Discourse and Politics

Discourse and Politics

Edited by

Gloria Álvarez-Benito, Gabriela Fernández-Díaz

and Isabel Mª Íñigo-Mora
 Discourse and Politics,
Edited by Gloria Álvarez-Benito, Gabriela Fernández-Díaz and Isabel Mª Íñigo-Mora

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2009 by Gloria Álvarez-Benito, Gabriela Fernández-Díaz and Isabel Mª Íñigo-Mora

and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-0334-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0334-2

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii

List of Tables............................................................................................... x
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................. xii
List of Contributors .................................................................................. xiv

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Discourse and Politics
Gloria Álvarez-Benito and Isabel M. Íñigo-Mora

Part I: Political Discourse Strategies

Chapter One............................................................................................... 12
Japan in Transition: Talking Styles among Prime Ministers
in Post-War Japan
Shoji Azuma

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32

When Catechism Meets Science and Politics
Michel Dufour

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51

Political Language in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Electoral Process
Manuel Mejías Borrero

Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 61
Argumentative Functions of Parentheticals in Parliamentary Debates
Cornelia Ilie

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 80

Memory, Gender and Speech Quotations in Parliament: A Comparison
of British and Spanish Cases from a DP Analysis
Aurelia Carranza Márquez and María del Mar Rivas Carmona
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97

Political Interviews in the Media: The Private-Public Interface
Anita Fetzer

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 115

Ideological Discourse Strategies and the Formation of Identities
in Spanish Political Debates on the Process of European Construction
María del Mar Rivas Carmona and Aurelia Carranza Márquez

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 135

Proposal for the Analysis of the Legitimatory Function of Political
Discourse in the Northern Irish Context
Laura Filardo Llamas

Part II: Verbal and Nonverbal Elements in Political Interaction

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 154

Politicians’ Gestures and Words: An analysis of a Televised Interview
with J. L. Rodríguez Zapatero
Isabel M. Íñigo-Mora and Gloria Álvarez-Benito

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 167

The Speech-Gesture System in the European Parliament
Carmen Del Solar Valdés

Part III: Methods of Analysis

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 196

APOLLO-I: An Annotation Tool for the Analysis of Political Language
and Oratory (Political Interviews)
Gloria Álvarez-Benito and Carmen Del Solar-Valdés

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 215

How to Analyse Political Interviews
Peter Bull
 Discourse and Politics vii

Part IV: Corpus Analysis

Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 232

Building and Exploiting a Political Language Corpus
Gabriela Fernández Díaz

Index........................................................................................................ 246
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1-1. Prime Ministers: days in office ............................................... 15

Figure 1-2. Level of formality ................................................................... 16
Figure 1-3. Frequency: de arimasu… ........................................................ 18
Figure 1-4. Frequency: omoimasu ............................................................. 21
Figure 1-5. Frequency: desu ...................................................................... 24
Figure 1-6. Frequency: Shimasu ................................................................ 27
Figure 1-7. Frequency: yo and ne .............................................................. 29
Figure 2-1. Catechisms published during the revolutionary era. ............... 41
Figure 3-1. The nation is a family (adapted from Lakoff) ......................... 52
Figure 3-2. Persuasive language of Bush and Kerry.................................. 56
Figure 7-1. Construction of difference and uniqueness (adapted from
Martin 1995)............................................................................................ 123
Figure 8-1. Deictic identification of discourse spaces. Based on Chilton
(2004:141) ............................................................................................... 140
Figure 9-1. Frequency chart of question types according to their form... 157
Figure 9-2. Percentage of communicative conflict questions in the
interview.................................................................................................. 157
Figure 9-3. Frequency of communicative conflict questions in Lomana’s
turns. ........................................................................................................ 158
Figure 9-4. Frequency of communicative conflict questions in Urdaci’s
turns. ........................................................................................................ 158
Figure 9-5. Frequency of communicative conflict questions in Valentin’s
turns. ........................................................................................................ 159
Figure 9-6. Types of replies in the interview........................................... 159
Figure 9-7. Types of replies: Interviewer 1 (Gloria Lomana).................. 160
Figure 9-8. Types of replies: Interviewer 2 (Alfredo Urdaci).................. 160
Figure 9-9. Types of replies: Interviewer 3 (Juan Pedro Valentín).......... 161
Figure 9-10. Rodriguez Zapatero’s eye behaviour in the interview......... 164
Figure 10-1. Analysis with Transana: Clip 1, MEP Gil-Robles .............. 169
Figure 10-2. The coding module as seen on the Anvil interface .............. 177
Figure 10-3. The Babel Tower and the Louise Weiss building ............... 179
Figure 10-4. Seating arrangements at Strasbourg's Hemycicle................ 175
Figure 10-5. Percent of seats per political group ..................................... 181
Figure 10-6. Distribution of informants across political groups.............. 181
Figure 10-7. Mr. Hansch’s object-adaptor............................................... 183
 Discourse and Politics ix

Figure 10-8. Mr. Napolitano enumerates a series of facts ....................... 185

Figure 10-9. Percentages of speech functions for Spanish (against general
trend) ....................................................................................................... 187
Figure 10-10. Percentages of facial expressions for Spanish (against
general trend)........................................................................................... 188
Figure 10-11. Percentages of facial expressions for English (against
general trend)........................................................................................... 188
Figure 11-1. Groups and sub-groups of the Annotation Scheme, as seen on
Anvil ........................................................................................................ 198
Figure 11-2. Defining labels on the XML File ........................................ 199
Figure 11-3. The labels, as seen by users ................................................ 200
Figure 11-4. Selecting a Discourse Type................................................. 201
Figure 11-5. Warning sign....................................................................... 202
Figure 11-6. Selecting the type of Interrogative ...................................... 202
Figure 11-7. An Internet browser showing some info from the coding
manual for APOLLO-I ............................................................................ 203
Figure 11-8. Identifying the Interviewer.................................................. 209
Figure 11-9. Working with Anvil ............................................................ 211
Figure 13-1. General Reference (GR) Corpus ......................................... 235
Figure 13-2. Specialised Purpose (SP) Corpus........................................ 236
Figure 13-3. GR Corpus Word List ......................................................... 237
Figure 13-4. SP Corpus Word List .......................................................... 238
Figure 13-5. GR Corpus Word Clusters .................................................. 239
Figure 13-6. GR Corpus Collocates......................................................... 240
Figure 13-7. GR Corpus Concordances................................................... 241
Figure 13-8. GR Corpus Context Words ................................................. 242
Figure 13-9. SP Corpus Key Words ........................................................ 243
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 5-1. Direct vs. Indirect quotations. Spanish Parliament................... 85

Table 5-2. Direct vs. Indirect quotations. British Parliament..................... 91
Table 8-1. Political elements for the analysis of referential expressions in
NI and their equivalent element in any social practice ............................ 141
Table 9-1. Correlation between Equivocation and Interviewee's Eye
Contact..................................................................................................... 161
Table 10-1. Subject Information.............................................................. 180
Table 10-2. Distribution of the data for the r-correlation analysis........... 184
Table 10-3. R-correlation results ............................................................. 185
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origin of this book was the First International Conference on

Political Discourse Strategies held in September 2007 at the University of
Seville, Spain. However, this volume is not a proceedings but a collection
of chapters written and submitted after the conference.
We are deeply grateful to Peter Bull (University of York) and Anita
Fetzer (University of Lueneburg) for their generous advice, help and
support during the conference.
Special thanks are due to the authors for their patience and enthusiasm
during the compilation of the volume.
The chapters of this book were read and commented by a number of
anonymous reviewers. We would like to thank them for their advice,
comments and suggestions at various stages of its development.
Finally, we thank Gabriel, Miguel and our families for being there, and
for preventing us from analysing our friends’ discourse all the time.
This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science
and Technology (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología) under the project
titled GILDA: Natural Language Generation for Dialogue Systems,
number TIN2006-14433-C02-02).
It is conventional but necessary to add that the editors alone are
responsible for the final form of the book and whatever shortcomings it
may have.
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AM: Member of the E

APOLLO: Analysis of Political Language and Oratory
C: Centerpartiet (Swedish Center Party)
CC question: Communicative Conflict question
CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis
cf.: Confer (compare)
CiU: Convergència i Unió (Spanish nationalist party)
CL: Corpus Linguistics
Con: Conservative
DP: Discursive Psychology
DAM: Discourse Action Model
DUP : Democratic Unionist Party
e.g.: exempli gratia
EEC: European Economic Community
ELDR: European Liberal, Democrat and Reformist Party
EPP-ED: European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)
et al.: et alii
E.T.A.: Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom)
EU: European Union
FP: Folkpartiet (Swedish Conservative Party)
GR Corpus: General Reference Corpus
ibid: ibídem
i.e.: id est
HCI: Human-Computer Interaction
IDF: Ideological Discursive Formations
IE: Interviewee
IGC: Intergovernmental Conference
IR: Interviewer
IRA: Irish Republican Army
IU: Izquierda Unida (Spanish left wing party)
Lab: Labour
LDP: Liberal Democratic Party
LSP: Language for Specific Purposes
M: Moderaterna (Swedish Conservative Party)
MEP: Member of European Parliament
 Discourse and Politics xiii

MP: Member of Parliament

MPP: Modus Ponendo Ponens
MPs: Members of Parliaments
MTP: Modus Tollendo Ponens
NI: Northern Ireland
PDA: Political Discourse Analysis
PES: Party of European Socialists
PL: Political Language
PM: Prime Minister
PP: Partido Popular (Spanish right wing party)
RUC: Royal Ulster Constabulary
S: Socialdemokraterna (Swedish Social-Democratic Party)
SDLP: Social Democratic and Labour Party
SF: Sinn Fein
SP Corpus: Specialised Purpose Corpus
tr: Translation
TV: Television
TVE: Televisión Española (a Spanish TV Channel)
UUP: Ulster Unionist Party
V: Vänsterpartiet (Swedish Left Party)
vs.: Versus
WW2: World War Two
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Álvarez-Benito, Gloria (University of Seville, Spain)

Azuma, Shoji (University of Utah, USA)
Bull, Peter (University of York, UK)
Carranza Márquez, Aurelia (University of Seville, Spain)
Del Solar Valdés, Carmen (University of Seville, Spain)
Dufour, Michel (University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
Fernández Díaz, Gabriela (University of Seville, Spain)
Fetzer, Anita (University of Lueneburg, Germany)
Filardo Llamas, Laura (University of Valladolid, Spain)
Ilie, Cornelia (Örebro & Södertörn University, Sweden)
Íñigo-Mora, Isabel (University of Seville, Spain)
Mejías Borreo, Manuel (University Pablo Olavide, Seville, Spain)
Rivas Carmona, M. Mar (University of Seville, Spain)
 INTRODUCTION

DISCOURSE AND POLITICS

GLORIA ÁLVAREZ-BENITO,
UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE
AND ISABEL M. ÍÑIGO-MORA,
UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE

“... in politics nothing is accidental. If

something happens, be assured it was
planned this way.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The main aim of this volume is to explore the relationship between

politics and discourse from different perspectives and in different
languages and cultures. It seems an outright, well-defined and
straightforward goal, but the first issue which should be tackled is: how
can we define politics after all?
According to Chilton (2004), there are two broad strands when
considering most definitions in traditional discourse studies of politics
(Chilton 2004:3):

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

The effects of political communication

The effects of the planned and deliberate communicative behaviour of
most politicians can be examined “... at the micro-level of the individual
consumer of the message, or at the macro-level, when individual responses
2 Introduction

to political communication are aggregated together in the form of public

opinion polls and other indices of collective political will.” (McNair
1999:29). In this sense, it is interesting to examine both “how the political
process of democratic societies – their procedures and practices – has been
affected by the growing importance within them of mass communication”
and the rising impact of political communication on advanced societies.
As McNair (1999:45) puts it: “… political communication is too
important to be ignored by those with a concern for the workings of
modern democracies.” But the effects of political communication are null
if the audience is not receptive. For that reason, we do not only have to
take into account the content of the message, or the historical content or
even the political environment but also the audience’s stance. Bettinghaus
(1973) also highlights the fact that the perception of a persuasive message
is not a passive process. According to Bettinghaus (1973:30) “The receiver
is as active in the receiving process as is the source in the transmitting
process. The attitudes and beliefs of the receiver mediate the way in which
messages will be received and responded to.” During the 50s and
throughout the 60s, it was widely recognised that the effects of political
communication were limited or mediated just by social and cultural
factors. It was not until the semiological school (Umberto Eco and others)
that the potential for different decodings of a message was acknowledged.
There can be as many divergent interpretations of a single message as
different groups or even individuals you can find in society and it may
even provoke an array of contrasting responses. Additionally, we cannot
either forget that political communication is largely mediated
communication and for that reason, reporters, journalists, commentators,
etc. can also alter the message.
So, how can we measure the effects of a political message? How can
we know to what extent a politician has been able to alter the public’s
attitude or behaviour? According to McNair (1999:32), there are basically
three main methods: (1) asking people how they have responded to
specific messages (opinion polls); (2) observing voting behaviour
(political campaigns); and (3) conducting “… experiments intended to
isolate the effects of particular elements of the communication process”.
Needless to say, all these data-gathering techniques have their
methodological limitations.

Strategies and interaction

How could we define a strategic behaviour? When describing the main
characteristics which could define strategic persuasive situations in
 Discourse and Politics 3

general, Bettinghaus (1973:12) explains that they are:

… communication situations which involve a conscious attempt by one

individual to modify the attitudes, beliefs, or behavior of another individual
or group of individuals through the transmission of some message. . .
Those communication situations in which two or more individuals each
consciously attempt to modify the attitudes, beliefs or the behavior of each
other through mutual interaction.

And a key idea underlying this explanation is that the persuasive

communicator normally has a specific response which he wishes to elicit
from an audience (Bettinghaus 1973:34). But this elicited response will be
dependent on both the context of reception of the message (political
affiliation, age, ethnicity, gender, etc.) and the type of message transmitted
(a party election broadcast, a news report, a chat show interview, a live
debate, etc.).
In relation to the first one (i.e. the context of reception of the message),
it is extremely important to take into account the audience’s beliefs.
According to Bettinghaus (1973:60-1):

The more central the belief, the more resistant will individuals be to
changes in the belief. (2) Those beliefs that are derived from more central
beliefs are more resistant to change than those beliefs that exist only as
peripheral beliefs. (3) The more central the belief which is changed, the
more widespread will be changes in the remainder of the individual’s
belief structure.

Stuart Hall (1980) argues that, taking into account the audience’s
beliefs, there are like three possible decoding positions: (1) the dominant-
hegemonic position; (2) the negotiated position; and (3) the oppositional
position. Basically, the first one refers to a situation in which a message is
decoded entirely within the encoder’s framework of reference; the second
“acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the
ground significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it
makes its own ground rules (Hall 1980:138); and the third “the point when
events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way
begin to be given an oppositional reading.” (Hall 1980:138). For example,
a Labour supporter watching a Labour Party broadcast would hold a
dominant-hegemonic position; in contrast, a Conservative supporter would
sustain an oppositional position watching the same programme; and the
so-called “floating voter” would keep a negotiated position. In other
words, the more central the political beliefs, the harder to be changed.
This is highly related to what Bettinghaus (1973) calls “the reference
4 Introduction

group”. He explains that (Bettinghaus 1973:78):

The term “reference group” is used to describe any group to which a

person relates his attitudes. An understanding of reference groups is
necessary to persuasion because frames of reference are built up as the
result of contact with or membership in particular groups.

We have just also pointed out that the elicited response is dependent on
the type of message transmitted (a party election broadcast, a news report,
a chat show interview, a live debate, etc.). As McNair (1999:31) explains
“… one’s knowledge that a piece of communication is partisan will to a
large extent predetermine one’s ‘reading’ of it.” It is not the same for an
individual to watch a biased political advertisement or a neutral news
report. In the first case, the effects of the political message can be in
inverse proportion to the audience’s knowledge of the party (Cundy 1986)
and it is very likely that the new information generates no change at all in
the audience’s stance. On the contrary, during the broadcasting of a neutral
news report, “… the audience may take the opportunity to judge abilities
and policies from a more detached perspective. There will be less
interference in the communication process, and the audience may be more
open.” (McNair 1999:31).

Topics covered in this volume

Discourse analysis, in general, is a vast interdisciplinary field including
disciplines such as linguistics, communication studies, sociology,
sociolinguistics, anthropology, psychology, among others. Similarly,
political discourse analysis in particular can also be studied from different
methodologies which focus on several dimensions (pragmatics, semantics,
social and cognitive psychology, semiotics, etc.) in different settings
(parliaments, interviews, election campaigns, speeches, etc.).
Because it is an interdisciplinary field, many different approaches and
perspectives can be found in political discourse studies. It is a well-known
fact in the field of political discourse that “… linguistic resources are
selected in terms of their interaction with principles of human behaviour to
achieve specified outcomes” (Wilson 1990:18) and for that reason it is
logical to wonder why a politician chooses a specific verb or adjective or
metaphor when speaking.
The chapters in this volume cover many of the areas of political
discourse. Part I discusses the use of different strategies in political
discourse.
In chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, Azuma, Dufour, Mejías-Borrero, Ilie, and
 Discourse and Politics 5

Carranza-Márquez & Rivas-Carmona try to answer this question from

different perspectives. Azuma (Chapter 1) analyses how politicians use
politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987) in order to mitigate
various face threatening acts. In his chapter, Azuma examines Japanese
politicians’ speech documented in the Japanese Diet records during the
period of 1945-2006. The main hypothesis is that a new type of speech is
emerging based on the concept of solidarity, which reduces psychological
distance between the public and politicians and also improves the public
image of politicians. Dufour (Chapter 2) underlines the social nature of
language and draws our attention to the religious-political nature of
catechisms. Specifically, he brings into focus the numerous political or
“national” catechisms which were published during and shortly after the
French Revolution. Mejías-Borrero (Chapter 3) studies the techniques
used by American Presidents (U.S. presidential campaign in the year
2004) and highlights the key importance of metaphor and framing in
analysing political language (G. Lakoff). Ilie (Chapter 4) deals with one
type of discursive device (“parentheticals”) which represents sentential
and intersentential strategies of planning, signalling, explicitating,
justifying and/or evaluating the ongoing talk. She carries out a contrastive
analysis of British Question Time vs. the Swedish Frågestund. Finally,
Carranza-Márquez & Rivas-Carmona (Chapter 5) explain how direct and
indirect quotations are tools which speakers in general and
parliamentarians in particular use in order to achieve specific effects in
particular situations (following the definition of memory offered by
Discursive Psychology). This is also a contrastive study which compares
British and Spanish parliamentary debates on domestic violence.
In chapters 6, 7 and 8, Fetzer, Rivas-Carmona & Carranza-Márquez,
and Filardo-Llamas, focus on the most social aspects of language. They
study issues such as the discursive identity of a politician or the
connections between language, power and ideology. Fetzer (Chapter 6)
analyses the interactional organization of the discourse genre and media
event of political interview (discourse identities, discourse topics,
communicative strategies, and style) from a sociopragmatic framework.
She deals with the reconstruction of the discursive identity of a politician,
her/his attribution to public and private domains of life, and the
interactional organization of credibility and responsibility. Then, Rivas-
Carmona & Carranza-Márquez (Chapter 7) select a session of the Joint
Committee for European Affairs in the Spanish Parliament discussing the
topic of the European Construction in order to look into the discourse vs.
power relationship and their apparent spin-offs in the “discursive
ideological formations” (Fairclough 1995). They will mainly focus on
6 Introduction

aspects such as legitimation vs. deslegitimation and consensus/

polarization. Finally, Filardo-Llamas (Chapter 8) will also tackle the issue
of legitimisation as one of the key functions of political discourse (Chilton
2004). Her chapter highlights that legitimisation is connected to the
promotion of specific representations about a socio-political reality, which
is, in turn, related to the ideological conception underlying specific
instances of discourse.
Part II is concerned with the relation between verbal and nonverbal
communicative devices in political interaction. In chapter 9 Íñigo-Mora
and Álvarez-Benito analyse the use of speech and nonverbal signals (eye-
contact and hand movements) in a Rodríguez Zapatero’s interview. The
chapter focuses on the study of aspects such as: 1) types of questions
raised by interviewers, both according to their form and to their content; 2)
relation between question type and interviewer; 3) types of replies; 4)
relation between types of replies and interviewer; 5) interviewee’s eye
contact and possible relation with equivocation; and 6) interviewee’s hand
gestures and possible relation with equivocation. In this study the authors
argue that both the politician and interviewer’s behaviour regarding most
of these aspects is not accidental but generally conscious and planned. The
selection of yes-no questions, for example, is one of the interviewers’
strategies to limit the interviewee’s possible answers. The selection of
Communicative Conflict questions (CC questions) is also an interviewer’s
strategy, either to seek for information or to cause some kind of tension or
pressure. The fact that the interviewee replies does not mean he/she
answers the question raised by the interviewer. We argue the interviewee’s
type of reply and his/her eye behaviour are closely connected. The
interviewee generally avoids eye contact when he/she does not answer the
question.
In chapter 10, Del Solar argues that the communication process is
based on a sound interdependence between verbal elements and nonverbal
cues. In this vein, she conducts a qualitative and quantitative analysis of
the speech-gesture system of 8 members of the European Parliament
(MEPs). Acknowledging that the European Parliament has evolved into an
increasingly multicultural framework, the analytical section provides an
empirical basis for the assessment of the verbal and nonverbal behaviours
of the political actors partaking in intercultural scenarios of this kind. The
author first introduces a pragmatic proposal for a coding scheme. Then,
she discusses the different arguments and ideas forming the cross-cultural
multi-system approach to discourse analysis that she fosters in this study.
Finally, she shows the results obtained, and offers some concluding
remarks regarding the MEPs’ observed patterns of discourse.
 Discourse and Politics 7

Part III centres on methods of analysis of political discourse. In

chapter 11, Álvarez-Benito and Del Solar present an annotation tool,
called APOLLO-1, which aims at covering the wide range of verbal and
nonverbal communicative techniques used by politicians in interviews.
APOLLO-I focuses on the multimodal analysis (speech and oratory,
gestures, facial expressions, body posture, etc.) of political interviews. The
use of cross-modality annotation tools for this task does not have a very
long tradition in mass data annotation (compared to, e.g., spoken discourse
analysis). The authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach to discourse and
gesture analysis, thus borrowing concepts from such fields as Syntax and
Semantics, Political Discourse Analysis, Speech Analysis, Interpersonal
Communication, and Nonverbal Communication. They also deal with the
methods used during the gathering of the information and the
implementation of the scheme.
In chapter 12, Bull describes techniques devised by the author and his
colleagues for analysing question-response sequences in broadcast
political interviews. In this context, the pragmatic force of a question is
defined as a request for information, which may or may not take
interrogative syntax (Bull 1994). Questions are subdivided according to
their syntactic structure (polar, interrogative word, disjunctive); these
categories are important for judging what constitutes a reply. Intermediate
responses are also distinguished (answers by implication, incomplete
replies, interrupted replies), which lie somewhere between a full reply and
a compete failure to answer the question (referred to as a “non-reply”). To
further analyse non-replies and intermediate responses, an equivocation
typology distinguishes between at least 35 different ways of not replying
to a question (Bull & Mayer 1993; Bull 2003). To analyse factors
underlying equivocation, a question typology distinguishes 19 different
ways in which questions can pose threats to face (Bull, Elliott, Palmer &
Walker 1996). If all the principal forms of response are considered face-
threatening, the question is regarded as creating a “communicative
conflict”, identified by Bavelas, Black, Chovil and Mullett (1990) as the
prime situational factor creating pressures towards equivocation.
Finally, Part IV is concerned with how to build and exploit a corpus
on political language. In chapter 13 Fernández-Díaz tries to show the
reader what kind of information can be gathered just by observing the use
of the language in its context. She argues a corpus can be exploited for the
acquisition of a specialised language, specifically, political language (PL).
By using some basic processing tools in Corpus Linguistics, she analyses
PL in the context of the European Union (EU). Firstly, she shows how to
compile a corpus from scratch. Secondly, she presents the two corpora she
8 Introduction

has built for her research: a general reference corpus and a specialised
corpus. The first corpus consists of approx. 500,000 words collected from
the speeches of Javier Solana, EU High Representative for the Common
Foreign and Security Policy, whereas the second one consists of approx.
200,000 words on the topic of Human Rights. Thirdly, she processes the
two corpora in order to examine the most distinctive features of PL
vocabulary: frequency of words, key words in context, word clusters,
collocations, and concordances. Samples and data are collected and
presented throughout the whole chapter to support analyses and
hypotheses.

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politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 629-650.

Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. London:
Longman.
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Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of
Political Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
 PART I:

POLITICAL DISCOURSE STRATEGIES

 CHAPTER ONE

JAPAN IN TRANSITION:
TALKING STYLES AMONG PRIME MINISTERS
IN POST-WAR JAPAN

SHOJI AZUMA, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, USA

Introduction
An important finding in sociolinguistics is that social identities and
situational factors do not necessarily determine the way speakers use
language. For example, Gumperz (1982) argues that an individual’s choice
of speech style has symbolic value and interpretive consequences that
cannot be explained simply by correlating the incidence of linguistic
variants with independently determined social or contextual categories. In
other words, speakers exploit the possibility of linguistic choices in order
to convey intentional meaning of a socio-pragmatic nature.
Linguistic choice is a dynamic event, and it is no longer seen as
influenced only by situational factors. Scotton (1983) extends this view of
linguistic choice to the concept of negotiation between speaker and
addressee. According to her, the negotiation principle guides speakers to
“choose the form of your conversational contribution such that it
symbolizes the set of rights and obligations which you wish to be in force
between speaker and addressee for the current exchange” (Scotton
1983:116).
The present study takes this view of language use as a dynamic
interpersonal negotiation and examines politicians’ speech in Japan from a
diachronic perspective. How do politicians use language in order to gain
social approval from the audience? What are their linguistic strategies to
improve their public image as desirable politicians? In order to answer
these questions, we will examine speech styles of Prime Ministers since
WWII. The main hypothesis of the present study is that a new style of
speech is emerging in Japan based on the concept of solidarity (Brown &
 Japan in Transition 13

Gileman 1960). Solidarity encourages equal and affective relationships

between speakers and listeners. This new style of speech improves the
public image of politicians. Additionally, it encourages listeners/viewers to
feel closer to politicians and get more involved in politics. The primary
data for the present study come from the national Diet (parliament) record,
in particular Shoshin Hyoomei Enzetsu (“General Policy Speech”) or the
keynote address delivered at the opening of the Diet session when each
Prime Minister took office.

Prime Ministers in Japan

Upon examination of postwar Prime Ministers, a political scientist,
Hayao (1993:4), notes:

The typical Japanese Prime Minister is, by the standards of most other
countries, a remarkably weak and passive figure. Prime Ministers have
come and gone with more rapidity than in virtually any other country.

Indeed, the tenure of Japanese Prime Ministers is relatively short (on

average it is just about two years or 752 days). Figure 1-1 below shows the
tenure (i.e., the number of days in office) for each Prime Minister, starting
from wartime Prime Minister Tojo (1941-1944) to the most recent Prime
Minister Abe (2006-2007).
There are several Prime Ministers with exceptionally long tenure. In
recent years, for example, Prime Minister Koizumi (2001-2006), who was
able to maintain a relatively high approval rate (on average, more than
40% throughout his tenure), served more than 5 years or 1980 days.
However, on average, it is true that Japanese Prime Ministers change very
often in a short amount of time. The relatively short-lived tenure as Prime
Minister becomes clear when it is compared to the tenure of the U.S.
Presidency. For example, Japan had seven different Prime Ministers
during Bill Clinton’s administration. According to Hayao (1993),
Japanese Prime Ministers were weak and passive in their role in leading
the country. They were not agenda-setters who exercised strong political
leadership. Instead, they dealt with issues that were already on the agenda.
They became involved in the issues because of outside pressures, such as
foreign demands and domestic crises and scandals. Hayao (1993) calls
Japanese Prime Ministers “reactive”. They react to various foreign and
domestic issues passively.
Interestingly, this nature of being “reactive” has been reflected in the
way they speak. Instead of proactively using the language, they passively
follow the socially prescribed “Japanese way” of speaking within the rigid,
14 Chapter One

tightly knit traditional society. Then, what is the Japanese way of

speaking? One characteristic can be found in Japan’s so-called “vertical”
(rather than “horizontal”) society (Nakane 1972), where well developed
honorifics based on social hierarchy play a pivotal role. Prime Ministers,
like any other Japanese speakers, follow the socially prescribed norms of
speaking including the use of honorifics (Ide 1989). The following is an
illustration of the prescribed linguistic system with respect to sentence
final expressions.

Japanese sentence final expressions

Japanese is a language where every sentence linguistically reflects the
speaker’s attitude toward his/her relation to the addressee/referent. For
example, English speakers may use the same linguistic form “Today is
Monday” to anyone ranging from a professor, a friend, or for that matter,
even to a dog. However, in Japanese there is no neutral form as such, and a
Japanese speaker has to choose an appropriate verb form with respect to
politeness and formality depending on to whom he/she is speaking
(Matsumoto 1989). The following examples illustrate several possibilities
for the expression “Today is Monday” in Japanese.

(1-1) Kyoo wa getsuyoobi da

Today TOPIC Monday is
[tr.: Today is Monday]

(1-2) Kyoo wa getsuyoobi desu

(1-3) Kyoo wa getsuyoobi de arimasu

(1-4) Kyoo wa getsuyoobi de gozaimasu

 Japan in Transition 15

To o Hideki
Koiso Kuniaki
Suzuki Kantaro
Higashikuninomiya Naruhiko
Shidehara Kijuro
Yosida Shigeru(1st)
Katayama Tetsu
Ashida Hitoshi
Yosida Shigeru(2nd-5th)
Hatoyama Ichiro
Ishibashi Tanzan
Kishi Nobusuke
Ikeda Hayato
Sato Eisaku
Tanaka Kakuei
Miki Takeo
Fukuda Takeo
Ohira Masayoshi
Suzuki Zenko
Nakasone Yasuhiro
Takeshita Noboru
Uno Sosuke
Kaifu Toshiki
Miyazawa Kiichi
Hosokawa Morihiro
Hata Tsutomu
Murayama Tomiichi
Hashimoto Ryutaro
Obuchi Keizo
Mori Yoshiro
Koizumi Junichiro
Abe Shinzo

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500 3,000

Figure 1-1. Prime Ministers: Days in Office.

16 Chapter One

The underlined sentence final expressions in the previous examples

function as a copula and their English equivalent is a be-verb. However,
each expression carries a different level of formality and speaker’s
attitude. Da in (1-1) is informal whereas desu in (1-2) is formal. For
example, it is inappropriate to use da in a formal meeting; instead desu
should be used in such a context. De arimasu in (1-3) is more formal than
desu in (1-2). Because of its high level of formality, de ariamsu sounds far
more traditional and strict than desu. For example, de arimasu is an apt
expression for military personnel to use in an upright stance at a formal
occasion. Among these three expressions, the relative level of formality
can be described as follows (Makino & Tsutsui 1995):

Figure 1-2. Level of formality.

De gozaimasu in (1-4) is a formal expression to indicate a speaker’s

humbleness. By using de gozaimasu, the speaker is expressing his/her
perception that the addressee is socially in a higher position than the
speaker him/herself. As such, example 1-4 is most appropriate when
employees are addressing their company’s president. In other words, the
power relationship is encoded in the expression.
Given the fact that the socio-pragmatic information is already encoded
in the sentence final expressions, it is interesting to examine how
politicians choose a specific linguistic form in order to promote and
maintain their positive image. Politicians have to commit to a specific
linguistic code, whether it is an expression of deference or informality. In
other words, the unavoidable overt linguistic forms are clear
manifestations of what a politician has in mind with respect to how he
perceives the occasion and the relationship with the addressee.

Decline of oratorical de arimasu

An examination of all sentence final expressions in Prime Ministers’
speeches at the opening session of the Diet revealed that the most
commonly used expression is de arimasu. It accounts for about 43% of all
sentence final expressions. This expression sets the frame of speech as
formal and strict, giving an oratorical tone to the speech. Prime Ministers