Background
An accurate use of language is a key factor in achieving
personal and public objectives in all spheres of our everyday interaction, but
the exploitation of the appropriate linguistic resources becomes crucial for those
professionals involved in the field of politics. Obtaining the support of the
masses,legitimising political policies, or succeeding in public debates and
parliamentary negotiations may depend to a great extent on the kind of language
a politician employs and its adequacy to each political event.
1.
Introduction
According to this line of reasoning,
the wide range of potential linguistic choices a politician can make to build
up his or her discourse may have a crucial effect in shaping an ideology that
will lead people to more easily accept his or her arguments. Moreover, it seems
that the language used by politicians often provides an implicit rationale
through which the issues under discussion in each communicative situation are
to be identified and understood. Political leaders often play with theaudience’s
presuppositions and the activation of the pertinent mental schemata by
selecting or evading certain lexical items in order to increase the credibility
of their assertions and to create and diffuse a particular ideology. This often
allows most politicians’ claims –including those which, in other contexts.
2.
Method
The oral delivery of John Kerry is
analysed in this paper on the grounds of a corpus made of four transcriptions
of the Democratic candidate’s interventions in the aforementioned speeches and
debates.These transcriptions were extracted from Project Vote Smart,2 a
“campaign information website”created in 1992 by several American political
leaders. According to the description provided in the website, Project Vote Smart has the objective of providing the voter with trustworthy,
neutral, factual and unbiased information.
allaboutlinguistics.blogspot.com
