A pragmatic Analysis of Effective Political Communication from a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Abstract

A substantial aim of political communication is to engage specific groups of citizens through pragmatic policies and various media channels to convey messages and gain the audience’s acceptance effectively. This study investigates political communication as a form of discourse that occurs within political contexts, which involves the exchange of messages among political actors to address and resolve political issues. It is an interdisciplinary field encompassing aspects of psychology, economics, culture, society, and linguistics. This paper aims to give a satisfactory explanation for the question concerning effective communication characteristics: how might politicians utilize them in their speech to be more effective? This pragmatic study in discourse is devoted to analyzing the various effective syntactic structures that arise within political interactions according to Sperber and Wilson’s Theory of Relevance. The contribution of this study is evident as guidelines for further understanding the correlation between language and cognition. The researchers find that politicians seek to cognitively take advantage of the tendency of the audience to strive for relevance. In this way, expectations and attitudes are to be recognized and met by either interlocutors. The focal point of the study is the linguistic and inferential aspects of communication (verbal and non-verbal forms), represented in explicatures and implicatures. The study’s findings exhibit the politicians’ efforts in crafting their utterances optimally to meet the audience’s expectations of relevance, which could be used as an influential method for further studies concerning discourse and communication. This research paper aims to pragmatically exploit the effectiveness of the political interactions (extracts) in the House of Commons (UK parliamentary debates).