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SUMMARY
The author puts forth a theoretical framework based on a cognitivist perspective, which claims that social interaction is based on the actions of individuals, and that these individuals are primarily complex neural beings. He questions the current explanation of political discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the actions of some social group or elite that exploits or controls language in order to preserve its own power. Instead, Chilton aims for a theory of language and politics that rests on the intersection of three axes: space, time, and modality. The book is divided into three sections.
Part I presents the proposed theoretical framework. Parts II and III include detailed analyses of samples of political text and talk. Part IV offers concluding thoughts concerning the need for a theory of language and politics.
SYNOPSIS
Chap. 1 , Politics and Language, explores the linguistic, discursive, and communicative dimensions of politics drawing in part on Aristotle's view of humans as political creatures with a unique capacity for speech. Chilton explores the possibility that language might have evolved to perform social functions, which would correspond to the "political", or that it evolved primarily by a random mutation.
Chap. 2 , Language and Politics, Chilton examines the nature of language, particular languages, and the use of language in relation to politics. He discusses the re-emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the development of new methods of investigation grounded in cognitive science, computational linguistics, archeology, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Chilton also presents the three major approaches to the evolution of language: the species-specific ability for language capacity exemplified by Chomskyan linguistics; the social intelligence language module view; and the "Machiavellian" behavior view which presumes that early human individuals sought to developed strategies to maximize individual advantages through reciprocal altruism.
'Generative creativity' of language allows individuals to overcome the so-called Whorfian constraint. The communicative power of reason, or reason freed from purposive bias, allows humans to reach true enlightenment through interaction.
Interaction (chap. 3) is examined in relation to its political dimension. The mechanisms for flouting the maxims and the implied pragmatic meaning or implicatures are also discussed within the context of political interaction as in particular institutionalized contexts such as Parliamentary debates.
In a micro-analysis of political interaction, Chilton utilizes notational conventions from conversation analysis developed by Schegloff and Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson that reveal fine details of face-to-face (F2F) interaction. Concerning strategic uses of language in political discourse, the author puts forth the following strategic functions: coercion, legitimization and delegitimization, and representation and misrepresentation.
Chapter 4 deals with the way representations of the world are communicated in political interaction. Semantics and pragmatics, or the nature of meaning and meaning as a function of context, are discussed in relation to the study of language and politics. Chilton investigates how mental representations of reality are constructed during the process of interaction in political discourse. Knowledge of politics and political ideologies involves storage in long-term memory, and how short-term memory deals primarily with processes of discourse production and understanding.
The term 'frame' is introduced and defined as a theoretical construct related to the conceptualization of situation types and their expression in language. He also discusses conceptual metaphor, an important element of political rhetoric. Metaphorical mappings are also discussed as complex bundles of meaning and frame representations that consist of accumulated cultural knowledge.
In doing practical analyses of text and talk, Chilton uses a theoretical framework that allows him to make propositional representations consisting of arguments (e.g., noun phrases), predicates (e.g., verbs, adjectives, and prepositional phrases), and adjuncts, which specify location, time, and manner. Citing Dowty (1991), Chilton explains that the thematic roles of arguments have to be understood as clusters of entailments about the predicate, and that traditional roles (e.g., agent, source, patient, experiencer, goal) must be linked to one of two prototypical categories: prototypical agent (P-Agent) and prototypical patient (P-Patient). The semantic phenomenon of presupposition is explained as being triggered by syntactic and lexical structures. He displays the propositional representations (Table 4.1) of unpacked sentences from a transcript of a speech given in 1999 by former President Clinton to justify the use of air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in alliance with NATO. Serbian forces are represented as responsible agents of brutality and Kosovo civilians and insurgents as victims of brutality in Kosovo.
Chilton also shows how indexical expressions are used as linguistic resources to relate to a variety of situational features, and elaborates on spatial, temporal, and social deixis since these relate to elements of political discourse. Clinton's 1999 speech is mapped onto a three-dimensional deixis. Events, nations, agents, and patients are located in relation to the Self or speaker. Time or the here/now is also at the center, and in this type of political speech, historical periods are either close or remote to the source. Along the m axis, Chilton describes close connections between epistemic modality (involving degrees of certainty) and deontic modality (related to permission and obligation), commonly regarded as scales.
More complexity is added to the proposed dimensions of deixis by suggesting that social groups are conceptualized metaphorically on the basis of container and center-periphery image schemata. A rightness- wrongness scale along the m axis is added, showing primarily modal verbs (will, must, should, ought, etc.) though other linguistic expressions could easily be used.
In Part II, the Domestic Arena , Chilton examines the micro-structure of the media interview ( chapter five ). Margaret Beckett, Labour MP and Leader of the House of Commons (HC) is interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC. Using conventions from conversation analysis, Chilton explains how participants are aware of recent political history, social structures, and customs of discourse beyond the context of the local interview. For example, Beckett's comments about William Hague, the Conservative Party leader, reveal her concern with the impact of his speech on voters.
Propositions and presumptions are closely examined in the Humphrys-Beckett interview. The analysis also shows how Humphrys, the interviewer, uses frames of beliefs about democracy and overt deontic expressions such as 'be allowed,' to lead Beckett into logical dilemmas that force her to reformulate her explanation of 'non-voting as a rejection of the government' by using analogy.
The characteristics of a particular genre of democratic discourse, Parliamentary language, are examined in chapter six. On a parliamentary debate in the HC, 7 July 1999. A new MP, Laxton, puts questions that are really statements until the opposition MPs interrupt following Laxton's falling intonation at the end of speech segment, which enables the Speaker to use the imperative, 'put your question now please' as a means of controlling the syntactic form and pragmatic force of the MP's utterances. Prime Minister Blair's response to Laxton's requests concerning a community hospital focuses on the order of salience and he repeats the word 'agree' twice and the phrase 'he's right' three times to elicit a chorus of approval from Labour MPs. Chilton characterizes this activity as a form of bonding as well as bounding behavior among members.
Next, Chilton analyzes parliamentary exchanges between seasoned leaders such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and opposition leader MP William Hague. At one point Hague is criticizing the waiting time for access to health services using interrogatives, presuppositions, and hand gestures to accompany rising-falling intonation contours, which Chilton interprets as meaning challenges since prosodic features often accompanied by gestures are part of the parliamentary performance. Blair interrupts to save face and quickly asserts that waiting time has decreased.
The chapter concludes with a speculation about the possible linkage between historical intimations and religious presumptions present in Bush's presidential discourse during a crisis situation.
Chapter 11, Part IV of the book, presents Chilton's concluding thoughts concerning a theory of language and politics. He explores the question of what it means to communicate in the 21st century across societies, culture, and languages but remains primarily focused on F2F interaction. He thus leaves out a very important realm in which millions of humans communicate on a daily basis: virtual space or the Internet.
In proposing a new theoretical framework, Chilton borrows ideas from Aristotle, Chomsky, evolutionary theorists, and cognitive scientists, and posits hypotheses based on descriptive and explanatory analyses of political texts. Twelve propositions are advanced concerning political discourse: that political discourse has specific connections to the emotional centers of the brain, and that it is anchored in multi-dimensional deixis.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
Though the author presents a novel theoretical framework for the analysis of political discourse, I found his use of the multi-dimensional spatial model to deictically represent specified reality spaces from linguistic analyses of political texts in chapters 8, 9, and 10 sometimes difficult to follow. Moreover, one wonders how it would be possible to utilize this multi-dimensional model in the analysis of large numbers of political texts or on different types of political discourse data since the author never explains his methodology for compiling a corpus of political texts.
Despite some methodological shortcomings and problematic speculations about the possible connection between innate political tendencies of humans and their innate linguistic abilities, "Analysing Political Discourse" is provocative and offers readers a unique international perspective. The author's in-depth linguistic analyses of various contemporary samples of political discourse bring to light different mental representations of political thought and behavior. Given its broad scope, "Analysing Political Discourse" would be a valuable resource for researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, English, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and communication studies.
