POLITICAL
DISCOURSE
What
exactly is 'political discourse'? The easiest, and
not
altogether misguided, answer is that political discourse is identified by its
actors or
authors, viz., politicians. Indeed, the vast bulk of studies of political
discourse
is about the text and talk of professional politicians or political
institutions,
such as presidenta and prime ministers and other members of
government,
parliament or political parties, both at the local, national and
international
levels. Some of the studies of politicians take a discourse analytical
approach
(Carbó 1984; Dillon et al. 1990; Harris 1991; Holly 1990; Maynard
This
way of defining political discourse ishardly different from the identification
of medical, legal or educational discoursewith the respective participants in
the domains of medicine, law or education.This is the relatively easy part (if
we can agree on what `politics' means).
From the interactional point of
view ofdiscourse analysis, we therefore should also include the various
recipients inpolitical communicative events, such as the public, the people,
citizens, the`masses', and other groups or categories. That is, once we locate
politics and itsdiscourses in the public sphere, many more participants in
political communicationappear on the stage.
Obviously,
the same is true for the definition of the field of media discourse,which also
needs to focus on its audiences. And also in medical, legal or
educational
discourse, we not only think of participants such as doctors, lawyers
or
teachers, but also of patients, defendants and students. Hence, the
delimitation
of
political discourse by its principal authors' is insufficient and needs to be
extended
to a more complex picture of all its relevant participants, whether or not
these are
actively involved in political discourse, or merely as recipients in
one-way
modes of communication.
CRITICAL
DISCOURSE
Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a branch of linguistics that seeks to understand
how and why certain texts affect readers and hearers. Through the analysis of
grammar, it aims to uncover the 'hidden ideologies' that can influence a reader
or hearer's view of the world. Analysts have looked at a wide variety of spoken
and written texts – political manifestos, advertising, rules and regulations –
in an attempt to demonstrate how text producers use language (wittingly or not)
in a way that could be ideologically significant.
CDA
is not a monolithic method or field of study but rather a loose agglomeration
of
approaches to the study of discourse, all of which are located broadly within
the
of critical social research that has its roots in the work of the Frankfurt
School
(Wodak and Meyer 2001). Though having developed, at least initially, largely
independently
of each other, these approaches are united by a concern to understand
how
social power, its use and abuse, is related to spoken and written language.
REFERENCE
https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/proj/genbunronshu/29-2/haig.pdf
