values and attitudes that are evident in social labels – for example in
the names that are used

to refer to these groups – so the evidence for ‘attitude’ and

discriminatory practice is in language use or discourse. This risks
tautology or circular argumentation – if discrimination arises from
language use which in turn arises from discrimination, how can we
know which causes which? One way to

overcome this is by considering intention. It is for this reason that an

analyst using DHA has to be explicit about his or her own intentions:

It follows from our understanding of critique that DHA should make

the

object under investigation and the analyst’s own position transparent

and

158 Critical Approaches to Discourse

justify theoretically why certain interpretations and reading of

discursive

events seem more valid than others. (Wodak and Meyer, 2009, p. 88)
This means that authors should be frank about their own perception
of

power relations and define how they understand concepts such as

ideology

and power. It also implies that textual evidence needs to be provided

of

textual readings; this can be done in the way illustrated above by

analysing discursive strategies and topoi. It could be done by using
corpus methods to identify particular collocations so that a naming
practice could be demonstrated as conveying a negative semantic
prosody – I have illustrated this in the analysis of ‘pikey’ as compared
with ‘traveller’. Another possibility is to use receiver-oriented
methodologies to gain insight into ideology: hearers’

or readers’ judgements as identified in focus groups could include

estimates of the ideological motivation of speeches.

As discussed above, the interpretation of ‘topos’ has been criticised

as

unclear because it confuses ‘formal’ argument rules with ‘content-

related’

rules (Žagar, 2010) or ‘semantic arguments’ with ‘field dependent

argu-

ments’ (Kienpointer, 1992). The difference is in the level of

abstraction: the form of an argument is an abstract set of rules;
however, the content of an argument refers to rhetorical situations, or
the fields, where these rules are applied. Žagar argues that, for
Aristotle, topos referred to the form of an argument rather than its
content:

The Aristotelian topos (literally: ‘place’, ‘location’) is an argumentative

scheme, which enables a dialectician or rhetorician to structure an
argument for a given conclusion. The majority of Aristotle’s
interpreters see

topoi as the (basic) elements for enthymemes, the rhetorical

syllogism.

(Žagar, 2010, p. 14)

Žagar goes on to illustrate the topos concerning opposites:

If action Y is desirable in relation to object X, the contrary action

Yśhould be disapproved of in relation to the same object X.

This is an abstract formulation of a general argument scheme that –

as

with any statement of rules – could be applied in any number of

different rhetorical situations. We can derive from it an enthymeme for
a situation advising how to behave with one’s friends: ‘If it is desirable
to act in favour of one’s friends, it should be disapproved of to act
against one’s friends’.

Using an approach based on the field of the argument, this is a topos

of

‘usefulness’ since it is advantageous to behave consistently. The

advantage of the more abstract formulation of opposites (following
Žagar) is that it

allows arguments to be evaluated by identifying their structure,

whereas the content-based topos of ‘usefulness’ is descriptive and
does not identify logical structure.

The Discourse-Historical Approach 159

A further problem is that use of the phrase ‘topos or fallacy’ does not
in
itself differentiate between an argument that is reasonable and
another that is fallacious. This is an admission made by the authors
of the approach:

‘However, we must admit, it is not always easy to distinguish

precisely

without context knowledge whether an argumentation scheme has

been

employed as reasonable topos or as fallacy’ (Chilton et al., 2009, p.

110).

It would seem to be beneficial – perhaps using the model above in

which

warrants are identified – to have a systematic method for

differentiating

between rational and fallacious arguments. One such method might

be to

identify inconsistencies through analysis so that the data could be

demon-

strated as being partial or incomplete, or as not leading to the claim

that is made. I have tried to demonstrate how this might be done by
identifying

arguments relating to logical structure in Examples 1 and 2 above

and

naming these as ‘warrants’ rather than as ‘topoi’; reserving ‘topoi’ for

the content of field-dependent arguments.

A further criticism is that it is not clear how general or specific a ‘field

of action’ should be; it is defined as ‘a segment of social reality which
constitutes a (partial) frame of a discourse. Different fields of action
are defined
by different functions of discursive practice’ (Chilton et al., 2009, p.
90).

They are illustrated with reference to various political (sub-)genres

such as lawmaking procedure and political control, each of which
requires different types of speeches. However, many of these speech
types are classified as

falling into different fields of action; for example, the inaugural speech
is listed under four different fields of action: formation of public
attitudes, formation of inter-party attitudes, formation of international
relations, and political and executive administration. The State of the
Union speech is also listed under four different fields of action:
lawmaking procedure, formation of public attitudes, political
advertising, and political and executive administration. A multiple
classification occurs with other types of speech, leading to the
question of whether there is any limit to the number of ‘fields of
action’.

A similar multiple listing occurs in relation to topoi – for example, in

the

sample text analysis in Wodak and Meyer (2009) we have a number

of topoi

that did not occur in the first edition of this work (see Exercise 6.4).
This raises a question regarding the limit to the number of field-
dependent topoi.

The risk is that we end up with an endless list – rather as classical

rhetoricians did when each school sought to identify new tropes and
schemes.

Exercise 6.4

➢ Compare the lists of topoi used in the first, second and third
editions of Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Meyer,
2001, 2009, 2015) and in
The Politics of Fear (Wodak, 2015) . What differences do you note?

➢ Evaluate the insights gained by identifying the warrant (semantic

argument) and topos (field-dependent argument).

160 Critical Approaches to Discourse

6.7 Summary

◇ DHA examines a range of genres and fields of action.

◇ It draws on a range of different disciplinary frameworks (politics,

psychology, etc.), but with a special emphasis on history.

◇ It has an ethical purpose of addressing social problems arising

from

injustice and discrimination.

◇ The primary concepts are discursive strategies (see Table 6.4) and
the

identification of ‘topoi’ that constitute the basis for how arguments are

constructed.

◇ The DHA uses ‘topoi’ to refer to both formal and content-related

warrants. However, I have suggested restricting its use to content-

related

warrants, thereby allowing ‘warrants’ to refer only to formal warrants.

Table 6.5 Summary of discursive strategies

Strategy

Objectives
Devices

1 NOMINATION

Discursive

➢ Membership categorization

construction

devices, deictics, anthropo-

of social

nyms, etc.

actors, objects,

➢ Tropes such as metaphors,

phenomena,

metonymies and synecdoches

events processes

➢ Verbs and nouns used to

and actions

denote processes and actions

2 PREDICATION

Discursive

➢ Stereotypical evaluative attri-

qualification
butions of negative or posi-

of social

tive traits

actors, objects,

➢ Explicit predicates or pre-

phenomena,

dicative nouns/ adjectives/

events,

pronouns

processes

➢ Collocations

and actions

➢ Comparisons, similes, met-

(positively or

aphors and other rhetorical

negatively)

figures

➢ Allusions, evocations, presup-

positions/ implicatures, etc.

3 ARGUMENTATION
Justification

➢ Topoi (formal or content

and questioning

related)

of claims of

➢ Fallacies

truth and

normative

rightness

The Discourse-Historical Approach 161

4 ‘PERSPECTIVIZATION’, Positioning

➢ Deictics

FRAMING AND

the speaker’s

➢ Direct or indirect speech

REPRESENTATION

or writer’s

➢ Quotation marks, discourse

point of view
markers/ particles

and expressing ➢ Metaphors

involvement or ➢ Animating prosody

distance

5 INTENSIFICATION OR Modifying

➢ Dimunitives or augmentatives

MITIGATION

(intensifying or

➢ (Modal) particles, tag ques-

mitigating) the

tions, subjunctives, hesitations,

illocutionary

vague expressions, etc.

force thus the

➢ Hyperboles or litotes

epistemic or

➢ Indirect speech acts (e.g.

deontic status

question instead of insertion)

of utterances
➢ Verbs of saying, feeling or

thinking, etc.

Source: Wodak and Meyer (2015, p. 33).

Essential reading

Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing Political Discourse (London/New York:

Routledge),

Chapter 7.

Chilton, P., Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2009). ‘The discourse-

historical approach’.

In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse

Analysis, 2nd edn (London: Sage), pp. 87–121.

Widdowson, H.G. (1998). ‘The theory and practice of critical

discourse analysis’, Applied Linguistics, 19(1), 136–51.

Wodak, R. (2006). ‘Review focus: boundaries in discourse analysis’,

Language in Society, 35(4), 595–611.

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) (2015). Methods of Critical Discourse

Studies, 3rd edn (London: Sage).

Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear (London: Sage).

Žagar, I.Ž. (2010). ‘Topoi in critical discourse analysis’, Lodz Papers

in Pragmatics, 6(1), 3–27.

Chapter 7

Ad Hominem Arguments and

Corpus Methods
7.1 Introduction – impoliteness in politics

There is no doubt that since the first edition of this book there has
been

a tendency towards showing less respect towards political opponents

and employing personalised verbal attacks. There are a number of

rea-

sons for this: increased media attention is given to remarks that

appear

to confront high-status individuals, and a higher level of emotional

expressivity potentially conveys an authentic projection of the social

self.

Controversial – and even offensive – language is sometimes viewed

as

more acceptable in political discourse because of the high level of

impor-

tance attached to the issues at stake. Verbal directness – even insults

–

imply an interpretation of freedom of speech that permits the speaker

to

express views without concern for the ‘face’ of their addressee; face
may

be defined as follows:

The positive social value (that) a person effectively claims for himself.

(Goffman, 1967, p. 5)
Face-threatening language also occurs as part of institutional ritual:
for

example interjections, interruptions and insults are conventional ‘pan-

tomime’ routines in Prime Minister’s Questions, in the British House

of

Commons. An adversarial atmosphere enhances the dramatic

performance

of political identity and forms part of a ritual in which normal face con-

siderations are suspended. From the perspective of social

psychology and

communication studies, Spencer-Oatey (2007) differentiates between

individual, interpersonal and group ‘face’, and in political contexts
‘social identity face’ is more pertinent:

We have a fundamental desire for people to acknowledge and uphold

our social identities or roles, e.g. as group leader, valued customer,

close friend. Social identity face is concerned with the value that we

effectively claim for ourselves in terms of social or group roles, and

is closely associated with our sense of public worth. (Spencer-Oatey,

2002, p. 540)

162

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 163

An example of a challenge to social identity face occurred in the

Conservative Party Conference Speech by Theresa May in October

2017.
While struggling to make it to the end of her speech because of a
cold, she was interrupted early on by a comedian Simon Brodkin:
suitably dressed

as a Conservative Party member with white shirt, tie and spectacles,

he

walked comically to the podium to hand her a P45 (an official

redundancy

notice), saying to her that ‘Boris asked me to give you this’. This was
a

deliberate attempt to undermine both the prime minister’s social

identity

face and that of her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, for his implied
dis-

loyalty. Although she managed the retort that the only P45 she
wanted to

give out was to Jeremy Corbyn (the leader of the opposition), the
stunt was sufficiently successful for a former Conservative Party
chairman to appeal

for her resignation.

There is a wide range of variation in terms of the level of impoliteness

deemed acceptable according to the political genre. There is a

difference

between campaign rallies where audiences are comprised of those

support-

ive of the speaker, where the speaker’s purpose is to contribute to the

social identification of ‘them’ and ‘us’ groups, and debates on
contemporary
issues where the purpose is to convince a neutral audience. Face-to-
face

interactions such as media interviews are likely to be managed,

evaluated

and controlled by the presenter, and in settings such as elected

legislatures there are often formally stated guidelines over what
constitutes impolite

language and insults. This does not mean that impolite language will
not

occur, but that there will be rules over how others respond to it and
rules over the consequences for the offending party that may affect
future speaking rights.

In this chapter, I address the issue of impoliteness within the context

of the argument theories that we looked at in the previous chapter

focus-

sing on the so-called ‘ad hominem’ argument that is directed towards

the

character of an individual rather than the ideas or views that are

being debated. I also illustrate how such fallacious arguments can be
examined

by using corpus methods and illustrate this with reference to the 2016

American presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary

Clinton. The issue of impoliteness is related to the work of Searle and

Grice, who acknowledged the importance of intentions in interpreting

meaning through their notion of ‘implicature’; this recognises that

speak-
ers often suggest meanings even though they are not made fully
explicit: recognition of the speaker’s intention is crucial in explaining
how we are

able to recognise irony, understatement and metaphor. However,

corpus

methods cannot access intentions – only actual word forms as

detected

by computational software. It is for this reason that I commence with

a

discussion of impoliteness in political contexts as a preliminary to

corpus analysis. Discussing ad hominem arguments in the context of
impoliteness

theory provides us with a framework for interpreting the words that

may

be identified by corpus analysis as contributing to impoliteness.

164 Critical Approaches to Discourse

In the last chapter, the notion of fallacious arguments was intro-

duced; since the first edition of this book, these have increased spec-

tacularly, to the extent that they have become a defining feature of

contemporary political argument; primary amongst these are the ad

hominem and the ad populum arguments. In the first, an argument

attacks the character of a political rival in a highly personal way,

while in the second the argument is an appeal to popular sentiment.

What both share is that they provide effective vehicles for engaging
an audience’s interest and arousing some form of emotional
response

to what the speaker is saying. They have a contemporary style of

directness that reflects some of the stylistic norms of social media.

The

emphasis on engaging with viewers has become an excuse to

develop

the personal insult into a propaganda tool. Just as when two boxers

are slugging it out, it is hard to look away, so the online diatribes

(‘hate speech’) enforce our attention, even if our role is only that of a
passive onlooker in a supposedly entertaining spectacle.
Impoliteness

has been defined as follows:

Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviours occur-

ring in specific contexts. It is sustained by expectations, desires and/

or beliefs about social organisation, including, in particular, how one

person’s or group’s identities are mediated by others in interaction. …

Such behaviours always have or are presumed to have emotional

conse-

quences for at least one participant, that is, they cause or are
presumed

to cause offence. Various factors can exacerbate how offensive an

impolite behaviour is taken to be, including for example whether one

understands a behaviour to be strongly intentional or not. (Culpeper,

2011, p. 23)

Personal attacks contribute significantly to the construal of political

identities and political allegiances. Unlike non-political contexts,

when negative attitudes are expressed towards political opponents,

the same ‘negative attitudes’ have a positive valence for the

speaker’s own political group. A personal attack on the leader of an
opposing

group – though it might have negative emotional consequences for

the

addressee – can stimulate positive emotions for the speaker’s

political

allies, because it can be seen as a justified retort to a previous attack

by the opposing leader and so corrects a moral imbalance. Combined

with its humorous effect, it contributes to the strengthening of

in-group identities. It is therefore the perception of strategic political

advantage that contributes to its rhetorical impact. However, because

of the threat to social identity face, it is only in cases where political

allies believe that the means justify the ends that it has the
appearance

of being an acceptable rhetorical strategy.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 165

7.2 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as

entertainment
One view on ad hominem attacks is that when the recipients of insult-

ing and impolite language are candidates for high office with estab-

lished social identities, they are not victims, but rhetorical

combatants.

Ad hominem attacks can sometimes be a form of entertaining banter.

In

some contexts, these can enforce relations of social intimacy among

fel-

low professionals – when barristers engage in personalised verbal

debate,

they are in reality engaging in a form of ritual behaviour that

reinforces

social bonds. This is what Culpeper refers to as ‘mock’ rather than

‘genu-

ine’ impoliteness. As Culpeper (2011, p. 234) notes, there has been a

rise in TV quiz shows and talent shows such as The Weakest Link
and The X Factor that exploit impoliteness for the purpose of
entertainment. He notes several types of pleasure that may be
derived from witnessing impoliteness as a form of entertainment:
emotional pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, voyeuristic pleasure and the
pleasure of being superior. I would include

satire as a form of aesthetic pleasure that characterises other genres;

for example, the magazine Private Eye provides entertainment by
exposing to ridicule the wrongdoings of figures in public life.
Television, driven by a search for audiences to ensure commercial
survival through advertising

revenues, has influenced politeness norms in other performance-

related
areas of social life. Apart from intrinsically competitive genres such as

Prime Minister’s Questions, there is also reality television in which

politeness norms may be temporarily suspended for the purposes of
entertain-

ment for audiences and self-publicity for participants. As Hillary

Clinton

puts it when reflecting on the American 2016 election campaign: ‘I

was

running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out

policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a

reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’

anger

and resentment.’ (Clinton, 2017).

Impoliteness as entertainment is practised by a number of British poli-

ticians associated with the centre and far right; for example Boris
Johnson caused a scandal by referring to the French President
Hollande’s proposal

that Britain should pay for leaving the European Union as a form of
‘pun-

ishment beating’, though broadly he is relatively cautious in directing

his more colourful metaphors of insult to institutional targets; for
example,

he refers to ‘Nanny Brussels’ and the ‘ratchet’ of European law that

only

goes one way and is never reversed. A good example of a whole

speech
that performs impoliteness is Nigel Farage’s addresses to the
European

Parliament immediately after the UK had voted to leave the European

Union. Although the audience of European Members of Parliament

(MEPs) had been called to order at the start of his speech because
they

were booing, their faces look bemused when told by Nigel Farage
that ‘I

166 Critical Approaches to Discourse

know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your
lives

or worked in business or worked in trade or, indeed, ever created a

job, but listen, just listen.’1 Here Farage was not attempting to
change the point of view of opposing MEPs, but to gain access via
the media to a much wider

audience who might be attracted by his ad hominem argument. It was

also

intended to strengthen feelings of solidarity among fellow

Eurosceptics in a coalition of ten Eurosceptic political parties known
as Europe of Freedom

and Democracy.

Online responses to Farage’s ad hominem attacks on MEPs on the

4Chan blog suggest that many followers were entertained by it,

probably

without having much idea about the career records of MEPs, and the
fact
that his speech is readily accessible on the Web suggests that he
achieved

his intention of broadcasting strongly negative views of the European

Parliament that challenged its legitimacy. The point to his argument is

not therefore within the argument itself, as for example with the
appeals to reason described in section 1.3.2, but within the situational
and cognitive circumstances that were described in Chapter 4 (4.2.1).
Many people across Europe, and probably beyond, view politicians
as lacking

experience of the real world while simultaneously making decisions

from

which they benefit themselves. Farage activates such negative

schema

concerning MEPs by questioning their knowledge of ‘proper jobs’ or

how

to create them with the broad purpose of uniting his supporters. So,
for

example, if an MEP responded by illustrating his actual experience of

‘proper jobs’, he would be partially missing the point: this was a form
of

satire – based on general knowledge frames for politicians – and

such a

response would imply that the MEP was arrogant and/or out of touch.

In practice, when ad hominem arguments are genuinely entertaining,

they

become very difficult to refute.

Supporters of Donald Trump dismissed criticisms of Trump’s apparent

impoliteness as part of a smear campaign that reflects so-called

political

correctness and provides evidence of the widespread media bias for

which

Trump coined the term ‘fake news’. They argue that his ad hominem
argu-

ments are intended to be taken seriously, to gain publicity by

shocking

and to form social bonds by entertaining audiences. As with Nigel

Farage,

Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo, Donald Trump is an expert in

dominat-

ing media attention by supplying constant news content. In this

respect,

he employs ad hominem attacks as entertainment on a post-

mainstream

media stage. He knows that audiences seek to be entertained, and

the

comic attack, through exaggerated expressive choices – whether

verbal,

gestural or enacted – are effective in so far as they generate laughter.

Why should laughter be so important? Because political events are
typically

formal and constraining, they are scenarios where the normal rules of
behaviour no longer apply, characterised by either a specialist
register or 1 Statement to the European Parliament, 28 June 2016.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 167

an elevated style – during the Obama era this was a Ciceronian style.
For

some the comic style of Donald Trump is a more homely and familiar
style,

employing an informal register that is associated with one’s friends or

perhaps in a tea break in a Rust Belt diner. It is a style that tends to
reduce the distance between orator and audience and establishes
ethos through

pathos. Quoting Arditi, Müller comments:

Populism resembles a drunken guest at a dinner party: he’s not

respect-

ing table manners, he is rude, he might even start flirting the wives of

other guests. But he might also be blurting out the truth about a
liberal

democracy that has become forgetful about its founding ideal of

popu-

lar sovereignty. (Müller, 2016, p. 8)

However, rhetorical style has consequences: as the host of the first

14

seasons of The Apprentice, Donald Trump became closely

associated with the catchphrase ‘You’re fired’ as an entertaining
appeal to the schaden-freude of his audiences; but in the first 15
months of his presidency, 21 of his administration have been fired or
departed.2
Another aspect of classical rhetoric in which Trump demonstrates

competence is delivery: the words flow from him, and although they

may not always be elevating or sophisticated, it is a simple Attic style

that is rarely dull. His ad hominem attacks constitute one component,

and his ability to perform displays a new role that can be described as

‘the celebrity politician’ who creates the unexpected – both in terms of

what he or she says and in terms of undertaking a more fully

multimodal

performance. Trump uses facial expressions, bodily movement and

hand

gestures like a young man who is eager to entertain his friends, and

though the content of what he is saying sometimes appears

irresponsible,

perhaps because for some it is offensive, it has – at least for his

followers –

a frank, fresh and energetic appeal. His boyishness has the effect of

transforming political occasions into a different type of social

experience: more like that of a comedy act or even a festival, and this
has the effect

of opening the possibility of new types of cognitive and emotional

expe-

riences among his audience. It is hard to watch five minutes of a

Donald
Trump speech online without seeing a smile appearing on the faces
of his

supporters, or ‘fan base’. Just as in sporting occasions when people

are

entertained through laughter or joy, they can relax with each other,
make

friends and form new social relationships that will continue long after

the political event has ended. Entertainment through impoliteness can

therefore contribute to a political and social identity that is

subsequently nurtured through social media.

2 Chris Graham, You’re fired!: Who Donald Trump has sacked and
who has resigned during his time as president’, The Telegraph, 28
March 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/fired-

donald-trump-has-sacked-has-resigned-time-president/.

168 Critical Approaches to Discourse

7.3 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as coercion

An alternative view of the ad hominem attack is that it is a form of

coercive action; this has been defined as follows:

A coercive action is an action taken with the intention of imposing

harm

on another personal of forcing compliance. Actors engaged in

coercive

actions expect that their behaviour will either harm the target or lead

to compliance, and the value of these proximate outcomes …

(Felson,
1994, p. 168. In Culpeper, 2011, p. 226)

An attraction of this definition is that it includes the notion of ‘social

harm’ –

this has been defined as ‘damage to the social identity of target

persons

and a lowering of their power or status’ (Tedeschi and Felson, 1994,

p. 171). Castigators of Donald Trump argue that he has developed a

coer-

cive style based, at least in the period of his candidacy, on scorning

and

mocking his rivals. This has led to quite widespread accusations of

racism

and misogyny. Evidence for impolite behaviour as a form of coercion

emerged during the election campaign when a number of women –

including

his former wife, Ivana Trump, made allegations of sexual harassment.

A 2005 audio tape was leaked in which he bragged that a celebrity

like

himself ‘can do anything’ to women, including ‘just start kissing them

…I

don’t even wait’ and ‘grab ’em by the pussy’. Forcing a woman to
comply

with sexual desires is clearly a form of coercion. The distinction

between
‘impoliteness as entertainment’ and what I am (following Culpeper)
calling

‘coercive impoliteness’ was made by his rival for the presidency,

Hillary

Clinton, in one of her campaign speeches:

And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it

comes from. You know, for the past year many people made the
mistake

of laughing off Donald Trump’s comments, excusing him as an enter-

tainer just putting on a show. They thought he couldn’t possibly mean

all the horrible things he says. Like when he called women pigs,3 or
said

that an American judge couldn’t be fair because of his Mexican

heritage,

or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability or insults

pris-

oners of war, like John McCain, a hero and a patriot who deserves
our

respect. [APPLAUSE] Now, at first, at first, I admit, I couldn’t believe

he meant it either. It was just too hard to fathom that someone who

wants to lead our nation could say those things, could be like that.
But

here’s the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump, this is it. And in

the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn’t get: America is
3 Trump is alleged to have referred to the comedian and talk-show
host Rosie O’Donnell as a ‘fat pig’.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 169

great because America is good! [APPLAUSE] So enough with the

bigotry

and the bombast. (Hillary Clinton, 28 July 2016)

Here Hillary Clinton adopts a logical style of argument: she makes a

claim

regarding Donald Trump’s ‘mean and divisive rhetoric’ and then,

without

actually quoting him, provides data to support this claim with

reference

to various examples of the victims of such ad hominem attacks:

‘women’,

‘an American judge’, ‘a reporter’ and ‘John McCain’. She then allies
herself with the audience who thought that he could not really mean
what he says,

that there must be another Donald Trump behind the façade, perhaps
a

‘warrant of disbelief’, but then concludes her argument by inferring

that

Donald Trump really is a ‘bigot’ because of the lack of counter

examples.

But let’s consider in more detail the ad hominem attacks that Clinton

attributes to her rival, and let’s look at the context in terms of what
was said and the contextual circumstances for two of the insults to
which

Clinton makes reference (Table 7.1):

Hillary Clinton seeks to undermine the credibility of Trump by argu-

ing that he uses inappropriate language that insults individuals and

social groups on the basis of their identity; Trump’s comments on
identity seem

to occur irrespective of whether the target lays claim to a particular

social identity. For example, as a reporter, Serge Kovaleski does not
project a

public identity, whereas John McCain frequently makes reference to

his

Vietnam veteran experience. However, Clinton – probably unwisely –

also engaged in insulting Trump’s supporters by referring to them as

‘a

basket of deplorables’. Although this amused her supporters, this

pejora-

tive shopping metaphor could easily be construed as elitist and

dehuman-

ising by representing ordinary people as an undesirable retail

commodity.

According to van Eemeren (2010, p. 3), the strategies for responding

to

coercive attacks to the face include the following:

1 Ignore the attack altogether on the grounds that it is better to simply

not pay attention to it rather than respond to it. This is the best
strategy for handling instances of impoliteness as entertainment, but
would seem to

be too passive a response for impoliteness as coercion.

2 Ignore the attack and end the discussion. A variation of this is to

only

continue the discussion if the original attack is retracted. As with the

first strategy, this is only appropriate for a coercive attack.

3 Respond to the attack with some form of counter-attack, that is, to

restore the imbalance caused by an ad hominem argument by

respond-

ing in like style. Although this has the advantage of apparently restor-

ing the scales of justice, employing ‘an eye for an eye’ moral code
has

the risk of implicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of the original ad

hominem attack. This is not an effective strategy for coercive

impoliteness, though a witty retort is an effective strategy for
impoliteness as entertainment.

170

Process Circumstances

The reporter suffers

from arthrogryposis,

a condition which

limits the movement

of joints and is
particularly noticeable

in Kovaleski’s right arm

and hand.

The audience looks

mildly surprised; one

woman is smiling.

Unscripted

Spontaneous reaction

to the claim by the

interviewer that

McCain is a ‘war hero’

Evokes extended

laughter from audience

and subsequent media

response

Cognitive Circumstances

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in

Paris, Trump repeated an apparently

false claim that crowds of thousands

of ‘Muslims’ were seen in New Jersey

cheering the collapse of the World

Trade Towers after the 9/11 attacks.

This claim was partly based on an

article by Serge Kovaleski, implying

that people were seen celebrating

the attacks; however, the reporter

Kovaleski subsequently denied this.

Usually war veterans are treated

with respect by Republicans

(including Trump).

Knowledge that Trump challenges

politeness norms in political

interactions for strategic gain.

Situational

Circumstances

Campaign rally in

South Carolina on

24 November 2015

Interview at the Family

Leadership Summit:
a gathering of 3,000

socially conservative

activists who are

potential supporters of

his candidacy.

he graduated last in his

Trump’s Comment

‘Now, the poor guy, you’ve

got to see this guy: “Uh, I

don’t know what I said. Uh,

I don’t remember.” He’s

going like “I don’t remember.

Maybe that’s what I said”’

(while mimicking the words of

the reporter, Trump held his

mouth comically open, with

eyes staring and hands flailing).

‘He’s a war hero because he

was captured. I like people

who weren’t captured. I hate

to tell you. Okay?’

‘…

class in Indianapolis.’

Context analysis of Trump’s ad hominem arguments

Table 7.1

Subject of

ad hominem

Argument

Reporter:

Serge

Kovaleski

Rival

Republican

candidate

and Vietnam

war veteran

John

McCain

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 171

4 Request that an ad hominem attack be partially retracted: the

person
to whom it is directed can request that the offending party revise their
fallacy so that the discussion can continue. This shows that the victim
of an attack is still prepared to engage in discussion, but only under
certain conditions. This strategy is effective only when the elements
of an

ad hominem that were viewed as coercive are withdrawn. But it

avoids

the possible face threat entailed by a full-scale retraction and shows

that though the offended party is not prepared to engage in a ‘Punch
and

Judy’ slanging match, he or she implicitly acknowledges that at least

some impoliteness is entertaining.

I suggest that this does not exhaust all possible ways of dealing with

attacks, since there are also the options of denying emotional hurt or

admitting hurt to gain sympathy. The first option follows the old
saying:

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, though words will never hurt
me’

and is rather outmoded and unlikely to gain much sympathy: it is now

generally accepted that people are hurt by words. Verbal attacks

have always been the subject of libel claims, and such attacks via
social media

now legally constitute a form of ‘hate crime’ in the United Kingdom.

Another approach is to reveal, sometimes retrospectively, the level of

hurt caused by verbal offence; this incorporates the notion of social

harm –
inflicting harm on the social identity of persons and so reducing their

power or status. This approach was adopted by Michelle Obama in a

speech at a meeting in Denver. In response to a comment by the host

that

she had ‘broken through a glass ceiling’ by becoming the first black
first

lady, Michelle Obama then elaborated the glass ceiling metaphor with
a

question about which of the falling glass shards had cut her the
deepest.

Rather than rejecting the metaphor or denying the emotional pain

caused

by her critics, she extended the metaphor further: ‘The shards that cut

me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut.’ Because

intentions are

invisible language, philosophers often find them problematic. She

went

on to explain that the danger of pretending that racist language

doesn’t hurt is that it lets those who are responsible off the hook. This
would be the case with both responses (1) and (2) above: simply
ignoring an attack

does nothing to redress the offence that has been caused. Strategies
(3)

and (4) also differ from explaining how and why an ad hominem
attack is hurtful. This is what Michelle Obama does when she
develops the
metaphor: ‘Women, we endure those cuts in so many ways that we
don’t

even notice we’re cut . . .We are living with small tiny cuts, and we
are

bleeding every single day. And we’re still getting up.’ Her eloquent
testi-

mony was considered newsworthy by the media because it appeals

to a

more general sense of social injustice felt by some women. The value
of

this response is that it brings to social awareness the notion of

coercive

impoliteness and therefore counteracts the influence of ratings-driven

broadcasting, where impoliteness is viewed as entertainment.

172 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Exercise 7.1

In the following extract, discuss whether the impoliteness in the ad

hominem argument could be interpreted as a form of entertainment or
as a form of coercion. (Read the full speech online if more context is
necessary to decide).

Nigel Farage’s Statement to the European Parliament, 28 June 2016

Funny isn’t it? Funny isn’t it?

Thank you very much for that very warm welcome.

Funny, isn’t it? When I came here 17 years ago and I said that I
wanted to
lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the EU, you all laughed at me.
Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you? And the reason
you’re so

upset, the reason you’re so angry has been perfectly clear from all
the angry exchanges this morning – you as a political project are in
denial. You’re in denial that your currency is failing – just look at the
Mediterranean – as a policy to impose poverty on Greece and the
rest of the Mediterranean you’ve done very well, and you’re in denial
over Mrs Merkel’s call last year, for

as many people as possible to cross the Mediterranean into the EU

has led

to massive divisions between countries and within countries. … But

what I

would like to see is a grown-up and sensible attitude to how we

negotiate

a different relationship. I know that virtually none of you have ever

done a proper job in your lives or worked in business or worked in
trade or, indeed, ever created a job, but listen, just listen. …

Exercise 7.2

Identify the ad hominem arguments attributed by the then Australian

prime

minister, Julia Gillard, and then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, in

Core

Text 8.

What were Julia Gillard’s strategies for responding to these

arguments?

Core Text 8: Julia Gillard’s ‘Misogyny’ Speech,

9 October 2012 (extracts)

The Leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views

and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I

hope the Leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper and he is

writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what

misogyny

looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House

of Representatives; he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs. … I

was

also very offended on behalf of the women of Australia when, in the

course of this carbon pricing campaign, the Leader of the Opposition

said, ‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they

do

the ironing …’ Thank you for that painting of women’s roles in modern

Australia.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 173

And then of course, I was offended too by the sexism, by the

misogyny of the Leader of the Opposition catcalling across this table

at me as I sit here as Prime Minister, ‘If the Prime Minister wants to,

politically speaking, make an honest woman of herself …’, something

that would never have been said to any man sitting in this chair. I was
offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front
of

Parliament and stood next to a sign that said ‘Ditch the witch.’ … And

now, the Leader of the Opposition wants to be taken seriously; appar-

ently he’s woken up after this track record and all of these
statements,

and he’s woken up and he’s gone, ‘Oh dear, there’s this thing called
sex-

ism; oh my lords, there’s this thing called misogyny. Now who’s one of

them? Oh, the Speaker must be because that suits my political

purpose.’

He could change his behaviour, he could apologise for all his past

statements, he could apologise for standing next to signs describing

me as a witch and a bitch, terminology that is now objected to by the

frontbench of the Opposition.

He could change a standard himself if he sought to do so. But we

will see none of that from the Leader of the Opposition because on

these questions he is incapable of change. Capable of double

standards,

but incapable of change. His double standards should not rule this

Parliament. … I’ve had him yell at me to shut up in the past, but I will

take the remaining seconds of my speaking time to say to the Leader

of
the Opposition I think the best course for him is to reflect on the
stand-

ards he’s exhibited in public life, on the responsibility he should take

for his public statements; on his close personal connection with Peter

Slipper, on the hypocrisy he has displayed in this House today.

Gillard’s speech was so influential that the Macquarie Dictionary

changed

its definition of ‘misogyny’ from ‘hatred of women’ to ‘entrenched

preju-

dices of women’.

7.4 Corpus methods for exploring the rhetoric of Donald

Trump

7.4.1 Introduction and method

Corpus linguistic methods provide insights into the rhetoric of political

speeches that complement and enhance those gained from intuition

alone

and entirely qualitative approaches. The method of comparing word

fre-

quency in two research corpora that I describe here differs from

critical

metaphor analysis described in Part 3 of this book but provides

alternative insights into style that can supplement metaphor analysis.
For exam-
ple, metaphors may simply not occur or only occur rarely, or the
analyst

may be more interested in other figures such as metonymy. For

example

174 Critical Approaches to Discourse

when deflecting criticism of his method for attracting women, Trump

used the expression ‘locker room talk’ – here a place is used to refer
to

speech that is purported to take place there, although a number of

sports-

men denied that they talked about women in the dehumanising way

that was implied by this metonym. So corpus methods provide a

bridge

between the lexically and grammatically based approaches described

in

Chapter 5 and the metaphor-based ones in the following chapters.

It is possible to compile a corpus of speeches from the Web that can

be classified according to variables such as speaker, political

orientation, time period or genre (e.g. ‘campaign speech’ or ‘annual
state of the nation address’). The text versions of most political
speeches may be treated as

‘in the public domain’, and although they often diverge from the
delivered

version of the speech, at least the text is already transcribed.

Transcriptions vary in their accuracy and method – for example
whether they include
non-verbal responses from live audiences and speaker deviations
from

the published text version. Good-quality transcriptions will include

audi-

ence response such as applause, cheers or booing and will record

what was actually said as well as what was supposed to have been
said. When transferring text from the web source, analysts need to
remove digital data such as images and hyperlinks and to save as
plain text if they are going

to use text analysis software – much of which is now freely available

on

the Web.4 The basic AntConc software enables users to generate

word lists

that show all the words in a corpus; concordances that show search
words

in their actual contexts; and keywords, words that occur statistically

more frequently in one data sample as compared with another
‘control’ sample.

This can either be a general language reference corpus, or, in order

to

control for the variable of genre, a sample of other political speeches

from a similar genre. The method is known as comparative keyword
analysis

(Charteris-Black, 2012, 2014).

The main research questions that I address in this section are

presented here: 1 What keywords indicate Donald Trump’s rhetorical
style?
2 What evidence do keywords provide of how Donald Trump’s
rhetorical

style varies from that of other American presidents?

In passing, I also address a question related to the previous

discussion:

3 Does analysis of Trump’s keywords provide insight into

impoliteness –

either as a means of entertainment or as a means of coercion?

I demonstrate how comparative keyword analysis provides a method

for

answering these questions by identifying keywords and key phrases

that

then form the basis for a more qualitative investigation.

4 A wonderful range of text analysis software is available at

www.laurenceanthony.net/

software.html.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 175

I used two electronic databases (or ‘corpora’): one comprising Donald

Trump’s speeches delivered during the 2016 American election

campaign

(from various internet sources) that I refer to as the ‘Trump Corpus’;

the

other was a corpus of speeches made by American presidents

(accessed
through the internet) that I refer to as the ‘Presidential Corpus’; I
compiled it myself mainly from readily available State of the Union
speeches and

Inaugural Addresses. Although campaign speeches are likely to vary

from

post-election speeches, it was not possible to obtain a ‘presidential’

corpus for Trump because of the short duration of his presidency at
the time of

writing. The Trump Corpus commences with his acceptance of

candidacy

speech and continues up to his election, and contains 82 speeches

and

481,919 words. The Presidential Corpus contains 129 speeches and

502,294

words. It is similar in size to the Trump Corpus and includes

speeches by

all American presidents from Roosevelt onwards. Since the objective

of

Trump’s campaign was to become president, I was interested in

exploring

the potential insights offered by corpus linguistic methods into his

rhetorical style and how far, and in what ways, his language differs
from what is typical for American presidents – though clearly this will
only be fully proven once an equivalent corpus of his own speeches
as president becomes available.

The method compares any two sets of data to establish which words
occur
with a statistically higher frequency in one set (A) as compared with
the other set (B) to identify ‘keywords’. Here (A) is the Trump Corpus
and (B) is the Presidential Corpus. The method proceeds by using
the AntConc software to

create a list of all of the words in A and B. Comparison is then made

of the two wordlists to show which words are more frequently used in
A as compared

with B. When examined critically, such keywords provide insight into

Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. For example, the word ‘beautiful’
occurs 216 times in the speeches by Trump; this is nearly four times
as often as in the Presidential Corpus ( n = 47) – ‘beautiful’ is
therefore a Trump keyword. However, it is questionable as to whether
this keyword alone provides any additional insight, and we will see
that patterns of semantically related keywords are more relevant to
stylistic analysis than individual stand-alone keywords.

7.4.2 Trump keywords

Table 7.2 compares raw counts of a sample of Trump keywords in the

two corpora. We should recall that the Presidential Corpus is 4 per

cent

larger than the Trump Corpus; because this is a relatively small

difference, I have not normalised the data (i.e. indicated the
frequency per x number of words), but this would be necessary if
there was a difference in size of perhaps more than 5 per cent
between set A and set B.

As mentioned earlier, keywords form the basis for a qualitative inves-

tigation; the first stage in doing this is to group semantically or rhetor-

ically related keywords; for example, if we classify ‘people’, ‘folks’ and

‘audience’ as ‘people-related keywords’, we might then search the full

list
176 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 7.2 Trump’s keywords

Keyword

Trump Corpus

Presidential Corpus

(481,919 words)

(502,294 words)

people

3,269

2,191

country

1,909

758

great

1,771

1,218

jobs

1,266

332

believe
648

452

folks

608

23

money

596

185

audience

551

14

trade

537

240

care

511

454

wall

465

105
of keywords for other examples, and we would find ‘family’, ‘veterans’

and ‘Americans’. Together this group provides support for the claim
that

Trump’s rhetorical style is essentially popularist. Another group of

key-

words can be semantically grouped under the heading ‘illegality’:

these

include: ‘criminal’, ‘illegal’, ‘rigged’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘corruption’: so

clearly keywords allow us to identify a major theme of his campaign –
negative

representation of his opponents. As Müller (2017, p. 3) puts it:

In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist.

Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people … the

claim to exclusive representation of the people is not an empirical

one;

it is always distinctly moral. When running for office, populists portray

their political competitors as part of the immoral corrupt elite.

Keywords provide insight into the rhetorical style of populist leaders;

initially – in the case of Trump – we might focus on words that have
very

different counts in the two corpora: for example ‘tremendous’ occurs

249

times in the Trump Corpus, but only 32 times in the Presidential

Corpus,
and ‘incredible’ occurs 262 times in the Trump Corpus, but only 5
times in

the Presidential Corpus. We may then infer that his style is

characterised

by hyperbole and relate positive emotions words like ‘tremendous’ to

other

keywords expressing negative emotions such as ‘horrible’ and

‘disaster’.

Key phrases formed by two or three words that occur in adjacent

positions

to a keyword should also be examined because phrases are

potentially even

more important style markers than single words – especially where

they are

revealing of the rhetorical basis of ideological appeals. For example,

a search of collocates shows that ‘great people’ occurs 156 times
compared with

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 177

five times in the Presidential Corpus and can be interpreted as

potentially populist in style. ‘Great people’ is a broad inclusive term
for those he refers to as supporters, potential supporters or past
affiliates. When specifically named, they become ‘great guy(s)’ ( n =
52). So key phrases containing highly ranked keywords such as
‘people’ demonstrate some of the characteristics of populist rhetoric:
an appeal directly to the people as if they were a homogeneous entity
and an appeal to ordinary people – ‘folks’, ‘veterans’ and so

on – in contrast to a corrupt elite (Wodak, 2015). One way to explore

key phrases initially is by identifying patterns that correspond with
traditional word classes; here I illustrate adjectives, adjective-noun
and verb patterns to consider the insight they provide into ad
hominem attacks.

I argue that analysis of these patterns provides insight into both

rhetor-

ical style and an ideology of ruthless competition in which the devil

takes the hindmost. The term ‘Manichean’ is often used to describe a
belief

system that simplistically reduces the world to a struggle between

good

and evil, as in the spirit of old-fashioned westerns, where the good

guys

were always struggling against the bad guys, or in fantasy fiction

such as

Harry Potter or sci-fi movies and other dramatic genres where the plot

is structured around a struggle between good and evil. The identity of

the good and bad guys is never ambiguous in Trump’s style, and
Weaver

(1986) argues that fundamental to political language is taking credit

for

effective policies and avoiding blame for ineffective ones. Trump does
this by blaming opponents, rivals, foreigners or any other readily
recognisable

‘out’-group. Perhaps the appeal of this dualism between the forces of

order and those of chaos was partly a reaction against the
complexities of the

modern world, where under pressures of globalisation and

immigration
old certainties and boundaries have been eroded, leaving a sense of
threat-

ened identity, insecurity and confusion. I refer to the style as

‘Reductive Rhetoric’ and the ideology as ‘Life as a Competition’.

Exercise 7.3

Classify the following 40 Trump keywords into five semantic

fields.

For example, ‘people’, ‘folks’ and ‘audience’ could all be classified

under the semantic field ‘People terms’.

amazing

bill

dishonest

incredible

people

America

build

family

jobs

right

American

business

fight
love

safe

audience

China

folks

massive

special

beautiful

choice

good

Mexico

states

better

companies

great

money

tax

big

countries

history
nation

taxes

billion

deals

illegal

pay

tremendous

178 Critical Approaches to Discourse

7.4.3 Adjective-noun patterns: ‘us’ and ‘them’ groups

The analysis of the keyword ‘people’ indicated that it was commonly

pre-

modified by either a positive or negative adjective. Although such

premod-

ifiers partly challenge the myth of the people as a homogenous entity

that

characterises populism – the division into two very clear categories

creates a dichotomy between a homogeneous group of ‘heroes’ who
exist in opposition with another homogeneous group of ‘villains’. This
pantomime cast-

ing serves the primary rhetorical purpose of political language: the

creation of groups whose interests, identity and morality are
positioned as close to the self: an ‘Us’ group, who receive credit,
against another group whose

interests, identity and morality are construed as distant from the

speaker: a ‘Them’ group who should take all the blame. Politics, then,
becomes

an amphitheatre in which opponents engage in a life-and-death

struggle,

and the election campaign is just one battle in an ongoing war of

survival.

The ‘Us’ group is appealed to via extensive use of adjective keywords

that

express positive emotions, as shown in Table 7.3:

Table 7.3 Trump’s ‘positive emotion’ keywords

Positive Emotion

Trump Corpus

Presidential Corpus

Keywords

(481,919 words)

(502,280 words)

special

293

162

incredible

262

amazing
255

16

tremendous

249

32

beautiful

216

47

smart

134

22

happy

123

37

TOTAL

1,532

321

Typically Trump’s positive adjective keywords premodify the noun

‘people’, as in Table 7.4:

Table 7.4 Trump’s ‘positive people’ phrases

Incredible people

48

Incredible. These are incredible people. These are

truly great patriots, and they are truly brave.

(7 November 2016)

amazing people

28

Thank you. Amazing. Amazing people. One of

the greatest privileges of my journey has been the

time I’ve spent with the evangelical community and

the support they gave me in those primaries was

absolutely incredible. (9 September 2016)

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 179

One way to explore these populist phrases in more detail is to identify

the group of people to whom they refer; for example, Trump uses
‘incredi-

ble people’ to refer to those defined by their institutional or

administrative role, such as army veterans, border patrol agents,
firefighters, medal of

honour recipients, members of the National Guard or ‘rank-and-file’

FBI

agents. Alternatively, ‘incredible people’ are those who attended one

of his other rallies and are named by their geographical location.
‘Amazing people’ describes his supporters, although there are three
specific references to

‘miners’ among 86 references to ‘miners’ in the Trump Corpus they

are not

referred to at all in the Presidential Corpus. A Trump phrase that does

not occur at all in the Presidential Corpus is ‘love the people’ – Trump
uses it 30 times; similarly, no other president uses either of the
phrases ‘amazing people’ or ‘smart people’.

However, Trump uses negative emotion keywords comparatively

even

more than positive keywords, as summarised below (Table 7.5): Table

7.5 Trump’s ‘negative emotion’ keywords

Negative Emotion

Trump Corpus Presidential Corpus

Keywords

(481,919 words)

(502,280 words)

disaster

330

36

rigged

162

bad
526

68

worse worst

298

60

illegal

260

27

horrible

185

dishonest

165

corrupt

156

20

crooked

139

3
terrible

135

50

stupid

99

incompetent

45

sad

100

46

TOTAL

2,600

318

Some negative emotion keywords premodify ‘people’ (Table 7.6

below): Over 90 per cent of the references to ‘dishonest people’ refer
to the

media who are ubiquitously supporting his rival Hillary Clinton.

Similarly, nearly all the references to ‘stupid people’ refer to the
current administration of Barack Obama, and ‘bad people’ are
political opponents, the media

or illegal immigrants. ‘Stupid’ occurs 130 times in the Trump Corpus,

but only once in the Presidential Corpus. The most common pattern
is

180 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 7.6 Trump’s ‘negative people’ phrases

Key Phrase

Trump Corpus

Example

dishonest people

52

Among the world’s most dishonest people.

Look at all of them. Oh, look at all those

cameras … Go ahead, twirl them. Show

the crowd. Show the crowd … These are

the world’s bad people . They’re dishonest

people. They’re very, very dishonest. Not

all of them, but I would say most of them.

(7 November 2016)

stupid people

33

Everything is wrong. Our country

doesn’t win anymore. We’re tired of

being led by stupid people. They’re

stupid people. Stupid. (7 November

2016)

‘stupid people’, and he asks the rhetorical question: ‘How stupid are
we?’

20 times, as when commenting on failure to curtail illegal immigration:

The Border Patrol Agents want to do their job. It’s a much tougher
job,

probably a much more dangerous job when you stop people and say,

Sorry folks – boom – go back. But that’s more dangerous than saying

we can’t do anything. It’s called stand back – stand back and leave
them

alone. Let them walk right in. How stupid are we? How stupid are we?

Okay?

The rhetorical argument follows a problem–solution pattern, whereby

he defines lax immigration control as ‘stupid’ to provide a warrant

for his proposed solution of building a wall between Mexico and the

United States – a typical, medieval strategy for protecting and

defending

a city. However, the rhetorical ad hominem ‘stupid’ is reminiscent of

playground talk, and there is only a single instance of the word in the
Presidential Corpus, and this is in relation to the hypothetical actions
of an enemy:

Even if there were no British Navy, it is not probable that any enemy

would be stupid enough to attack us by landing troops in the United

States from across thousands of miles of ocean, until it had acquired

strategic bases from which to operate. (Roosevelt, 6 January 1941)

‘Stupid’ is not a word used previously by presidents to describe their

political opponents.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 181

7.4.4 Negative emotions and ad hominem arguments

Negative adjective keywords commonly modify the names of rivals or

social groups from which he seeks to distance himself. The prime

indi-

vidual target of Donald Trump’s ad hominem attacks is Hillary Clinton;

in Trump’s Reductive Rhetoric, she is an evil and corrupt woman who

became the living symbol of everything to be despised and detested:

an

enemy within. These keywords are closely related to the ad hominem

attack; for example ‘dishonest’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘crooked’ all imply a form
of ethical attack on an individual – typically of Hillary Clinton:

But think of how disloyal Hillary Clinton was to Debbie. Think of it.

This was her – crooked person. This was a dishonest person. This
was a person that was rigging the system for her. She rigged the
system –
Carson never had a chance. (Pennsylvania, 27 July 2016)

Or on a social group – typically the media:

We’re running against a rigged system, and we’re running against a

very

dishonest media. The media’s very dishonest. It’s very, very

dishonest. …

It’s just so unfair, it’s so unfair, we’re running against a rigged press.

We’re running against dishonest people. Okay, really dishonest

people.

(Pennsylvania, 21 October 2016)

Lexical repetition is combined with intensifying adverbs that heighten

the

hyperbole to represent the media as unethical: the media, are

‘extremely’,

and ‘terribly’, ‘totally’ or ‘extraordinarily’ dishonest. The only use of the

word ‘dishonest’ in the Presidential Corpus is the following:

Our kind of government, above all others, cannot tolerate dishonesty

among public servants. Some dishonest people worm themselves

into

almost every human organization. (Harry Truman, 9 January 1952)

Lexical repetition is pervasive in Trump’s negative evaluations; for

exam-

ple the repetition ‘horrible, horrible’ occurs 22 times; ‘terrible, terrible’

9 times and ‘sad, sad’ twice. However, repetition in Trump’s attacks
on the media generates a high level of interaction as it serves as
cues to the live audience to side with him against bogeymen. Trump’s
focus on the immorality of his opponents – both individual and social
– is a typical strategy of

populist rhetoric. As Müller (2017, pp. 19–20) notes: ‘Populism, I

suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of
perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified
… people against elites deemed corrupt or in some way morally
inferior’.

Perhaps the most familiar of Trump’s moralistic coinages was in the

epithet he devised to attack his opponent: ‘Crooked Hillary’. This

occurs

182 Critical Approaches to Discourse

111 times in the corpus and, like a playground taunt, it reiterates

endlessly through his campaign speeches, as if the repetition of a
claim naturalises

it so that it no longer requires evidence. It intensified after questions

were raised about Clinton’s use of a private email server, situated in
her New

York home while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

The other candidate in this race – you know, her name – crooked

Hillary Clinton – and believe me, folks, she is crooked – has a much
different view.

Okay? When you look at the world and what’s happened – so we

have

the queen of corruption, she’s the queen of corruption. She is a

disaster.
I said before, if crooked Hillary Clinton becomes president, terrorism
will destroy the inner workings of our country. Believe me, they are

loving it. (Wisconsin, 5 August 2016)

Although a demonising epithet such as ‘the queen of corruption’ is so

exaggerated that it becomes entertaining, at a deeper level it is

intended to destroy Clinton’s ethical credibility and therefore appears
to be a case of coercive impoliteness because it caused social harm
– effectively a loss of public face for Clinton contributing to the crucial
decision by the FBI to

commence an investigation at a politically sensitive time: according to

most commentators, the FBI enquiries into the use of her home
server

for official business had a significant impact on the election outcome.

Accusations of dishonesty, corruption and stupidity all form part of an

essentially Manichaean worldview of politics as a struggle between

good

and evil, light and darkness: a relentless struggle for survival. The
only

time the word ‘crooked’ occurs in the Presidential Corpus is in a

biblical

quotation from Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech: ‘Every

val-

ley shall be exalted, and every hill shall be made low; the crooked
places

shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.’ It is not a word
that
is deemed appropriate by presidents for naming individuals.
Accusations

of incompetence are very rare in presidential language, but Trump

uses

‘incompetent’ 45 times, and the expression ‘incompetent president’ to

refer to his predecessor seven times:

We have an incompetent president. I hate to say it, but it is 100 per

cent true. All he’s doing, instead of working on your jobs and your
companies leaving for Mexico and other places, he’s campaigning for
crooked

Hillary. That’s all he does. (North Carolina, 14 October 2016)

This is strong empirical evidence that abusive language that attacks

the moral integrity of opponents is something quite novel for
American presidents, as if ‘locker-room talk’ is being recontexualised
into the language of serious political deliberation: a type of genre
hybridity that is consistently employed

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 183

in the projection of a social identity as the defender and protector of

the people – a regular guy who speaks like ordinary guys do. Trump
uses other

words more commonly found in very colloquial American English –

such

as ‘loser’ and ‘clown’ – that are not found at all in the Presidential
Corpus.

But these attacks prove to be entertaining for his audience, who

appear to

enjoy the atmosphere of febrile bear-baiting and his gladiatorial cut

and thrust; notice how, in Core Text 9, ad hominem attacks evoke
applause and laughter: Core Text 9: Trump’s 2nd Amendment
speech,

9 August 2016 (extracts)

Unstable Hillary lacks the judgment, now; Bernie Sanders said she

lacks judgment, right? And nobody said anything about it, no prob-

lem. He said, ‘You lack judgment.’ And – during one of the debates,

nobody said it was fine.

When I say it, they say that’s terrible the way you talk.

[LAUGHTER]

She does – she lacks judgment, she lacks temperament and I’m the

one that used ‘unfit’ many, many months ago. And now they’ve

turned it around, use it on me. Unfit? I’m unfit? That’s – that’s a first.

But she lacks the temperament and the moral character to lead this

country; it’s very simple.

She really does. She’s a dangerous person who doesn’t tell the truth,
which has been proven very loudly.

I’ve never seen a – I don’t think we’ve ever had greater proof of that,

of anybody.

[APPLAUSE]

And she has disregarded the lives of Americans – you see what’s

happening – with what she has done with her server? And you know
why she did that.

So, I just look at this, and I said that if she gets elected, she will

cause the destruction of this country from within. Remember that.

Remember that.

[APPLAUSE] …

Hey, you know, it’s one thing to make bad decisions. It’s another

thing to be wacky and make bad decisions.

184 Critical Approaches to Discourse

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

She is disdainful of the rules set for everyone else, and she hasn’t
changed a bit. … Nobody would believe because it’s so terrible, so
terrible. And

she comes across like this woman – nice, easy – but she’s not. And –
and

she’s – listen – she’s not a leader, not a leader. And she is a liar.

[APPLAUSE]

Hey, hey – 33,000 emails are gone. Okay? 33,000 emails are gone.

They’re gone. How do you get rid of 33,000 emails? Who sends

33,000 emails? I mean, 33 – do you know how many that is? I …

And she’s so guilty. She’s so guilty.

[APPLAUSE]

I think it’s a tremendous blot on our country. I really mean that. I think

what happened over the last two weeks with respect to her, especially

in light of the fact that General Petraeus and many others have
suffered

unbelievable consequences. I think it’s a tremendous blot on our

country, a tremendous blot. Just remember that. (North Carolina, 9
August 2016) Each time he uses an abusive epithet, the audience
reacts, initially with

laughter and then with applause. In this way, Trump connects with his

supporters by breaking the rules of what constitutes normal political

dis-

course. His multiple repetitions of keywords – ‘bad’, ‘terrible’, ‘guilty’ –

culminate in the triple repetition of ‘a tremendous blot’, and this is

followed by the imperative ‘Remember that’. Like water dripping on a

millstone, Trump’s negative lexicon grinds his opponents into dust,

and

he draws on his media celebrity image to give the command

‘remember

that’ – as if his audiences could ever forget something that has been
so

forcefully imprinted into their memories. He nearly always uses the

phrase

‘remember that’ at the end of a sentence or other unit. By contrast, in

presidential speeches it is never used in this way, as it is always
followed by a subordinate clause:

Let us remember that America was built not by government, but by

people; not by welfare, but by work; not by shirking responsibility, but

by seeking responsibility. (Nixon inaugural speech, 20 January 1969)

Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his

fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine’, or ‘His beliefs are strange and
different’, in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears
created this

Nation. (Johnson inaugural speech, 20 January 1965)

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 185

A measure of how Trump’s ad hominem attacks generated

interactivity

with his audience is in the high frequency of booing that occurs in his

speeches. In the Trump Corpus, booing is transcribed in 581

instances.

Although some of these are in relation to unpopular policies

associated

with the Democrats, many of these are highly personalised and are

reserved for named political opponents, of whom the most frequently

named is Hillary Clinton. These commonly serve as signals to

commence

the chant ‘Lock her up’. This direct threat to the legitimacy of an
oppo-
nent has no precursor in American political campaign rhetoric and
serves

to create the atmosphere of a lynch mob that has already determined

guilt without the need for judge, jury or evidence. Hillary Clinton is
rep-

resented in the discourse of Donald Trump as an inherently

illegitimate

leader (we will recall the semantic group referred to as ‘Illegality’

above).

Other attacks on Hillary Clinton are on her ‘bad judgment’, a phrase

that occurs 52 times, or her ‘bad instincts’ (24 times); nearly all of
these make more or less direct reference to criticisms that are
attributed to her rival for the Democrat nomination, Bernie Sanders.
Once Trump spots

a chink in his opponent’s armour, he is keen to reiterate the refrain ad

infinitum in the belief that each time he says it, it becomes a bit more

true, a bit more likely to be recycled in the whirlpools of social media.

Neither phrase occurs in the Presidential Corpus, and it seems that

this

form of impoliteness is coercive because of its relentless repetition: it

is intended to destroy the political credibility of his opponent, as well
as to inflict social harm.

Trump’s supporters were impressed by the dynamism and energy of

the man, and his keywords certainly contribute to a style

characterised by
simplicity and directness – an Attic style in which sophistication is
replaced by boyish enthusiasm. For them, echoing the language of
the common

man established his ethos as a speaker who can be trusted to serve

their

best interests precisely because that language is not sophisticated.

His

doubters have dismissed these as markers of a populist style lacking

in

the rhetorical standards expected of an American president that were

so

fully demonstrated in the elegant rhetoric of his precursor, Barack

Obama.

For them, his style is a Reductive Rhetoric that represents social

groups

and political rivals in categorically black and white terms so that

people

are either good or bad, loved friends or hated enemies. How

effective,

they may ask, is such a style likely to be in the language of

negotiation,

of overcoming resistance and winning friends that normally

characterises

political language?

7.4.5 Size adjectives

A final group of semantically related adjectives that is perhaps less
available from an intuitive judgement are words related to ‘size’, and
their

frequency in the two corpora are summarised below (Table 7.7).

186 Critical Approaches to Discourse

Table 7.7 Trump’s ‘size’ markers

Size-Related Keywords

Trump Corpus

Presidential Corpus

(481,919 words)

(502,280 words)

big/bigger/biggest

812

145

little

273

161

massive

240

40

small/smaller/smallest
187

213

TOTAL

1,512

559

We can then examine the nouns that these adjectives typically

premod-

ify to identify typical collocations (Table 7.8):

Table 7.8 Trump’s ‘big’ collocations

Phrase

Frequency

Example

big league

38

We are in a competition with the world,

and I want America to win. We don’t win

anymore, but when I am president, we will

start winning again. Big league.

big/biggest problem

36

They said she was negligent – all these

things. And the other day this weekend,

she went out and said, ‘No, no, no, I think

you must have misunderstood.’ She’s a big

problem.

big, big

33

We were in Florida yesterday, two

tremendous – and just big, big arena, sold

out, packed, thousands of people outside

couldn’t get in.

biggest tax cut

19

Hillary Clinton will have a tax cut that is

not there. It’s going to be a tax cut times

20 in reverse, like a rocket ship. We have

the biggest tax cut proposed,

I guess, in the last four years.

big deal

19

It depends on the audit – not a big deal.

Use of ‘big’ has a range of purposes. First of all hyperbole through

repetition: the phrase ‘big, big’ occurs 33 times and ‘massive,

massive’ ten times: reduplication is a simple and direct way of
enforcing his commitment to and investment in a proposition. Like
machine gun fire, it is ended to gain its effect more through volume
and speed than necessarily through

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 187

accuracy. Repetition also occurs at the level of phrase: notice the ‘big
story’

is repeated in reference to his claim that Hillary Clinton lied.

Superlatives perform a similar function as references to the ‘biggest
problem’ and ‘bigger and better’. The use of ‘big’ in reference to
quantities such as tax cuts is a way of being deliberately vague –
evidently a commitment to making

big tax cuts is also a way of avoiding indicating specifically how much
they will be. Then expressions such as ‘big league’ and ‘big deal’
echo the familiar register of ordinary working people to whom he is
intending to appeal.

Given the positive evaluation given by Trump to ‘big’, it might be

expected that its antonyms, ‘little’ or ‘small’, might carry a negative

sense.

However, this is not the case, because ‘little’ occurs in colloquial

phrases as in ‘little bit’ and ‘little while’ (32 times), while ‘small’
typically appeals to the ‘small man’ who he sees as his potential voter
in references to small businesses and small donors. This is ironically
the same audience to whom

Obama sought to appeal to when contrasting ‘Main Street’ with ‘Wall

Street’. Trump employs a similarly populist disassociation from Wall

Street, instead linking Wall Street with the political elite and those
who are financing Hillary Clinton’s campaign – in contrast to his ‘small
donors’.

Table 7.9 summarises some of these uses:

Table 7.9 Trump’s ‘small’ collocations

Phrase

Frequency

Example

Little bit

72

And he said something that really caught

my imagination. He used the term ‘the

queen of corruption.’ I think we’re going to

have to … we’re going to have to use that

a little bit.

small business/es

36

Small businesses will benefit the most

from this plan. Hillary Clinton’s plan will

require small business to pay as much as

three times more in taxes than what I’m

proposing.

small donors

15

But we’re also raising money from people

where they send in a check, small donors,

right? You’ve sent in a check? Who sent in

a check? Wow. Whoa. That’s fantastic.

Trump views size as a semantic domain to exploit – possible

reinforced

by his own stature compared to that of Hillary Clinton – over whom he

towered in the televised debates – just as Trump Towers dwarfs its

neigh-

bours. His view reflects one of a self-made businessman who can

empathise

with the values and needs of the small businessman seeking to

survive in a

world of cut-throat competition.

188 Critical Approaches to Discourse

7.4.6 Verb patterns: ‘attack’ and ‘defend’ strategies

Chilton (2004, p. 204) notes: ‘Political discourse has specific

connections to the emotional centres of the brain’. Although he is
unsure whether there are specific ‘political’ emotions, he suggests
that there are politically relevant feelings related to territorial
belonging and identity that includes love of family, fear of intruders
and of unknown people. The keyword analysis

of verb phrases provides further supporting evidence that an ideology

of

life as a competition contributes to the specifically political emotions

that he arouses. There is further evidence of Reductive Rhetoric in
the keyword

analysis of verb patterns and modality, especially in relation to the

level of conviction with which future commitments are made. The
future modal

auxiliary ‘will’ is a Trump keyword, and I identified common phrases in

object position after the pattern ‘we will’, including adverbials, for
example ‘we also will…’. The number of times each object occurs is
indicated

in brackets (Table 7.10):

Table 7.10 Trump’s pattern ‘we (+ x) will + verb + object’

Verb following ‘we will’

Frequency

Object Position

(20+)

make … again

229

America great/wealthy/safe/strong/

prosperous again
end

76

government corruption (9)

nightmare of violence (7)

illegal immigration (7)

build

71

a wall (21)

stop

70

‘(the) jobs from leaving’ (32)

illegal immigration (13)

tell

61

I will tell you (55)

fix

55

‘it’ – vague reference to ‘problems’

rebuild

42
military (13), inner cities (9),

roads (8)

put

42

America first (9)

cancel

35

federal funding to sanctuary cities (15)

Obama executive order (7)

keep

35

radical Islamic terrorists the hell out

of our country (18)

uphold

29

the Constitution of the United States

(29)

secure

29

our borders (29)

➜

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 189

protect

27

religious liberty (4), ‘American lives’

(4)

become

28

a rich nation again (17)

repeal

25

Obama-Clinton Defense Sequester

(13)

Obamacare (7)

suspend

20

the Syrian refugee program (19)

Following a Manichean ideology, there is a clear-cut contrast between

‘attack and eliminate’ phrases and ‘protect and defend’ phrases that
interpret the primary function of government as protecting the nation
or valued
groups within the nation. ‘Attack and eliminate’ phrases include ‘end’,

‘stop’, ‘fix’, ‘cancel’, ‘repeal’, ‘suspend’ and ‘keep terrorists out’. These
refer to the policies of the present government or rival candidates
against the ‘Them’ group. ‘Protect and defend’ phrases refer to the
‘Us’ group and

include ‘build a wall’, ‘put America first’, ‘uphold the Constitution’,

‘secure our borders’ and ‘protect American lives’.

A characteristically Trumpian phrase is ‘going to take care of’: it

occurs

205 times in the Trump Corpus as compared with only five times in
the

Presidential Corpus, and highlights a protective attitude towards the

‘Us’

group who are the beneficiaries of Trump’s care; these are: ‘veterans,
or

vets’ (86 instances); ‘miners’ (11); ‘military’ (6); ‘people’ (5);

‘steelworkers’

(4). Non-people-related entities are much less the target of Trump’s

care;

for example, there is one instance of ‘take care of the environment’.

Again a dualistic dichotomy is created between ‘bad guy’ policies that
should be

eliminated and ‘good guy’ policies that should be supported because

they

will ‘make America great again’. The lexis in both groups are short
words
(8 are one syllable and 8 are two syllable) reflecting a disdain for
more

elaborate word choices from which Trump seeks to disassociate

himself, as

they characterise the rhetoric of the elite. The use of ‘protect and
defend’

phrases contributes to a sub-component of the Life as a Competition

frame: the War and Invasion frame.

A key Trump verb phrase relating to epistemic modality is ‘believe

me’:

it occurs 317 times in the Trump Corpus but only occurs only 7 times
in

the Presidential Corpus; this is perhaps his most typical style marker
of

epistemic modality, as if by exhorting his audiences to believe him,

they

are more likely to do so. It is also colloquial and appeals to people’s

sense of trust, thereby making an appeal based on ethos. It is a
rhetorical move

to establish the character of the speaker in opposition to all those

who

should not be believed – his opponent Hillary Clinton, of course, but

also

a further homogeneous category – ‘the media’. It is quite common for

him to repeat the phrase, as in the following from a Republican

National
Convention speech:

190 Critical Approaches to Discourse

I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our

streets

and the safety of our police. When I take the oath of office next year,

I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me, believe me… .

By ending catch and release on the border, we will end the cycle of

human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down.

We will stop it. It won’t be happening very much anymore. Believe

me.

[APPLAUSE]

The phrase ‘believe me’ (irrespective of whether it is repeated) allows

him to reiterate a point, often combined with a reduction in speech
pace, and

serves the deictic purpose of drawing attention to a point that requires

either special rhetorical emphasis or further elaboration, for example

when bringing attention either to his opponent’s lack of ethical
credibility or to the danger posed by her policies:

We’re going to take care of our veterans like they’ve never been
taken

care of before. The other candidate in this race – you know, her name
–

crooked Hillary Clinton – and believe me, folks, she is crooked – has
a much different view.
She is a disaster. I said before, if crooked Hillary Clinton becomes
pres-

ident, terrorism will destroy the inner workings of our country. Believe
me, they are loving it.

As with the repetition of ‘crooked Hillary’ and the ‘dishonest media’,

the

cumulative stacking of claims against opponents provides a substitute

for

evidence and serves as a warrant in the Trump style of

argumentation.

Rather than linking claims with data or evidence, which, as we saw in

Chapter 6, is the normal way of developing an argument, Trump’s

reiteration of claims against Hillary Clinton serves to link them back to
Trump’s

powerful ego by expressing a very high level of commitment to claims

through heightened modality (see Chapter 5).

The most common grammatical words following ‘believe’ in the

Presidential Corpus are ‘that’ and ‘in’, as for example ‘believe in

democ-

racy’, ‘believe in liberty’ or ‘believe in ourselves’. But Trump’s

constant refrain of ‘believe me’, often with falling intonation, is a way
of hypnotis-ing his audiences, as if his extraordinary self-belief was
itself a guarantee of success. Critics view Trump’s continual appeal to
belief in the truth of his pronouncements as egoism and his self-
obsession as more fitting to a

cult leader than to an American president.

Another Trump keyword that relates closely to ‘believe’ is ‘lies’: this

verb is polysemic with either the sense of intentionally telling a

falsehood or a time or location reference as in ‘understanding the
enormity of the

task that lies ahead’. The verb occurs 71 times in Trump Corpus, of
which

all have the former sense; conversely, in the Presidential Corpus only
5 of

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 191

the 44 occurrences refer to the telling of a falsehood, and the

remaining 39

have a time or location reference. Trump constantly accused his

opponent

of lying: ‘Aren’t you tired of the same old lies and the same old broken
promises? And Hillary Clinton has proven to be one of the greatest
liars

of all time’. He also accuses the then president of lying: ‘ Speaking of

lies, we now know from the State Department announcement that
President

Obama lied about the $400 million dollars in cash that was flown to
Iran’

(Charlotte speech, 18 August 2016). Ad hominem attacks on either

rival

candidates or existing presidents are unheard of in American

presidential

rhetoric: and such rule breaking is a way of indexing non-conformity

with
an ‘elite’ discourse style.

The most persuasive of the slogans in the presidential campaign –

‘Making American great/wealthy/safe again’ – presupposed that

America

was none of these things already, and implied that for some time
govern-

ment had lost control of its true duties and that a vote for Trump
would

enable the American people to regain control over their national

destiny.

This slogan contributed to the frame of war and invasion: a guerrilla

army

struggles ‘to take back control’ over a land area once it has been
occu-

pied: it needs to be liberated from an occupying force in order to

regain

its legitimate freedom. But it also activates a betrayal myth: that

America has been betrayed just as much by social entities within the
country as by external enemies such as Iran and ISIS. This shows
very clearly in his attacks on Hillary Clinton, who, in Reductive
Rhetoric, becomes a symbol

of all ‘traitors’ because of her dishonesty, lack of judgement,

incompetence and dangerous policies. By contrast, Trump’s political
self-representation

is as an authentic leader who knows what is necessary to save his

country
and who will fight patriotically against the dangers that are
threatening

to overwhelm it – both from without and from within. A straight-talking,

combative style of conviction rhetoric is intended to contrast with the

duplicitous, devious and treacherous style of his opponents.

Exercise 7.4

The following keywords were obtained for Hilary Clinton by

comparing 36

speeches of her campaign speeches with 500,000 words of American

political

speeches.

Classify the 36 keywords by semantic field, and compare this

analysis with

that you have undertaken for Donald Trump in Exercise 7.2. Were
there any

differences, either in semantic field or in the number of keywords in

each

semantic field?

affordable

debt

insults

paying

wealthy
audience

disabilities

job

people

women

casinos

excited

jobs

person

wonderful

192 Critical Approaches to Discourse

childcare

family

kids

right

young

corporations

folks

millionaires
student

country

friends

mother

trillions

dad

grandkids

opponent

trusted

daughter

guys

paid

veterans

7.5 Summary

One of the principles underlying corpus approaches is that they bring

to our attention words or phrases that we might not have accessed

via

intuition. In the case of Trump’s expression of judgements and

opinions

through premodifying adjectives with negative and positive valence,

or
nouns such as ‘people’ we might have accessed these through
familiarity

with listening to extracts of his speeches on news clips. But corpus

meth-

ods provide evidence of just how far these ad hominems diverge from

the norms for American presidents. Other groups of words less

available

through intuition show more subtle characteristics of his rhetorical

style; these include ‘size’ terms, the ‘attack and eliminate’ and ‘protect
and

defend’ strategies in verb phrases and the presuppositions underlying

‘take back control’ and ‘make America x again’. Choosing the

keywords and key phrases that best bring out the characteristics of a
particular text is, then, a qualitative judgement, informed by
examination of the meanings that these words have in the texts
concerned and relating this to the

research questions that were formulated.

A few qualifying points need to be made about the corpus methods

described and illustrated here. Ideally, both set A and set B are
‘representative’ – that is the speeches should control for genre – in
this case, while both sets of speeches were higher stakes speeches,
the Trump Corpus

comprised campaign speeches while the Presidential Corpus was, by

defi-

nition, after election as president. Other comparisons can overcome

this by controlling for genre, for example another comparison was
with Hillary
Clinton’s campaign speeches. However, in all high-stakes speeches
we can

expect the speaker to have had a higher involvement in their

authorship

(even though advice on drafts will certainly have been offered).

Issues of

authorship are discussed in more detail in Charteris-Black (2011, p.

6) the primary point being that though politicians do not author all
their speeches, the words that are put into their mouths by speech
writers are

intended to fit their style of leadership. Although speechwriters are

marketing a political ‘ brand’, it is the politician who owns the
copyright on this brand. In Reductive Rhetoric the Life as a
Competition frame is the

rhetorical corollary of Manichaean dualism: both are the glue that

binds

together the text and its political animator.

Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods 193

A focus on word choices does not preclude identification and analysis

of

other language variables. A premise underlying my work on the

metaphors

used by individual politicians (Charteris-Black, 2011) is that

metaphors are insightful in the expression of rhetorical style.
Identifying, classifying and analysing such metaphors contributes to
the identification of the

underlying narrative structures that I refer to as ‘myths’ but that have

also
been described as ‘metaphor scenarios’ (Musolff, 2006). I also argue
that metaphors work through interaction with other rhetorical features
such as

schemes, metonyms and lexical choices to create frames. The more

com-

plex such interaction, the more unlikely it is that attention will be

drawn to any one feature – thereby evading the sensibility of an
audience that

they are being consciously worked upon. However, sometimes

metaphors

are deliberately avoided – for example in a plain style – and so other

technologies for language analysis can assist in identifying word and
phrase

choices. The approach described above could also be used to

examine the

style of the same leader in different speech situations or to examine

shifts in a leader’s style by comparing different time periods.

Essential reading

Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis (London:

Continuum).

Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor

Analysis

(Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Chapter 2.

Charteris-Black, J. (2012). ‘Comparative keyword analysis and

leadership communication: Tony Blair – a study of rhetorical style’. In
L. Helms (ed.), Comparative Political Leadership (Basingstoke:
Palgrave), pp. 142–164.
Charteris-Black, J. (2014). ‘Political style: a study of David Cameron’.
In P. Stockwell and S. Whiteley (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of
Stylistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 536–557.

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Chapters 2 and 7.

Müller, J.W. (2016). What Is Populism? (Philadelphia, PA: University

of Pennsylvania Press), Chapters 1 and 2.

PART III

Critical Metaphor Analysis

Chapter 8

Researching Metaphor in Public

Communication

8.1 Introduction: Blair and the ‘beacon’ metaphor

In this part of the book, I shall consider how systematic analysis of

political speeches can help us to understand the way that discourse
processes

are driven by underlying metaphors. I begin by illustrating the

conceptual

approach to analysis of metaphors that originated with the work of

George

Lakoff and then go on to explore some of the general methodological

issues in analysing metaphor in political discourse, such as how

metaphors

are identified. In Chapter 9, I propose a method for metaphor identifi-

cation that is designed especially for critical metaphor analysis
because it shows how a corpus of language can be used to provide
insight into

psycholinguistic considerations in metaphor identification, and how a

sim-

ilar approach can also be used when formulating conceptual

metaphors;

I also compare conceptual metaphor with blending theory. In Chapter

10,

I demonstrate how such a critical approach provides the basis for

expla-

nation of why metaphors are used in political speeches by comparing

van

Dijk’s notion of social cognition (van Dijk, 2008b) with the concept of

‘purposeful metaphor’ (Charteris-Black, 2012a). I suggest that

conceptual metaphors can be related to social cognition and that a
corpus provides

evidence of the individual processing of metaphor.

On 30 September 1997, a fresh-faced Tony Blair (the third-youngest

prime minister in British history) mounted the podium at the Labour

Party

conference soon after New Labour had won an astonishing landslide

victory

and come into power for the first time since 1979. It was a time of
hope and expectation, as established Conservative politicians had
been defeated by
generally younger, largely unknown, and in many cases female
politicians.

Blair needed to give a speech that responded to the sense of

expectation and hope for a real change in values that would sustain
the momentum of this

success. He chose for this purpose the image of Britain as ‘a beacon

to the world’ and used this metaphor at various intervals in the
speech:

Today I want to set an ambitious course for this country. To be

nothing

less than the model twenty-first-century nation, a beacon to the world.

197

198 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Nearly 2,000 words further into the speech, he repeated this image:

We are free to build that model twenty-first-century nation, to become

that beacon to the world.

And again used the same metaphor to give a positive representation

of

New Labour policies:

We will lift the cap on student numbers and set a target for an extra

500,000 people into higher and further education by 2002. Our

educa-

tion system – a beacon to the world.

And a negative representation of Old Labour policies:

We will not be that beacon to the world in the year 2005 with a
welfare

state built for the very different world of 1945. Our tax system should

reward hard work.

The speech ended with an exhortation:

Help us make Britain that beacon shining throughout the world. Unite

behind our mission to modernise our country.

Evidently the metaphoric use of ‘beacon’ contributes to the coherence

of

the speech by introducing a theme early on, developing it throughout

the

speech and reiterating it in its conclusion. Of course, Blair is not alone

in using this metaphor as it is widely used, for example:

Even constrained by cuts in your block grant, what Labour has

achieved

in Wales stands as a beacon. A beacon that shines a light on the

Tories’

abject failure – socially, economically and morally. (Jeremy Corbyn,

25 March 2017)

And Barack Obama frequently used the same metaphor:

You can make this election about how we plan to leave our children

and all children a planet that’s safer and a world that still sees
America
the same way my father saw it from across the ocean – as a beacon
of

all that is good and all that is possible for all mankind. (22 April 2008)

And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns

as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our

nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our
wealth,

but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty,

opportu-

nity, and unyielding hope. (4 November 2008)

But why did these politicians choose the metaphor of a valued entity
as

‘a beacon’ rather than as, say, a constellation or a sun? A beacon is a

fire

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 199

or light set up in a prominent position originally as a warning system;

Blair was using the image as a symbol of social aspiration – a British
equivalent of the ‘American Dream’. In a detailed study of such ‘fire’
metaphors

Charteris-Black (2017a, pp. 190–3) illustrates how the metaphor was

contested in American politics and probably originated in the poem
‘The

New Colossus’ at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which contains

the lines: From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

But how does ‘beacon’ work as a symbol? To answer this, we need to

identify its conceptual elements. General knowledge tells us that a

beacon

provides light by shining; it is in a high location so that it can be seen

from afar; and it is made of fire. The ‘beacon’ metaphor integrates a
set of cog-

nitive schemata that are summarised in Figure 8.1.

It is by activating a rich range of associations, or ‘entailments’, that

we can account for how ‘beacon’ works as a metaphor for both hope

Keeping

us warm

Seeing

Passion

Cooking

FIRE

& desires

Divine

LIGHT

Knowing

Purifying

Hoping
Health

Happiness

UP

Control

Virtue

Figure 8.1 Cognitive schema activated by ‘beacon’.

200 Critical Metaphor Analysis

and emotional enthusiasm. The image of light is widespread in

religious

imagery – it is associated with seeing (it enables us to see at night),

and seeing is conceptually linked to knowing and understanding; fire
is associated symbolically with the divine, but also with powerful
emotions

such as hope and enthusiasm (e.g. ‘to be fired up’), desire (‘to burn
with

passion’) as well as moral cleansing, because we use fire to sterilise

and

purify as well as for its everyday purposes such as cooking and

keeping

ourselves warm. Fire can be dangerous, of course, and those familiar

with

classical myths will know that Prometheus was punished for stealing
it

from the gods. Its ambiguity is captured in speeches using

metaphors,
such as here:

Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of

battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by

the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid
for liberty. (Barack Obama, second inaugural speech, January 2013)

Here, the destructive potential of fire is a precondition for its purifying

moral benefits. High positions have universally positive associations
with

happiness (e.g. ‘on a high’), virtue (e.g. ‘upstanding citizen’), control

(e.g.

‘on top of the situation’), and health (e.g. ‘feeling on top of the world’).

A beacon is valuable because of its functions – but, more importantly,

the

image has a powerful positive symbolism.

One of the advantages of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and

Johnson, 1980) that I discuss in more detail in the next chapter is that
it offers a set of mid-level conceptual categories that are broad

enough to provide an account of what motivates related metaphors

by

identifying their systemic use. In the case of the ‘beacon’ metaphor,

we can identify what are known as the ‘source domains’ – or primary

senses – of a beacon; these comprise ‘UP’, ‘LIGHT’ and ‘FIRE’. This

then allows us to explain why the image of the beacon has the
potential
to symbolise hope and aspiration, by evoking any or all of the
concepts

listed below that arise from the cognitive schema activated by these

source domains:

HEALTHY IS UP

CONTROL IS UP

GOOD IS UP

HAPPINESS IS UP

SUCCESS IS UP

VIRTUE IS UP

GOD IS LIGHT

EMOTION IS LIGHT

KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 201

ENTHUSIASM IS FIRE

HOPE IS FIRE

PASSION IS FIRE

DESTRUCTION IS FIRE

PURIFICATION IS FIRE

The metaphor of Britain as a beacon therefore worked for Blair

rhetori-
cally at a number of levels:

◇ contributing to its coherence by providing a theme for his speech;

◇ introducing positive and negative evaluations of actual policies

(analo-

gous to the celebratory and warning functions of the beacon);

◇ evoking a range of largely positive emotions associated with health

and

ethical beliefs, the divine and knowledge (the emotional and the
ethical

are not divorced, so believers in the ethical principles of New Labour

were passionate about them in a way that was captured by the image
of

the beacon); and

◇ providing an image that affiliated Blair with American orators who

often

used this image; as mentioned above, the metaphor has a long

tradition

in American political rhetoric, as in these extracts:

It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited

people throughout the world who had dared only to dream of
freedom.

(Martin Luther King, 17 May 1957)

We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for

those who do not now have freedom. (Ronald Reagan, 20 January
1981)
The Statue of Liberty depicts the figure of a woman, embodying free-

dom, who is holding a beacon, and so for American politicians it is a

form of exophoric reference to a symbol of national identity. Analysis

of the ‘beacon’ metaphor reveals how Blair was establishing an

identity

of optimistic idealism that was more typical of empathetic and ethical

appeals characteristic of American culture. His oratorical style can be

interpreted as evidence of the growing influence of American political

rhetoric.

8.2 Metaphor: definition and appeal

Aristotle proposed that ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name

that belongs to something else’ (Aristotle, 1952, Poetics). Although

this

assumed that a name ‘belongs’ to a particular thing, whereas we

know

that words have the potential to ‘belong’ to different things, it identifies

a core idea about metaphor: it connects two things that are not
normally

202 Critical Metaphor Analysis

related. Further definitions of metaphor provide additional insight;

Samuel Johnson proposed that metaphor ‘gives you two ideas for
one’, and I. A.

Richards noted, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric: ‘The mind is a

connecting organ, it works only by connecting and it can connect any
two things in

an indefinitely large number of different ways’ (Richards, 1936, p.

125).

This brings us to a crucial feature of metaphor: as well as requiring

two

elements, it stimulates some exchange or interaction between them:

metaphor therefore entails thought, or ideas, as well as language,
and enables

us to explore different ways of thinking.

Metaphor is effective in public communication because it draws on

the unconscious emotional associations of words and assumed

values

that are rooted in cultural and historical knowledge. For this reason, it

has potentially a highly persuasive force and activates unconscious,

often

mythic knowledge to influence our intellectual and emotional

responses

by evaluating actions, actors and issues. It can either do this directly,

through novel, poetic or creative metaphors that provide a theme for

a

particular speech, one that may be active in the short-term memory;

or it

can do this indirectly through conventional or familiar metaphors such

as ‘beacons’. These are intertextual because they refer to concepts

that
have been established in political discourse by constant use. They
are no

longer processed actively, but have become systemically present in

long-

term memory.

Since classical times, metaphor has been considered essential in

oratory

because it is by definition a multifunctional phenomenon; this means

that

it does not do just one thing at a time, but many things

simultaneously.

Metaphors arouse emotions that can be used as the basis for

evaluating

political actors and actions by offering persuasive representations of

social groups and social issues. They are also creative – not just in
an aesthetic sense (though that is important) but also in the manner
in which they

frame ways of thinking about the social world that actually construct

power relations and become political realities. Consider how, in the

post–

Second World War period, the relationship between the Soviet Union
and

the United States was shaped by metaphors that originated in the

language

of politicians, which were then taken up by the media and in public

dis-
course to become the ‘normal’ way of talking about these issues: ‘the
Cold

War’, ‘the Iron Curtain’ and ‘the Evil Empire’ were metaphors that
high-

lighted only negative aspects of these relationships – coldness,

hardness, immorality. They constructed relations between the United
States and the

Soviet Union with a set of unarticulated assumptions that constrained

these relations.

Other metaphors described the strategies that emerged out of this

frame-

work of hostility; ‘the domino theory’ turned opposition to communism

into a game, and the notion of an ‘arms race’ implied that there would
be

a winner and a loser if each ‘side’ did not expand their stock of
nuclear

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 203

weapons. From the source domain of physics, the notion of ‘a power

vacuum’ implied that it was necessary for one of these ‘powers’ to

involve

itself in the affairs of other nation states, as if this were predetermined

by the laws of nature. Such metaphors were limiting insofar as they
blocked

other more positive ways of thinking about international relations

between
the superpowers, and other nations were only ‘pawns’ in the
‘brokerage’ of

the superpowers (to use two other metaphors).

Metaphors can also be constructive; more recently, the phrase ‘the

Arab Spring’ highlighted the naturalness of the energy and

enthusiasm for

change that swept across many Arabic nations from 2011. It offered a
posi-

tive and, as it turned out, largely illusory, evaluation of change by

implying that a summer will inevitably follow the spring. Rather like
the metaphors

of the ‘beacon’ and the ‘torch’, it draws on experiential knowledge

from

nature of what is good and life-giving. But, of course, it still does so

from a particular perspective, as other metaphors were used by those
leaders who

lost power in ‘the Arab Spring’ – for example, Libyan leader

Muammar

Gaddafi described his opponents as ‘rats’. So how a metaphor

frames an issue is not predetermined by metaphor, but by the orator’s
skill in finding a metaphor that constructs reality in a way that is
plausible, resonates with the popular view and complies with his or
her own political objectives and

world view.

There are also expectations that public figures will display a

command

of language, and metaphors that are memorable and persuasive con-

tribute to a style of public communication that enhances the speaker’s

reputation as a skilled orator rather than merely a speaker. A

command

of metaphor associates the speaker with a classical pedigree and

with a

literary canon that includes the Bible and Shakespeare – and in doing
so

makes a speaker sound like an orator. Take away the metaphors from

the speeches of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher or Barack

Obama,

and they would lose the unique appeal that defined them as
passionate,

articulate and able to resolve the political problems of their time. In

short, without metaphor (whatever its dangers – and critical analysts

rightly draw our attention to these) these leaders would no longer

sound

like orators.

Charteris-Black (2009) compared the use of metaphor in speeches by

male and female British politicians and found that inexperienced
female

politicians had a tendency to avoid metaphor, whereas more

experienced

ones showed a pattern of metaphor use that was more in keeping

with

that of male politicians who were familiar with the genre. Female pol-
iticians either accommodated to the rhetorical norms of the House of

Commons or avoided metaphor completely because of its association

with the emotional appeals associated with stereotypical femininity.

Successful politicians generally use metaphor, and this explains why

it

is of such interest to political scientists as well as linguists. Evidence

for

204 Critical Metaphor Analysis

this is provided in two important edited volumes by political scientists

that offer a range of theoretical and applied approaches to

researching

metaphor: Beer and De Landtsheer (2004) and Carver and Pikalo

(2008) and also in a special edition of Metaphor and the Social World
on the political impact of metaphors (Perrez and Reuchamps, 2015).

In the remainder of this chapter, I describe some research into meta-

phor that uses political speeches as a source of data, and then

outline a

set of methods that provide a framework for critical metaphor

analysis;

this is based on an approach to CDA originally outlined in Fairclough

(1995): identification and description, interpretation and explanation.

In various places, I refer to a speech that was given by Michael Foot

at the Labour Party Conference in 1976, and at the end of the chapter

is a case study where I apply the critical metaphor analysis (CMA)

method by identifying metaphors in Obama’s first inaugural address.

Throughout this chapter, I emphasise the importance of ensuring that

the methods for analysis of metaphor correspond with the aims of the

research; when these are translated into research questions, they

pro-

vide the map for metaphor research.

Exercise 8.1

Read the following extracts from various political contexts. Identify the
metaphors.

1 I do not put much trust in what is normally called persuasion: In

times of industrial crisis, when mass meetings are addressed by fiery
orators, passions become inflamed, tempers roused … (Lord
Hatherton, 1 May 1946)

2 My right hon. Friend deserves great credit for obtaining massive

sums for the industry, but does he know that 4,200 Airbus workers in
my constituency

are incandescent with rage at the refusal of a regional grant? (Barry

Jones, 30 March 2002)

3 Let them take the opportunity of this debate to tell the Labour Party

that that policy option is closed, not only for now, but for the future,

and to say clearly that they will not tolerate attempts to black private

hospital building or political decision-making in planning applications.

We shall wait to hear those assurances and we shall judge how

brightly
burns the red flame of the Government’s courage … (Norman Fowler,

21 November 1975)

4 You see there are two flames burning in the human heart all the
time. The flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope you
can build a better world. And my job at 83 is going round and fanning
both flames … because

people need encouragement. (Tony Benn interview, The David Frost

Show, 12 December 2008)

Why are these metaphors used?

Is there are any way you could group the metaphors?

How rhetorically effective are they?

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 205

8.3 Research design for metaphor in political discourse:

an overview

There is inevitably a range of approaches available when designing

research into political metaphor, and which ones are used will depend
on

the research aims and epistemology of the particular disciplines.

Because

metaphor and public communication are of interest to linguists,

rhetori-

cians, political scientists and those working in media studies and

science
communication, they will each have different theoretical perspectives
on

metaphor. In this section, I describe research into metaphor with

reference to a set of questions that a survey of the literature shows
are implied by

their research design. By making these questions explicit, I hope to

assist researchers in locating their own research with other
methodologically

related research. The questions are as follows:

1 What counts as a metaphor?

2 How are metaphors classified?

3 Over what time period are metaphors looked for?

4 In what settings are metaphors looked for?

5 Which metaphor(s) are examined?

6 Which political issues are metaphors used to describe?

7 Which political actors use metaphor?

8 How and why are metaphors used?

9 What are the framing effects of metaphor on political reasoning?

10 How far should research into political metaphor be multimodal?

Some research is insufficient because it moves too swiftly to Question

8;

however, to provide an adequate answer to Question 8 requires

attention

to the earlier questions.

Question 1, What counts as a metaphor? is a question often
overlooked by humanities researchers and one that can lead to
methodological weaknesses. Too often it is taken for granted that
metaphor is self-explanatory and unproblematic. When making
decisions about what counts as a

metaphor, researchers usually assume that there was an alternative

non-

metaphoric, or literal, way of stating the same thing, but that a

metaphor

was chosen for some rhetorical reason. Identifying metaphors is also

closely related to the question of how to classify them. One approach

to

classification is according to whether metaphors are novel – that is,

rare

and original – or conventional. Another is whether they are

‘deliberate’ or

‘non-deliberate’ (Steen, 2008), a distinction that some researchers

found problematic (e.g. Gibbs, 2011; Charteris-Black, 2012a). Having
broad categories of metaphor in the early phases allows us to include
a wider range

of candidate metaphors and then refine decisions later as to exactly

their

type, as this is also part of the interpretation stage.

206 Critical Metaphor Analysis

In deciding what counts as a metaphor, studies vary in how far they

systematically apply a definition of ‘metaphor’. Some linguistically

based
approaches start with a working definition but many studies rely on
intu-

ition alone. They also vary as to whether informants are consulted

when

identifying metaphor and how decisions are made when there is lack

of agreement. There are also interdisciplinary variations, as

researchers

from a language and linguistics background are more concerned with

providing an explanation of how they set about identifying metaphor

(at

least by raising this as an issue; see Pragglejaz Group, 2007). By

contrast, political scientists have a tendency to treat ‘metaphor’ as a
‘natural’ or

self-explanatory category requiring no further definition, for example

in

the two collections of papers on metaphor by political scientists

referred

to above (Beer and De Landtsheer, 2004; and Carver and Pikalo,

2008), although many examples of metaphor are provided, none
supply a clear

definition of a metaphor or an account of the procedure through which

metaphors were identified. The problem is that sometimes ‘metaphor’

is

used in a very general sense for anything not explicitly literal. This is
less of a problem in qualitative approaches to metaphor than it is in
quantitative ones. When the researcher is actually counting
metaphors, it is
necessary to define, as well as to illustrate, what counts as a
metaphor.

I shall explain my own approach later in the chapter.

Regarding Question 2, a common approach to classification is by

‘source’ or ‘target’ domain; for example, in a study of metaphor in

British parliamentary debates, I found that New Labour politicians
frequently

used metaphors linked to words whose primary meaning referred to

journeys, plants, health, and light and dark (Charteris-Black, 2009);

these

would be known by exponents of conceptual metaphor theory as

‘source

domains’. Classification by source domain may be integrated with

judge-

ments made at the identification stage; for example, metaphoric uses

of

words such as ‘shadow’, ‘light’ and ‘dark’ are conventional ways of

making

positive or negative evaluations in political rhetoric, whereas this may

be less so in other genres. Politicians quite often discuss social
issues in terms of illness and health – ‘blights’ and ‘remedies’, and
their own actions in

terms of ‘healing’ or ‘restoring’. The domain of health and disease is

more common in speeches than in other spoken genres such as
conversation.

I go into more detail in Chapter 9 about using categories from

conceptual
metaphor theory. The issue of how to classify metaphor is one that I
shall

discuss in more detail in section 9.4, where I introduce the method of

using a corpus to test intuitive judgements as to the novelty or
otherwise of a

particular phrase analysed as a metaphor.

The next group of questions relates to the design of a dataset that

cor-

responds with the aims of the research. For example, Question 3

concerns

the time period over which metaphors should be examined; for

example,

Putz (2016) looks at metaphors in Hungarian public discourse from

1920

until the time of writing. Other studies look for more generally
historical

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 207

patterns, such as metaphor in times of international crisis; for

example, De

Landtsheer (2015) looks at metaphors from 2006, since the onset of

the

financial crisis. A large number of studies concern the use of

metaphor in

the period leading up to war, on the assumption that metaphor was

influ-
ential in framing war so that it became acceptable to public opinion.
These include Lakoff (1991), Jansen and Sabo (1994), Semino and
Masci (1996),

Herbeck (2004) and Ferrari (2007). Other studies relate to Question

4,

which concerns the setting for metaphor use; for example, van Hulst

(2008) looks at the use of metaphor in local planning meetings, and

Drulák (2008) looks at speeches given in the European Parliament
because of a particular interest in these arenas of power.

When deciding on a dataset for metaphor, there is also the possibility

of a more dynamic (diachronic) approach by exploring the evolution

of a

particular metaphor over time and identifying change and continuity in

its

use. This raises Question 5: which metaphor(s) to analyse. I gave a

brief

illustration of this at the start of this chapter, where I chose to analyse

a particular metaphor – ‘beacon’ – and it would be possible to explore

the evolution of the ‘beacon’ metaphor in Western political culture and

perhaps expand this more generally to an investigation of ‘light’ or

‘fire’

metaphors. A particular metaphor may be preselected because it is

seen as

offering an overarching historical or cultural symbol. Billig and

MacMillan (2005) examines the phrase ‘smoking gun’ that was used
in relation to the controversy over the search for weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq,
tracing it back to the Watergate controversy. Stenvoll (2008)
examines the metaphor of the ‘slippery slope’ in debates in the
Norwegian parliament on

sexuality, abortion and reproductive technologies. Perrez and

Reuchamps

(2015) investigate how the Tetris game was used a metaphor in

debates around Belgian federalism. Other studies focus on a
particular semantic

field rather than a single metaphor; for example, Musolff (2010)

examines

the origins in Western thought of the ‘body politic’ metaphor that was
used

in Nazi propaganda. Charteris-Black (2017b) examines how the

‘competi-

tive race’ metaphor is employed in debates on globalisation and

capitalism.

Charteris-Black (2006) and Lambkin (2014) look at migration

metaphors.

Other studies focus generally on ‘sports’ metaphors or on a particular

sport (e.g. Jansen and Sabo, 1994; Semino and Masci, 1996;
Dumitriu and Negrea-Busuoic, 2017). In such studies, research has
been motivated by

contextual awareness of the frequency of a particular metaphor in

public

discourse and its possible role in framing policy; and tracking it back
in
time helps in the understanding of how ideologies are formed. Such
studies

are valuable in tracing intertextual allusions and an interaction

between

rhetorical traditions.

Perhaps more common than the study of the evolution of a single

met-

aphor or semantic field over time is the investigation of speeches on

prob-

lematic or controversial topics of contemporary political and

ideological

importance. This raises Question 6 – also relating to dataset design:

which

208 Critical Metaphor Analysis

political issues are metaphors used to describe? Studies of speeches

have

examined the following topics, for which I give illustrative citations:

◇ Globalisation – L’Hôte (2010), Flowerdew (2002)

◇ The role of the hijab (veil) – Bakhtiar (2017)

◇ Immigration – Charteris-Black (2006), Hart (2011), Santa Ana

(1999)

◇ Security issues – Chilton (1996)

◇ Patriotism – Flowerdew and Leong (2007)

◇ Unemployment – Straehle et al. (1999)

◇ Biotechnology – Holmgreen (2008)

◇ Reform of the European Union – Drulák (2008)

◇ International relations – Mio and Lovrich (1998)

◇ A Hungarian peace treaty – Putz (2016)

◇ The Arab uprisings – Fallah and Moini (2016)

Researchers may also be interested in the metaphors that

characterise a

particular genre of public communication. In this respect, ‘genre’

could

either be defined broadly, for example in terms of deliberative,

forensic or epideictic speeches; or more narrowly by considering sub-
genres such as

the political eulogy, inaugural speeches, declarations of candidacy,

parliamentary debates or party election broadcasts (see Reisigl,
2008a, 2008b,

for an overview of types of political speeches). However, such studies

are

relatively rare for reasons I explain later.

Question 7 relates to a different type of research aim concerned with

which political actors use metaphor. Broadly speaking, there is the

option

of examining metaphors used by individual politicians or by groups of

politicians on the basis of their shared political role (e.g. as policy
formers) or their shared political orientation. Studies of single
politicians are designed to investigate how metaphors contribute to
the creation of a unique rhetorical style and political identity. Again, I
offer a few examples:

◇ Bakhtiar (2016) – the speeches of two Iranian leaders.

◇ Charteris-Black (2011) – the speeches of ten different British and

American politicians.

◇ Drulák (2008) – speeches by the political leaders of EU member

and EU

candidate countries.

◇ McEntee-Atalianis (2011) – speeches by the Secretary-General of

the United Nations.

◇ Ritchie and Thomas (2015) – speeches on climate change by

Barack

Obama.

Some studies undertake a detailed study of a single speech

(Flowerdew,

2002). As with the discussion of different genres of discourse, there is

the

possibility of comparing different individuals or groups of politicians;

for

example, Lakoff (2002) compares metaphors used by the

Republicans and

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 209

Democrats, and Charteris-Black (2006) compares the metaphors

used by politicians from the centre and far political right. Some
studies compare
speeches with language in general; for example, Anderson (2004)
compares

metaphors in public addresses by Soviet political leaders with a

represent-

ative sample of diverse Russian texts. For research into rhetorical

style, it is often effective to compile a reference corpus of politicians’
language in a particular genre. Charteris-Black (2012b, 2014)
identifies keywords of a

particular British politician by comparison with a reference corpus of

British political speeches. The sample of speeches should be

selected

according to a number of criteria: that the politicians are well known

(and therefore familiar with the genre) and that the major parties are
rep-

resented. The reference corpus can be added to and developed over

time.

Whichever approach is taken in relation to research aims and dataset

design, most researchers are likely to address Question 8, regarding

how and why a metaphor was used. Typically, this will involve some
linguistic and conceptual analysis of the discourse in which
metaphors occur and

some judgement on the content of these metaphors with regard to

what

they foreground and what they play down, and the ideology that they

communicate. Metaphors may be evaluated according to their ethical

views, how consistently they communicate an ideology, or an
evaluation of

whether they were effective. In political science, this often involves

establishing a method for evaluating the rhetorical ‘power’ of
metaphors that

may predict their effect on an audience (e.g. De Landtsheer and De

Vrij,

2004). Non-verbal evidence for metaphor effect may include changes

in

voting patterns, and evaluation of the spread and influence of a

particular metaphor by looking at its frequency and take-up in other
related measures

of public opinion such as the media (press, broadcast or digital).

Based on a number of empirical studies, an area of research that has

developed since the first edition of this book concerns the framing
effects of metaphor on political reasoning, as indicated by Question 9.
Much of this

work takes its origin from Schön (1993), who explored how housing
pol-

icies in the post-war period were influenced by metaphor choice. He

illus-

trated how policy decisions regarding the Victorian housing stock

(known

as ‘slums’) depended on whether they employed ‘disease’

metaphors, in

which case they should be knocked down, or ‘natural communities’

meta-
phors, in which case they should be preserved. Developing this line
of work though psychological studies, Thibodeau and Broditsky
(2011) found that

when informants were presented with a fictional city in which crime

was

framed by ‘beast’ metaphors, they advocated that it should be

captured

and controlled, whereas when it was framed by ‘virus’ metaphors,

crime

should be diagnosed and treated. However, replication studies have

failed

to confirm these framing effects (e.g. Reijnierse et al., 2015). In a

world in which, at least since 2000, there have been far more scares
about viruses,

such as avian flu, swine flu or SARS, than there have been around
large

‘beasts’, the results of the original study seem a little counter-intuitive.

210

2016

Metaphor and the Social

6(1), 103–33.

Bakhtiar (

‘Pour water where it burns”:

Dysphemistic conceptualizations

of the ENEMY in Persian political

discourse’.

World

2010–2015

Iran

1. Supreme leader, Ayatollah

Khamenei

2. ex-president Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad

1. Speeches

2. Four different sources

Incongruity/semantic tension as

identified by two Iranian scholars

21(4): 355–76

2010

L’Hôte (

‘New Labour and Globalization’,

Discourse & Society

1994–2007

Unspecified

Unspecified representatives of New

Labour

Three manifestos

49 speeches

(234,387 words)

Use of software Wmatrix Qualitative

analysis. Use of keywords and key

concepts

Discourse &

n = 4)

2008

19(3): 383–408

Lu and Ahrens (

‘Ideological Influences on

BUILDING Metaphors in Taiwanese

Presidential Speeches’,

Society
New Year’s days and ‘Double Tenth’

days, 1954–2006

Taiwan

Presidents of China (

95 Nationally televised ‘State of

the Nation’ Speeches (235,757

characters)

Intuition and use of an online

Chinese general corpus to establish

literal meanings

Comparison of published research on metaphors

Table 8.1

Authors

Title and

journal

CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND SELECTION OF DATA

When

Where

Who

Genre and
topic

METAPHOR IDENTIFICATION

Identification

211

1979.

By target domain using keywords:

‘US’, ‘Israel’ and ‘the West’

By conceptual metaphors:

Political opponents are animals;

Israel is an animal/tumour/bastard.

The United States is a devil.

Iranian leaders employ dysphemisms

motivated by anger or hatred

towards the enemy in line with a

rhetorical tradition established by

the Islamic Revolution of

By target domain: globalisation

By conceptual metaphors:

Globalisation is an independent

entity; globalisation is a force/

moving entity.

Globalisation is presented as being

inevitable. New Labour reacts to

it as if it were a threat to create a

politics without an adversary

By source domain: buildings and

reconstruction

By conceptual metaphors, e.g.:

A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING;

FORERUNNERS ARE

BUILDERS; COMMUNISTS ARE

DESTROYERS.

Contrast between retrospective and

forward-looking metaphors that

are oriented to recent historical

events (i.e. damage of Communism).

Cultural and individual variation

METAPHOR INTEPRETATION

Classification:

linguistic
Classification:

conceptual

METAPHOR EXPLANATION

Topic of

findings

212 Critical Metaphor Analysis

In an ambitious review of the literature on metaphor framing effects,

Boeynaems et al. (2017) contrast studies that take a critical-discourse

approach with those that take a response-elicitation approach. They

note

that CDA studies typically report a stronger and more negative effect
of

metaphors, which is perhaps not surprising given that (i) they are
often

corpus-based and hence have extensive evidence of negative

representations

from collocational patterns (as we saw in Chapter 7), and (ii) by

definition

they are concerned with power imbalances and exploitation and so

will

place more emphasis on metaphors that contribute to such

imbalances.

There are also fundamental methodological differences in how effects

are
measured, as when political science measures effects by shifts in
voting patterns. For example, I can claim that Tony Blair employed
journey metaphors

successfully because he was re-elected three times and won some

important

votes in the House of Commons; this is rather different from self-

reports

and questionnaires of the type used in response-elicitation

methodologies.

CMA and response-elicitation may also be combined; for example, in

an

empirical study of framing effects, Hart (2017) finds evidence that

together images of fire in multimodal news texts and fire metaphors
achieve the

framing effect of legitimating police use of water cannon in instances

of

social unrest. This more empirical and response-oriented approach to

met-

aphor has been valuable and will produce much further research.

Metaphor is also relevant to researchers in areas such as media

studies,

political science and discourse analysis precisely because it pervades

a range of discourses and spreads between them, as in the metaphor
‘goes viral’. This raises the final question, Question 10, which asks,
‘How far should research into political metaphor be multimodal?’ For
example, a particular metaphor

that originated in a speech may be reported in a TV broadcast, then

referred to in a press cartoon and subsequently distributed as a
‘meme’ via social

media; consider metaphors such as a ‘smoking gun’ or ‘rogue state’.

For this reason, many researchers draw on more than one mode as a
source of data;

political cartoons and billboards are attractive to researchers both

because they provide evidence of the potential influence of
metaphors on public opinion and because of the relative ease of
access to them. The genre of the polit-

ical cartoon as a vehicle for satire has been recognised by El Refaie

(2009a,

2009b) and there is a developing body of research in this area; for

example

Lan and Zuo (2016) explore Chinese editorial cartoons on food safety

and Abdel-Raheem (2016) analyses a cartoon in which the United

States is

depicted as Satan along with two children: Israel and the Muslim
Brothers.

Charteris-Black (2017a, Chapter 10) analyses fire metaphors in

British political cartoons, identifying a range of metaphor themes
based on British cultural references: the Olympic torch, dragons and
phoenixes are depicted by visual metaphors. We may anticipate
further studies of multimodality – especially

when political contexts censor more direct forms of criticism of

governments.

Usually, visual metaphor forms offer a more indirect and subtle form
of critique, but they can cause even greater offence than verbal
metaphors, as was illustrated so drastically by the Charlie Hebdo
massacre in 2015.
Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 213

Exercise 8.2

Select three published papers on metaphor in political speeches (e.g.

vol. 2, no. 2, of the journal Metaphor and the Social World on the
political impact of metaphors). Use the framework in Table 8.1 to
analyse these papers.

Table 8.1 provides an overview of three published studies that use

political speeches as a source of data (either exclusively or in
conjunction with other data sources).

8.4 Metaphor identification and classification

In current metaphor theory, a metaphor is a word or phrase that has a

more

basic meaning than the meaning that it has in the context where it is
used.

The concept of metaphor relies on the idea of words having more

than one

sense; when Aristotle wrote ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a

name

that belongs to something else’, the use of ‘belong’ assumes that

words

have a primary or basic sense – but how is this ‘belongingness’

established?

The answer of a group of current theorists is that a more basic

meaning is

one that is more concrete, one that is related to bodily action, one
that is more precise, or one that is historically earlier (Pragglejaz
Group, 2007).
They explain that the more basic meanings are not necessarily the
most

frequent ones. This immediately brings in two resources that are

likely

to be essential in identifying metaphors: a dictionary that will assist

with identifying more basic meanings, and a corpus for identifying
how words

are used. The Oxford English Dictionary is the most reliable source
for identifying historically earlier meanings (which are usually also
those that are more concrete and more related to bodily action).
However, it is also

possible to use a corpus-based dictionary that incorporates a broad

and

representative sample of contemporary language use. An effective

compro-

mise is to use both types of dictionary so that there is detailed

evidence of both word etymologies and of current word use.

Counting metaphors

If one were to ask ten metaphor scholars to count the metaphors in a

text, they would almost certainly arrive at ten different answers.

Similarly, experience shows that even the same analyst can produce
different counts

of metaphors on different days. Why is this, and what can be done

about

it? Well, it arises because of different views regarding:

1 where exactly a metaphor starts and ends; and

2 what exactly counts as a ‘metaphor’, which necessarily takes into

account the cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of metaphor.

214 Critical Metaphor Analysis

The first point relates to whether to count all the words in a phrase
con-

taining a metaphor separately or whether to treat them as a single

unit –

for example, is the phrase ‘the Iron Curtain’ two metaphors, because
‘iron’

and ‘curtain’ are distinct lexical units, or one metaphor because they
have been used together so frequently that they have produced a
fixed phrase?

In the next chapter, I describe the procedure I use in critical metaphor

analysis.

Historically earlier meanings

From the point of view of metaphor identification, historically earlier

meanings require special attention in relation to language change,

because

if what was originally a metaphor replaces a historically earlier

meaning,

then what was a non-basic meaning becomes a basic or literal one.

For

example, it may be that 50 years from now, when all memories of the
potato blight that caused the famine in Ireland have passed, the
original

meaning of ‘blight’ may have faded away (there were only three literal

‘disease’ meanings in the corpus). What was originally a metaphoric

sense

‘something that spoils or damages’ might have become the basic

sense.

Cognitive processing of metaphors

There is some psycholinguistic evidence that when metaphors are

first

introduced, they are processed by means of comparison because

there are

two separate domains, but as they become increasingly

conventionalised

over time, an abstract category emerges to encompass the two

separate

ones so that they become processed in a different way – by

categorisation

(Gentner and Bowdle, 2001; Bowdle and Gentner, 2005). In the case
of

‘blight’, when processed by comparison, there would be the two

domains

of ‘illness’ and ‘social problems’, but over time, if processed by

catego-

risation, ‘blight’ would only refer to a category of ‘potentially harmful

things’; this shift in processing mode is referred to as the ‘career of
metaphor hypothesis’. Glucksberg and Keysar (1993) claim that
metaphor

works by establishing a general (i.e. superordinate) category to which

both parts related by a metaphor belong; they illustrate this with the
example

‘cigarettes are time bombs’: as both cigarettes and time bombs are
deadly,

putting them together establishes a general category of ‘deadly

objects’ to which they both belong.

Similarly, when Michael Foot used phrases such as ‘the scourge of

unemployment’, if the more basic meaning of ‘scourge’ – ‘whip’ – is

active, there may be a comparison between ‘being whipped’ and
‘experiencing

unemployment’. However, because ‘scourge’ is often used in a more

gen-

eral sense to refer to any cause of social suffering, then it could be

that

‘scourge’ activates the general category of ‘unpleasant social

experiences’; in such cases, when someone hears ‘scourge of
unemployment’, it is processed by categorisation because
‘unemployment’ is one of a number of

things that come into the category of ‘unpleasant social experiences’.

The

Researching Metaphor in Public Communication 215

same may happen with ‘war’ when it is used metaphorically in

expressions
such as ‘war on crime’, ‘war on drugs’ or ‘war on poverty’ – there is
no

comparison, just a category of ‘taking action against bad social

phenom-

ena’ of which war is the prototype. If these metaphorical senses of

words

such as ‘blight’, ‘scourge’ or ‘war’ become the normal or basic ones

for

talking about social ills, then we may speak of ‘entrenched

metaphors’ that are processed by categorisation.

Exercise 8.3

Consider each of the following metaphors (in italics) used by the

British Labour Party politician Jeremy Corbyn, and discuss whether
you think it is likely to be processed by comparison or by
categorisation:

1 To persist with it, as the Conservative Government has made clear

it is determined to do, is a recipe for increasing, not reducing, threats
and insecurity.

2 Any tax rises will fall most heavily on those with the broadest
shoulders and will be a something-for-something deal.

3 The corridor of northern cities stretching from Liverpool and Preston

in the west to York and Hull in the east, has the economic clout, and
skills, to become a powerful driver of economic growth.

4 A Labour government will not offer false promises on immigration

as the

Tories have done. We will not sow division by fanning the flames of
fear.
8.5 Summary

It is recommended that researchers indicate clearly what counts as a

met-

aphor; closely related to this is the need to explain how metaphors

will be

organised and categorised (this is explored in Chapter 9). Research

aims

will determine the time periods, settings and other factors relating to
the sources of metaphors, such as whether they are about a
particular topic

or by particular political actors, or whether a comparative approach is

adopted. All studies need to provide an account of how and why

metaphors are used. It is strongly recommended that researchers
examine what

other discursive features occur in conjunction with metaphor as well

as

considering the possibility of using more than a single data source for

metaphor research where possible, formalising these considerations

into

specific research aims.

The counting of metaphors needs to ensure that a set of criteria are

applied systematically, preferably using a clear definition of metaphor,
a dictionary to access earlier meanings of words, and a corpus to
establish norms in current use. These resources can also assist in
identifying the likelihood of a metaphor being processed by
categorisation (where there is a general category
that includes both the metaphor and the entity referred to) or by
comparison (where the two entities related by metaphor are still
cognitively separate).

216 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Essential reading

Bowdle, B.F. and Gentner, D. (2005). ‘The career of metaphor’,

Psychological Review, 112(1), 193–206.

Charteris-Black, J. (2017). Fire Metaphors: Discourses of Awe and

Authority

(London & New York: Bloomsbury), Chapters 2 and 10.

Hart, C. (2017). ‘“Riots engulfed the city”: an experimental study

investigating the legitimating effects of fire metaphors in discourses of
disorder’. Discourse & Society,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926517734663.

Mio, J.S. (1997). ‘Metaphor and politics’, Metaphor and Symbol,

12(2), 113–33.

Perrez, J. and Reuchamps, M. (2015). ‘Special issue on the political

impact of metaphors’, Metaphor and the Social World, 5(2).

Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press), Chapter 3.

Thibodeau, P.H. and Boroditsky, L. (2011). ‘Metaphors we think with:

the role of metaphor in reasoning’. PloS ONE, 6(2), e16782.

Chapter 9

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory

and Method
9.1 Introduction

Critical metaphor analysis (CMA, Charteris-Black, 2004, 2017a,

2017b) aims to identify which metaphors are chosen in persuasive
genres such as political speeches, party political manifestos or press
reports, and

attempts to explain why these metaphors are chosen, with reference

to the interaction between an orator’s purposes and a specific set of

speech circumstances. As well as general pragmatic motives for the

use

of metaphor – such as gaining attention, facilitating understanding

and

framing issues in a way to encourage acceptance of the speaker’s

point

of view – in a political context this explanation involves demonstrating

how metaphors are used systematically to create political myths and

discourses of legitimisation and delegitimisation that give rise to
ideologies and world views.

Critical analysis of metaphor in public communication demonstrates

how this aspect of vocabulary choice influences an audience by

providing

a favourable representation of speakers and their policies, or an

unfavour-

able representation of opponents and their policies. Figure 9.1

provides a brief overview of the four principal stages of CMA.

Stage 1: Contextual analysis

The first stage is to develop research questions about metaphor that

should emerge from an awareness of its potential for rhetorical

impact in

social and political contexts. CMA identifies and investigates

metaphors

that are employed systematically to represent vulnerable social

groups

in a negative way, or to represent policies – such as war – as being in

the interests of all. Questions might be, for example, ‘What

metaphors

are used by politicians to motivate followers in election campaigns?’

Or

‘How do these metaphors change once these politicians are in

power?’

These questions will influence the collection of the texts to be

analysed.

Decisions will be taken regarding the speaker(s), the time period, the

number of speeches and so on – all of which determine the data set

to

be examined.

217

218 Critical Metaphor Analysis

2. Metaphor

identification
(verbal context and

identifying types:

novel, etc.)

1. Contextual

3. Metaphor

analysis leading to

interpretation

research questions

(identifying &

& selection of

classifying concepts

speeches

& representations)

4. Metaphor

explanation

(agency, rhetorical

purpose & identifying

myth & ideology)

Figure 9.1 Principle stages of critical metaphor analysis.

Stage 2: Metaphor identification

Identification of metaphors entails deciding through analysis of words
and

phrases what to count as a metaphor in the context of the speech. At

the identification stage, metaphors can be grouped into preliminary
categories

such as ‘novel’ and ‘conventional’, as we saw in Chapter 8, and a

dictionary and a corpus of electronically stored language can assist
with this.

Stage 3: Metaphor interpretation

This is deciding how metaphors are to be classified, organised and

arranged, for example whether they are: classified on the basis of
shared lexical characteristics, such as words from the semantic field
of ‘sports’ or ‘light’; arranged according to what they refer to, for
example ‘war’ or ‘hope’; or because they contribute to the discourse
history of a metaphor. Classification of metaphors on the basis of the
literal meaning of words is known as organising by source domain,
whereas classification on the basis of what metaphors refer

to in context is called organising by target domain.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 219

A subsequent stage in interpreting patterns of metaphor involves

work-

ing out the particular meanings, representations and evaluations

conveyed

by the speaker, typically deciding whether these are positive or

negative,

as is indicated for example by their collocations. Metaphor may be

treated
separately or as interacting with other linguistic modalities, such as
the

level of certainty conveyed.

Stage 4: Metaphor explanation

This involves going back to the broader social and political context to

determine the purposes that speakers had in using these metaphors.

Explanation requires judging whether and how metaphors influenced

an audience, how they interacted with other features and their
persuasive role in forming, consolidating or changing opinions, ideas
and beliefs. This

may lead to the identification of underlying ideologies and political

myths.

Researchers usually take little convincing that metaphor contributes

to persuading an audience; however, as we saw in Chapter 8, there is
a growing interest in measuring these persuasive effects.

In practice, although I have described these four stages of CMA

sequen-

tially, I see them as recursive, so an insight gained while interpreting

a

particular metaphor in a speech by one politician might raise

questions

about how it is used by other politicians and may spark off a new
phase of

metaphor identification (and part of a pilot study might lead to a

reformu-
lation of an original research question). Similarly, an insight gained
while explaining the choice of a metaphor might start off a fresh cycle
of metaphor interpretation by providing evidence of a positive or
negative rep-

resentation that can be incorporated into identifying patterns of

metaphor

use. Similarly, judging the function of metaphors may be influenced

by the

broader social context that motivated the original research questions.

All of the issues discussed above will at some point require a theory
of

metaphor and a clear statement of research purposes and research

questions.

What is identified and classified as metaphor and how metaphors are

organ-

ised, interpreted and explained depends on the researchers’ theory of

meta-

phor and what methods are employed for measuring its impact. The
more

clearly these issues are defined, the more robust the methodology for
critical research of metaphor. Building on the discussion of general
considerations in metaphor identification and classification in the last
chapter, in this chapter I consider the identifying and categorising of
metaphor from two theoretical perspectives: conceptual metaphor
theory and blending theory.

9.2 Metaphor identification in critical metaphor analysis

Counting metaphors
Metaphors in political rhetoric typically occur in phrases, or
collocations, rather than as separate words, and for this reason the
unit of measurement

should be the phrase rather than the word. For example, in the
speech by

220 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Tony Blair given at the start of Chapter 8, ‘beacon’ occurs in the

phrase

‘beacon to the world’, though it sometimes occurs as ‘beacon of

hope’;

‘torch’ occurs in the phrase ‘torch of freedom’. Because it is easy to

search for these collocations in an electronic corpus of language,
they should, in my view, be treated as single examples of metaphor.

This is where my procedure varies from that described in Pragglejaz

(2007), who analysed the phrase ‘wear the mantle’ in the context
‘Sonia

Gandhi has struggled to convince Indians that she is fit to wear the
mantle of the political dynasty into which she married’ as two
separate metaphors, because both ‘wear’ and ‘mantle’ occur as
separate headwords in a dictionary source. When applied to political
rhetoric, this procedure would, in my view, lead to a considerable
overcount of metaphor, because ideologically

interesting metaphors are those that have become conventional

colloca-

tions through recurrent use and so should be analysed as phrases. A

corpus

of political language readily shows evidence of these recurrent

patterns; for example, a phrase that occurs a total of 41 times in the
corpus of Trump

speeches analysed in Chapter 1 is ‘drain the swamp’:

But I’ll tell you what. We’re going to win the election, and we’re going
to clean out the swamp. You know, I’m using the expression, we’re
going to drain … the swamp of Washington, DC. It is a swamp of
absolute corruption! It’s absolutely corrupt! And we’re going to drain
the swamp.

We’ll see what happens. We’re going to drain it. But we’re going to
win.

I have indicated what for me are the five metaphors in this excerpt,
whereas if the verb ‘swamp’ (or ‘swamp’ + noun phrase) were
counted separately,

there would be at least eight metaphors. A similar case of repetition

occurs in a corpus of Tony Blair, where the phrases ‘journey of
change’, ‘journey

of renewal’ and ‘journey of conviction’ and so on occur. Whenever

there

is a pattern JOURNEY + OF + ABSTRACT NOUN these should each

be counted as one rather than two metaphors. A general pattern such

as

CONCRETE ENTITY + OF + ABSTRACT NOUN may account for a

range of metaphors such as ‘scourge of unemployment’, ‘torch of

liberty’

and so on, but each is a single metaphor. In language study, a

repeated

grammatical pattern such as this is known as colligation; if colligation

is confused with metaphor, it risks both overestimating the number of
metaphors and concealing the equally important pattern of colligation.

Which phrases to count?

After selecting the fixed phrase as the unit to count, we then need to
decide which of these phrases counts as a metaphor. Because
metaphors arise from transferred meanings, whatever sense a word
or phrase originally had, a

metaphor is formed when this word or phrase is used in a new

context with

a different sense that creates some type of semantic tension or

incongruity.

However, knowledge of historically earlier senses and how language

is

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 221

processed varies among individuals; for example, someone who is

aware of

the primary sense of ‘beacon’ as a fire in a prominent position will

count

it as a metaphor in the phrase ‘Britain is a beacon’, and experience

some

awareness of meaning shift. Conversely, someone who has only

come across

‘beacon’ with an abstract sense – as in political rhetoric – will not do

so, because they do not experience any resemblance relation. If the
Democrats

got back into power, diehard supporters of Donald Trump may again
refer
to Washington simply as ‘the swamp’, in which case their sense of it
as a

metaphor might be lost. This is one reason why people vary in their
estimates of metaphors in texts. Metaphor originates in an awareness
of a resemblance relationship (usually known as the ‘grounds’)
between the two entities it

associates. The problem is that the perception of two entities as

being separate (a precondition for any resemblance) varies among
individuals because there are personal psycholinguistic variations in
the images and associations aroused by metaphor. The relationship
between the two entities connected

by metaphor is not one that pre-dates the metaphor; it is a

relationship that is created by it. Awareness of incongruity is an act of
interpretation and is therefore ultimately subjective. Metaphors are
not inherent in words, but

arise from how words are used and understood, especially in the
extent to which their contexts are understood as familiar or novel.

Use of a corpus to confirm categories

Evidence on use is available in a general corpus of language, which

provides a robust method for CMA. For example, a search of the
British National

Corpus shows that in the first 100 examples of ‘blight’, only three
refer to the disease of a plant – ‘a plant disease, typically one caused
by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smut’ – whereas the remainder
refer to ‘a thing that spoils or damages something’, so this second,
metaphoric sense of ‘blight’

is likely to be entrenched and therefore to be processed by

categorisation.

However, 94 of the first 100 examples of ‘beacon’ have the literal

sense of a light that can be seen from afar. We can infer that when
‘beacon’ is used to refer to a goal of social aspiration, it is more likely
to be processed as a metaphor – that is by comparison – because it
is normally used literally; this does not tell us how an individual will
understand it in a particular

context, nor does it show the psycholinguistic processes that an

individual goes through, but it does illustrate how a processing
tendency can be inferred from the evidence of verbal context. This is
confirmed by looking at the

Oxford English Dictionary (OED), where we find only the literal

meaning of ‘beacon’, whereas for ‘blight’ the second, more general
meaning is given.

This is not to say that ‘beacon’ is any more persuasive than ‘blight’ or
that it is an especially novel metaphor, but it is helpful in establishing
a relationship between a corpus approach and the psycholinguistic
approach discussed in

Chapter 8. Corpora offer more generalisable instances of language

use than are available in empirical response research and serve to
counterbalance the inherent subjectivity of metaphor identification.

222 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Metaphor categorisation: types of metaphor

An initial approach to categorisation that builds on the distinction

between comparison and categorisation modes of processing
introduced at (8.4) is

on the basis of psycholinguistic criteria, as follows:

1 Novel metaphors (processed by comparison)

2 Entrenched metaphors (processed by categorisation)

3 Conventional metaphors (processing shifts between comparison

and
categorisation, depending on context)

Goatly (2008, p. 31ff.) distinguishes between ‘Tired’ and ‘Sleeping’

metaphors, which correspond to ‘conventional’ and ‘entrenched’
metaphors, and

refers to novel metaphors as ‘Active’ metaphors. I have shown corpus

and

dictionary evidence to support the classification of ‘blight’ and

‘scourge’

as entrenched metaphors and ‘beacon’ as a conventional metaphor.

To be

more specific, if using a corpus and a metaphor occurs fewer than

five times in a sample of 100 corpus entries, it is a candidate for
being a novel metaphor; when more than half of the entries have a
metaphoric sense, it is an

entrenched metaphor. Conventional metaphors are likely to be those

that

occur somewhere between 5 and 50 times in a sample of 100 corpus

entries.

In reality, there is a continuum over time for novel metaphors to

become

conventionalised and then entrenched, so the researcher will need to

note

the period of time over which a corpus has been collected, because
the more recent the sample of language, the more potential there is
for metaphors to become established and fall into either the
conventional or entrenched categories. In political speeches, the
majority of metaphors are conventional and entrenched, with only a
few likely to be novel – the opposite of the situation in literature or
other more creative genres. As metaphor is a source of language
change; its inherent instability leads to a situation where most
metaphors are not processed by comparison because they are
conventional or entrenched.

Steen (2008) refers to this as ‘the paradox of metaphor’.

We have seen in the analysis of the Cold War how conventional

meta-

phors became so entrenched that they were accepted as the normal

way of

describing international relationships. Phrases such as the ‘Iron

Curtain’, the ‘Evil Empire’, the ‘Arms Race’, the ‘Arab Spring’ and so
on became the

only way of framing certain international relations. But we cannot be

sure which mode of processing a particular individual will use. There
are two empirical approaches to dealing with this problem: a
researcher can collect data from a sample of informants to gain
insight into the psycholinguistic processing of words that are
potentially metaphoric, or he or she can

search a representative corpus of language to identify the normal

uses of a word. This can, as I have illustrated, assist in making
distinctions between novel, conventional and entrenched metaphors.
Though most of my own

work uses the second, corpus-based approach, I think it can be

integrated

with an empirical psycholinguistic method.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 223

As mentioned earlier, an analyst will come up with different metaphor

counts on different days. Identification and classification of metaphors

is necessarily a slow and at times laborious process, preferably
undertaken

by more than one analyst to ensure the reliability of the findings. A

robust method is to analyse speeches in five phases, preferably on
different days,

as summarised in Figure 9.2.

1 Identify all potential metaphors by working through a text with a

marker

pen; initially, all candidate metaphors can be identified.

2 Confirm or reject initial decisions, drawing on dictionaries to

establish whether there is a more basic sense of a word, and corpora
to identify

whether the word is usually metaphorical; and decisions taken with

regard to the type of metaphor.

3 From the list in stage 2, identify novel ‘metaphors’ – that is, words

and phrases that are likely to be processed by comparison. These

may

be indicated in the title of a speech. They are likely to be processed

by

comparison in short-term memory and are influential in contributing to

audience response.

1. Identify all

potential

metaphors

5. Identify
2. Confirm or

entrenched

reject initial

metaphors

classifications

4. Identify

3. Identify

conventional

novel metaphors

metaphors

Figure 9.2 Method for critical metaphor analysis.

224 Critical Metaphor Analysis

4 Identify conventional metaphors – the ones that a corpus shows

have

become a pattern, such as ‘beacon of hope’, and where these words

are

metaphors between 5 and 50 occurrences in a sample of 100 lines.

5 Identify entrenched metaphors – these might have been completely

invis-

ible in the first phase because they have become naturalised. They
will

occur in over half of the lines in a sample of 100.

6 Compare classifications with those of (an)other metaphor
scholar(s).

Ideally, each metaphor expert should undertake his or her

classification

separately, and then all participants should arrange to meet to

compare

and discuss findings, with the expectation of reasonable variation.

All three types of metaphor should be identified, but for different

reasons: the invisibility of entrenched metaphors can reveal the

ideology

behind the framing of issues in a certain way. But novel metaphors

can

evoke empathetic responses and contribute to powerful, heroic

narratives.

Where time is limited, it may be preferable to focus on the extreme

ends of the cline of metaphor, and pay less attention to conventional
metaphors.

This is again where a corpus is useful. A method that is commonly

used

is to read a sample of the data set to identify words that are often
used

metaphorically (referred to as ‘metaphor keywords’ in Charteris-

Black,

2004) and then to search through the whole data set for these (see
Semino,
2008, Chapter 6, for an overview of corpus methods). As Deignan
(2005) explains, collocates around metaphorical expressions – as
evident from a

corpus – provide insight into whether they count as metaphors and

will

certainly assist in deciding whether they are conventional/entrenched

or

novel. As mentioned above, a reading of a sample of Tony Blair’s

speeches

showed frequently used words from the semantic field of journeys

(includ-

ing ‘journey’, ‘path’, ‘destination’ etc.), and so it was then possible to

search through a larger corpus of his speeches using these metaphor

key-

words and to categorise these as conventional or entrenched.

However,

this method is unlikely to be effective for novel metaphors.

A related but slightly different approach that has more potential for

detecting novel metaphors is to identify a set of potential keywords

from

a particular semantic field before searching in a corpus on the basis

of both intuition and previous studies; for example, a number of
studies (e.g.

Jansen and Sabo, 1994) show that war is often discussed in terms of
sport (and vice versa: Charteris-Black, 2004) so it would be possible
to draw up a set of words from sports (‘team’, ‘race’, ‘tactics’ etc.) and
search for these in a corpus of speeches relating to war. In the case
of Blair’s use of ‘beacon’, we could draw up a list of words such as
‘light’, ‘dark’, ‘torch’, ‘flame’,

‘shadow’ and so on from the semantic field of light and dark, and then
use

these as search terms in a corpus. For example, Ritchie (2013)

identifies a metaphor used by Obama – ‘incendiary’ language, when
he was referring

to the controversial nature of statements by his pastor, Reverend

Jeremiah

Wright; the metaphor implies both emotional intensity and the

potentially

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 225

Table 9.1 The ten most common collocates in

the position after ‘incendiary’

devices

27

bombs

23

device

22
4

rhetoric

19

remarks

bomb

material

language

comments

10

fires
5

Source: Corpus of Contemporary American

English (COCA).

destructive effect of fire – as when arson is committed during race

riots.

When we search a corpus such as COCA, we find the ten most

common

collocates in the position after ‘incendiary’ are as shown in Table 9.1.

There is clear evidence from this limited search of collocations that

numbers 4, 5, 8 and 9 are used as metaphors. As these patterns

characterise around 30 per cent of the most common collocations, we
have some corpus

evidence to classify ‘incendiary language’ as a conventional

metaphor.

It is not always necessary to identify every metaphor in a text unless

the approach is entirely quantitative. A number of factors influence
this decision: the length of the text, the time available for the analysis,
and above all the research questions: if these are concerned with
metaphor frequency or distribution, then all metaphors need to be
identified. Where informants are available, insights can be gained into
whether metaphors are short- or long-term mental representations.
Words and phrases for which there is general agreement

regarding their classification as metaphors are likely to be novel

metaphors that are cognitively active in forming short-term
representations, whereas those for which classifications diverge are
likely to be entrenched metaphors which contribute to long-term
mental representations and hence ideology.

9.3 Case Study 1: identification of metaphor in Obama’s

first inaugural address

Initially, I distinguished between novel metaphors that are likely to be

identified as such by the majority of informants – many on their first

analysis – and conventional metaphors over which there will be
variation. I also

226 Critical Metaphor Analysis

distinguish between conventional metaphors – the ones that are

readily

identifiable as metaphors – and entrenched metaphors – those which

the

majority of an audience is unlikely to recognise as metaphors

because they

are processed entirely by categorisation. This addresses critical

linguistic concerns about naturalised used of language – when a
particular perspective becomes habitual so that its assumptions are
no longer evident.

Table 9.2 summarises my analysis of metaphor in Obama’s inaugural

address according to psycholinguistic criteria.

At the start of Obama’s speech (the text of the speech can be found
at

the end of Chapter 1), there is a very evident metaphor in (2.3): ‘Yet,
every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging
storms’. Why

might most analysts classify this as a novel metaphor? First, because

these words occur in the context of a discussion of economics and
international
relations. Then, from the extra-linguistic context, we know that the
speech was not delivered in stormy weather, which allows us to
identify semantic

incongruity because he is not actually describing the weather. We

also know that the genre of the inaugural address is too formal to
permit a discussion of the weather – unless humorously – which
clearly this is not. So this is a novel metaphor because it contributes
to the author’s intended purpose of bringing to the audience’s
attention an awareness of America’s considerable current

economic problems (the full extent of which he was probably unaware

of

prior to his election). It is interesting because of its potential rhetorical

effect in arousing the emotion of fear or anxiety in the audience.

However, ‘America has carried on’ in (2.4) is likely to be processed

differently by different individuals. Why is this? First, because
‘America’ could be treated as a metonym based on a relation of
GEOGRAPHICAL PLACE FOR

PEOPLE THAT LIVE THERE, and – related to this – because it is

convenient

and economical to talk about nation states as if they were people.

However, it is a metaphor in the sense that nation states and
geographical areas cannot physically move, so they cannot be the
subject of a verb of motion.

I would suggest that individuals vary in the extent to which the

expres-

sion activates a visual or concrete image of a person struggling

heroically through bad weather. Highly patriotic Americans might not
process this as

a metaphor at all, as for them ‘America’ automatically means ‘the

people
in America’, whom they visualise in a concrete way as physically
strug-

gling; so when they hear ‘America’, they think ‘Americans’ because

this

is entrenched in their long-term mental representations (van Dijk,

1987).

Consider for example when Donald Trump said: ‘Hillary Clinton is a

leg-

acy of death, destruction, and terrorism. America deserves a better

legacy. ’

Here he was referring to the people of America. However, supporters

of

Hillary Clinton might process this as a metaphor because they create

a dis-

tinction in their minds between the abstract concept of the nation

state and embodied human beings. ‘America carries on’, or ‘America
deserves’ are

not therefore independently classifiable as metaphors, as this will

depend

on the cognitive schema of the individuals hearing the phrase – their

values, their beliefs and their political orientations. But to the majority,

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 227

it is probably relatively invisible as a metaphor because of the very

high

frequency of metaphors that represent the nation as a person in

political
rhetoric. I therefore classify it as an entrenched metaphor.

Of course, identifying such entrenched metaphors is still useful for

critical approaches, because the invisibility of this metaphor questions
the assumption that the audience readily identify themselves as part
of ‘America’. We Table 9.2 Psycholinguistic analysis of metaphor in
Obama’s first inaugural speech Novel

Conventional

Entrenched

sacrifices borne by our

ancestors (1.1)

rising tide of prosperity

vision of those in high

(2.2)

office (2.4)

still waters of peace (2.2)

America has carried

gathering clouds (2.3)

on (2.4)

raging storms (2.3)

the ways we use energy

far-reaching network (3.2) jobs shed (3.4)

strengthen our
a new age (3.3)

collective failure to

adversaries and threaten

make hard choices (3.3)

our planet (3.5)

economy is badly

weakened (3.3)

a sapping of confidence

a nagging fear (4.2)

(4.2)

next generation must

lower its sights (4.2)

a short span of time (5.3)

have strangled our

worn-out dogmas (6.2)

politics (6.2)

we have chosen hope over

fear (6.1)

to carry forward that

to pursue their full

a young nation (7.1)

precious gift (7.2)

measure of happiness

that noble idea, passed

(7.2)

on from generation to

generation (7.2)

choose our better history

(7.2)

our journey has never

been one of short-cuts or

settling for less (8.3)

It has not been the path

for the faint-hearted (8.4)

who have carried us up

in search of a new life (9.1)

the long, rugged path

towards prosperity and

freedom (9.5)

228 Critical Metaphor Analysis

could use this as proof of an ideology: a long-term mental
representation in which the nation state is primary. Distinguishing
between novel metaphors

that are cognitively active in short-term memory and entrenched

metaphors

therefore contributes to interpretation and explanation.

Exercise 9.1

Identify metaphors in the following extracts, and classify them into the
following categories: novel, conventional and entrenched. Use the
British National Corpus to assist with identifying these metaphor
types.

1 That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards.

We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as
the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. (Boris
Johnson, Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2016)

2 . . . or is this (‘city price’), like all the other inner-city projects

launched by the Government, a project launched in a blaze of glory
and forgotten six months later? (Keith Vaz, 29 June 1994)

3 We took the responsibility of the decision in order to avert the

implementation of the more extreme aims [of] the more extreme
conservative circles in the European Union. Greece managed to
resist a request that Greece transfer public assets abroad as well as
a plan of financial suffocation and the collapse of the banking system.
(Alexis Tsipras, 13 July 2015)

4 Today the Financial Secretary and I are publishing a road map to

make Britain’s business tax system fit for the future. (George
Osborne, 16 March 2016)

5 We have become so used to Nanny in Brussels that we have

become infan-
tilised, incapable of imagining an independent future. (Boris Johnson.
Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2016)

9.4 Theoretical approaches to metaphor

The first stage in interpretation can be facilitated by the distinction

made by Cameron and Low (1999) between local, global and
discourse systematicity, which can be summarised as follows:

◇ Local systematicity involves identifying patterns of metaphor in a

par-

ticular speech.

◇ Discourse systematicity is when we examine metaphors in a

collection

of political speeches from a particular genre – say, inaugural

speeches or

eulogies.

◇ Global systematicity is when we examine metaphors in a large

general

corpus, such as the British National Corpus.

In CMA, I suggest we are primarily interested in discourse systems –

how issues, actors and social groups are typically discussed in

political

speeches; however, to interpret metaphors, we also need to examine

them

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 229

in individual speeches (local systems) as well as in a representative

sample of general language (global systems).
For this reason, the research design often involves compiling a set of

speeches with a shared discourse feature, either because they are

related to a similar topic (e.g. immigration or domestic violence) or to
a particular

political grouping (e.g. the far right). However, global systems are
impor-

tant because a general corpus provides insight into whether a word is

likely to be processed by categorisation or comparison, as it provides
evidence on whether its typical use is metaphoric. Similarly, local
systems are insightful in revealing the persuasive strategies of a
particular speech. Allusions – as when the metaphors of Obama echo
those of Martin Luther King, Jr, or

those of Jeremy Corbyn echo those of Michael Foot – show the

transition

from local to discourse systems.

When interpreting metaphors, researchers seek to identify a pattern

in

the metaphors they have identified – this could be according to the

mode

of thinking or cognitive processing involved with reference to general

con-

ceptual representations that may link what happens in an individual’s

mind

on hearing a metaphor with normative social meanings. There are

two

main theoretical approaches to metaphor interpretation: one is based

on
conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and the
other on blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). Both
approaches require

establishing conceptual categories based on the metaphor vehicle

and the

metaphor topic; in the case of conceptual metaphor theory, this

involves

identifying ‘source’ and ‘target’ domains followed by interpreting

system-

atic correspondences by proposing conceptual metaphors. In the

case of

blending theory, there is identification of two input spaces (similar to

source and target domains), a generic space that identifies what the
two inputs

have in common, and a blended space where integration between

concep-

tual elements of the two input spaces occurs. An emergent structure

arises

in the blend that may include material that is not present in either of
the input spaces. The two approaches complement each other with
conceptual

metaphor theory, providing a good account of conventional and

entrenched

metaphors, whereas blending theory is often more insightful when

inter-

preting novel metaphors. Next, I discuss each of these approaches.

9.4.1 Conceptual metaphor theory applied

The first stage in applying conceptual metaphor theory is to identify

semantic fields that include groups of semantically related metaphor

vehi-

cles; these are known as the ‘source domains’. As we saw in Chapter

8,

‘beacon’ could be classified with other words such as ‘glow’, ‘shine’

and

‘torch’ as belonging to the semantic fields of ‘light’ and ‘fire’. Evidence

from conventional metaphors in a corpus can assist in identifying
semantic

fields such as ‘light’, ‘plants’, ‘animals’, ‘weather’ and ‘landscape’.

There will be difficult decisions over the naming of these semantic
fields as this

230 Critical Metaphor Analysis

can be done by using more-, or less-, inclusive terms. For example,

‘plants’

and ‘animals’ could both be included in a category named ‘animate

enti-

ties’, and ‘weather’ and ‘landscape’ could both be included in a

category

named ‘environment’. Further, all the semantic fields, or source

domains,

just mentioned (light etc.) could be subsumed under the more general

notion of ‘nature’; similarly ‘path’ and ‘journey’ are both included

under

the semantic category of ‘motion’, and ‘health’ and ‘disease’ could be

included under the semantic category ‘human body’. There are no
hard and

fast rules when identifying semantic fields from metaphor analysis,

but it is the first stage in moving from literal to metaphoric meanings,
and a metaphor dictionary can help. Most researchers use semantic
fields proposed in

previous research as a starting point.

The next stage is to identify the metaphor target (i.e. topic or tenor) –

what it is that the metaphors are used to talk and think about; for
example, Martin Luther King, Jr’s major political concern was racial
segregation,

and he used metaphors from various semantic fields such as illness,

prisons and slavery to describe this. Critical analysts will often begin
with particular issues of concern; these are typically social issues
such as immigration, unemployment or pollution, and they will only
identify metaphors that

refer to these topics. Conceptual metaphor theory proposes a

systematic set of mappings between everything that is cognitively
activated by the source

domain onto the target domain. So, for example, the knowledge of
illnesses

activates ideas of symptom, remedy and cure. When applied to

politics,

a social illness therefore activates ideas of social problems and

political solutions to these problems.

Whether it is the source or the target of metaphors that is the primary

focus will depend on the research questions; for example, if they

relate to metaphors in particular political situations, such as election
campaigns or the build-up to war, then the focus will be on metaphor
source domains.

However, if the questions concern the life history of a metaphor (e.g.

the ‘slippery slope’) or a group of established metaphors (‘family

meta-

phors’), the source domain of the metaphors is already determined,

and

the focus will be on the range of topics they are used to describe –
the metaphor targets. ‘Slippery slope’ metaphors are typically used by
those who

are resisting change – for example to the legalisation of ‘soft’ drugs or

steps towards euthanasia. Sometimes both source and target are in
equal focus,

and the process of metaphor grouping works recursively from a

sample

reading of a body of texts; if a particular metaphor is used frequently

for a particular topic, then further research may be directed towards
challenging or confirming this hypothesis.

The interpretation of words used metaphorically has been

summarised

as follows:

They (Lakoff and Johnson) identified numerous groups or families of

metaphors, each organised around a common implicit metaphor. For

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 231

many of these families of metaphors, they traced the underlying

meta-
phor to a literal concept based on embodied physical experience; on
this

basis they claim that most conceptual reasoning is fundamentally

meta-

phorical in that our abstract concepts are experiences and expressed

in

terms of embodied physical experience. (Ritchie, 2003, pp. 125–6)

Once metaphors are grouped by semantic field (family, journey,
sports

etc.) and by metaphor targets (immigration, unemployment etc.),

researchers propose a ‘conceptual’ metaphor – one that connects

these

words with the topic to which they typically refer and accounts for

what motivates the cognitive mappings between source and target.

So

the researcher identifies patterns by grouping together metaphors

from

the same semantic field – for example, SPORT. Then, when a group
of

these metaphors share the same metaphor target – for example,

WAR –

a conceptual metaphor can be inferred, such as WAR IS SPORT.

When

‘sports’ metaphors are commonly used in political speeches,

cognitive
mappings or alignments can take place based on fitness, strength,
organi-

sation, training, teamwork, strategy, winning and losing and so on.

When

a conceptual metaphor is inferred in this way, it is not proof of what

occurs in an individual’s mind when interpreting ‘sports’ metaphors,

but

the extent to which the conceptual metaphor is predictive of

metaphors

that occur in future texts in a particular discourse implies that it has,

like a grammatical rule, predictive power in the activity of lexical
choice in

that discourse.

Notice how the conceptual metaphor always commences with the

target domain – the concept to which the metaphors refer. The

concep-

tual metaphor should account for the relatedness of these metaphors

by

implying that there is a shared cognitive representation. The

conceptual

metaphor is a shadow of individual metaphors – the words from

which

it is formed (e.g. ‘war’ and ‘sport’) are not necessarily present in the

speeches themselves, but they are there (using a Platonic metaphor)

in
their reflections on the wall of the mind’s cave. The claim of
conceptual

metaphor theory is that these reflections constitute cognitive

representa-

tions – hence their relevance in CMA; evidence for this is that

conceptual

metaphors can predict how metaphors might be used on the basis of

which metaphors have already been used. So we can anticipate that

in situations where war is being advocated in a political speech, a
speaker

may use sports metaphors.

9.4.2 Conceptual blending theory applied

Blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) does not use the
termi-

nology of conceptual metaphor theory – in place of ‘source’ and ‘tar-

get’ domains, there are ‘input spaces’. This has important implications

because there is not the direction of cognition implied by ‘source’ and

232 Critical Metaphor Analysis

‘target’ in which the literal meanings of words are taken as primary

and

their metaphoric meanings as secondary. In practice, when

researchers

apply blending theory, the first input space typically corresponds with
the source domain of conceptual metaphor theory, and the second
input

space with the target domain. What is novel about the theory is that it

also proposes a ‘generic space’; these are ways of interpreting

events that derive from previous experience of similar events and
therefore form part

of the cognitive context. The proposal is that we have abstract,

cognitively related representations of experiences – schemes or
scenarios – that are

stored in memory. We rely on these when interpreting novel

experience.

For example, we have scenarios based on time sequences in which

events

have a beginning and an end; similarly, we have spatially based

sequences

in which journeys have a beginning and an end. There are also

schemes

similar to the warrants we examined in Chapter 6, such as for ‘cause-

and-effect’ relationships. These cognitive entities in the generic space

then influence what is selected from each of the two input spaces, to
become

integrated in the blended space by identifying what they have in

common.

In traditional metaphor terminology, this was referred to as the

‘grounds’

of the metaphor.
I describe the differences between the two approaches by comparing

how a familiar metaphor for which there is evidence in a range of

familiar

expressions is analysed using each of the approaches. Consider

expressions

such as ‘He always wants to be in the spotlight’; ‘We each have our
role to play’; ‘He stole the show’; ‘That’s not in the script’; ‘You missed
your cue’;

‘Clean up your act!’; ‘He always plays the fool’; ‘You deserve a
standing

ovation’; ‘It’s curtains for him’. Applying conceptual metaphor theory,

these would all be analysed as words originating from the source

domain

of the ‘THEATRE’ that are used to describe some aspect of ‘LIFE’ –

the

target domain. The mappings are shown in Figure 9.3: SOURCE

DOMAIN –

TARGET DOMAIN –

THEATRE/ACTING LIFE

MAPPINGS/ALIGNMENTS

An actor

→ a person leading a life

The beginning of the play → birth

Fellow actors
→ the people with whom he or she interacts

The way the actor acts

→ the behaviour of the person

The parts in a play

→ the roles in life

The script of a play

→ the story of one’s life as it should happen

The end of the play

→ death

Figure 9.3 Conceptual metaphor theory analysis of theatre

metaphors.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 233

The mappings show the systematic correspondences or alignments

between knowledge of theatre and knowledge of life; we can then

propose

a conceptual metaphor LIFE IS THEATRE, although Lakoff and

Turner

(1989, pp. 20–1) propose LIFE IS A PLAY. Let’s compare how these
same expressions might be analysed using blending theory; this is
summarised

in Figure 9.4: GENERIC SPACE:

EVENTS

1. Beginning
2. Agents/actors

3. Events in sequence

4. End

INPUT SPACE

1 – THEATRE

INPUT SPACE 2 – LIFE

1. Birth

1. Start of play

2. Social norms

2. Roles in a play

3. Behaving in life

3. Acting

4. Dying

4. End of play

BLENDED SPACE

1. Birth = Start of a play

2. Social norms = Roles in a

play

3. Behaving in life = Acting

in a play
4. Dying = End of a play

Figure 9.4 Blending analysis of the ‘theatre’ metaphor.

Conceptual knowledge from the two input spaces is integrated in the

blended space under the influence of mappings from a generic space

that

identifies what it is the two input spaces have in common. We know

that

events have a beginning, occur in sequence and have an end; we are

also

aware of active agents who follow social norms of behaviour.

Blending the-

ory also proposes an emergent structure, so here we could have

ideas of the quality of a performance being influenced by choice of
dress and clothes –

and this could be part of the emergent structure. This gives blending
theory

234 Critical Metaphor Analysis

a more dynamic character than conceptual metaphor theory and

allows it

to be used to interpret novel metaphors that creatively exploit

conventional metaphors, connecting two domains or input spaces.

Next, I illustrate how blending theory can also be applied to the

analysis of a novel metaphor by considering Donald Trump’s phrase,

referred to earlier, from his 2016 election campaign: the promise that
he
would ‘drain the swamp’, by which he meant that he would end
govern-

ment corruption of the existing Washington elite. Now this is quite

hard

to analyse using conceptual metaphor theory – partly because

‘swamp’ is

more typically used in right-wing political rhetoric as a verb. For

example, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was criticised after claiming that
Britain might become ‘swamped by people of a different culture’. But
here Trump is

using ‘swamp’ as a noun, and agency is implied by the verb ‘drain’. I

apply

blending analysis to capture this in Figure 9.5: GENERIC SPACE:

CAUSE–EFFECT/

PROBLEM–SOLUTION

1. Cause of a problem

2. Action to address

this cause

3. Beneficial result

INPUT SPACE 2 –

INPUT SPACE 1 –

POLITICS

DISEASE MANAGEMENT

1. Insects breed in swamps and

1. Government corruption

cause disease

2. Take action against corruption

2. Drain the swamp

3. Remove the dangers of

corruption

3. Remove the cause of the disease

BLENDED SPACE

1. Insects breed in swamps

and cause disease –

Government corruption

2. Drain the swamp –

Take action against corruption

3. Remove the cause of

the disease – Remove

the dangers of corruption

Figure 9.5 Blending analysis of Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ metaphor.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 235

Here the generic space is our knowledge of cause–effect

relationships

and problem–solution patterns, which profile the agency to respond to

problems by finding solutions. So here the knowledge of the health
risks

of swamps – especially in the southern states of the United States,

where

Trump had strong support – is blended with the dangers arising from
gov-

ernmental corruption; similarly, the idea that swamps can be drained

with

beneficial effects is blended with ideas of ending government

corruption.

Therefore the generic space – knowledge that problems have

solutions and

of cause–effect relationships – is what drives the conceptual

integration

of an environmental management issue with a political one by

identifying

what they have in common. The emergent structure might be other

forms

of action that would address a wider range of social problems arising

from

corruption.

Another type of metaphor to which blending theory can be applied

is visual metaphor: this is where a metaphor is conveyed through the

visual mode, although this is often accompanied by the verbal mode.

Such multimodality is of increasing importance in online propaganda

circulated via social media, as well as in party political posters. I
illustrate this with reference to a highly controversial poster used by
the right-wing Republican politician Sarah Palin in an election
campaign in 2011. The

poster showed 20 seats (with the names of the Democratic

candidates)

which Palin believed the Republican Party should ‘target’; these were

depicted by the cross hairs of a gun superimposed on a map of the

United

States – each cross hair represented a targeted Democratic seat; the

poster had the caption ‘It’s time to take a stand’. The poster was
controversial

because it connected ideas of assassination, or at least shooting,

with the

political activity of campaigning. Figure 9.6 applies a blending

analysis to the poster.1

Here I suggest that what drives the blend is a schema for cause–
effect

relationships. The aiming of the gun is blended with forming a political

plan; the shooting of the gun with the act of voting; and the resulting

death with the defeat of the Democratic opponent. Conceptual

metaphor

theory might analyse this with the conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS

ASSASSINATION; however, blending analysis integrates a more

abstract
scenario for plans leading to actions that lead to outcomes or results
– it does not articulate any abstracted conceptual metaphor. Its
emergent structure could also relate to the political assassination of
politicians. Because visual metaphor does not contain words
(although here the visual imagery

was verbally supported), it seems that the entirely conceptual

representa-

tions of blending theory work well. Both Donald Trump’s verbal

metaphor

‘drain the swamp’ and Sarah Palin’s visual ‘cross-hairs’ metaphor

were

1 Suzanne Downing, ‘New York Times uses shooting to blame Sarah

Palin again’, Must

Read Alaska, 26 June 2017, http://mustreadalaska.com/new-york-

times-uses-shooting-

blame-sarah-palin.

236 Critical Metaphor Analysis

GENERIC SPACE:

CAUSE–EFFECT

a. Plan

b. Action

c. Result

INPUT SPACE 2 –

INPUT SPACE 1 –
POLITICS

WAR

a. Taking aim

a. Planning a strategy

b. Shooting an opponent

b. Voting

c. Killing the opponent

c. Winning a seat

BLENDED SPACE

a. Planning strategy – Taking

aim

b. Voting – Shooting an

opponent

c. Winning a seat – Killing an

opponent

Figure 9.6 Blending analysis of the visual ‘cross-hairs’ metaphor.

quite creative and innovative, and blending theory is better suited to

ana-

lysing such metaphors than conceptual metaphor theory, which is

always

dependent on prior norms and expectations based on historic

metaphor
patterns. However, conceptual metaphor theory, as we have seen, is
effec-

tive in analysing conventional and entrenched metaphors.

9.5 Case Study 2: interpretation of metaphor in

Obama’s first inaugural address using conceptual

metaphor theory

I now illustrate how analysis of the metaphors in a particular speech

can

reveal conceptual metaphors. To do this, I examine Barack Obama’s

first

inaugural address, given in January 2009 (Core Text 1). Initially, I

classify

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 237

metaphors in terms of the source domains identified and then

consider

to what they are used to refer (their target domains). Before

proposing

conceptual metaphors that influence cognitive representations,

extensive

evidence is needed from a range of speeches by the same politician.

For

example, a conceptual metaphor I identified for Martin Luther King, Jr,

was THE HISTORIC STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IS A JOURNEY

(Charteris-Black, 2011) and there is evidence of this in section 9.5 of
Obama’s speech: ‘who have carried us up the long, rugged path
towards

prosperity and freedom’. When we locate allusions to other speakers,

we

are tracing an emergent discourse metaphor. The same procedure

would

be used with speeches by the political left or right, inaugural

speeches, or speeches given in particular historical circumstances,
such as around elections or in the lead-up to war.

An analysis of the speech circumstances shows that the speech was

given at a time when the speaker was just becoming aware of the
extent

of the financial crisis and so needed to dampen the feelings of

euphoria –

sometimes verging on hysteria – that surrounded Obama’s election to

the

presidency. As a young president in his first term of office, he needed,

like Kennedy almost 50 years before, to establish himself as a
statesman and

show himself to be in command of a precarious situation. For

Kennedy,

this had been in relation to an international crisis, whereas for Obama

it

was in relation to a financial one that started in the United States but
which came to have global implications. Analysis of the speech
circumstances
will later assist us in explaining the metaphor choices, and more
detailed

background on the speech circumstances is given in Charteris-Black

(2011,

Chapter 11).

We now examine how the metaphors identified in Chapter 8 might be

interpreted by providing some cognitive representations in the form

of conceptual metaphors. Initially, I decided to classify the metaphors

with reference to their source domains, because this early phase of

meta-

phor interpretation delays making more debatable decisions about

target

domains (to what metaphors refer); this is because source domains

are

evident in the surface level of the text, whereas targets are present in
the understanding of the speaker and audience. Where metaphors
from the

same source domain recur, it is possible to identify this as a category,

though it is useful to have a general category for metaphors that do

not

(at least initially) appear to be part of a patterned use of metaphor

(see

‘Various’ in Table 9.3). Because I was interested in the distribution of

metaphors, I analysed the first part of the text (sections 1–10) and the
last part (sections 22–29) separately; the findings are shown in
Tables 9.3 and 9.4.
What we may notice is that most of the metaphors used in the text
can

be classified in terms of relatively few source domains; for example,

the

source domain of weather and the sea allows us to propose a

conceptual

metaphor CIRCUMSTANCES ARE THE WEATHER, which accounts

for

the group of weather and sea metaphors in the first and final parts of
the

238 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Table 9.3 Analysis of metaphor source domains in sections 1–10 of

Obama’s first inaugural address (Core Text 1)

Source Domain

Examples

Various

high office (2.4); far-reaching network (3.2); a new

age (3.3); jobs shed (3.4); the ways we use energy

strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet

(3.5); a sapping of confidence (4.2); a short span of

time (5.3); in search of a new life (9.1)

Human

economy is badly weakened (3.3); a nagging fear (4.2);

have strangled our politics (6.2); a young nation (7.1)

Journeys and Motion

sacrifices borne by our ancestors (1.1); America has

carried on (2.4); to carry forward that precious gift

(7.2); to pursue their full measure of happiness (7.2);

our journey has never been one of short-cuts or

settling for less (9.3); It has not been the path

for the faint-hearted (9.4); who have carried us up

the long, rugged path towards prosperity and

freedom (9.5)

Religion and Ethics

collective failure to make hard choices (3.3); we have

chosen hope over fear (6.1); worn-out dogmas (6.2);

choose our better history (7.2); that noble idea, passed

on from generation to generation (7.2)

Sight

vision of those in high office (2.4); next generation

must lower its sights (4.2)

Weather/Sea

rising tide of prosperity (2.2); still waters of peace

(2.2); gathering clouds (2.3) raging storms (2.3)

speech. It is noticeable that several of the source domains that occur

in

the first ten sections recur in the final part (weather/sea, human,
journeys and motion, religion and ethics). Identifying a distribution like
this implies that there was an underlying rhetorical purpose in the use
of metaphors

from this source domain. But once we start to consider ‘purpose’ – or

the

rhetorical plan behind the use of metaphor – we are moving on to the

explanation of metaphor, which I discuss in Chapter 10.

When interpreting how metaphors work in this particular speech, we

may also wish to classify them by their target domains; this can help

in identifying the specific themes or topics that metaphors are used to

address. I have employed this approach in Table 9.5, in which many

of

the metaphors identified, initially by source domain, can then be

grouped

together by target domain to produce macro propositions – some of

them

quite similar to Ruth Wodak’s content-specific topoi. The findings for

this analysis are shown in Table 9.5 and in the Comments for
Exercise 9.2.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 239

Table 9.4 Analysis of metaphor source domains in Core Text 1

Source Domain

Examples

Various conventional

moment that will define a generation (22.4); The

instruments with which we meet them (24.1); the

quiet force of progress (24.5); duties that we do not

grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly (24.7); calls

on us to shape an uncertain destiny (25.2)

Human

whisper through the ages (22.2); the year of America’s

birth (26.2)

Journeys and Motion

how far we have travelled (26.1); we refused to let

this journey end (27.3); we did not turn back nor

did we falter (27.3); we carried forth that great

gift of freedom (27.3); delivered it safely to future

generations (27.3)

Religion and Ethics

guardians of our liberty (22.3); spirit that must inhabit

us all (22.4); the promise of citizenship (25.1)

Light and Darkness

sees us through our darkest hours (23.2)

Weather/Sea

the depth of winter (26.6); winter of our hardship

(27.1); let us brave once more the icy currents (27.2);

endure what storms may come (27.2)

Table 9.5 Analysis of target domains and propositions in Core Text 1

Target domain

Metaphors

Current dangers and

gathering clouds (2.3); raging storms (2.3);

risks (negative social

far-reaching network (3.2); economy is badly

events, states and

weakened (3.3); the ways we use energy strengthen

actions)

our adversaries and threaten our planet (3.5); a

sapping of confidence (4.2); a nagging fear (4.2);

next generation must lower its sights (4.2); have

strangled our politics (6.2); winter of our hardship

(27.1)

Qualities of character

sacrifices borne by our ancestors (1.1); America has

required to contend

carried on (2.4); vision of those in high office (2.4); a

with the past dangers

young nation (7.1); to carry forward that precious gift

and risks in American

(7.2); to pursue their full measure of happiness (7.2);

history

who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards

prosperity and freedom (9.5); in search of a new life

(9.1); the quiet force of progress (24.5); Let it be told

to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter

(26.6); we carried forth that great gift of freedom

(27.3)

240 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Table 9.5 continued

Target domain
Metaphors

Qualities of character

we have chosen hope over fear (6.1); It has not been

required to contend

the path for the faint-hearted (9.4); sees us through our

with the present

darkest hours (23.2); duties that we do not grudgingly

dangers and risks:

accept, but rather seize gladly (24.7); calls on us to

determination and

shape an uncertain destiny (25.2); how far we have

endurance

travelled (26.1); the year of America’s birth (26.2); let

us brave once more the icy currents (27.2); endure what

storms may come (27.2); we refused to let this journey

end (27.3); we did not turn back, nor did we falter

(27.3); delivered it safely to future generations (27.3)

Values

collective failure to make hard choices (3.3); worn-

out dogmas (6.2); our journey has never been one

of short-cuts or settling for less (9.3); choose our

better history (7.2); that noble idea, passed on from

generation to generation (7.2); guardians of our

liberty (22.3); spirit that must inhabit us all (22.4); the

promise of citizenship (25.1)

In Chapter 10, I discuss how interpretation of these target domains

contributes to an explanation of Obama’s use of metaphor in this
speech.

Exercise 9.2

Look at the metaphors in Tables 9.4 and 9.5, and attempt to formulate
the wording of some conceptual metaphors (remember to put the
target domain first and then the source domain). Are there any that
could be analysed using blending theory? If so, attempt to draw a
diagram like those shown in Figures 9.4–9.6.

9.6 Evaluating conceptual metaphor and blending

theory

I would guard against treating conceptual metaphors as having any

special

status because they are convenient ways of outlining a possible

cognitive representation, but they are useful in identifying discourse
features of metaphor as well as in detecting the underlying ideological
import of metaphors through the type and intensity of the evaluation
they convey. As Ritchie (2003, p. 143) points out, the conceptual
metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR actually emerges

from a field of interrelated concepts, including athletic contests,

games,
and interpersonal quarrels as well as war and argument: The
associations

of each of these concepts are available for metaphorical application

to the others as well as to external concepts such as business and
politics.

Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method 241

So experiences, often from childhood, make available a whole set of

entailments, images, schemas and so on that relate language to

experience

of struggle and conflict. In this respect, ‘the propositional expression

of a conceptual metaphor is but a mnemonic and not to be accorded
independent status’ (Ritchie, 2003, p. 144). Conceptual metaphors
emerge from a similar recursive process to the one described above
when identifying

linguistic metaphors: a conceptual metaphor is postulated as a

working

hypothesis but then modified in line with further evidence. Works by

authors such as Goatly (2007) and Charteris-Black (2011) contain an

index showing the conceptual metaphors for which there was

evidence

in the speeches examined, but these should be taken as subject to

further

modification in line with findings from additional data on the politicians

examined. It is also acceptable to group metaphors thematically

without arriving at a stage of proposing a particular conceptual
metaphor. One of
the risks of proposing conceptual metaphors is that they become a
reifi-

cation or naturalisation of a pattern of metaphor use that constrains

how

language will (or should) be used in the future, whereas we might

hope

that language would evolve and change in line with discourse shift
over

time. We have seen how blending theory can be preferable for

handling

predictions about how metaphor might emerge in the future by

identify-

ing the more abstract generic spaces that are shared by the input
spaces.

Conceptual metaphors should only be identified when there is

evidence

of the repeated systematic use of the same source domain for the
same

target in a particular discourse (this could be defined in terms of

genre or individual style), not where there is only evidence of a local
system. Here, for distinctive metaphors and for innovative visual
metaphors, we might

turn to blending theory.

9.7 Summary

Metaphors typically arise from a tension between the intended sense

of a
word or phrase in its specific verbal context and the normal, or
linguistic, senses that this same word or phrase has in the language
as a whole (as

established from a corpus). But over time these uses become

convention-

alised and entrenched in the everyday language of politicians so that

they

influence psycholinguistic processing. Critical linguistics is concerned

with identifying evidence about intentions and purposes from a
corpus of language; examining the associations of a particular word
allows inferences

to be made about the intention of a speaker. ‘Metaphor’ is a

metalinguistic concept, and how far an individual ‘sees’ metaphors
will vary according

to the extent to which that person responds to the pragmatic or

contex-

tual meaning (evident from considering its use in a speech and the
speech

circumstances), the conceptual or cognitive meaning and the

linguistic

meaning (evident from a dictionary). Some types of metaphor will

‘stand

242 Critical Metaphor Analysis

out’, whereas others will not – to the extent that this questions
whether we classify them as a metaphor or not.

Evidence from a corpus will be helpful in working out this interactive

and dynamic relationship between the pragmatic and linguistic
meaning,

and assist with attributing intention and purpose – which we shall see
is

necessary when it comes to explanation. There is always a danger in

stud-

ying something like ‘metaphor’, in that we reify it and start to attribute

agency and purpose to the metaphor itself – whereas in CMA we

should always return to questions of rhetorical purpose: Why is this a
metaphor?

What type of metaphor is it? Why was this type of metaphor chosen

(e.g. familiar or novel)? What social impact does this choice have?
Where

do we find evidence of this impact? How else could it have been

said?

In interpretation, some principle of classification of metaphor is

needed;

this can be according to psycholinguistic and/or corpus evidence,

such as

whether a metaphor is novel, conventional or entrenched. It can also

be

according to the notions of the source and target domains of the

meta-

phors – the identification of these facilitates the formation of

conceptual metaphors. Evidence for these can be found from
previous research, and
of their ability to predict linguistic metaphors in texts other than the
ones analysed, or in the case of lengthy speeches, in different parts
of the same speech. However, they should be postulated tentatively
and subject to

revision and reformulation in their wording, always accepting that they

are working hypotheses rather than final conceptual rules. Where
metaphors

are novel, or visual, blending theory can provide a richer and more
insightful analytical framework.

Essential reading

Cameron, L. and Low, G. (eds) (1999). Researching and Applying

Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor

Analysis

(Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Chapter 2.

Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think:

Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexes (New York:
Basic Books), Chapters 3 and 5.

Pragglejaz Group (2007) ‘MIP: a method for identifying

metaphorically used words in discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol,
22(1), 1–39.

Ritchie, L.D. (2003). ‘“ARGUMENT IS WAR” – Or is it a game of

chess? Multiple meanings in the analysis of implicit metaphors’,
Metaphor and Symbol, 18(2), 125–146.

Ritchie, L.D. (2013). Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press),

Chapter 9.
Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), Chapter 6.

Chapter 10

Purposeful Metaphor and Social

Cognition

10.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss two important concepts that relate to the

expla-

nation of metaphor: ‘ideological metaphor’ and ‘social cognition’ as

this

offers a theory for why orators use metaphors. When Aristotle defined
met-

aphor as ‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’

(Aristotle, 1952), the use of ‘giving’ implies something that is done
intentionally – an action where language is used with real-world
purposes. CMA explores

the ideological nature of these purposes in order to explain why

metaphors are used. In this chapter, I therefore use the term
‘ideological metaphor’

to refer to a metaphor that legitimises the worldview of a social group

(Charteris-Black, 2017b). Such ideological metaphors provide

coherent representations of a story that a speaker is actively telling. It
is often the ideological purpose of metaphor that turns a speech into
a narrative, rather than a list of conceptual metaphors or other
cognitive representations.

I describe such narratives as ‘myths’, which can be defined as

follows:
Myth therefore … engages the hearer by providing stories that
express

aspects of the unconscious. It provides a narrative based representa-

tion of intangible experiences that are evocative because they are

unconsciously linked to emotions such as sadness, happiness and

fear.

(Charteris-Black, 2011, p. 22)

A closely related model to account for groups of related metaphors is

the

concept of a ‘scenario’, which Musolff (2006, p. 28) defines as

follows: We can characterise a ‘scenario’ as a set of assumptions
made by competent members of a discourses community about
‘typical’ aspects of

a source-situation; e.g. its participants and their roles, the ‘dramatic’

storylines and outcomes, and conventional evaluations of whether

they

count as successful, or unsuccessful, normal or abnormal,

permissible or

illegitimate etc. These source-based assumptions are mapped onto

the

respective target concepts.

243

244 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Notice how metaphors offer whole storylines with dramatic roles that
establish their interconnectedness. In fact, ‘image schemas’,
‘scenarios’,

‘scripts’ and ‘context models’ are not fundamentally different from

‘myths’

but have a different intellectual origin; the notion of a political myth

originates in political science (Edelman, 1988; Flood, 1996), whereas
the other

terms originate in cognitive and discursive psychology. I discuss

myths in

more detail towards the end of this chapter, when analysing reasons
for

using metaphor in public communication, but first I compare myth

with

these other related concepts.

Van Dijk (2008b) draws on cognitive psychology in his concept of

‘social cognition’; this is where ‘social representation’ contributes to

‘organised clusters of socially shared beliefs’. He has developed this

into a theory in which he describes mental models as ‘contexts’.
These contexts are ones where participants, drawing on episodic
memory, construct

unique, subjective interpretations of communicative situations. He

adopts

a distinction (made originally by Tulving, 1983) between episodic and

semantic memory, in which episodic memory stores personal
autobiographical experiences while semantic (or ‘social’) memory
stores general,
abstract, socially shared representations. So there are mental models
for

personal individual experiences (episodes) and for socially shared

mental

models. ‘Social cognition’ therefore refers to the construction of

personal understanding with reference to cognitive representations of
the social

world. As he puts it:

It is not the social or political situation itself that influences text or talk,
but rather the way individual participants represent, understand or
otherwise construct the now – for them – relevant properties of a
situation.

Thus contexts are not objective, or ‘out there’, but subjective

constructs

of participants. In terms of contemporary cognitive psychology, this

means that contexts are mental models represented in episodic

memory:

context models. (van Dijk, 2008b, p. 188)

I have demonstrated these mental models in the application of

blending

theory in Chapter 9. Although the theory is interesting, it is difficult to

see why van Dijk restricts ‘context models’ to verbal communication
(this

is the only thing that distinguishes them from ‘mental models’: van
Dijk,

2008b, p. 71). Why should contexts be purely verbal, and if they are
not, how are context models different from mental models?
Metaphors and

memories are often visual, as we saw in the analysis of the ‘cross-

hairs’

poster in Chapter 9, in which case the distinction between ‘context

models’

and ‘mental models’ becomes hard to maintain. The drift away from
an

objectivist situational account of thought to a cognitive one reflects in

the

notion of ‘speech circumstances’ described in Chapter 4 and

emphasises the need for a shared understanding of context rules
between speaker and

audience.

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 245

In my view, metaphor influences personal psychological contexts

while

also contributing to socially shared beliefs; developing conceptual

meta-

phors is a way of understanding and communicating social

representations

implied by metaphors, but does not determine personal cognitive rep-

resentations – as these are probably unique. For example, how

individuals

respond to the visual ‘cross-hairs’ metaphor may depend on whether

or not
they support America’s current gun ownership laws. I suggest that
meta-

phors influence the ‘subjective constructs of participants’, and

conceptual metaphors are similar to the socially shared mental
models that are present in semantic memory and give rise to long-
term cognitive representations that

‘form the basis of all social practices, including discourse production

and

comprehension’ (van Dijk, 2008a, p. 175). However, these long-term

representations could also be analysed as the emergent structures of
blending

theory.

Here I illustrate how conceptual metaphors contribute to

understanding

van Dijk’s mental models by taking further the analysis of Tony Blair’s
and

Jeremy Corbyn’s image of ‘a beacon’ (discussed in Chapter 8). I

suggest they

were both contributing to a different version of the same long-term

cogni-

tive representation as Michael Foot when he talked about ‘The red

flame of

socialist courage’. The image of a beacon and a red flame were both
intended to inspire positive representations of feelings of courage and
hope associated with the political context of the time (courage was
needed when the Labour

Party was declining, and hope was needed when it was being
transformed in
different directions by Blair and Corbyn). Each of these speakers and
at least some of their audience shared these beliefs, and the
audience would have

recognised the speakers’ purpose in using these images.

Conceptual metaphors such as EMOTION IS FIRE and POLITICAL

CONVICTION IS FIRE offer a mental model that integrates not only

embodied experience (we know that when our emotions are aroused,
we

experience an increase in bodily temperature) but also cultural

knowledge.

Fire is used to burn debris and other unwanted things, and in social
revo-

lutions it symbolises a rejection of the past order. It may also tie in

unconsciously with ideas originating in alchemy that are associated
with using

heat to purify base metals and turn these into gold, giving rise to a
concept that PURIFICATION IS FIRE. The expression ‘the sacred fire
of human

liberty’ is used extensively in American political rhetoric (see

Charteris-

Black, 2004, pp. 100ff; 2017a, pp. 184–5). As well as strong emotions
and idealism, Foot’s ‘red’ fire, brings in another far-left symbol – red
as the colour of Communism – a beacon only warns against danger,
whereas

revolutionaries embrace a creative destruction of the old order. So

‘fire’
metaphors activate a shared network of associations based on
underlying

schemas that contribute to a long-term cognitive representation – a

mental

model or context – for political conviction. Not all fire metaphors do

this, but there are a sufficient number to show evidence of both a
conceptual

network and a purpose behind their use.

246 Critical Metaphor Analysis

The ‘career of metaphor’ hypothesis (Bowdle and Gentner, 2005)

proposed that as a metaphor becomes conventionalised over time,
the mode

of processing changes from comparison to categorisation. We saw in

Chapter 8 how the metaphor ‘cigarettes are time bombs’ works by

establishing a category of potentially lethal objects to which both
cigarettes and time bombs belong. Conceptual blending of metaphor
provides cognitive

representations that creative orators can exploit in novel metaphors

to

shift the mode of processing back from categorisation to comparison.

For

example consider the charismatic left-wing orator Tony Benn:

You see there are two flames burning in the human heart all the time.

The flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope you can
build a better world. And my job at 83 is going round and fanning

both flames … because people need encouragement. (Tony Benn,

12 December 2008)

Just as Foot’s metaphor ‘the red flame of socialist courage’

reactivates a

comparative mode of processing by a conceptual blend of

associations

involving the metaphoric use of ‘fire’ words, interacting with the

symbol-

ism of ‘red’, so here Benn uses fire imagery to contrast negative and
pos-

itive emotions in a rich conceptual blend. There is an emergent

structure

in his self-representation as someone who goes round fanning the

flames

of emotion. Whether it is effective is another matter – the idea of

being

burnt in a fire may make socialism appear dangerous. The potential

for

the reactivation of comparative processing demonstrates underlying

cogni-

tive representations; conceptual metaphors proposed seek to capture

these

cognitive representations as economically as possible, but they can

also be understood by blending theory.

The notion of ‘social cognition’ (van Dijk, 2008a) provides a theory of

why many language features (apart from metaphor) are persuasive; it

is
oriented to what takes place in the hearer’s mind, whereas
‘purposeful metaphor’ is oriented to speaker’s intentions. Social
cognition and purposeful metaphor offer complementary ways of
exploring the same phenomenon –

one places more emphasis on reception and the other on production;

similarly, blending theory is reception or interpretation oriented and

con-

ceptual metaphor theory is production oriented. ‘Ideological

metaphor’

does not draw a distinction between speaker and hearer, and

legitimises

a worldview that is jointly constructed by both. The ideological nature

of

metaphor is more obvious in political propaganda, where there are

gov-

ernment departments and agencies whose primary function it is to

produce

colourful metaphors – just as there are marketing departments of

large

corporations with a similar objective. In Chinese rhetoric, metaphors

such

as ‘paper tiger’ (something that appears dangerous but is in reality

harm-

less) or ‘running dog’ (a servile lackey) invite processing by

comparison

when in translation – though the rhetorical effect of the comparison

will
depend on the cultural values attached to animals such as ‘tiger’ and
‘dog’.

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 247

However, for Chinese adult native speakers they are formulaic

expressions

and so may be processed by categorisation. Similarly, metaphors

such as

‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ state invite processing by categorisation because

they

have become equally formulaic ideological metaphors.

CMA proposes that an important area of choice is whether to use

meta-

phors at all, and, if they are used, which metaphors to use, as such
choices communicate ideology. No matter how entrenched
metaphors become, the

fact that they have been chosen presupposes that at their time of
inception they were ideological. So an assumption of CMA is that
much language use

is purposeful, and its own purpose is to emancipate by raising

awareness

of choices that reinforce social prejudices and communicate, and at

times

constitute, ideologies.

The authors of metaphors such as floods or tidal waves of immigrants

are drawing on a conventional way for the political right to think about
immigrants. But once the terms are understood as metaphors that
invite

comparison – perhaps when they are used in a novel conceptual

blend such

as ‘a tsunami of immigrants’ – this raises awareness of a fear-based

topos

for describing the movement of people across national boundaries in

this

way (and perhaps suggests alternatives as well). In overt cases, such

as in the discourse of the far right, there is direct evidence of the
purposeful-ness of metaphors because they are chosen
systematically from a range of

domains associated with danger (e.g. van Dijk, 1987; Hart, 2011,
2017; Chilton, 2004; Charteris-Black, 2006). But this is less the case
with more covert metaphors – words such as pressure or burden
when applied to immigration – and CMA aims to provide insight into
the possible motivation of metaphors such as these that may be
processed by categorisation

rather than comparison.

10.2 The purposes of metaphor

In this section, I explain in more depth some purposes of metaphor

first

introduced in section 8.1 of Chapter 8; though I explain these

separately, it should be remembered that these purposes interact
dynamically with each

other so that when a metaphor is encountered, it is not instantly

ascribed
a purpose. However, exploring possible motives (conscious or
otherwise)

that underlie the use of metaphor raises awareness of the potential

scope

for metaphor for the communication of ideology – even though in real-

time processing hearers are only aware of a general effect, or

conceptual

blend, rather than its cause. A particular example of metaphor may

often

be motivated by a single predominant motive – though typically there

are

several – and it is beneficial to have an understanding of the full

rhetorical repertoire for metaphor so as to identify potential purposes
in a particu-

lar speech. I begin by summarising the seven purposes in Figure 10.1

– it

may help to compare Figure 10.1 with Figure 1.1 (p. 7), which shows
the rhetorical means of persuasion in political speeches.

248 Critical Metaphor Analysis

2. Heuristic:

Simplifying issues,

so that they become

intelligible, and framing

3. Predicative:
issues

1. Gaining

Implying positive or

attention and

negative evaluations

establishing trust

of actors and issues

in a way that makes

an argument

Purposes of

7. Mythic: Framing

metaphor

4. Empathetic:

participant roles so

Arousing feelings that

that they contribute to,

are favourable to the

or create, apolitical

speaker

myth
6. Ideological:

5. Aesthetic:

Representing political

Creating textual

actors and issues in

coherence and alluding

a way that reflects,

to respected orators

or constitutes,

and/or history

a world view

Figure 10.1 Persuasive purposes of metaphor.

10.2.1 General rhetorical purpose: gaining the audience’s

attention and establishing trust

Aristotle advised orators to connect with audiences initially by

attracting their attention, as this is a prerequisite for other persuasive
modes such

as the artistic proofs; the use of language that is colourful and

sometimes memorable, such as metaphor, seems to contribute to this
purpose. When

gaining attention, it is important to establish trust and to demonstrate

that the speaker has the right intentions, so the prologue of a speech
is often
oriented to the speaker, as he or she needs to establish ethical
credentials.

Notice how Michael Foot does this: ‘No one is less surprised than me
that

this Conference has been dominated, and will continue to be

dominated

in my judgement, by the rising anxieties and fears and anger of our

peo-

ple about unemployment up and down this country.’ He uses

metaphor

to index himself as sharing the strong emotions aroused by high

unem-

ployment. Jeremy Corbyn also opens a speech with a metaphor

about the

dangers of Brexit: ‘Labour is a government in waiting and we are

ready

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 249

to take up the responsibility for Brexit negotiations. Labour respects

the

referendum result and the decision to leave the European Union. But
a

Labour Brexit would look very different to the race-to-the-bottom tax

haven backed by this Conservative Government.’ This is what

Charteris-

Black (2017b) describes as a ‘competitive race’ metaphor.

The need to gain attention also applies to media reporting of
speeches, and for this reason orators use memorable, ‘soundbite’
metaphors to inspire followers and arouse media interest. ‘The big
society’, ‘winds of change’, ‘rivers of blood’ and so on are nominal
metaphors that attracted attention because

they were short, memorable and readily available for distribution

through the media. There is also always the hope that an especially
powerful metaphor

will become a catchphrase for a policy that encapsulates the

predominant

political perspective of a whole period – as happened with the ‘war on

terror’

or the ‘Arab spring’. Such metaphors become a form of shorthand

and offer

banners around which supporters can rally. Political advertising is no

different from advertising in general – it fails completely if nobody
notices it, and the more provocative the metaphor, the better from this
point of view – but it also depends on political context. In situations
where a high level of emotion may be considered undesirable
metaphor, especially colourful metaphor, may be avoided altogether;
an example of this is in the language of Jeremy

Corbyn. I searched a corpus of his speeches, and, in spite of the

example given above, found few instances of ‘fire’ metaphors (two
uses of ‘beacon’); ‘fuel’ is only ever used by Corbyn to refer to petrol
rather than as a metaphor meaning ‘stimulate’ or ‘contribute to’ as in
‘fuel inflation’. It is generally minority parties from the political
extremes that are associated most closely with a colourful use of
metaphor, and it may be that his avoidance of metaphor is

motivated by a desire to dissociate himself from populist discourse.

10.2.2 Heuristic purpose: framing issues so that they are

intelligible in a way that is favourable to an argument

Political, social and especially economic issues are abstract, complex

and

usually disputed, and metaphors are a way of simplifying issues to

make

them generally intelligible. The majority of people have only a partial

understanding of these issues, especially in the case of financial mat-

ters – notice how quickly the metaphor ‘credit crunch’ took off to refer

to the severe restriction on credit following the subprime mortgage

crisis

in the United States. One reason for this was that very few people
knew

what a ‘subprime mortgage’ was. A similar attempt to rename

complex

issues occurred when the inability of European governments to pay

their

debt became known as the ‘sovereign debt crisis’ – a term which, like

‘subprime mortgage’, few people probably understood in any depth. It

is

useful to political audiences when abstract issues are explained by

image-

based metaphors that make them more intelligible – though in the

case of

recent economic events the metaphor of ‘Austerity’ is really only a

way
250 Critical Metaphor Analysis

of referring to the effect of economic problems rather than helping us

to understand their causes (economists themselves do not seem to
understand how the problems arose). The heuristic role of metaphors
concerns problems for which there may not be readily available
solutions – in particular, the causes of these problems – so a
metaphor such as ‘winds of change’

is more accessible than a concept such as ‘decolonisation’. As Mio

(1997,

p. 130) explains: ‘Because of information-processing demands,

people can-

not pay attention to all aspects of political evidence. Therefore,

something is needed to simplify decision-making, and metaphor and
other shortcut

devices (e.g. cognitive heuristics) address this need’.

Metaphor provides the mental means of accessing a concept by

referring

to something that is abstract, such as ‘peace’, using a word or phrase

that in other contexts refers to a material entity, such as ‘roadmap’
(Semino,

2008, pp. 110–17). As we have seen, when cognitively accessible

metaphors become entrenched, their status as a metaphor becomes
invisible, and they

become increasingly processed by categorisation. When metaphors

become

catchphrases, they reveal one aspect of what they refer to but

conceal other ways of thinking about an issue if a different metaphor
were used: they
frame issues in a way that is favourable to the speaker’s argument.
Critical explanation of a metaphor involves working out exactly what
that metaphor

brings to our attention and what it obscures. Part of explaining the

metaphor is to consider how we might have thought about an issue
differently had a

literal equivalent – or alternative metaphor – been used; for example,

if the entrenched metaphors in Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ and
Enoch

Powell’s so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ were replaced by a ‘Velvet

Curtain’ or

‘Rivers of Gold’, this would reactivate comparative modes of

processing.

CMA seeks to identify what is implied and the other point of view

concealed by the metaphor. For example, when Harold Macmillan

said,

‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent: whether we

like

it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact,’ he

was framing the independence movements in the British colonies as
a natural force and implying that independence should be accepted
because it

would be accepting a natural process. It was an inevitable concession

by

the British government. The metaphor obscured any notion of agency

on

their part and its indirectness was euphemistic because, in reality,

decol-
onisation entailed a massive shift in political power. As the experience
of the French government showed when it withdrew from Algeria in
1962,

granting independence was not something that was accepted by

everyone.

A resistance movement – the OAS (Organisation armée secrète) –

did not

frame independence as a natural process to be accepted

fatalistically: it was to be challenged and resisted. So ‘wind of change’
had a covert argument

of acceptance rather than resistance. But metaphors can also be

used by

opponents of change: for example, when Enoch Powell used the

phrase

‘River Tiber foaming with much blood’, he was framing immigration as

inevitably leading to conflict and arguing that it should be resisted, but

his

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 251

choice of language obscured the reality that widespread immigration

into

Britain has been a largely peaceful process.

10.2.3 Predicative purpose: implying an evaluation of political

actors and their policies

We examined the concept of predication in Chapter 6, where we

found that ideological perspectives are conveyed by the traits,
characteristics,
qualities and features attributed to social groups. Metaphor provides
a

lexical resource for highlighting or concealing positive or negative

features: when Hitler referred to the Jews as ‘parasites’, he was
highlighting negative features, but when he spoke about ‘the final
solution’, this was evidently

concealing negative features of the death camps. We also saw that

this

often works intertextually, so that a metaphor can allude to previous

uses

by opponents to offer a counter-representation and contest political

issues.

Metaphors offer positive representations of the speaker and his

supporters, and of their actions and policies, and a negative
representation of opponents and their actions and policies.

While this sounds simple, how it is done by lexical choices is often

much more complex. For example, Charteris-Black (2011) describes

in

detail how Blair and Clinton used verbs such as ‘create’, ‘craft’, ‘forge’

and ‘shape’ metaphorically to represent themselves as creative

forces

working for what is morally good, and proposed the conceptual

metaphor

POLITICAL ACTION IS CREATING WHAT IS GOOD, but these

words

might not at first sight be conveying any explicit evaluation. A further

claim was that Blair used aggressive physical verbs such as ‘stamp
out’,

‘strip away’ and so on when describing actions against negatively

evaluated entities. The political left always refers to reductions in
central government expenditure as ‘cuts’. The entities represented as
warranting destruction

are usually abstract entities such as the nuclear arms trade:

We know, also, that there are groups or people, occasionally states,

who

trade the technology and capability for such weapons. It is time this
trade was exposed, disrupted, and stamped out. (Blair, 14 September
2001) To capture this, I also proposed the conceptual metaphor
POLITICAL

ACTION IS DESTROYING WHAT IS BAD. Politicians establish legiti-

macy by representing themselves as upholding the moral values that

bind

society together by regaining control over rampant forces. Control

over

what is threatening is obligatory because it ensures survival of the

social and moral order. Of course, the conceptual metaphor
POLITICAL ACTION IS

DESTROYING WHAT IS BAD presupposes that the speaker knows

what

constitutes badness and contains an argument about what should be

done.

Hitler thought the Jews constituted a force for social disintegration,

and the metaphor of ‘the final solution’ was in reality an argument for
death camps.
252 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Disease metaphors are typically used by politicians for predicative

purposes. In political philosophy, the analogy between disease and

social

disorder demands a rational response of some sort. Early political

the-

orists such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes

recommended

intervening before the disease was out of control. Susan Sontag

argued

that, after the French Revolution, disease metaphors became a much

more

melodramatic hallmark of totalitarian movements. For Hitler, the Jews

were syphilitic and cancerous; for Trotsky, Stalinism represented

syphilis; and in Arab and Iranian polemic, Israel is represented as a
cancer in the

heart of the Arab world (e.g. Bakhtiar, 2016). The switch to fatal
illnesses argued for much more radical cures. As Sontag (1991, p.
73) summarises:

‘Disease imagery is used to express concern for social order, and

health is something everyone is presumed to know about.’

The main point of Sontag (1991) is that a polemical use of disease

met-

aphors – in which disease becomes progressively represented by

metaphors
from the source domain of war, such as invasion, is damaging for
people

like herself who are actually suffering from one of these diseases.
She illustrates how, when a disease is conceptualised as an invasion,
it also entails a powerful moral argument, so that in the same way as
it is right to end

a disease, it becomes right to end whatever is metaphorically

represented

as being disease-like. Once the enemy is effectively demonised by

disease

metaphors, it becomes a moral obligation to destroy him.

Margaret Thatcher represented social problems and political oppo-

nents as illnesses, which implied that regaining control required

surgical

intervention. In these right-wing metaphors, the politician is

represented

as a doctor, and his or her solutions to social and moral problems as

remedies – with milder conditions treated with medicine while more

dras-

tic ones require intrusive surgery with the aim of restoring balance.
For

Thatcher, I proposed the conceptual metaphors: ‘LABOUR POLICIES

ARE A DISEASE’ as in:

Labour’s real prescription for Britain is the disease half the world is
struggling to cure. (October 1989)
A Britain that was known as the sick man of Europe – And which
spoke the language of compassion but which suffered the winter of
discontent.

And ‘CONSERVATIVE POLICIES ARE A MEDICINE’ as in:

They dodged difficult problems rather than face up to them. The

ques-

tion they asked was not “Will the medicine work?” but “Will it taste all
right?” (October 1985)

The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, developed

a

style of argument characterised by the systematic use of disease

metaphors

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 253

(see Charteris-Black, 2007, Chapter 8, for a detailed account). Here

is one

example:

But the deluge of immigrants which the British encouraged, and the

segregation which followed, arrested this healthy, natural process and

precipitated the problems which have plagued the Malays ever since,
and which have undermined their rights as the definitive people of the

peninsula.

To describe these, I proposed two conceptual representations: THE

POLITICIAN IS A DOCTOR; and POLITICAL PRACTICE IS

MEDICAL
PRACTICE (Charteris-Black, 2007, p. 173). Since at times a degree
of force is necessary in the practice of medicine (as, say, to remove a
rotten tooth or a diseased organ) this argues that similarly in politics,
forceful policies are legitimate; for example, in a debate over a
university merger, Mahathir argued that ‘when the indications are
irrefutable, amputations,

however painful, must be undertaken’ (Mahathir, 14 July 1967). The

argu-

ment here is one often used by extremists of the left or the right: the
ends justify the means. The predicative purpose of metaphor has the
same cognitive objects as the heuristic purpose: to frame political
actors and issues in line with an underlying rhetorical purpose of
‘being right’. But it does so more explicitly with reference to positive
and negative scales that draw on lexical semantics for good and bad
embodied experience of life: health

and life are inherently positive, and disease and death inherently
negative.

Such frames contribute to the development of the allegorical

character of

political metaphors (Gibbs, 2015). Framing an issue in a way that

conveys strong evaluations also contains implied arguments – ones
that may not

stand up in an analysis of argument structure.

Exercise 10.1

Go through the contents list of a collection of speeches such as

MacArthur’s The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches or
any other source that gives the titles of speeches. List the titles that
contain a metaphor.
➢ Select one of these speeches and analyse the predicative and
heuristic purposes of metaphor by considering the features that
repeated metaphors

bring to an audience’s understanding and what features they

obscure.

➢ Identify any metaphors in this speech that convey an evaluation of

some

type. Make a table with two columns to show the entities, actors or
issues

that are evaluated (1) positively and (2) negatively.

➢ Write a short account of how your findings framed a situation in a

particular way. Try to indicate the arguments that are being made and
whether

these are explicit or by predication.

➢ Discuss how it might have been framed differently had alternative

meta-

phors been used, and the effect this would have.

254 Critical Metaphor Analysis

10.2.4 Empathetic purpose: to arouse the audience’s feelings

in such a way that they will be favourable to the

speaker

The interactive dynamics between the orator and audience offer

evidence of

how metaphors evoke an emotional response; for example, if you

look at the analysis of the artistic proof of pathos in Obama’s
inaugural address given at the end of Chapter 1, you see that in
almost every section where pathos is employed, there is audible
applause or cheering at the next opportunity: Starting today, we must
pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of
remaking America [CHEERS] (11.7)

know that America is a friend of each nation every man, woman, and

child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to
lead

once more [CHEERS AND LONG APPLAUSE] (16.4)

It is worth noting how each of these metaphors encourages positive

emo-

tions of optimism and hope associated through personification: the

first

example creates an image of a person showing resolution and

courage in

recovering from being knocked over. Although speaking of nation

states

as individual people with the capacity for thought and action is a

conven-

tional way of discussing national affairs, the use of the expression

‘dust

ourselves off’ reactivates the comparison between an abstract entity,

the

nation state, and an embodied individual engaged in a boxing match

(see

Gibbs [2015] for a discussion of POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING

MATCHES). The second example conceives of international relations

in terms of personal relationships, with America as a friend.

Conceiving

of abstract international relations as if they were relationships

between

people creates the potential for the full range of emotions that we
associ-

ate with relationships – empathy towards friends and family or

hostility

towards enemies, criminals or villains who threaten our group.

Intertexual use of metaphor also arouses stronger emotions by

transfer-

ring the emotions aroused by the historical memory of admired and

loved

past leaders. For example, if we look at the broader context of

Obama’s

use of the friendship metaphor, we can identify an allusion to John F.

Kennedy’s inaugural address (see Chapter 3):

Obama

Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for
expediency’s sake (3) [APPLAUSE]. And so to all other peoples and
governments

who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small
village
where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each
nation …

John F. Kennedy

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling

to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 255

them help themselves, for whatever period is required – not because

the

Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but
because

it is right. (8.1)

What evidence is there here of allusion? First, the proposition that

America is offering friendship, second, the reference to ‘village’, and
then the syntax: Obama begins ‘And so to all . . .’; it is not particularly
common to start a sentence with a dative construction and it evokes
the syntax of Kennedy’s series of parallel phrases: ‘To those old
allies’, ‘To those new States’, ‘To those peoples’ and so on. For
Obama, allusion aroused positive emotions

associated with Kennedy’s memory. As mentioned in Chapter 1,

humour

also contributes to arousing the emotions, and metaphors are

sometimes

used humorously. Charteris-Black (2011) illustrates how right-wing

politi-

cians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used humour

success-
fully. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond
employed

a humorous extended metaphor to denounce his opponents in his

autumn

budget speech in 2017:

Both we Conservatives and politicians of the centre-left thought we

had won so decisively that the one or two remaining proponents of

hard-left socialism in Parliament like Corbyn and McDonnell were for

years treated almost as museum pieces. Dinosaurs worth preserving

for

the sake of historical curiosity. But last week at Brighton the dinosaurs

had broken out of their glass cases, their political DNA apparently

uncontaminated by any contact with the reality of thirty years of global

economic development, ready to wreak havoc fighting the battles of

the

past using the language of the past all over again. A sort of political

version of Jurassic Park.

He also employed a magician metaphor and alluded humorously to a

rugby metaphor used by his colleague Boris Johnson:

I suspect that I will prove no more adept at pulling rabbits from hats

than my successor as foreign secretary has been in retrieving balls

from

the back of scrums.

Such humorous metaphors on what are otherwise very serious
occasions

are a way of establishing empathy with an audience.

10.2.5 Aesthetic purpose: creating textual coherence

We saw in the discussion of tropes in Chapter 4 that metaphors are

not evenly distributed, but tend to cluster in rhetorically important
parts of

the speech – typically the prologue and the epilogue; this contributes
to

coherence by identifying a theme early on and indicating that a

speech is

approaching a conclusion when the same metaphor theme is

returned to

256 Critical Metaphor Analysis

later. This aesthetic function establishes the speech as being well-

formed, balanced and having the qualities of a piece of music, in
which the coda

is signalled by a return to a main theme. I shall illustrate this in detail

in Case Study 3 (below), which explains the metaphors in Obama’s
inaugural

address, but here I would like to illustrate how metaphor creates

coherence in a speech given to the United Nations Youth Assembly
on 12 July 2013

by the young Pakistani girl, Malala. She wanted to make a speech

with the

dual themes of advocating non-violence and encouraging the

education of
girls. She explains the context early on:

Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side
of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the
bullets would

silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of
voices.

She then introduces the two main themes:

I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the

terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.

Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of

me,

I would not shoot him.

In the narrative of the speech, she introduces two metaphors to

develop

the theme of education, one is a ‘light’ metaphor and the other a

metonym

for education:

Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we

see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are
silenced.

In the same way, when we were in Swat, the north of Pakistan, we

real-

ised the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns. The
wise saying, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ – it is true. The
extremists
are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them.

‘Pens and books’ are from the same domain as education and
represent

it – and so are metonymic. In the speech coda she returns to the idea
of

knowledge as weaponry:

And if we want to achieve our goal, then let us empower ourselves

with the weapon of knowledge and let us shield ourselves with unity
and togetherness. … So let us wage, so let us wage a glorious
struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism, let us pick up our
books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons. One child,
one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education
is the only

solution. Education first.

Here the ‘pen and books’ metonyms are then metaphorically

construed in a

conceptual blend as ‘weapons’. The conceptual blend is

systematically developed through the speech to create coherence –
at a local textual level, but also

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 257

intertextually so that a speaker can create a particular style of

discourse that

forms a political identity. Charteris-Black (2011) illustrates how a

number of different politicians create such identities through this
stylistic of metaphor – often in combination with other linguistic
features such as modality.
For example, Malala’s sense of self-conviction permeates her
rhetorical style so that her personal bravery and commitment to a
cause is communicated

through a combination of the language of modality with metaphor.

Exercise 10.2

Analyse the conceptual blend that Malala creates between ‘pens and
books’ and

‘weapons’ by drawing a diagram that shows the two input spaces, the
generic space and the blended space (see Figures 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6).
What is its emergent structure?

10.2.6 Ideological purpose: to offer a ‘worldview’

In a study of political speeches, I defined ideology as ‘a coherent set

of

ideas and beliefs that provides an organised and systematic

representa-

tion of the world’ about which the holders of the ideology could agree

(Charteris-Black, 2011, pp. 21–22). A more detailed definition is ‘the

basis of the social representation shared by members of a group.
This means

that ideologies allow people, as group members, to organise the

multitude

of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong,
for

them to act accordingly’ (van Dijk, 1998, p. 8). In Chapter 9, I gave a

few illustrations of ideological metaphor, for example pressure-related

metaphors in relation to immigration (‘pressure’, ‘strain’, ‘burden’ etc.)

and the associated idea of Britain as a contained space all form part
of a

worldview that experiences immigration as threatening. The use of

crime

metaphors relating to justice was an ideological motivated way of

framing

the ‘War on Terror’, and the use of plant metaphors is an ideological

way

of framing economic issues so that they are represented as being

controlla-

ble (economic growth, the green shoots of recovery etc.). Crime

metaphors

cast politicians as judges and plant metaphors as gardeners, but

without

making explicit the role of the judge or gardener, because ideological

uses of language are generally covert. These metaphor systems may
be revealed

by analysis of the predicates (as in section 10.2.3), but ideology may

sometimes only be revealed by analysis of the systemic use of
metaphor rather

than merely the lexical semantics of particular words in the

metaphors.

Ideological metaphors are systematic and form long-term mental rep-

resentations that contribute to a mythic view of the world. An example

of
this is Lakoff (2002), which contrasts Republican and Democratic
ideologies by contrasting a strict father with a nurturing parent. He
claimed that Republicans employ metaphors that emphasise
government as strength-based and as concerned with authority,
whereas Democrats employ

258 Critical Metaphor Analysis

metaphors that emphasise the caring role of government. As Mio

(1997,

p. 130) puts it: ‘They [metaphors] are also effective because of their
ability to resonate with latent symbolic representations residing at the
unconscious level.’ In the conclusion of a detailed analysis of the
metaphors used by American and British politicians, I claimed:

In many cases, therefore, metaphor choice is motivated by ideology.

The same notions could have been communicated in a different way

had

the ideology been different and the same metaphors can be

employed

in different ways according to ideological perspective. In politics, for

example, conflict metaphors could be used either to attack an oppo-

nent’s point of view or to represent the opponent as an aggressor.

Different aspects of the source domain were found to correspond with

different ideological outlooks. (Charteris-Black, 2004, p. 247) The

point I was making was that ideologies through their use of metaphor
actually make ideologies, and I illustrate this with reference to what

I describe as the ‘Competitive Race’ metaphor (Charteris-Black,

2017b).
I did not discuss how deliberate this was, but assumed that linguistic
decisions were purposeful. Table 10.1 summarises some ideologies
that are

commonly expressed by metaphor.

Table 10.1 illustrates the findings of particular studies using

conceptual

metaphor theory to explain metaphors in speeches with reference to

evalua-

tion – that is, to the positive and negative representations of political

actors and action, political issues, ideas and ideologies. In places, I
have modified the wording of conceptual metaphors to simplify and
generalise from particular speakers to concepts that characterise
political speeches in general.

It is not possible to list all research, but I indicate a few sources in the
footnotes. I use the term ‘in-group’ to refer to those allied to the
speaker –

whether the ‘we’/‘us’ refers to supporters who are physically present

in the audience, members of a party, a region, a nation or believers in
a valued

ideology; and ‘out-group’ to refer to those whom the speaker

represents as

the ‘other’ – whether ‘they’/‘them’ refers to opponents, members of an

opposition party, an enemy or subscribers to a devalued ideology.

I would like to illustrate ideological metaphor with reference to a

speech

made on 20 September 2010 by the American performance artist and

singer Lady Gaga (Core Text 10). The purpose of the speech was to
oppose
homophobia in the armed forces at a rally protesting against the
policy

known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DATD) that discriminated against

bi- and homosexual military personnel by preventing them from

serving

in the army if they shared information about their sexual orientation.

The speech is named by a metaphor, ‘The Prime Rib of America’, and

Lady

Gaga develops this ideological metaphor in the narrative of the

speech as

indicated in the following extracts; ideological metaphors are in italics

and line numbers are in brackets to show their distribution through
the speech:

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 259

Core Text 10: Lady Gaga ‘The Prime Rib of America’,

20 September 2010 (extract)

My address to you today is called The Prime Rib of America. … (7)

Equality is the prime rib of America. (19)

[CHEERING]

But because I’m gay, I don’t get to enjoy the greatest cut of meat my

country has to offer. … (21)

If you serve this country, is it acceptable to be a cafeteria American

soldier? Can you choose some things from the constitution to put on
your plate, but not others? A buffet, perhaps. I’m not talking about
citizens.

We have a right to breath, to protest. We have a right to this rally.

[CHEERING]

But I’m talking about soldiers. Should the military be allowed to treat

constitutional rights like a cafeteria? … (97–102)

And ultimately, how much does the prime rib cost?

[CHEERING]

Because I thought that this was an all-you-can-eat buffet. This

equality stuff – I thought equality meant everyone. But apparently, for
certain

value meals, for certain civil rights, I have to pay extra because I’m
gay.

[BOOING]

I’m allowed to stand in line next to other men and women. I’m allowed

to get shouted at and shoot a gun to protect myself and my nation.

But when it’s time to order my meal, when it’s time to benefit from the
freedoms of the constitution that I protect and I fight for, I have to pay
extra. I shouldn’t have to pay extra. I should have the ability, the
opportunity, the right, to enjoy the same rights, the same piece of
meat, that my fellow soldiers, fellow straight soldiers, already have
included

in their meal of rights.

[CHEERING]
It’s prime rib, it’s the same size, it’s the same grade, the same cut and
wholesale cost, and it’s in the constitution.

[CHEERING]

My name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

[CHEERING]

I am an American citizen. To the Senate, to the Americans, to

Senator

Olympia Snow, Senator Susan Collins – both from Maine – and

Senator

Scott Brown of Massachusetts. Equality is the prime rib of America.

[CHEERING]

Equality is the prime rib of what we stand for as a nation. (130–156)

260

Negative

THE OUT-GROUP IS A MACHINE

OPPOSING IDEOLOGIES ARE MACHINES

THE OUT-GROUP IS A CHILD

DIFFICULTIES BETWEEN NATIONS ARE SEPARATION/

DIVORCE

STRICT FATHER

OUT-GROUPS ARE OBSTACLES

FAILURE IS SLOWNESS

FAILURE IS LOSING

NATION STATES ARE COMPETITORS

LIFE IS A RACE

SOCIAL PROBLEMS (e.g. INFLATION) ARE ENEMIES

OPPOSING IDEOLOGIES ARE ENEMIES

OUT-GROUPS ARE ENEMIES

FAILURE IS DEFEAT

Positive

THE IN-GROUP/NATION IS A PERSON

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE IN-GROUP IS A PERSON

THE IN-GROUP IS A FAMILY

RELATIONS BETWEEN NATIONS/GROUPS ARE FAMILY

RELATIONSHIPS

RELATIONS WITHIN THE IN-GROUP ARE FAMILY

RELATIONSHIPS
NURTURANT PARENT

PURPOSEFUL POLITICAL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING

ALONG A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION

THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IS A JOURNEY

SUCCESS IS SPEED

SUCCESS IS WINNING

SPEED IS SUCCESS

POLITICS IS SPORT

POLITICS IS A GAME

POLITICS IS FOOTBALL

WAR IS SPORT

POLITICS IS WAR

IN-GROUPS ARE ALLIES

SUCCESS IS VICTORY

POLITICAL DEBATES ARE BOXING MATCHES

Conceptual metaphors and ideology in political speeches

10.1

Table

Source domain

Human/Machine
Family

Motion/Journeys

Sport and games

War and conflict

261

THE OUT-GROUP IS A DISEASE

THE OUT-GROUP’S POLICIES CAUSE DISEASE

SOCIAL PROBLEMS ARE A DISEASE

SOCIETY IS A SICK PATIENT

THE OUT-GROUP IS A VILLAIN

THE OUT-GROUP IS A DEATH FORCE

BAD GOVERNING IS DESTROYING

THE OUT-GROUP IS DARKNESS

THE OUT-GROUP IS A FORCE FOR EVIL

THE OUT-GROUP ARE DEVILS

THE OUT-GROUP IS A PARASITE/DANGEROUS ANIMAL

THE OUT-GROUP IS A WEAK ANIMAL

OUT-GROUP IDEOLOGIES ARE RAPACIOUS ANIMALS

THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE OUT-GROUP IS ANIMAL

BEHAVIOUR
OPPONENTS ARE DESTROYERS

7) for a discussion of how this was used by Margaret Thatcher.

) for a discussion of this in relation to Silvio Berlusconi.

, Chapter

b) for a discussion of competition metaphors.

) for a discussion of the metaphors of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and

George W. Bush.

) for a discussion of Taiwanese speeches.

1996

2011

2017

2011

2008

) for a discussion of family metaphors in debates around the

European Union.

THE IN-GROUP’S POLICIES ARE A MEDICINE

THE POLITICIAN IS A DOCTOR

THE IN-GROUP IS A HERO

THE IN-GROUP IS A LIFE FORCE

GOOD GOVERNING IS CREATING

THE IN-GROUP IS A SOURCE OF LIGHT

THE IN-GROUP IS A FORCE FOR GOOD

THE IN-GROUP ARE GODS/ANGELS

THE IN-GROUP IS A POWERFUL ANIMAL

(BULLDOG, LION etc.)

SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS A BUILDING/STRUCTURE

) for an interpretation of political metaphors as allegories.

2006

2015

See Musolff (

See Semino and Masci (

See Charteris-Black (

See Charteris-Black (

See Gibbs (

See Charteris-Black (

See Lu and Ahrens (

Disease and

health

Myth
Creation and

Destruction

Light

Religion

Animals

Building

Notes

567

262 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Here the conceptual metaphor is EQUALITY IS A CUT OF MEAT. But

a conceptual blend is also elaborated playfully to develop its

ideological

significance through other predicates of the source domain – the

quality of meat, buffet meals and the idea of the price of food varying
according to the sexuality of the consumer. What is interesting about
the choice of metaphor from an ideological point of view is that it
blends a comment on American

consumerist meat-eating culture with its views on gender equality. At

the
surface level, it appears to accept the underlying ideology of meat
consumption, but it then it points to the hypocrisy of a society that
allows people to consume meat, but not to have equal access to
human freedoms. This

creative ambiguity encourages reflection. The DATD policy was

abolished

on 20 September 2011, exactly one year after the speech was

delivered.

Exercise 10.3

Draw a diagram to represent the metaphors in Core Text 10 as a

conceptual

blend (see Figures 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6).

10.2.7 Mythic purpose

The mythic purpose of metaphor is to engage the hearer by providing

stories that express aspects of the unconscious. Myth provides a
narrative-based

representation of powerful, intense, often unconsciously driven

emotions

such as grief, fear, happiness and joy. Myths are purposeful, but their
origin is in the unconscious. I illustrate this duality in an account of
journey metaphors: ‘Analysis of metaphors can add to our
understanding of how spe-

cific rhetorical goals are achieved through the use of metaphors that
match the speaker’s intentions with the audience’s mental schemata
and scripts

for journeys’ (Charteris-Black, 2011, p. 71). I emphasise the

unconscious, mythic, appeal of journeys: ‘In many myths going on
long journeys towards
some predetermined goal is an established means of taking on the
stature of a hero’ (Charteris-Black, 2011, p. 324). It is likely that many
politicians are motivated unconsciously by a heroic ideal but will
purposefully use metaphor to communicate their ideology. For this
reason, ‘purposeful’ metaphor

seems to be an explanatory term because, though it does not

assume that

speakers are fully conscious of their own essential motivation, it

nevertheless implies that they are driven by an underlying purpose
along a rhetorical path towards the anticipated outcome of political
power. I illustrate mythic purpose at the end of my analysis of
Obama’s inaugural address.

10.3 Case Study 3: explanation of metaphor in Obama’s

first inaugural address

Look back to the findings of the analysis shown in section 9.6, and
you

will see that the majority of metaphors are from the source domain of

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 263

journeys. These contribute to the cohesion of the text by identifying

major themes such as the difficulties that are to be overcome by
American citizens and the need for effort to contribute to social and
economic progress.

There is also some correlation between metaphor choice and

rhetorical

purpose: when the speaker is describing present difficulties, there is

the

use of weather metaphors, which remove any possibility of blame or

recrimination, as the weather is generally taken to be a given (rather
than of human creation); this is in keeping with the rhetorical purpose
of an

inaugural speech, which is to overcome feelings of division aroused

by the

election campaign. When the rhetorical purpose is to emphasise

agency

and effort by the audience, there is a shift to journey metaphors;

notice

how these also correlate with the use of first-person plural pronouns.

Finally, we should note how metaphors of light and darkness

introduce

themes of spirituality and idealism, presenting the speaker as a

visionary

with the power of ‘seeing’ the future, and this implies one of the
attributes of a charismatic leader.

There are clusters of metaphors in the introductory and concluding

sec-

tions of the speech – this is especially the case with ‘weather’

metaphors; this indicates the rhetorical importance of these parts of
the speech, as they have a high impact on the audience, and the very
formal, historic occasion requires a traditional or classical rhetorical
style. ‘Light’ metaphors introduce an important central section of the
speech that highlights the

ethical values of the speaker. ‘Journey’ metaphors are distributed

more

evenly through the text because of their role in identifying a major

theme
of effort.

We saw from Table 1.1 that Aristotle claimed that the epilogue has a

high impact, as the last words the audience hears before taking a
decision

(in the case of deliberative oratory) are the most persuasive. He

proposed

that the artistic appeal that is the most persuasive for the epilogue is
pathos because it is crucial to arouse the emotions when concluding
a speech.

Obama uses a complex cluster of metaphors to do this at the end of

the

inaugural speech. The metaphors are from the semantic fields of

weather

(‘winter’, ‘storms’ etc.), water (‘currents’) and journeys (‘turn back’).

They arouse emotions of fear and courage that are connected to
unify the audience for a common purpose. These metaphors combine
for the aesthetic

arrangement of the speech because these are the same semantic

fields as

those used in the prologue. The matching of metaphor in the

prologue and

the epilogue shows the aesthetic appeal of the arrangement. This

aesthetic

appeal is created here by metaphor to produce an elevated style that

is

appropriate to the main theme of his speech, which is the need for a
heroic narrative of nation.
The epilogue has the purpose of arousing emotions that are
appropriate

to an occasion – in this case, the emotion of enthusiasm arising from

the

social effort that is implied by a journey in the company of others. The

use of journey metaphors alludes to the heroic rhetorical style of
Martin Luther King, which was also based on creating a highly
persuasive messianic myth

264 Critical Metaphor Analysis

(see Charteris-Black, 2011, Chapter 4); and Obama had done this
earlier, in his election campaign:

And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us; if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off
our slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we
owe past and future generations, then I’m ready to take up the cause,
and march with you, and work with you. Together, starting today, let
us finish the work that

needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth.

(10 February 2007)

Here metaphors are drawn from the domains of war, sleep and
journeys,

and personifications of ‘destiny’ and ‘freedom’. The dense use of met-

aphor contributes to an elevated style intended to motivate hearers to

carry out the actions necessary to bring about the anticipated

outcomes,

so ‘war’ metaphors imply struggle and effort, and sleeping is equated

with inaction rather than dreaming. Metaphor is therefore a central

rhetorical figure in creating a myth appropriate for the political

purpose

of motivating social action. Figure 10.2 illustrates a mythic element in

the circular argument structure of a speech, but with core themes

Response to

Present crises,

past crises,

dangers and

dangers and

threats

threats

Delivers

A model for

followers from

response to

economic

present crises

oppression

A charismatic

leader
Figure 10.2 Myth and argument structure.

Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition 265

(corresponding with metaphor targets) that recur at various

rhetorically

important parts of the speech.

If you compare this with my analysis of the mythic structure in Martin

Luther King’s speeches, you will find many similarities (Charteris-

Black,

2011, pp. 88–96). In Table 8.5, we identified the following metaphor

targets in the speech: current dangers and risks, qualities of
character required to contend with the past dangers and risks in
American history, qualities of character required to contend with the
present dangers and risks, and values. Figure 10.3 summarises how
all these relate to the primary rhetorical purpose of ‘Being Right’
through the use of metaphor.

The diagram shows how, at the level of metaphor, the model for rhe-

torical persuasion introduced in Chapter 1 can be applied by

identifying

metaphor targets that correspond systematically with underlying

rhetorical

purposes: this provides an explanation for metaphor choices in the

speech

and, more generally, in Obama’s style of discourse.

‘Having the Right

Intentions’
Metaphor Target:

Values

‘Thinking Right’

‘Sounding Right’

Metaphor Target:

Metaphor Target:

Current dangers and

Qualities of character

risks (negative social

required to contend

states, events and

with the present

actions)

dangers and risks

PERSUASION

‘Being right’

‘Telling the

Right Story’

‘Looking Right’

Metaphor Target:
Symbolic Target:

Qualities of character

Tall, young, healthy

required to contend

and confident

with past dangers in

American history

Figure 10.3 Rhetorical persuasion and metaphor in Obama’s first

inaugural address.

266 Critical Metaphor Analysis

Exercise 10.4

Assemble a small corpus of around 10–15 speeches given by a

particular politician. Identify metaphors in this corpus; classify them
by source domain, then by target domain; propose some conceptual
representations. Identify those that contribute to positive in-group and
negative out-group representations, and consider whether they show
evidence of political myth. Work out an economical way of presenting
this myth (using either conceptual metaphor or blending theory). You
may wish to compare your findings with those in Charteris-Black
(2011, 2017b).

Essential reading

Charteris-Black, J. (2017b). ‘Competition metaphors & ideology: Life

as a race’. In R. Wodak and B. Forchtner (eds), The Routledge
Handbook of Language and Politics (London & New York:
Routledge), pp. 202–17.
Gibbs, R.W. (2015). ‘The allegorical of political metaphors in
discourse’. Metaphor and the Social World, 5(2), 264–82.

Goatly, A. (2007). Washing the Brain – Metaphor and Hidden

Ideology

(Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins).

Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics, 2nd edn (Chicago/London:

University of Chicago Press).

Musolff, A. (2006). ‘Metaphor scenarios in public discourse’,

Metaphor and Symbol, 21(1), 23–38.

Comments on Exercises

Exercise 1.1 (p. 6)

There have been a number of attempts to define rhetoric; these and

their authors can be summarised as follows:

Rhetoric is

◇ the art of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any

given case (Aristotle, 1952);

◇ the use of words to form attitudes or induce actions in other human

agents (Kenneth Burke, 1945);

◇ the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation

in beings that by nature respond to symbols (Kenneth Burke, 1945);
and

◇ communication which helps people think alike so that they may

share values, dispositions toward action, and actions (Chaïm
Perelman, 1982).

Negative collocates in the BNC include (ranking in brackets): mere

(5); populist (12); extreme (13); empty (15); incendiary (17) violent
(21); conspiracy (29). Negative collocates in COCA include:
inflammatory (7); heated (9); harsh (10); fiery (12); empty (14);
divisive (16); anti-American (19); populist (20); violent (23); bellicose
(25) hateful (30).

So there are more negative collocates in American English.

Exercise 1.2 (p. 8)

I shall leave you to work out most of these. The most debatable are
(c) and (f); I would say that (c) is deliberative because decisions are
likely to be taken on choice of strategies, and the orientation is
towards the future, whereas (f) is more likely to be forensic, with the
coach passing a verdict on the performance of particular players.

Exercise 1.3 (p. 12)

In the first paragraph, he positions himself modestly with words such

as ‘humbled’ and ‘mindful’; he also avoids criticising George W. Bush
(surely a tempting proposition) by attributing to him virtues such as
‘service’ and ‘generosity’.

In the second paragraph, he refers to the presidential oath, and

relates this to the vision and ideals of the founding fathers of America
– appealing therefore to a shared historical identity.

Exercise 1.4 (p. 15)

When working out the major premise, you need to identify the major
claim that an argument is making – this is similar to identifying the
main topic in a narrative. Here, it is the view that 267

268 Comments on Exercises

young people should avoid debt. The minor premise is a secondary

topic that could be omitted, and the conclusion is about what logically
follows. This is how I analysed the syllogism and enthymeme:

Syllogism
It is unwise for young people to take on large debt. (Major premise)

Going to university requires young people to take on a large debt.

(Minor premise) It is unwise for young people to go to university.
(Conclusion)

Enthymeme

It is unwise for young people to take on large debt. (Major premise)

Therefore young people should choose not to go to university.

(Conclusion)

Here the minor premise is omitted but will be inferred by the audience
because of their everyday experience of debt repayment.

Reason and Analogy

The sort of Reason that could be introduced might be an argument

based on the cost of interest, such as the following: ‘After all, the
more you borrow, the more interest you pay, and the more you go into
debt.’

The sort of Analogy that could be added might be to introduce other

situations in life that are likely to incur debt, such as buying a house.

Refutation

Present a counterposition

Young people should choose not to go to university.

Refute the counterposition

If they don’t go to university, their life chances will be limited to

servicing the needs of an economy at a relatively lowly paid level.

Offer an alternative position

By investing in their education, young people have a better chance of
being fulfilled and put themselves in a position whereby they can pay
back any debts they have incurred once they can afford to do so.

Exercise 1.5 (p. 18)

1 The emotion of anger is appealed to by arousing feelings of

resentment towards the Washington elite.

2 The emotion of happiness is appealed to by suggesting that

government will change to being for the benefit of all.

3 The emotions of happiness and pride are appealed to by the idea of

putting American interests first.

4 Pride in the nation and emotions deriving from historical sacrifice.

Comments on Exercises 269

Exercise 1.6 (p. 27)

The prologue of Core Text 1 is very short – only the first paragraph –
and satisfies the need to establish Obama’s ethos by showing
respect to his predecessor. A short narrative is effective because it
arouses interest by rapidly introducing a narrative of threat and
danger in (2). In (3–5) he continues to frame a narrative of crisis, and
at the end of (5) he introduces his main argument – that the
challenges America faces will be met. In (9), he introduces the proof
of his argument: at previous periods of American history when
challenges have been just as great as today, they have still been met.
This is an argument by historical analogy, and it is this that sustains
the momentum of the speech. In (13), the claim that ‘there are some
who question the scale of our ambitions’ signals the prologue of a
counterargument that is then refuted. The refutation is based again
on historical analogy, in (16) and (17) by referring back to America’s
heroic ancestors, whose ambitions enabled them to overcome the
challenges of their time. He continues in (18–25) with the main
argument of overcoming present challenges by positive future actions
but occasionally switches back to past achievement. The epilogue is
paragraphs (26–28).

He creates a circular flow in the structure of the speech by oscillating

between different time periods, and this cyclical time orientation
creates a mythical appeal. Consider how in (22), after a reference to
‘those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts
and distant mountains’, he continues ‘just as the fallen heroes who lie
in Arlington whisper through the ages (2). So that instead of a linear
progression from past to present to future, reflection on a present
event – American soldiers on patrol in some unnamed but distant
places – leads into a cycling back to the heroes of the American Civil
War and other conflicts for inspiration. This cyclical flow continues in
the epilogue (26), where he recounts a moving story about ‘a small
band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy
river’; notice how in (26) and (27) the focus is brought back on to fear
and courage in response to fear. This related to the historical
circumstances when the speech was given, following a serious
financial crisis that had left America ill-resourced to continue a foreign
policy based on global leadership. The message of the speech
evokes the phrase Clinton used in his campaign against George
Bush Sr: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – that is, the importance of the
economy to the financial well-being of Americans.

In terms of arrangement, this is similar to what I have described as

messianic myth in

the discourse of Martin Luther King (Charteris-Black, 2011, Chapter

4). This is a narrative pattern of historical myth, which could be
formulated as THE AMERICAN PRESENT IS ITS

HEROIC PAST. The effect of this pattern on the arrangement is that

rather than a sequence of narrative followed by proof, followed by
refutation, we find a reiterated cycle of narrative–argument–proof,
narrative–argument–proof. This cyclical arrangement adds a mythic
dimension to the speech that allows it to make an appeal at the
unconscious level and gives it a truly aesthetic status (see Figure 9.2
on p. 223). It is a work of art, and one that we understand better by
analysing its arrangement using the tenets of classical rhetoric.

Exercise 2.1 (p. 36)

The style of the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is one that
creates a tension from both the visual and verbal aspects of his style.
A hallmark of his appearance is the traditional dark suit and tie of a
businessman, yet this conflicts with his dishevelled hair, which evokes
a naughty schoolboy or public school rebel. In his verbal style, there
is a tension between his directness and his accent: Oxford English is
quite typical of this social class, whereas directness and honesty are
not stereotypical qualities of the English upper classes.

The effect of this clash between the expected and the unexpected is
to give the impression of honesty and intimacy – there is a mixture
between socially conventional elements – the accent and the suit,
with those more individual, eccentric features of the outspoken rebel.

‘Boris’ is usually referred to by his first name in the media, which

implies that his style evokes trust, as if we know him personally. By
contrast, Tony Blair – in spite of his considerable communication skills
– became simply ‘Blair’ in public discourse, with ‘Tony’ being only an

270 Comments on Exercises

echo of an earlier public persona. I am not sure that Blair was ever
fully trusted by the public, though he was much admired.

Exercise 2.2 (p. 48)

There is the use of antithesis to contrast good qualities of character –

fighting according to international law, magnanimity in victory and so
on – with bad qualities – dishonourable behaviour and ‘over-
enthusiasm in killing’.

Repetition operates at the level of words, so there is ‘fly’ (1.2) and

‘flown’ (1.3); ‘to liberate’
(1.1) and ‘to free’ (1.2); in 2.1 there is ‘alive at this moment’ and ‘not
be alive shortly’ (2.1). In (3), there is the use of anaphora, where
words are repeated at the start of a sentence ‘You will …’

(3.3. and 3.4); there is a triple repetition (tricolon) in (4.2). In 8.1 there
is ‘wish to fight’, and

‘aim to please’; in (10.1) ‘It is (not) a question of’ is repeated, and

‘decision’ is repeated in (10.2).

Exercise 2.3 (p. 53)

Tropes

Core Texts 2 and 3 both allude to myth by using place names; Collins
alludes to biblical locations and personal names in (3), while the
Henry V speech alludes to the festival of St.

Crispian, and in (14 and 15) aristocratic families are listed by

reference to their family title.

Metaphors are used sparingly but appropriately, so in Core Text 2 we

have a series of metaphors related to battle as a journey (in 2.2, 3.3
and 7.1) and this is continued in (9.2) with the idea of ‘deeds’
following the audience through history – so the journey metaphor
becomes a journey through time: not of individuals but of the effect of
their actions – like the Buddhist idea of karma. There are religious
metaphors in Core Text 2 referring to light in (3.7) and to fire in (6.2);
there are also two other metaphors: in (5.2), where the idea of death
as sleep is evoked by ‘sleeping bag’, though this is also metonymic
as it alludes to the bags in which the bodies of war fatalities are
transported. In the final line there is a metaphor of business as war;
though this could also be metonymic, since military combat is how
soldiers earn a living. Both these metaphors seem euphemistic as
they tend to reduce the threat and danger of war, though without
hiding its realities.

Fewer metaphors exist in Core Text 3, only occurring in (27), where

the idea of moral value as material value is present in ‘hold their
manhoods cheap’. There are, however, a few metonyms: in (8) and
(9), the ‘scars’ and ‘wounds’ stand for the heroic acts which caused
them and so imply bravery and pride, and the ‘flowing cups’ in (16)
stand for recognition of past valour. In a sense, the whole image that
is evoked of a remembrance ceremony appears to stand for the
heroism of the victors.

Schemes

We find two similar antitheses that underlie the messages of both

speeches: first, pervading the whole structure of Core Text 3 is an
antithesis between the present – the imminent battle –

and the distant mythic future when it will be celebrated on Saint

Crispin’s day. This contrast is explicit in line 19, but is also realised
lexically in the contrast between ‘forget’ and ‘forgot’

in line 10 and ‘remember’ in (11), (16) and (20). It is important to the

purpose of the speech because only those who fight heroically will be
remembered, and by implication, those who don’t will be forgotten.
Significantly, ‘remember’ also occurs in sections 2.4, 4.1 and 7.4 of
Core Text 2.

Comments on Exercises 271

Equally important to the cadence of both speeches is the use of

repetition and parallelism. In Core Text 3, ‘Crispian’ is repeated
several times to enforce the mythical appeal of the speech; ‘he that
outlives/shall live this day’ is repeated in (2) and (5); from (12–26), we
have repetition of predictive clauses using ‘shall’. ‘Few’ and ‘brothers’
are both repeated.

Dense repetition at short intervals is important because attention is

likely to be limited when the focus is on the battle, and repetition aids
short-term memory and facilitates processing.

Time viewpoint
In both speeches, the orator takes the perspective of someone in an
idealised future reflecting on an imminent battle; this rhetorical
method presupposes that there will be victory because without
survivors there would be no perspective for this point of view. It is
also worth noting how the schemes and tropes contribute to the time
orientation of both speeches: prior to combat, the focus is on a future
after the victory. The use of a compressed time scale is present in
both speeches, so actions taken in the very near future will have very
long-term consequences: Collins does this very explicitly in (9), where
he emphasises the shame that will attach to dishonourable conduct,
whereas Henry V focuses more on the duration of honour that will
accrue from victory.

From this we can assume that Collins was rather more convinced of
victory than was Henry V, so needed to give more emphasis to the
ethical rather than the military outcome of combat.

Social relations and space viewpoint

The social relations in Core Text 2 are formal and impersonal,

appropriate to the social distance between a respected officer and his
men. The first-person pronoun is used only once –

implying detachment, but the first-person plural pronoun is used

extensively to communicate solidarity between leader and followers.

In Core Text 3, social relations are communicated by a contrast

based on physical space between those who are close to the speaker
– in line 21 ‘we band of brothers’ and those who are remote (line 25)
from the speaker and less emotionally close. This spatial contrast
then becomes the basis for an appeal to ethos in a contrast between
men who are worthwhile (see lines 17, 23) and men who have little
value ‘hold their manhoods cheap’ (line 27).

Exercise 2.4 (p. 57)

In (2.2), there is interaction between several metaphors, with both

parallelism and an inverted syntax (it is not ‘we will not send those
who do not wish to go on that journey’, which would be the normal
word order). In (3.1) and (3.2), we have metaphors and allusions that
lead into parallelism in (3.3) and (3.4); in (4) we have a metaphor
followed by a tricolon. In (5) we have parallelism and metaphor.

The analysis identified the presence of multiple schemes in both

speeches, a large number of metaphors in Core Text 2 and quite a
few metonyms in Core Text 3; as a result, the two speeches seem to
share a range of stylistic features: they both share the communicative
purpose of motivation and achieve this by keeping the focus on the
distant future rather than the imminent future.

They both also draw on a mythic element and in places employ an

elevated style – for example, when considering honour or the
outcome of the battle. But they also use a plain style with a simple
and uncomplicated lexicon to express ésprit de corps and solidarity in
death; because of the evidence of both an elevated and a plain style,
I suggest that, overall, both speeches employ a middle style. The
movement between high and low styles corresponds with the
conflicting emotions that are likely to be experienced by the audience
on such an occasion.

272 Comments on Exercises

Exercise 3.1 (p. 61)

Coherence is the impression that a reader has of a text’s unity or

completeness. This impression of unity does not necessarily arise
from specific linguistic features in the text, though these can
contribute to such an impression. Coherence arises from the reader’s
awareness of the writer’s communicative purpose, based on their
shared background knowledge of the world and of how texts have
similar communicative purposes.

Exercise 3.2 (p. 67)

Perhaps you identified exophoric reference in (11.1): ‘Finally, to those

nations who would make themselves our adversary’; here, the
reference is to America’s perceived enemy (the Soviet Union and its
allies). Other examples are references to a ‘generation of Americans’;
these could be analysed as exophoric reference when they refer to
groups of Americans who have not been mentioned previously (e.g.
in 3.2), but where reference is repeated, as in (21.2), the second
example is endophoric. Because of its political purpose this speech
probably has quite a large amount of exophoric reference.

Most people find it preferable to approach this task methodically, by

analysing each of the types of deixis separately, so going through the
text to identify first person deixis, then place deixis, and after that time
deixis (though not necessarily in this order). Others might prefer to
work in a more synthetic way by going through the text sequentially to
identify all examples of deixis simultaneously. The first approach is
more likely to avoid missing occurrences, whereas the second might
be better for a discursive account where some examples of deixis are
illustrated rather than each one.

Something to note in analysing person deixis is that second-person

pronouns are only introduced towards the end of the speech; prior to
that the deictic reference is impersonal but using syntactic inversion
(i.e. bringing to the front of the sentence) – for example, ‘to those
states’ (7.1) ‘to those peoples’ (8.1). This indirect form of address to
the audience enhances the rhetorical effect.

Exercise 3.3 (p. 70)

You will note that pronouns are usually anaphoric references because
they refer back to a noun. You will also note that the majority of
cohesive ties are references – these usually account for as many as
90 per cent of all ties.

Generally, texts where there is less reliance on cognitive

circumstantial knowledge will use more grammatical cohesion. For
example, advertisements reduce the amount of grammatical cohesion
because they rely on audience inferencing and therefore on cognitive
knowledge; other types of text reduce this sort of cohesion for
reasons of economy, though this is often at the expense of
comprehension. The reduction of grammatical cohesion can present
difficulties for the decoding of texts by younger learners; authors of
children’s books are particularly concerned to make cohesive
relations explicit rather than relying on inferencing. Given that political
speeches need to accommodate multiple audiences, they are likely to
be in the mid-range.

Exercise 3.4 (p. 73)

There are a number of examples of repetition throughout Core Text 4.

The following are just some of the ones that you might have
identified.

Comments on Exercises 273

In (14–18) there is repetition of the phrase ‘both sides’, first

introduced in (11.1).

‘unite’ in (15) is a repetition of ‘united’ in (6.2); and ‘divide’ is a

repetition of ‘divided’ in (6.3).

‘arms’ in (16.1) is a repetition of the same word in (12.2).

‘power’ in (16.1) is a repetition of the same word a number of times in

the speech, including (2.2, 7.3 and 9.4).

‘globe’ (2.3; 8.1) and ‘global’ (23.1).

‘world’ in (19.1) is a repetition of the same word in (2.1, 3.2 and 10.1).

As regards reiteration:

Synonyms of ‘planet’ (20.2) include the following lexical chain: ‘world’

(2.1; 3.2; 10.1; 19.1; 24.1; 24.4; 26.1 and 27.1)

‘earth’ (18.1) and ‘world’ (27.1).

A synonym of ‘enemies’ (22.1; 23.1) is ‘adversary’ 11.1.

Antonyms include ‘peace’ (19.1), which is itself a repetition of various
earlier examples is an antonym of ‘war’ (3.2; 10.2 and 13.1).

Overall there are probably more examples of repetition than there are
of reiteration (synonyms and antonyms).

Exercise 3.5 (p. 77)

Once we have identified lexical cohesion in a speech there are a

number of stages of analysis we could then undertake; a simple
quantitative approach would be to work out the number of each type
of cohesive tie, as in the table below:

Summary of cohesive relations in Core Text 4

Type of cohesive tie

Paragraphs 1–13

REPETITION

60

COLLOCATION

22

REITERATION (SYNONYMS/ ANTONYMS)

19

TOTAL LEXICAL COHESION

101

From this we see that repetition is the most frequently used tie; and
collocation, synonymy/

antonymy are similar in frequency. These patterns could be different

in speeches by different speakers. It is possible that, in speeches,
given the greater demands on the hearer for cognitive processing,
there will be more repetition than in other types of text.

We could also use cohesion analysis to identify key sentences or

paragraphs of a speech;

‘key’ here would mean that one paragraph has multiple cohesive ties
to preceding or following paragraphs. For example, paragraph (9) is
linked especially closely with preceding sentences, with many
lexically cohesive ties (more than a quarter of all those identified in
the first half of the speech). It is particularly dense in collocations –
with nearly half of all the collocations identified in this part. The
following sentences refer back to it: there are 7 ties between
paragraph (10) and paragraph (9), and a further 3 between
paragraphs (11 and 9).

So our analysis of lexical cohesion suggests that paragraph (9)

identifies the major theme of the speech because of its close bonding
with other paragraphs. Hoey (1991) argues that

274 Comments on Exercises

paragraphs with a high density of cohesive ties can be used to

produce a précis of the whole text; there seems to be support here for
his analysis, as paragraph (9) presents Kennedy’s main arguments
that:

1 America welcomes allies, especially from recently independent

nations.

2 America threatens those nations (such as Cuba, though that is only

implied, since Cuba is to the south of the USA), who make alliances
with the USSR, by implication, against the USA.

Paragraph (9) could be taken to predict the Cuban missile crisis that
occurred in October 1962

and the USA response to the Soviet strategy of moving nuclear

missiles to Cuba. Lexical cohesion is central in contributing to the
coherence of a speech and analysis – combined with analysis of the
arguments – enables us to identify what constitutes persuasive
oratory.

Exercise 4.1 (p. 89)

A definition of power: power is when an individual or social group, A,

forces another social group or individual, B, to do things that are in
A’s best interests and prevents B from doing things that are in B’s
best interest.

Legitimate uses of power: the authority of a legitimate court; the

authority of a parent over a child when acting in the child’s best
interests; the authority of a teacher or lecturer over a pupil or student
acting in the pupil’s or student’s long-term interests.

Illegitimate uses of power: the force used by an illegitimate source of

power such as the Mafia. The physical or sexual abuse of children or
young people by those in positions of authority over them. The use of
a position of authority to collect illegal payments.

Exercise 5.1 (p. 121)

Lady Gaga is expressing a high level of obligation when she says, ‘I

have to pay’, and then a high level of undesirability when she says, ‘I
shouldn’t have to pay extra’. Since both are related to ideas of
permission and obligation they are instances of deontic modality.

Emma Watson also expresses a very high level of conviction in

relation to her moral outlook when she states her beliefs by repeating
the phrase ‘I think it is right that…’. These follow Lyons’ definition of
deontic modality: ‘the necessity or possibility of acts performed by
morally responsible agents’ (Lyons, 1977, p. 823).

Debates on gender equality might use epistemic modality when

representing inequality of pay as a fact but will shift to deontic
modality when expressing moral judgements on this purported
situation. In reality pay inequalities derive from the difference in years
of experience or professional qualification since it is (in Britain) illegal
to differentiate by gender in relation to pay because of the Equal Pay
Act (1970).

It has become the norm for celebrities to use their symbolic capital as
a means for expressing political viewpoints and ideologies.

Exercise 5.2 (p. 129)

There are, of course, many changes and modifications made from the
Joint Intelligence Committee assessment that was prepared for a
specialist audience and that produced by political advisers for the
general public and Members of Parliament. I summarise the main
ones in the following table.

Comments on Exercises 275

Published dossier

Commentary

Title:

The development of the generic name ‘Weapons

Iraq’s Weapons of Mass

of Mass Destruction’ not only sounded more

Destruction

frightening but also deliberately left it vague as

to whether or not Iraq was developing nuclear

capability. There was more evidence of chemical

weapons programmes than of other weapon

types – but to put them all into a category of

‘destruction’ was rhetorically persuasive.

This chapter sets out what is

The JIC was clear that it had little concrete

known of Saddam’s chemical,

evidence of current weapons programmes; the

biological, nuclear and ballistic

phrase ‘all the available evidence’ concealed the

missile programmes, drawing on fact that the evidence was very

limited in nature.

all the available evidence.

The intelligence picture …

The phrase ‘judgement and assessment’ emphasised

is extensive detailed and

the essentially subjective nature of the evidence;

authoritative. (Blair in House of

however the use of a new set of adjective clearly

Commons)

increases the level of epistemic modality.

4

Intelligence shows that Iraq has

The verb ‘shows’ is an interesting choice as it

covert chemical and biological

makes a strong epistemic claim: if something is

weapons programmes, in

‘shown’ it is available for all to ‘see’ as well as to

breach of UN Security Council

know.

Resolution 687.

Intelligence also shows that Iraq

The use of the phrase ‘conceal evidence’ implies

is preparing plans to conceal

an intention to deceive that fits with the general

evidence of these weapons,

idea of deception that was felt rhetorically

including incriminating

essential in winning the argument for invasion. If

documents, from renewed

Saddam wilfully misled, then there was no reason

inspections.

ever to trust him.

… intelligence indicates that

Again the use of ‘is willing to use’ heightens the

as part of Iraq’s military

threat posed by Saddam. It is a highly significant

planning Saddam is willing to

shift from ‘to defend the regime from attack’ as it

use chemical and biological

implies his potential to launch an attack – just as

weapons.

he had done in Kuwait in 1991.

We judge that Iraq has developed

The nominal phrase ‘mobile production’ is from

mobile laboratories for military

a semi-technical register that implies a degree

use, corroborating earlier reports

of scientific sophistication that again raised the

about the mobile production of

perception of threat.

biological warfare agents.

The Iraqi military are able to

The replacement of the modal ‘could’ by the use of

deploy chemical or biological

the simple present ‘are able to’ significantly changes

weapons within forty-five

the level of epistemic modality from something that

minutes of an order to do so.

is possible to something that is certain.

What I believe the assessed

The use of ‘established beyond doubt’ clearly

intelligence has established

raises the level of epistemic modality from

beyond doubt is that Saddam

possibility to certainty.
continues in his efforts to develop

nuclear weapons (PM forward)

276 Comments on Exercises

Exercise 6.1 (p. 136)

Fields of action 1, 7 and 8 – Speeches in a political assembly with

legislative powers. Speeches given in the High Court or Court of
Appeals could also be relevant.

Fields of action 2 and 6 – Inaugural speeches, televised speeches

during election campaigns by politicians; speeches made in prime
ministerial debates, but also comments and statements made on the
radio, on television or via blogs. Increasingly, speeches and
statements given via digital media, either through politicians’ own
websites or through blogs. For example, at the time of writing, the
black Labour politician Diane Abbot has been forced to apologise for
a comment she made via Twitter: ‘White people love playing divide
and rule.’ Though she said in her defence that ‘I think the tweet has
been taken out of context and some people have misinterpreted it
maliciously’, it was considered by her opponents to be contributing to
a stereotypically negative view of white people as being racist.

Type 3 Speeches given at party conferences and other political

meetings. Acceptance of candidacy speeches.

Type 4 Speeches given in public debating arenas or in political

legislatures.

Type 5 Speeches given on overseas visits, for international

occasions, such as Nobel prize acceptance speeches, speeches to
the nation or even declarations of war.

Your list might have included anything from the Del Hymes’ (1972)
model for the context of situation to that proposed by Normal
Fairclough (2003). Wodak and Meyer (2009, p. 93) identify four
‘levels’ of context for a particular discursive practice:
1 The other language in the text, or co-text of the practice.

2 The evocation of other texts leading to intertextual and

interdiscursive relationships as it is often similarity between
utterances in different contexts that creates genres and discourses.

3 The particular extralinguistic context of situation as in Hymes’ sense

(such as the institution where this discursive practice occurs).

4 The broader sociopolitical and historical context of the practice.

An analysis of the context for public communication includes aspects

of the setting, such as the time when and the location where a
speech was given, the occasion of the speech and its audience. We
would identify the sex, age, profession, educational level, ethnic,
regional, national or religious affiliation of the speaker. Similar generic
characteristics of an audience might also be identified. We would
identify the participants’ roles, shared knowledge, intentions and
goals.

Exercise 6.2 (p. 142)

In terms of class rather than ethnic identity, ‘chav’ is used in South-

East England to refer to those who wear ‘bling’ (large earrings and
garish jewellery) and behave in a socially irresponsible way –
smoking, drinking, speaking loudly, exhibiting promiscuity and so on;
chavs speak with a strong Estuary English accent; they may be from
a lower social class background. As a discursive strategy, ‘chav’
could be analysed as nomination and predication as it is a name
associated with negative traits relating to social irresponsibility and is
used by people who do not consider themselves within this category.
‘Chav’ is productive in contemporary colloquial English as it has a
verb form meaning ‘to steal’ as in ‘you have chaved my pencil case’.

An interesting pair of names in British culture refers to people leading

itinerant lifestyles without established home bases (e.g. working with
a funfair) – sometimes with origins in gypsy culture. A pejorative
name is ‘gypo’, while a positive name is ‘traveller’; ‘gypo’ marks
Comments on Exercises 277

an ethnic identity whereas ‘traveller’ refers more to a particular

lifestyle that involves moving from place to place. Here are two
examples from the British National Corpus:

… arrested six of them all they found all bits and bobs off hundreds
and hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of cars, and four wheel
drives they specialise in and off to the Continent with it. Yeah, it’s all
organised, it’s not like the gypos will be doing like this, Oh yes! Yeah,
this is all organised bloody down to! Oh yes, all yeah! They handled
something like a thousand pounds worth of cars that they did. (BNC)

We have already significant contact through the international Save

The Children alliance partners in Europe and we have representation
on the European forum for child welfare.

On particular issues, such as work with refugee children and work

with traveller and gypsy families, there is already established
European collaboration. (BNC) In terms of the discursive strategy of
naming, ‘gypo’ is a name used to position a people who do not live in
conventional houses as an out-group that is associated with negative
traits such as stealing scrap metal, whereas ‘traveller’ is used an in-
group marker or as a sympathetic term towards an out-group.

Exercise 6.3 (p. 157)

The table below shows a possible analysis of the second part of the
speech using Wodak’s categories.

Analysis of topoi in Core Text 7

Analysis of topoi

17

People: the people voted for Brexit, so the politicians are obliged to
leave the Customs Union and Single Market.
18

Usefulness: if an action/policy offers the possibility of improvements,

it should be adopted.

19

History: We have not been governed by fear in the past, so we should

not be now.

20

Definition/naming: the EU is defined as equivalent to a religious

authority.

21

People: We need to understand our destiny as a people.

22

Uselessness: Current policies inhibit global trade.

23

Usefulness: If the UK leaves the EU it will improve the world

economy.

24

Uselessness: staying in the EU will lead to a decline in wealth and

values.

25

Usefulness: If we leave the EU, our situation will improve.

26
History: Britain has lead the way in improving the global economy in
the past.

27

Saviour: Britain can save the world by taking the lead in free trade.

28

Definition/Naming: the EU is defined as bureaucratic and the US as

selfish.

29

Saviour: Britain can lead/save the world.

278 Comments on Exercises

The ‘people’ are referred to consistently throughout the text. In (1)

‘the condition of the people’, ‘that group of people’ in (5); (8); ‘the
British people’ in (15); ‘the UK’ in (2) (4), (22), (23) and (26); ‘UK
consumers’ in (4); ‘the United Kingdom’ in (9) and (13); ‘a nation’ in
(6); (14), (21); (16) and (17); ‘Britain’ in (8), (26), (29).

What is worth noticing is that, while different lexical forms are

employed to refer to the idea of the nation state, they are all based
around the concept of the nation. The British people are predicated
as having special traits – being creative etc. – and Britain as being an
exceptional nation; these contribute to a highly favourable view of
Britain by attributing to her a manifest destiny and a sense of its place
in the world.

Exercise 6.4 (p. 159)

The topoi in the second edition of Methods of Critical Discourse

Analysis that do not feature in the first edition include: ‘topos or
fallacy of frightening’; ‘topos or fallacy of authority’;
‘topos or fallacy of nature’; ‘topos of technological progress’; ‘topos or
fallacy of consequences of wealth to environment’; ‘topos or fallacy of
pressure’; ‘topos or fallacy of wasting’;

‘topos or fallacy of freedom’; ‘topos or fallacy of thrift’; ‘topos of

uncertainty’; ‘topos or fallacy of compulsion’ and so on.

Other topoi in the second edition are similar to topoi from the first
edition; for example,

‘topos/fallacy of pressure/compulsion’ is similar to ‘burdening and

weighting’; ‘topos or fallacy of frightening’ is similar to ‘danger and
threat’; ‘topos of costs’ and ‘topos or fallacy of thrift’ both appear
similar to ‘finance’; finally, ‘topos or fallacy of moral’.

There are further changes to the topoi in The Politics of Fear (Wodak
2015) –‘people’ and

‘saviour’ have been added. It is worth noting that preexisting topoi are
selected on the basis that they are specifically relevant to right-wing
populist rhetoric about immigration, which raises the question of
whether the content of topoi are dependent on the topic of political
discourse – and if so, how specific that topic has to be. For example I
have included ‘people’ and

‘saviour’ in analysing an appeal to national identity that makes no

reference to immigration.

Exercise 7.1 (p. 172)

Although Farage’s tone is strident and his style is highly sarcastic, he

is making an attack that is entertaining in such a way as to gain
publicity for his views. Because he addresses the audience
generically rather than naming particular individuals, it is difficult to
argue that he is inflicting social harm on their reputations – and so is
not coercive; this is also because he articulates an opinion that is
associated with his views on the European Parliament. It seems that
when the audience reacts negatively to his sarcasm by nonverbal
jeers, he intensifies his ad hominem with the claim that ‘none of you
have ever done a proper job in your lives’ – again it is a collective
form of address and a familiar argument, so is entertaining rather
than coercive.

Exercise 7.2 (p. 172)

The arguments attributed to Abbot by Gillard are as follows:

1 People who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not
appropriate for high office.

Gillard responds to this with strategy 3: ‘Respond to the attack with

some form of counter attack, that is, to restore the imbalance caused
by an ad hominem argument by responding in like style.’

Comments on Exercises 279

2 ‘If the Prime Minister wants to, politically speaking, make an honest
woman of herself …’

3 ‘Ditch the witch.’ Gillard responds to these with the following advice:
‘He could change his behaviour, he could apologise for all his past
statements.’ This is a version of strategy 4:

‘Request that an ad hominem attack is partially retracted’ – except

she seems to demand a complete rather than a partial retraction, and
this is in line with the hyperbole of her speech.

Exercise 7.3 (p. 177)

The table shows a classification of Trump’s keywords into five

semantic fields: People Terms

Good Attributes

Ethos

The Nation
Money & Finance

people

beautiful

dishonest

nation

billion

folks

better

illegal

America

bill

audience

good

right

China

business

family

great

safe

Mexico
companies

tremendous

choice

countries

deals

incredible

build

American

jobs

amazing

fight

states

money

special

history

pay

love

tax

big

taxes
massive

There are possible variations – for example ‘amazing’, ‘massive’,

‘big’, and ‘incredible’

could be classified as INTENSIFIERS. ‘Dishonest’ and ‘illegal’ could

be in a category ‘Bad Attributes’.

Exercise 7.4 (p. 191)

The table shows a classification of Clinton’s keywords into five

semantic fields: People Terms

Good Attributes

Ethos

The Nation

Money & Finance

audience

excited

childcare

country

affordable

dad

disabilities

casinos

daughter

right
corporations

family

trusted

debt

folks

job

friends

jobs

grandkids

millionaires

280 Comments on Exercises

People Terms

Good Attributes

Ethos

The Nation

Money & Finance

guys

paid

kids
paying

mother

trillions

people

person

student

veterans

The comparison with Trump’s keywords shows that Clinton relied

much more on ‘people’ terms and terms related to ‘money and
finance’ – perhaps indicating the extent to which the two are
associated in her world. Trump relied more on appeals to good
qualities, ethos and the nation.

Exercise 8.1 (p. 204)

The metaphors are in italics:

1 ‘ fiery’ orators, passions become ‘ inflamed’

2 incandescent with rage

3 to black private hospital building. how brightly burns the red flame 4
two flames burning. The flame of anger. the flame of hope

One way of grouping the metaphors might by whether they make

positive or negative evaluations.

1 Negative

2 Positive

3 Negative
4 Positive

The main purpose for using these metaphors is to refer to the force of
emotion. In (1) and (3) emotional intensity is negatively evaluated,
whereas in (2) and (4) it is positively evaluated. In each case, they do
this effectively – especially in (4). That has poetic merit.

Exercise 8.2 (p. 213)

There is variation among researchers as to whether they provide

sufficient information about the source of their data to allow their
research to be replicated. This is especially the case for researchers
into ‘discourse’ – who are interested in how metaphors may pervade
a whole way of talking and thinking. However, there can be difficulties
in accurate generalisation from sets of data that mix up quite different
types of speeches; for example, in the above papers, Lu and Ahrens
(2008) are very specific about the source of speeches and controls
for the genre of speech; this is less the case with the other two
papers, who use general categories of ‘speeches by New Labour’
and ‘speeches given in the European Parliament’, though this may be
because of their interest in identifying discourse characteristics of
these entities. Reisigl (2008a, 2008b) has an overview of types of
political speeches that would allow researchers to control for the
variable of genre, and generally this allows findings to be stated more
confidently.

Comments on Exercises 281

Exercise 8.3 (p. 215)

We should first recall that psycholinguistic approaches typically invite

some form of empirical enquiry to gain insight into cognitive
processing; without this it is, of course, difficult to know what takes
place in the human brain. There is also likely to be individual variation
in the responsiveness to active metaphor, so some individuals tend to
‘hear’ more metaphors than others; we are aware of this when
learning idiomatic expressions in a second language, where the
learner may be more aware of the comparisons because they are
new and unfamiliar than are native speakers of the language.

The following are hypotheses about the types of processing that may
occur:

1 ‘Recipe’ here means ‘plan’, and processing is by categorisation, as

no image of cooking is activated. Cooking is a prototypical situation
for a plan.

2 ‘Fall most heavily on those with the broadest shoulders’ is a single

image of carry-ing a physical burden. I think the use of ‘most’ and
‘broadest’ activates processing by comparison because we imagine
people with varying amounts of strength to carry the metaphorical
‘burden’. Were ‘Something-for-something deal’ in the conventional
phrase

‘ something-for-nothing’, processing would be by categorisation, but

the novel repeated form activates the idea of bargaining and hence
comparison modes.

3 ‘Corridor’ I suggest is a spatial metaphor that requires some

comparison, ‘clout’ and

‘driver’ are conventional physical force metaphors and probably have

elements of both processing modes (and variation between
individuals).

4 ‘Sow division’ and ‘ fanning the flames of fear’ both invite

processing by comparison and stylistically evoke a rather archaic,
even biblical, style.

I emphasise again that the above are illustrations based on

introspection as to the type of processing that may occur; an
empirical approach would require data on how individuals actually
respond to these metaphors.

Exercise 9.1 (p. 228)

1 The ‘ratchet’ metaphor is novel.

2 A ‘blaze of glory’ is conventional.

3 ‘Financial suffocation’ is novel. ‘Collapse of the banking system’ is

entrenched.

4 ‘A road map’ is conventional.

5 ‘Nanny in Brussels’ is novel but exploits a conventional metaphor in

which excessive government regulation is referred to as the ‘nanny
state’.

Exercise 9.2 (p. 240)

Possible Conceptual metaphors are listed here:

(social and economic) circumstances are weather conditions.

history is a journey.

The ‘weather’ and ‘sea’ metaphors for economic and social

conditions could be analysed using blending theory – perhaps more
effectively than the conventional ‘journey’ metaphors (though this
could be attempted).

282 Comments on Exercises

Exercise 10.1 (p. 253)

Here are a few obvious ones:

Harold Macmillan – ‘The winds of change’ (1960)

Martin Luther King – ‘I have a dream’ (1963)

Robert Kennedy – ‘A tiny ripple of hope’ (1966)

Enoch Powell – ‘I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much
blood’ (1968) Michael Foot – ‘The red flame of socialist courage’
(1976)

Edward Kennedy – ‘The dream shall never die’ (1980)

Prince Charles – ‘A monstrous carbuncle’ (1984)

Jesse Jackson – ‘Keep hope alive’ (1988)

Exercise 10.2 (p. 257)

Input space 1: Tools of education

Input space 2: Tools of knowledge

Generic space: Instruments/tools to achieve a purpose

Blended space: Tools of education and tools of war

Emergent space: Fighting a war on illiteracy

Exercise 10.3 (p. 262)

Input space 1: Meat: prime cut

Input space 2: Equality: gender rights

Generic space: Transactions: buying and selling

Blended space: Prime cut and equality in gender rights

Emergent space: Social equality comes with a cost, but it is one

worth paying.

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286 Further Reading and References

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Konstan, D. (2007). ‘Rhetoric and emotion’. In I. Worthington (ed.), A

Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 411–
26.

Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture and

Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Applied Linguistics, 11, 84–99.

Lakoff, G. (1991). ‘The metaphor system used to justify war in the

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Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics, 2nd edn (Chicago/London:

University of Chicago Press).

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By (Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press).

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh:

Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York:
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Lakoff, G. and Turner, M. (1989). More than Cool Reason: A Field

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Lambkin, B. (2014) ‘Migration as a metaphor for time: “Dealing with”

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Lancaster, S. (2010). Speechwriting (London: Robert Hale).

Leith, S. (2011). You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

(London: Profile Books).

L’Hôte, E. (2010). New labour and globalization: Globalist discourse

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Lu, L.W. and Ahrens, K. (2008). ‘Ideological influence on BUILDING

metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches’, Discourse & Society,
19(3), 383–408.

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Mancroft, Lord (1967). Reader’s Digest, February.

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12(2), 113–33.

Mio, J.S. and Lovrich, N.P. (1998). ‘Men of zeal: Memory for
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Metaphor and Symbol, 21(1), 23–38.

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Blackwell).

Palmer, F.R. (1986). Mood and Modality (Cambridge University

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Assessing the political impact of metaphors on citizens’
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Further Reading and References 287

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in Pragmatics, 6(1), 3–27.

Glossary

acronym A word made of the initial letters of other words: NATO,

UNESCO, etc.

agent The person or entity that performs an action described by a

verb, or a process.
allusion A rhetorical figure in which there is indirect evocation of
another text: ‘Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of
Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham’ (Tim
Collins); here the speaker is making allusions to the Bible without
directly mentioning it. Usually, allusions are to texts with high cultural
value.

analogy A parallel or similar instance, referred to because it helps

the process of explanation:

‘Cutting the deficit by cutting our investments in innovation and

education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its
engine’ (Obama) creates an analogy between the economy and an
aeroplane.

anaphora Repetition of syntactically similar clauses at the start of

clauses or sentences: ‘ It’s a promise that says each of us has the
freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have
the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect. It’s a
promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and
generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their
responsibilities’ (Obama).

anaphoric reference When a word refers back to another word

previously used in the text:

‘And so this afternoon, I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in

the American dream’

(King); here, ‘it’ is an anaphoric reference to ‘dream’. (See also

cataphoric reference.) anastrophe The inversion of the usual word
order: ‘The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please’ (Tim
Collins); the usual order would be: ‘We aim to please the ones who
wish to fight’.

antimetabole Repetition of identical words in successive clauses, but

in reversed word order:

‘Eat to live, not live to eat’ (Socrates).

antithesis A rhetorical relation of opposition or contrast: ‘We need a
president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at
the ideas of the past’ (Obama); this relies on an antithesis between
future and past.

antonymy A sense relation expressing the meaning of oppositeness:

‘The black man will have whip hand over the white man’ (Enoch
Powell); ‘black’ and ‘white’ are antonyms.

asyndeton A figure of speech in which conjunctions are omitted to

heighten the impact:

‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ (Julius Caesar).

autonomasia A figure of speech in which a person is referred to

indirectly without using his or her name: “And it is that promise that
forty-five years ago today brought Americans from every corner of
this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s
Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his
dream’ (Obama); here Obama is referring to Martin Luther King.

backgrounding The linguistic means for deflecting something away

from the audience’s attention.

cataphoric reference When a word refers forward to other words

that follow: ‘So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our
country first’ (Obama): ‘news’ is a cataphoric reference to the whole
of the second sentence.

chiasmus A rhetorical figure of two parts in which the word order of

the second part is the reverse or near reverse of the word order in the
first part: ‘Some people use ‘change’ to promote their careers; other
people use their careers to promote change’ (Sarah Palin).

289

290 Glossary
circumlocution (or periphrasis) The use of more words than is
necessary to express a meaning (see example of autonomasia
above).

coherence The impression a text makes of being unified – though

without explicit linguistic evidence of how this sense of unity arises.

cohesion The impression a text makes of being unified that can be

traced to the effect of specific lexical and grammatical relations such
as anaphoric reference and lexical repetition.

collocation The habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items,

such as ‘markets’ and

‘global’ or ‘bankers’ and ‘bonuses’.

colloquialism The use of informal and non-standard coinages such

as ‘Eurowimpishness’ –

said of a politician expressing his support for the euro in a weak

manner.

connotation The associations a word creates; for example, the

connotation of December, within British and North American culture
would be ‘cold’, ‘dark nights’ and ‘Christmas parties’. Connotations
are either personal or cultural.

conviction rhetoric A persuasive way of speaking in which a

speaker’s views are expressed with a very high level of personal
emotional investment.

corpus An electronically searchable database of language.

counterposition An argument that is held by an opponent and which

the speaker seeks to refute.

deixis Where meaning arises by pointing to some aspect of the

context in which words are spoken. It is sub-divided into person deixis
(e.g. ‘he’); place deixis (e.g. ‘here’) and time deixis (e.g. ‘now’).
deliberative speech A speech given to a decision-making or policy-
forming body.

delivery The vocal means through which a speech-maker

communicates.

denotation The literal or ‘dictionary’ definition of a word.

deontic modality The linguistic means available to a speaker for

conveying how necessary or desirable something is.

dialectic A mode of persuasion that emphasises the importance of

logic and reason by arriving at a balanced and truthful perspective
after considering every point of view.

direct speech The use of the actual words that were used, without
grammatical modification.

The term contrasts with indirect speech (also called reported

speech), speech that is reported with some grammatical
modifications.

discourse-historical approach An approach developed by Ruth

Wodak to interpret power relations in discourse with reference to their
social and historical context.

dysphemism A derogatory or unpleasant term used instead of a

pleasant or neutral one: ‘She is a dangerous liar who has disregarded
the lives of Americans, and who has put all of us at great risk while
supporting economic policies that have destroyed our economy’
(Trump on Hilary Clinton): ‘liar’ is a dysphemism.

ellipsis A sentence where part of the structure has been omitted, for
reasons of economy, emphasis or style. Typically, the omitted
element can be recovered on close scrutiny of the context: ‘On
November 4th, we must stand up and say: “Eight is enough”
(Obama). The word ‘years’ is omitted.

embedding When one clause is contained within another.

emotive language Language whose primary function is the
expression of emotion; also called expressive language. The
clearest case is the use of swearing, but other emotive utterances
include involuntary responses to art or scenery, expressions of fear or
affection, and the outpourings found in a great deal of poetry.

endophoric reference When a lexical item refers to another word or

phrase within the same text.

Glossary 291

enthymeme A type of argument structure in which there is a single

premise and a conclusion (an incomplete syllogism).

entrenchment A mode of processing metaphors where there is no

longer any active comparison, as what was originally a metaphor has
established a category meaning of a word. For example, ‘blight’ has
taken on a general meaning of ‘harmful entity’ rather than a specific
disease affecting potatoes.

enumeration A listing which brings more force to an argument or

more vividness to a description.

epilogue The closing part of a speech.

epiphora (or epistrophe) Repetition of syntactically similar clauses,

or words at the end of successive phrases: ‘We are born in sorrow,
pass our time in sorrow, end our days in sorrow’.

epithet A word or phrase which characterises a noun and is regularly

associated with it: the

‘Iron Lady’ became an epithet for Margaret Thatcher.

epideictic speech A speech given at a ceremonial occasion with the

purpose of building consensus.

epistemic modality The linguistic means available to a speaker for

conveying the truth, accuracy or certainty of what he or she is saying.
ethos One of the three artistic proofs in which an argument is based
on an appeal to the character of the speaker and the values that he
or she shares with the audience.

euphemism The use of a vague or indirect expression in place of

one that has an unpleasant association: ‘We will put them in their
sleeping bags and send them back’ (Tim Collins); since he is referring
to the dead bodies of soldiers, this is a euphemism.

exophoric reference When a lexical item refers to something that is

outside the text.

expressive Descriptive of any use of language which displays or

affects a person’s emotions.

Poetic language is usually highly expressive, as is the language of

prayer, political speaking and advertising.

figurative Where words are used in a non-literal way to suggest

illuminating comparisons and resemblances; also called figures of
speech. By contrast, ‘literal language’ refers to the usual meaning of
a word or phrase.

foregrounding The linguistic means for bringing something to the

audience’s attention.

forensic speech A speech given to an assembly whose duty it is to

arrive at a decision about guilt or innocence as regards a crime.

genre A traditional sense refers to an identifiable category of artistic

composition (e.g. poetry, drama, novels, science fiction as well as a
song, sermon or conversation). More recently,

‘genre’ has taken on a wider meaning that has lost its literary
connotations and refers to a body of texts (literary or non-literary) that
share a communicative purpose.

glossolalia Speaking in tongues.

hedge(s) Words and phrases which soften or weaken the force with
which something is said: for example ‘kind of’, ‘sort of’, ‘by any
chance’, ‘as it were’, ‘admittedly’.

heuristic A method by which students discover things for themselves

rather than being told them.

humour A use of language that evokes amusement or laughter, as in

‘If I am a mop, David, you are a broom – a broom that is cleaning up
the mess left by the Labour government’, where Boris Johnson
alludes humorously to David Cameron’s reference to him as ‘a mop’

(Johnson’s famous ‘mop of hair’) and ‘broom’ refers to Cameron,

alluding to the proverb ‘a new broom sweeps clean’.

hyperbole A figure of speech which involves emphatic exaggeration:

‘We’re running against a rigged system and we’re running against a
very dishonest media. The media’s very dishonest.

292 Glossary

It’s very, very dishonest. … It’s just so unfair, it’s so unfair, we’re
running against a rigged press (Trump).

hyponym A lexical item that is a specific member of a more general

class of lexical items; for example, ‘saxophone’ is a hyponym of
‘musical instrument’.

hypophora A figure of speech in which the speaker answers his or

her own question, as in

‘When the enemy struck on that June day of 1950, what did America
do? It did what it always has done in all its times of peril. It appealed
to the heroism of its youth’ (Eisenhower).

hypotaxis When one clause is subordinated to another by using, for

example, ‘because’,
‘when’ ‘which’ and so on. This creates a distinction between a main
and a subordinate clause.

inaugural address A speech given by an American president

following his or her election and marking the beginning of his or her
presidency.

irony A figure of speech where the meaning conveyed contrasts with

that implied by the literal meaning of the words, usually for humorous
or dramatic effect. A contrast is often drawn with sarcasm, where
words with a contrasting meaning are used harshly with the intention
of ridiculing or wounding their target.

isocolon A figure of speech containing two equal and syntactically

balanced parts.

juxtaposition The placing of two items side by side. Authors and

speakers can achieve humorous or telling effects by the judicious
juxtaposition of opposing, unusual or incongruous terms.

kairos A sense of timing so that a particular argument is introduced

at the moment it is most likely to be persuasive.

litotes (pron. lie-TOE-tease) A figure of speech involving an

understatement in which a positive idea is supported by negating its
opposite, as in the last phrase in ‘But because Russia and the West
know that there can be no victory in nuclear war, for thirty-seven
years we have kept the peace in Europe, and that is no mean
achievement’ (Thatcher, October 1982).

logos One of the three artistic proofs in which an argument is based

on an appeal to reason and rationality.

mental model A term associated with van Dijk, referring to the

ongoing subjective representations of participants when processing
discourse in episodic memory.

metaphor A figure of speech in which words are used with a sense

that is different from their primary or basic sense, as in ‘America, in
the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us
remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave
once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.’
Here Obama uses three expressions whose primary sense relates to
the weather to describe economic and political difficulties.

Several kinds of metaphor have been recognised. A conventional

metaphor is one that forms a part of our everyday understanding of
experience and is processed without effort, such as

‘to lose the thread of an argument’. Novel metaphors are those that
have not been extensively adopted in a language community.
Conceptual metaphor is the shared implied meaning that organises
a family of metaphors; for example, ARGUMENT IS WAR underlies
metaphors such as ‘I attacked his views’; ‘he retorted with a salvo’
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

metathesis The transposition of letters within a word: ‘Elvis Lives in

Evil Levis’.

metonymy A figure of speech in which the name of an attribute of an

entity is used in place of an entity to which it is closely related. In ‘So
we must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will
depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live
out there’, Lyndon B. Johnson used ‘hearts’ in place of ‘feelings’
because they are closely related and ‘minds’ in place of ‘rational
thought’ because they are also closely related.

modality The linguistic means for expressing certainty and conviction

by conveying what the speaker holds to be true, necessary or
desirable.

narrative In classical rhetoric, this was the part of the speech in

which the main arguments were introduced.

Glossary 293

oratory The practice of formal persuasive speaking in public.

oxymoron (pron. oxy-MORE-on) A figure of speech that combines
words of incongruous or contradictory meaning as in ‘The sound of
silence’ (Paul Simon). (Sometimes terms like ‘fun run’ and ‘military
intelligence’ are referred to ironically as oxymorons.)

paradox A statement that is contradictory or absurd on the surface

and thus forces the search for a deeper level of meaning: ‘War is
peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength’

(George Orwell).

parallelism A scheme in which two or more clauses share the same

syntactic pattern: ‘America, we are better than these last eight years.
We are a better country than this’ (Obama). (It is similar to isocolon,
but more marked by repetition; the repeated elements may also differ
in length, whereas in isocolon they are the same length).

parataxis The placing of clauses next to each other, but giving equal
emphasis to each clause.

The cumulative effect is to create build up, as in ‘We have to stop

illegal immigration, we have to do it, we have to do it’ (Trump). (This
contrasts with hypotaxis, where clauses are subordinated to each
other).

parison A figure of speech where two entities are compared; ‘In your
statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be
condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical
assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his
possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery?’ (Martin
Luther King); here the rhetorical question is followed by parison.

participants The people involved in a process.

pathos One of the three artistic proofs in which an argument is based

on an appeal to emotion.

periphrasis The use of more words than is necessary to express a

meaning.
personification A type of metaphor in which human qualities are
ascribed to non-human entities. In ‘I will never support a trade deal
that kills American jobs’, Trump personifies the abstract ‘trade deals’
by giving them the attribute of being able to kill.

persuasion A sustained effort to influence the point of view of an

individual or a group.

Persuasion can be compared with manipulation (negative) and

influence (milder).

portmanteau Words combined from two sources ‘Brexit’ = ‘Britain +

‘exit’; ‘remoaner’ =

‘remainer’ + ‘moaner’.

process (verbal) What actually happens and is indicated by verbs.

prolepsis The anticipation and answering of an objection or

argument before one’s opponent has put it forward ‘What we all saw
and heard on Friday was Donald talking about women, what he thinks
about women, what he does to women, and he has said that the
video doesn’t represent who he is. But I think it’s clear to anyone who
heard it that it represents exactly who he is’. Here Hillary Clinton
anticipates that Trump will repeat his denial of speaking in a
misogynstic way.

prologue The opening section of a speech.

proof The part of a speech where the speaker works out which of the
artistic proofs (ethos, pathos and logos) to employ for a particular
argument.

quotation The repetition of language that has previously been

encoded. In ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-
evident: that all men are created equal”’, Martin Luther King quoted
the American Declaration of Independence.
reference The grammatical relationship of identity between
grammatically related lexical items; for example, a pronoun refers to a
noun or noun phrase.

refutation The part of a speech that attacks an opponent’s

anticipated arguments.

register A variety of language defined according to its use in social

situations. Examples include ‘the scientific register’ and the ‘formal
register’.

294 Glossary

reification A figure of speech in which a word that has a literal

concrete meaning is applied to an abstract concept, as in ‘To repair
our broken society, it’s not more of the same we need, but change’
(Cameron); ‘broken’ usually has a concrete meaning but is applied
here to

‘society’. Reification is often used when coining political slogans, for

example ‘the winds of change’, ‘the domino theory’, ‘the big society’.

reiteration A form of repetition where there is some variation (of word

form or syntax) of the repeated forms.

repetition When an identical word or phrase recurs, as in ‘We open

up states, meaning me, meaning you. You know, we’re together. I’m a
messenger. I’m a messenger. That’s all I am.

Believe me. Believe me. I’m a messenger. It’s what I am. That’s what
I am’ (Donald Trump).

rhetoric The study of all the means that could be used for effective
persuasion.

rhetorical question A question for which no answer is expected

because it is already assumed to be known.
scheme A figure of speech where some modification is made in the
sequence of words (e.g. chiasmus).

semantic field A group of words which are related in meaning,

normally as a result of being connected with a particular context of
use. For example, ‘chop’, ‘sprinkle’, ‘salt’, ‘dice’,

‘wash’, ‘simmer’, ‘boil’ and ‘herbs’ are all connected with the semantic
field of cookery.

soft power The gaining of influence by persuasive means rather than

by military force or coercion. It contrasts with hard power, which
threatens others by military or economic means.

speech A coherent stream of spoken language usually based on a

pre-prepared written text and delivered by an individual speaker to an
audience on a particular occasion with a purpose that corresponds
with that occasion.

style The means through which an individual expresses his or her

identity.

substitution The process of replacing one lexical item with another.

superordinate A lexical item that represents a general class

containing a number of specific lexical items; for example, ‘musical
instrument’ is the superordinate of ‘saxophone’ and ‘trumpet’.

syllogism A type of argument structure that contains a major

premise, a minor premise and a conclusion.

symbolic power Power that arises from the position of individuals,

such as journalists or academics, by their institutional status or from
the cultural value that society attributes to non-institutional individuals
such as writers, film-makers or artists.

synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part is used for the

whole, or the whole is used for the part. In ‘to put their hands on the
arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day’
(Obama), ‘hands’ is used in place of ‘American people’.

synonym Word with an equivalent meaning. For example, ‘cheap’ is

a synonym of ‘inexpensive’.

transitivity The relationship between participants in a process; it

indicates who does what to whom. Transitive verbs take an object,
whereas intransitive verbs do not.

tricolon A figure of speech containing three equal and syntactically

balanced parts: e.g. ‘veni, vidi, vici’: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’
(Julius Caesar).

trope A figure of speech where words are used with senses other
than their normal ones (e.g. metaphor).

zeugma A figure of speech in which a word applies to two others, but

with different senses.

Index

Abbot, Diane, 138

Churchill, Winston, xiv, 61, 203, 250

acronym, 140, 289

Cicero, 53, 166

ad hominem, 162ff, 164ff, 167ff, 181, 191

circumlocution, 289

response to, 170ff

claim, 143, 147ff

ad populum, 174
Clinton, Hillary, 11, 14, 37, 38, 165, 168, aesthetics, 255ff

170, 179, 181ff, 187, 189ff, 226

African-American rhetoric, 55ff

coercion, 89, 167ff, 170ff, 182, 185

agent, agency, 95, 109ff, 289

cognitive circumstances, 63, 91ff, 152

allusion, 50, 255, 289

cognitive schema, 199ff ( see also frames

analogy, 13, 25, 252

and schema)

anaphora, 44, 46, 289

coherence, 59ff, 77, 198, 255ff, 290

anaphoric reference, 67ff, 289

cohesion, 61ff, 290

anastrophe, 289

grammatical, 62

antimetabole, 289

lexical, 70ff

antithesis, 44, 48, 289

colligation, 220
antonymy, 289, 72ff, 78ff, 187

Collins, Tim 39ff

Arab spring, the, 37, 203

collocation, 34ff, 71, 73ff, 290

argument, 4ff, 10ff, 19ff, 24, 55, 100ff,

comedy/ comedian, xvii, 163

, 167

134ff, 143ff, 157ff

communication, public, 90, 104, 111, 208

fallacious, 159

conceptual metaphor, 200, 211, 229ff

appearance, 15, 34, 94ff, 100

conjunction, 69ff

Aristotle, 16, 37, 49, 158, 201, 213, 248

context, 64, 90ff, 111, 133ff, 146, 159, arrangement, 19ff

162ff

asyndeton, 289

conviction rhetoric, 116, 290

autonomasia, 50, 289

corpus methods, 162ff, 173ff, 290

‘credit crunch’, 249

backgrounding, 110, 289

critical discourse analysis, 87ff

Berlosconi, Silvio, xvi

critical metaphor analysis, 197ff

‘Big Society’/‘big talk’, xv, 249

culture, (topos of), 145ff

Blair, Tony xiv, 116ff, 122ff, 148ff, 197ff

blending theory 229, 231ff, 240ff

Danger/threat, (topos of), 144, 149ff, 153

Brexit, xiii, 16ff, 144ff, 151ff, 248ff

data, 74, 99, 134, 143, 147ff, 159, 174ff

Brown, Gordon, 9

dataset design, 206ff

Burdening/weighting, (topos of), 144ff

Definition & naming, (topos of), 145, 155,

233

‘call and response’ 56

deixis, 64, 290

‘calm to storm’, 46, 57

person, 65ff

Cameron, David, xvi, 109ff

place, 65ff

career of metaphor, 214, 246

time, 66

cataphoric reference, 68ff, 289

delivery, xvii, 34ff, 48, 93, 95ff, 116, 129, categorization, 214ff, 222,
246ff

167, 290

causation, 147ff

dialectic, 4, 290

chiasmus, 44, 289

dictionary, use of, 173, 213

295

296 Index

discourse-historical approach, 133ff, 290

Hitler, Adolf, 251

discriminatory rhetoric, 136, 138ff

Humanitarianism, (topos of), 144, 146

disease/illness metaphors, 209, 252

humour, 165ff, 291

dominance, 137

hyperbole, 50, 161, 176, 181, 186, 291

dossier (dodgy), 119ff, 130, 275

hyponym, 71, 292

dysphemism, 210ff, 290

hypotaxis, 292

ellipsis, 44, 69, 290

ideology, 111, 139, 158, 188ff, 209, 218, Eminem, 36

224ff, 247, 257ff, 260, 262

emotions and feelings, 16ff, 23, 25,42, 49,

illocutionary force, 60, 161

52, 103, 116, 164, 176, 178, 181,

immigration, xv, 17, 23, 92, 97ff, 139, 146,

188, 200ff, 243, 245ff, 248, 254ff,

150ff, 177, 180, 188, 208, 230, 247,

263, 290

250, 257

endophoric reference, 63, 290

implicature, 163

entertainment, xii, xvii ff, 164ff

impoliteness, 164

enthymeme, 13, 158, 291

coercive

entrenched metaphor, 215, 222ff, 291

intensification, 139, 161

epideictic rhetoric, xiii, 6ff, 21, 25, 37, 41, 52

intentionality, 138,

epilogue, 25ff, 49, 52, 56, 255, 263, 291

interaction, 163-4, 170, 181

epiphora, 44, 291

irony, 50, 292

episodic memory, 244

isocolon, 45, 54

ethnic categorization, 138, 142

Isocrates, 41–2

ethos, 8ff, 12, 19, 23ff, 26, 41, 54, 95,

100ff, 166, 185, 189, 291

Johnson, Boris, xiii, 9, 17, 151, 163, 165, euphemism, 14, 291

166, 255

Europian Union, xiii, 17, 146, 151, 152ff,

just consequences, 149

165, 208, 249, 261

Justice, (topos of), 144, 146, 171, 184, 246, exploitation, (topos of),
145-6

257

exophoric reference, 63ff, 291

kairos, 37, 104, 292

face, 162ff

Kennedy, John F. 59ff, 237, 254

face-threat, 162ff

keywords, 174ff, 210ff

response to, 170ff

key phrases 176ff

fake news, 166

King, Martin Luther, 34, 46, 50, 52, 56,

Farage, Nigel, xiii, xvii, 18, 165ff, 172

201, 230, 237, 263, 265

field of action, 144, 159

Kovaleski, Serge, 169ff

figurative, 291

finances, (topos of), 145

Lady Gaga, 121, 258-9

fire metaphors, 198ff, 212

law and right, (topos of), 145-6, 155

foregrounding, 110, 113, 291

Leave (EU), 17, 144ff, 151ff, 249

forensic rhetoric, 6, 37, 291

legitimacy and illegitimacy xv, 113, 185, frames, framing, 56, 59, 61,
92, 98, 100,

251

103, 141, 166, 193, 203, 253

lexical cohesion, 70ff

lexis, 36, 43, 94, 189

Gästarbeiters, 140

litotes, 50, 161, 292

gender, 151, 162

logos, 12ff, 24, 26, 100, 292

genre, xvii, 7, 39, 89, 105, 134, 159, 165,

174, 192, 203, 206, 208ff, 291

Macmillan, Harold, 250

Gillard, Julia, 172ff

Mahathir, Mohamed, 252-3

Malala, 92, 104, 254ff

heuristic, 248, 249ff, 291

Manichean, 177, 189

history, (topos of), 57, 136, 139, 145ff,

May, Theresa, xvii, 151

152, 248, 265

McCain, John 24, 44, 50, 170

Index 297

media, xvi, 37, 89, 99, 112, 139, 162ff,

parataxis, 45, 293

170, 179, 181, 189ff, 209, 212, 249

parison, 13, 45, 293

mental model, 244–5, 292

participants, 64, 93, 110ff, 293

metaphor, 11, 37ff, 49, 51ff, 149, 171, 193, pathos, 16ff, 49, 100, 106,
254, 263, 293

197ff, 292

People, (topos of), 145ff, 175ff, 178ff, 226

‘beacon’, 197ff

periphrasis, 51, 293

classification, 205, 211, 213ff, 223ff, 242

performance, xiii, xvii ff, 36, 91, 94ff, 104, clusters, 263

162, 165, 167, 258

‘crime’, 257

Perry, Rick, 48

conventional, 222ff, 229

personification, xviii ff, 4ff, 293

counting of, 213ff, 219

persuasion, xviiiff, 93ff, 99ff, 247, 265, 293

definition of, 201ff

phrase, xv, 11ff, 35ff, 44ff, 56, 69, 71ff,

entrenched, 215, 222ff, 250

104, 120, 167, 178ff, 184ff

explanation of, 243, 262ff

key, 174, 176ff

identification of, 218, 225ff

‘pikey’, 141ff

interpretation of, 236ff

Plato, 4ff, 16

keywords, 224

political science, xiv, 133, 209, 212, 244

novel, 222ff, 234, 246

populism, 150, 166, 178, 181

purposeful, 197ff, 246, 262

Powell, Enoch, 250

range of, 220

power, 87ff, 111ff, 133ff, 158, 203, 256, source domains, 200, 206,
211, 218,

294

229ff, 232, 237ff, 239, 252, 258, 262

Pragglejaz, 220

target domains, 211, 218, 229, 230, 232, predication, 139, 160, 251

237ff

problem-solution pattern, 180, 234ff

metonym/ metonymy, 14, 43, 51, 54ff, 65, process/ processes 93,
110, 160

173ff, 193, 226, 256, 292

verbal, 113ff, 293

mitigation, 139, 161

proplesis, 293

modality, 109ff, 115ff, 292

prologue, 19ff, 26, 52, 248, 263, 293

deontic, 122ff, 290

proof/ proofs, 8ff, 12, 248, 293

epistemic, 121ff, 189ff, 291

psycholinguistic processing, 221, 222, 241

levels of 119ff

public communication, 64, 90, 104, 111, myth, xv, 52, 57, 100, 116,
178, 191, 193,

197ff

200, 218ff, 243ff

Putin, Vladmir, xvii

names/naming 111ff, 139ff, 144, 152, reality, (topos of), 3ff, 89, 145ff,
154, 159

158ff, 182

reason, 12ff, 166, 209

narrative, 19ff, 152, 193, 224, 243, 256,

recontextualisation, 98, 134

258, 262ff

reductive rhetoric, 177, 185, 188, 191ff

Nixon, Richard, 59

Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 151ff

nouns/nominal forms 110ff,

reference, 62ff, 293

numbers, (tops of), 145ff, 149ff, 225

refutation, 14ff, 24ff, 268ff, 293

reiteration, 71ff, 190, 294

Obama, Barack, xiii ff, 10, 19ff, 44ff, 50ff,

religious discourse, 41

185, 187, 191, 198, 225ff, 236ff,

Remain (in EU) xiv, 144, 151, 153ff

254ff, 262ff

repetition, 45ff, 55ff, 71ff, 149, 181ff, 220,

Obama Michelle, 171

294

oratory, xvi, 43, 48, 293

representations: positive and negative, 89,

branches of 6ff, 37ff

98, 100, 110, 118, 152, 202, 212, deliberative 38, 48ff, 208, 290

218, 225ff, 232, 237, 243ff, 257ff

oxymoron, 51, 293

research questions, 139, 174, 204, 217ff,

225, 230
paradox of metaphor, 222

Responsibility, (topos of), 144, 149, 150, parallelism, 41ff, 45, 55ff,
293

154–5

298 Index

rhetoric, xviii ff, 3ff, 19ff, 35ff, 46ff, 52ff,

synecdoche, 51, 55, 294

100ff, 116, 180ff, 135, 173ff, 225ff, synonymy, 72, 77

234, 246ff, 294

systematicity, 228

rhetorical question, 45, 51, 57, 95, 103,

149, 294

tautology, 137, 157

Thatcher, Margaret, xv, 234, 252, 255

satire, 166

topoi, 134ff, 143ff

saviour, (topos of) 145ff, 277

Toulmin, Stephen, 143ff

scenario, 166, 193, 232, 235, 243ff

transitivity, 113ff, 294

schema/schemata, 98, 100, 103, 166, 199ff,

triangulation, xix, 134

226, 241, 244ff, 262

tricolon, 45, 47, 48, 55, 294

scheme, 43ff, 294

trope, 43, 49ff, 55ff, 160, 294

situation, 90ff

Trump, Donald, xiii, 11ff, 14ff, 20ff, 23ff,

‘size’ adjectives, 185ff

37ff, 163ff, 220, 226, 234ff

social cognition, 97, 152, 197, 243ff

trust, xviii ff, 9ff, 189, 201, 248

social identity face, 162ff

social media xvii ff, 38, 89, 93, 101, 164,

Usefulness, (topos of), 144, 146, 153ff,

167, 171, 185, 212, 235

158

sociolinguistics, 135

Uselessness, (topos of), 144, 146, 147ff,

Sontag, Susan, 252

153ff, 277
Sorenson, Ted, 61

soundbite, 249

van Dijk, Teun, xviii, 97, 112, 152, 197, speech,

244ff

deliberative, 38, 48ff, 208

variation, 71ff

epideictic, xiii, 6ff, 21, 25, 37, 41, 52

verbs/verbal processes, 109ff, 113ff, 251

forensic, 6ff

verb patterns, 188

political, xiiiff

visual metaphor, xvi, 212, 226, 235ff, 241ff

story, 21, 55, 100, 103, 187, 243, 265

voice,

strategy, 137ff

human, 34ff, 94ff

style, 34ff, 42ff, 54ff, 167ff, 177, 185, 294

grammatical, 95, 110, 113, 115, 118

elevated, 36ff, 55ff, 263ff

populist, 185
warrant, 143, 146ff, 150, 159ff, 169, 180,

substitution, 69, 294

190

superordinate, 71, 149, 214, 294

Watson, Emma, 91ff, 99ff

syllogism, 12ff, 294

‘wind of change’, 250

symbol/symbolic power, 11, 34, 89, 152,

181, 199ff, 245ff, 258, 265, 294

zeugma, 294
Document Outline
Cover
Contents
List of Core Speeches
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
Political speech
Success and failure in political speaking
Overview
Acknowledgements
Part I Traditional Approaches to Rhetoric, Oratory and Discourse
Chapter 1 Classical Rhetoric: Artistic Proofs and
Arrangement
1.1 Introduction: rhetoric, oratory and persuasion
1.2 Branches of oratory
1.3 The proofs
1.4 Arrangement in classical rhetoric
1.5 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 2 Classical Rhetoric: Style and Figures
2.1 Introduction: what is style?
2.2 Style in classical rhetoric
2.3 Figures of speech
2.4 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 3 Coherence and Cohesion in Discourse
3.1 Introduction – what is coherence?
3.2 What is cohesion?
3.3 Grammatical cohesion
3.4 Lexical cohesion
3.5 Summary
Essential reading
Part II Critical Approaches to Discourse
Chapter 4 Critical Analysis: Context and Persuasion
 4.1 What is power?
4.2 CDA, context and circumstances
4.3 Persuasion
4.4 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 5 Social Agency and Modality
5.1 Agency
5.2 Modality
5.3 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 6 The Discourse-Historical Approach
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Discursive strategies and intention
6.3 Discursive strategies and discrimination
6.4 Topoi, warrants and arguments
6.5 Sample text analysis using DHA
6.6 A critique of DHA
6.7 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 7 Ad Hominem Arguments and Corpus Methods
7.1 Introduction – impoliteness in politics
7.2 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as
entertainment
7.3 Ad hominem arguments and impoliteness as
coercion
7.4 Corpus methods for exploring the rhetoric of Donald
Trump
7.5 Summary
Essential reading
Part III Critical Metaphor Analysis
Chapter 8 Researching Metaphor in Public Communication
8.1 Introduction: Blair and the ‘beacon’ metaphor
8.2 Metaphor: definition and appeal
8.3 Research design for metaphor in political discourse:
an overview
8.4 Metaphor identification and classification
8.5 Summary
 Essential reading
Chapter 9 Critical Metaphor Analysis: Theory and Method
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Metaphor identification in critical metaphor analysis
9.3 Case Study 1: identification of metaphor in Obama’s
first inaugural address
9.4 Theoretical approaches to metaphor
9.5 Case Study 2: interpretation of metaphor in
Obama’s first inaugural address using conceptual
metaphor theory
9.6 Evaluating conceptual metaphor and blending
theory
9.7 Summary
Essential reading
Chapter 10 Purposeful Metaphor and Social Cognition
10.1 Introduction
10.2 The purposes of metaphor
10.3 Case Study 3: explanation of metaphor in Obama’s
first inaugural address
Essential reading
Comments on Exercises
Further Reading and References
Glossary
Index