Language and Politics

Module 1

The Language of Politics

(How does language permeates politics and vice versa?)

Time Allotment : 9hours

Instructor : Lovelyn Layson-Granfiel
Contact Details: lovelyn.granfiel@chmsc.edu.ph

I. Learning Objectives:

At the end of this module, you will be able to:

1. Define language of politics.
2. Identify different features of language and politics.
3. Explain the relationship of language and politics.

II. Introduction:

Man is by nature a political animal, but some take it to extremes and become
politicians. The qualities that make a successful politician include the ability to lead
others by articulating a clear and inspiring vision of a better future with the use of
language.

This module seeks to give you a background of how language permeates politics
and how politics saturates language as well. It will provide a discussion on how
related language and politics, its features and how they are both being used by
leaders in our society.

III. Learning Activities

A. Engage

Instruction: Describe each picture in not more than 5 sentences.

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2. ______________________________________
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3. _____________________________________
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B. Explore

Answer the question below in not 5-10 sentences:

Is it necessary for a government leader to deliver a good speech and use
proper words and gesture in public? Explain your answer.
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C. Explain

Politics is concerned with power: the power to make decisions, to control

resources, to control other people’s behavior, and to control their values.

Political Scientist Noam Chomsky explains in his book Language and Politics
exactly how words are the currency of power in elections. Communication and
speech writing are the keys to swaying voters, and in Democracy, the system calls for
the people to buy in to what politicians are saying in their campaign speeches.

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Today, words are incredibly important in politics, given the abundance of false
information available to voters on the internet. When President Donald Trump was
elected in 2016, the term ‘alternative facts’ became popular, widely to discredit
what different news outlets were reporting about various scandals surrounding the
new administration.

The way politicians use language to manipulate the electorate was traditionally
through live or televised discourse, although today we also have the social media as
an important way to use words to influence people.

What are the features of language used by politicians? Why do politicians

choose their words carefully?

Politicians believe implicitly in linguistic relativity. They believe in the power of

language to influence thought . The following language of politics explain how these
are being used in political discourses.

The Language of Politics

1. Presupposition
2. Implicature
3. Metaphor
4. Euphemism
5. The ‘rule of three’
6. Structural parallelism
7. Dexies
8. Bushism
9. Political Correctness

(1). Presuppositions - the meaning of the word presuppose is to assume beforehand;

involve, imply - represent some of the most powerful of language patterns. They are
in common, everyday use by all of us and are built into the structure of the English
language.

Presuppositions may be fair and uncontroversial based upon the knowledge

which is common to all parties privy to a communication, or unfair, counterfeit or
controversial - made upon the basis of covert knowledge by a communicator with a
hidden agenda.

a) True Presupposition - is based on an unconsidered assumption by the

encoder. That assumption is that the decoder will draw the same suppositions from
the non-asserted elements of a message as the encoder holds

b) The Unfair Presupposition - The unfair or premeditated form of

presupposition can be defined as that used by a speaker to get the listener to

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presuppose (i.e. assume to be true, as a matter of fact) spurious assertions.

c) Presuppositions in Use
- Presuppositions in Questions
- Presuppositions in Addresses to Groups
- Presuppositions in Advertising
- Presuppositions in One to One Encounters
- Assumptions and their Refutation
- Courtroom
- Confrontational debates - political or otherwise
- Police interviews
- Advertising
- Political broadcasts
- Sales situations

(2. ) Implicature
Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatics subfield of linguistics, coined by
H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither
expressed nor strictly implied the utterance. Grice identified four types of general
conversational implicature:

a) Maxim of Manner: Clarity

- Avoid obscurity of expression.("Eschew obfuscation") Obfuscation (or
beclouding) is the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making
communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous, and harder to interpret Avoid
ambiguity. Be brief Be orderly When one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as
orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.

b) Maxim of Relation: Relevance

- Be relevant
- How to allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately
changed.
- Where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the
discussion

c) Maxim of Quantity: Information

- Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes
of the exchange.
- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
- Where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much
information as is needed, and no more.

d) Maxim of Quality: Truth

- Do not say what you believe to be false.
- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

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- Where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or
that is not supported by evidence

(3. ) Metaphors
- A metaphor is a figure of speech that is used to make a comparison between
two things that aren't alike but do have something in common.
- political contexts metaphor can be, and often is, used for ideological
purposes because it activates unconscious emotional associations and thereby
contributes to myth creation: politicians use metaphor to tell the right story.
- Combine a metaphor with another figure of style
- Make the audience aware of a metaphor

Examples:
*hard power -using military force against another country as form of
punishment.
*character assassination - spreading (usually) manufactured stories about a
candidate with the intent to destroy his or her reputation in the eyes of the public.
*puppet government - a government that is manipulated by a foreign power for
its own interests.

(4.) Euphemism
- A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively
uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or
otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience.

- Euphemism is an inoffensive expression that is substituted for one that is

considered offensive. In other words, the communication of painful or hurtful
concepts using softer words is known as euphemism.

Example of Euphemism: Words can signal strongly our attitudes to

fundamental things; debates that may appear to be about words can actually be
about values and world view. Whichever word is chosen may also affect peoples
perception of the world and of themselves." Therefore, when teachers tell students
that they have poor ability in their studies, they may feel that they are never likely to
improve and that there is no room for improvement and they may ask themselves:
“Why bother when I can’t improve anymore?”.
But when teachers tell students that they have low attainment, they may feel
they would do much, much better if they work harder. Thus, the word attainment
here is a euphemism to cover up an unacceptable fact with a prettier word.

(5.) Rule of Three

- The rule of three is powerful speech writing technique that you should learn,
practice, and master

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- It makes the author or speaker appear knowledgeable while being both
simple and catchy. Slogans, film titles and a variety of other things have been
structured in threes, a tradition that grew out of oral storytelling.

5.1Examples of the Rule of Three

 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Lend me your ears.“
 Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
“We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow —
this ground.“
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people”
 General MacArthur, West Point Address, 1962
“Duty, Honor, Country” [repeated several times in the speech]
 Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech
“We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the
work of remaking America“

5.2 Rhetorical Devices — Rule of Three

a) Hendiatris
- A hendiatris is a figure of speech where three successive words are used to
express a central idea.

Examples of Hendiatris include:

“Veni, vidi, vici.” [Julius Caesar]- ( I came, I saw, I conquered)
“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité“ [French motto] -(Freedom, Equality, Fraternity)
“Citius, Altius, Fortius” [Olympic motto] - (Faster, Higher, Stronger)

b). Tricolon
- A tricolon is a series of three parallel elements (words or phrases). In a
strict tricolon, the elements have the same length but this condition is often put
aside.

Examples of tricolon include:

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” [Advice for speakers from Franklin D.
Roosevelt]

5.3 Western Culture and the Rule of Three

Christianity
- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
- Heaven, hell, and purgatory
- Three Wise Men with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh

Movies & Books

- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- Superman’s “Truth, Justice, and the American Way“

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- Nursery rhymes such as the Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks and the Three
Bears
- In a more general sense, there is the allure of trilogies as with Indiana
Jones, The Godfather, The Matrix, Star Wars, and many others.

Politics
- U.S. Branches of Government: Executive, Judicial, and Legislative
- U.S. Declaration of Independence: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness”

(6. )Parallelism
- It is when elements of a sentence “have the same weight and are often the
same part of speech. Noun, noun, noun. Check. Adjective, adjective, adjective. Verb,
verb, verb. Parallelism is all about equality; parallelism creates a nice rhythm in your
sentence.

6.1 Obama’s Inaugural Speech - Examples of Parallelism:

Here are but some of them (in italics):
 “My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us,
grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne
by our ancestors.”
 “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shattered.”
 “Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things …”

(7. ) Bushisms
- Bushisms are unconventional words, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms,
and semantic or linguistic errors that have occurred in the public speaking of former
President of the United States George W. Bush and, much less notably, of his father,
George H. W. Bush.

The term has become part of popular folklore and is the basis of a number of
websites and published books. It is often used to caricature the two presidents.
Common characteristics include malapropisms, the creation of neologisms,
spoonerisms, stunt words and grammatically incorrect subject-verb agreement.

7.1 Neologisms
- Neologisms as a linguistic phenomenon can be seen from different aspects:
time (synchronic), geographical, social and communicative. Neologisms can be
either loan words in the form of direct loans and loan translations, or newly
coined terms, either morphologically new words or by giving existing words a
new semantic content.

Examples:
- “Webinar”

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- “Banana republic” This word was introduced by O. Henry in his book of
collected works Cabbages and Kings. It later became a term exploited in
politics and it stands for a politically unstable country dependent on a
product exported (bananas, for example).
- “Misunderestimate” - stated by Bush in the immediate aftermath of
the disputed 2000 election

7.2 A Spoonerism
- A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which
corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see
metathesis). It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner

(1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to

this tendency.

- A spoonerism is also known as a marrowsky, after a Polish count who

suffered from the same impediment. While spoonerisms are commonly heard as
slips of the tongue resulting from unintentionally getting ones words in a tangle,
they can also be used intentionally as a play on words. In some cultures,
spoonerisms are used as a rhyme form used in poetry .

7.2.1Examples of Spoonerism
- "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" (dear old queen, referring to
Queen Victoria)
- "The Lord is a shoving leopard." (a loving shepherd)
- "A blushing crow." (crushing blow)
- "A well-boiled icicle" (well-oiled bicycle)
- "You were fighting a liar in the quadrangle." (lighting a fire)
- "Is the bean dizzy?" (dean busy)
- "Someone is occupewing my pie. Please sew me to another sheet."
(occupying my pew...show me to another seat)
- "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole
worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain." (missed...history,
wasted...term, down train)

7.3 A Stunt Words

- It is created to produce a special effect, or to attract attention.
- Some stunt words are Portmanteau words
- Portmanteau word is a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes
into one new word. A portmanteau word typically combines both sounds
and meanings, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog.
- More generally, it may refer to any term or phrase that combines two
or more meanings. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph
which represents two or more morphemes.

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Examples:
- “Clintonomics” (encapsulates the economic policies of United States
President Bill Clinton that were implemented during his presidency, which
lasted from January 1993 to January 2001.)
- “Obamacare” (The Affordable Care Act (ACA), formally known as
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a United States federal
statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by
President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Together with the Health Care
and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 amendment, it represents the U.S.
healthcare system's most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of
coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

(8.). Deixis
- In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the
meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual
information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their
denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place.

- Words or phrases that require contextual information to convey any meaning –

for example, English pronouns – are deictic. Deixis is closely related to both
indexicality and anaphora .

Example: In a study conducted to analyze Obama’s speeches showed;

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8.1 Indexicality
- Indexical behavior or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of
affairs. For example, I refers to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time
at which that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of utterance.

- For Charles Sanders Peirce, indexicality is one of three sign modalities

(see further down), and is a phenomenon far broader than language; that
which, independently of interpretation, points to something — such as
smoke (an index of fire) or a pointing finger — works indexically for
interpretation.

- Social indexicality in the human realm has been regarded as including

any sign (clothing, speech variety, table manners) that points to, and helps
create, social identity.

8.2 Anaphora
- Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on
different levels. First, anaphora indicates "how discourse is constructed and
maintained". Second, on the level of the sentence, anaphora binds different
syntactical elements together. Third, in computational linguistics anaphora
presents a challenge to natural language processing, since the identification
of the reference can be challenging. Fourth, anaphora "tells us some things
about how language is understood, and processed", which is relevant to
fields of linguistics interested in cognitive psychology.
- the deliberate repetition of the first part of the sentence in order to
achieve an artistic effect.

Examples:
“I want my money right now, right here, alright?”

“When the world wanted rights, who wrote Magna Carta?

When they wanted representation, who built the first parliament?
When they looked for compassion, who led the abolition of slavery?
When they searched for equality, who gave women the vote?
When their freedom was in peril, who offered blood, toil, tears and sweat?
And today – whose music do they dance to?
Whose universities do they flock to?
Whose football league do they watch?
Whose example of tolerance of people living together from every nation,
every religion, young and old, straight and gay?
Whose example do they aspire to?” (David Cameron, 2013 speech)

(9.) Political Correctness

- Political Correctness is a trend that wants to make everything fair, equal and
just to all by suppressing thought, speech and practice in order to achieve that goal.

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-In recent years, there has been a political and social movement to make some
words in a language more neutral and less biased. Words like ‘passed away’ is used
instead of ‘die’ or ‘disabled’ instead of ‘handicapped’.

D. Elaborate

Instruction:

Look for some examples of different Language of Politics spoken or

delivered in a speech by a Filipino government leader. Identify at least 3 and explain
in not more than 5 sentences.

E. Evaluate

I. Identify examples of language of politics. Choose the letters in the box and
write the letters on the space provided before the number.

A. Spoonerism B. Stunt Words

C.Hendiatris D. Neologism

E. Rule of Three F. Tricolon

______ 1. A blushing crow

______ 2. Obamacare
______ 3. I came, I saw, I conquered
______ 4. Misunderestimate
______ 5. “Duty, Honor, Country”
______ 6. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people
______ 7. “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
______ 8. “Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Lend me your ears.“
______ 9. Banana Republic
______ 10. “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shattered.”

II. Answer the following in 5-10 sentences.

1. How is language related to politics? Explain.

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2. Who among the Filipino political figures do you think has been famous for his/her
use of language in politics? Why?
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References:

Joseph, John E., Language and Politics, Edinburgh University Press, 2006

Kling, Arnold., The Three Languages of Politics, Cato Institute, Washington DC,
2017

Chomsky, Noam., Language and Politics, AK Press, 2004

www. academia.edu

www.slideshare.net/Shamimali/language-and-politics

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