Language and politics

Each politician has a particular ideology, through their use of language they encourage voters to identify with their own particular ideology (or sometimes people who aim to garner attention from people with the same ideologies) The term “chemicals” has undergone pejoration to mean something bad and harmful to health, and often artificial or man-made, when its denotation is a term used to describe any substance with two or more atoms. With the increase in consumer awareness regarding the additives and preservatives that has been added to store-bought food, the specialist lexis in the field of food science which are the scientific names of additives have all been termed “chemicals”. This includes terms such as Lecithin, an emulsifier extracted from soybeans, and Riboflavin, another name for vitamin B2. While these are technically chemicals, most chemicals are not directly harmful to humans such as the hydrogen and nitrogen that are in our air. However, the term chemicals has been used meaninglessly in advertisements that say “chemical-free” and in fear-mongering on online platforms from views when the title often says “Did you know these common foods are full of chemicals” for the post to gain online traction. (Chilton and Schaffner, 1997) Functions of political discourse: 1) Coercion / Manufacture of consent (Fairclough, 2014) - Emotive coercion using attitudinal, emotionally charged lexis Inducement of public fear “urgency” “national danger” “evils” 2) Resistance, opposition and protest 3) Legitimation and delegitimation 4) Representation and misrepresentation “Alternative facts” a phrase used by US counsellor Kellyanne Conway during a Meet The Press interview in 2017, where she defended white house press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about false numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Features of political discourse: - Traditionally formal with formulaic utterances and a reserved, ritualistic and ceremonial tone, but shirting towards greater degree of informality – may be adopted to suggest a more personalised relationship between politicians and the public (intending to garner a greater buy-in of policies) - Usually contains genres that are scripted or semi-scripted Media interviews and debates: - Characterised by specific discourse strategies - Questions constructed to place politicians “on the spot” - “Wh-” words require a more focused answer - Questions starting with “will” suggests that any rejection will be rude

- Yes/no question to force politicians to accept or deny allegations - Interviewers in power: have the ability to interrupt and intervene to control the content and organisational flow of discourse - Politicians may evade questions or attempt to turn them to their advantage - Careful lexical choice because it affects public perception of an issue - Euphemism: downplay one’s aggression or wrongdoing - Dysphemism: highlight the negative qualities of a group or event - Mystification: use of jargon to conceal certain activities - Obfuscation: use of passive voice to hide the agent, or use of noun phrases and nominalisations to background process and foreground the effect - Use of political labels - Metaphors "Margaret Thatcher, the iron lady” - Blends involving proper nouns to associate the politician with a policy “Obamacare” - Naming of politicians with their titles/honorifics News and media discourse: 1. (Chomsky and Herman, 1998) Manufacture of consent using the media through 5 filters 1) Media ownership 2) Advertising income 3) Selection of news 4) How groups respond to the news 5) Creation of a common enemy - Note: “Propaganda” means that the state hides things from people so they do not know any alternatives 2) Selection of news and angle of representation: all news is reported from a particular angle and ideological position because the institution of news reporting is socially, economically and politically situated - Not all events are equally represented; what is newsworthy? - Bell’s 11 “news values”: - Negativity/recency/relevance - Proximity - Relevance - Eliteness (of involved parties) - Attribution: whether facts of story can be attributed to someone trustworthy - Consonance: events that can be made to cohere with the ideas and understanding that people already have - Unexpectedness

- Facticity: stats, figures, dates, locations are important for hard news - Bare declaratives may be used to frame information as presupposed facts even though it may not have been backed up by evidence - Superlativeness - Personalisation: reported in a personal rather than abstract way - Events can be framed in a certain way to construct a particular news value - News narratives are not chronological, instead dependent on what the author considers to be important - Degree of presence: aspects of an event can be foregrounded, backgrounded, omitted or presupposed 3) Creation and representation of stereotypes - labels 4) (Fairclough, 1994) Conversationalism - Conventionally formal, authoritative but now more conversational giving the illusion of intimacy or familiarity - Popular news media (tabloids) reply on informal language, slang and other conversational features to establish powerful common sense associations with news values are presented as already existent within a common belief framework 4) (Burke, 1787) Media as “fourth estate”: an essential ingredient of democracy which wields an indirect but significant influence on society Politics influencing language use: Many democratic politicians in the USA have stopped using the red heart emoji because it ‘looks too republican’, more specifically it is associated with newly elected republican President Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign. A study in the peace sign, sprout, 100, and muscle emoji showed that more left-wing supporters used the peace sign and sprout emoji while more right wing supporters used the 100 and muscle emoji. This is because of social network (Milroy and Milroy, 1980) whereby people in a social group mimic the ways others in their group speak until it eventually becomes a marker of group identity Jargon: - In itself, specialist terminology to name technical concepts that usually have little interest to outsiders, can be innocuous - A specialised term may be more precise and free of any other surplus meaning than any existing alternative - The issue is that professionals sometimes use technical language for other “extra-linguistic” purposes, such as to promote group solidarity or baffle outsiders

– the terminology then becomes simply a badge of in-group identity or a language of ex