article review

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.

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