Handbook Review

Book Review

     A.    Book Identity

Title    : The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Edited by        :  Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton

Publisher        : Blackwell Publisher

Print publication date: 2003

Page    : i-xx, 817

Review part III page 398 (Political Discourse) by John Wilson

B. Introduction

This book contains about Political Discourse written by John Wilson.  John Wilson (Ontario politician) (1807–1869), lawyer, judge and political figure in Ontario, Canada. Political Discourse, like that of other areas of discourse analysis, covers a broad range of subject matter, and draws on a wide range of analytic methods.

C. Content Analysis

 I. Introduction

.           In these first contents, there is some definitions of the political in terms of general issues such as power, conflict, control, or domination (see Fairclough 1992a, 1995; Giddens 1991; Bourdieu 1991; van Dijk 1993; Chilton and Schaffer 1997), since any of these concepts may be employed in almost any form of discourse. Recently, for example, in a study of a psychotherapeutic training institution, Diamond (1995) refers to her study of the discourse of staff meetings as “political,” simply because issues of power and control are being worked out. They are being worked out at different levels, however: at interpersonal, personal, institutional, and educational levels for example, and in different strategic ways (Chilton 1997). By treating all discourse as political, in its most general sense, we may
be in danger of significantly overgeneralizing the concept of political discourse.

II. Studying Political Discourse

The study of political discourse has been around for as long as politics itself. The emphasis the Greeks placed on rhetoric is a case in point. From Cicero (1971) to Aristotle (1991) the concern was basically with particular methods of social and political competence in achieving specific objectives. While Aristotle gave a more formal twist to these overall aims, the general principle of articulating information on policies and actions for the public good remained constant. This general approach is continued today.

Modern rhetorical studies are more self-conscious, however, and interface with aspects of communication science, historical construction, social theory, and political science (for an overview see Gill and Whedbee 1997). While there has been a long tradition of interest in political discourse, if one strictly defines political discourse analysis in broadly linguistic terms (as perhaps all forms of discourse analysis should be defined: see Fairclough and Wodak 1997), it is only since the early 1980s or 1990s that work in this area has come to the fore. Indeed, Geis (1987) argues that his is the first text with a truly linguistic focus on political language/discourse. There is some merit in this argument, but without opening up issues about what is and what is not linguistics, many of the earlier studies in social semiotics and critical linguistics should also be included in a general linguistic view of political discourse (Fowler et al. 1979 ; Chilton 1990, 1985; Steiner 1985). While language is always clearly central to political discourse, what shifts is the balance between linguistic analysis and political comment. Distinguishing the direction of this balance, however, is not always straightforward.

III. Representation and Transformation

In more modern times it was perhaps Orwell who first drew our attention to the political potential of language. This is seen in his classic article “Politics and the English Language,” where he considers the way in which language may be used to manipulate thought and suggests, for example, that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible” (1969: 225).

The general principle here is one of transformation. Similar words and phrases may come to be reinterpreted within different ideological frameworks. Linked directly to this process is the concept of “representation.” Representation refers to the issue of how language is employed in different ways to represent what we can know, believe, and perhaps think. There are basically two views of representation: the universalist and the relativist (Montgomery 1992). The universalist view assumes that we understand our world in relation to a set of universal conceptual primes. Language, in this view, simply reflects these universal possibilities. Language is the vehicle for expressing our system of thought, with this system being independent of the language itself. The relativist position sees language and thought as inextricably intertwined. Our understanding of the world within a relativist perspective is affected by available linguistic resources. The consequences here, within a political context, seem obvious enough. To have others believe you, do what you want them to do, and generally view the world in the way most favorable for your goals, you need to manipulate, or, at the very least, pay attention to the linguistic limits of forms of representation.
While many analysts accept the relativist nature of representation in language, i.e. that experience of the world is not given to us directly but mediated by language, there is a tendency to assume that politically driven presentation is in general negative. In Fairclough's (1989) view of critical linguistics/discourse, for example, political discourse is criticized as a “form of social practice with a malign social purpose” (Torode 1991: 122). The alternative goal is “a discourse which has no underlying instrumental goals for any participant, but is genuinely undertaken in a co-operative spirit in order to arrive at understanding and common ground.”

IV. Syntax, Translation, and Truth

A similar and related point to that noted in Montogmery's work has been made specifically in the case of syntax (Montgomery 1992; Simpson 1988, 1993; Chilton 1997). The system of “transitivity,” for example (Halliday 1985), provides a set of choices for describing “what is going on in the world.” One such choice is referred to as a “material process,” where what is going on may be described as an action, transaction, or event. An example from Goodman (1996: 56) clearly illustrates these options:

Action
a.	The solider (Actor)	fired (material process: action)
Transactions
b.	The soldier (Actor)	killed (material process: transaction)	innocent villagers (goal)
Event
c.	Innocent villagers (goal: material process)	died (material process: event)

The idea that similar grammatical categories may be operationalized in different ways is taken up by Kress and Hodge (1979), who have argued that several different types of strategy might be subsumed under a general heading of negation. They explore the use of a variety of options available to politicians which allow them to articulate some contrastive alternatives to what they are saying: I agree with you but…; that is a fair point, nevertheless…; I see your point yet…. However, such stylistic assumptions seem to overlap with other levels of structure such as discourse, for example, and indeed forms such as but, nevertheless, well, etc. are now normally referred to as discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987; Gastil 1993; see Schiffrin, this volume). Wilson (1993) explicitly treats such forms as discourse markers and suggests that they may function differentially in the marking of ideological contrasts. In an analysis of students' debates on specific political subjects, it is noted that “and” may be used for either planned coordination (as in X, Y, and Z) or unplanned coordination (as in X and Y and Z). The choice one adopts relates to the way one wishes to present the elements coordinated by “and.” In political terms, unplanned coordination is used where one wishes the elements to be treated independently (Scotland and England and Wales and Northern Ireland), whereas planned coordination treats the elements as naturally linked (Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

V. Politics, Representation, and Textual Production

The general claims made by Mayhew in the House of Commons were summarized and paraphrased in Wilson (1993: 470) as follows:

• (1a) We did not talk to the IRA, we had channels of communication/contacts.
• (1b) We did not authorise anyone to talk with the IRA.

In the first case a semantic contrast between talk and communication is presented, the claim seemingly being that the British government did not have articulate verbal contact, but did communicate with the IRA using selected channels of communication. In (1b) negation is employed in the context of a particular type of presuppositional verb (authorize) which creates two possible interpretations, both of which are equally acceptable:

We did not authorize anyone to talk to the IRA, so no one did.

We did not authorize anyone to talk to the IRA, although someone did (unauthorized).

Which statement was intended was never made clear in the debates that took place. However, as a number of politicians indicated at the time, the issue was not whether the government had communication channels with the IRA, but that John Major (and the secretary of state in other statements) implied by their comments (“[to] talk with Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA… would turn my stomach”) that the British government would not have any contact with the IRA until they gave up violence. For some of the politicians who listened to John Major's original claims, any contact at whatever level, authorized or unauthorized, was in breach of such claims.
The reference to an arms race or communist threat dates the POLITICS system. The important point nevertheless is that such systems generally work on the basis of key propositions within the input. These are then linked to particular scripts or frames (Schank and Ableson 1977); for instance, what the USA should do in the case of nuclear threat. These scripts provide a mechanism for grouping inferences and de fining the context in which interpretation takes place. Such contexts are modified relative to certain ideological formations (conservative or liberal). While it would be possible to build in specific parsing constraints which may be sensitive to structural dimensions of syntax, the important features for the system are elements such as “Congress” and “fund,” not necessarily their syntactic embedding.

VI. A Word about Politic

The point is that there are many dimensions of language involved in political output, and all of these have the potential in their own way for political impact. Even individual sounds may become political, and a much-neglected area of political language is what we might call “political phonology.”

VII. Sounds Political

It may be initially difficult to grasp how specific sounds come to be interpreted as political, although where one sees politics as tied directly to forms of ideology, the issue becomes a central plank of variationist sociolinguistics, and beyond (see Cameron 1995; Lippi-Green 1997). Research on accent clearly indicates that selected phonolo gical variables can carry political loading. By their very nature, phonological vari ables have been tied to issues such as class, gender, and ethnicity, and, in turn, to the social and political implications of the use of such variables (at both macro- and microlevels; Wilson and O Brian 1998).

VIII. Conclusions and Summary
One of the core goals of political discourse analysis is to seek out the ways in which language choice is manipulated for specific political effect. In our discussions we have clearly seen that almost all levels of linguistics are involved; i.e. most samples of political discourse may be mapped onto the various levels of linguistics from lexis to pragmatics. At the level of lexical choice there are studies of such things as loaded words, technical words, and euphemisms (Graber 1981; Geis 1987; Bolinger 1982). In grammar, as we have seen, there are studies of selected functional systems and their organization within different ideological frames (Fowler and Marshall 1985). There are also studies of pronouns and their distribution relative to political and other forms of responsibility (Maitland and Wilson 1987; Wilson 1990; Pateman 1981; Lwaitama 1988) and studies of more pragmatically oriented objects such as implic- atures, metaphors, and speech acts (van Dijk 1989; Wilson 1990; Holly 1989; Chilton and Ilyin 1993).
As we have discussed above, defining political discourse is not a straightforward matter. Some analysts define the political so broadly that almost any discourse may be considered political. At the same time, a formal constraint on any definition such that we only deal with politicians and core political events excludes the everyday discourse of politics which is part of people's lives. The balance is a difficult one, and perhaps all we can expect from analysts is that they make clear in which way they are viewing political discourse, because they too, like politicians, are limited and mani pulated in and by their own discourse. As we have seen, in a number of cases (Stubbs and van Dijk, for example) the text which is being analyzed has already been delimited as a specific political type. Stubbs refers to his chosen text as an “environmentalist one,” and van Dijk refers to specific speeches as “racist.” In both cases, social and political judgments have been made before analysis commences. In other studies (Gunn and Wilson, for example) the data generate their own stories, and the initial constraint is usually only linguistic, the political being drafted in later to explain why patterns may have emerged as they have. I am not suggesting that these are mutually exclusive alternatives, or that one or the other has any specific problems. The point is made to illustrate the way in which some analyses may become as much political as linguistic; and I think political discourse is made up of, and must allow for, both.

It's all about the review of one part of the book. In my opinion this book has so many benefits in Discourse Analysis Topics.

Thank you for always reading and to always give thanks to God.