Abstract
This paper investigates political discourse from the perspective of relevance theory in relation to the function of reasonable persuasion oriented towards voters. The research’ objectives are to identify and to describe: 1) the mechanisms of persuasion used in election campaign speeches; 2) the meta-strategy of miming dialogue; 3) the manner in which political discourse infringes upon the principles of relevance. The accomplishment of the objectives requires a two-fold methodology: rhetorical and linguistic by means of instruments of lexical-semantic, pragma-stylistic and logical-argumentative analysis. The research is focused on political election campaigns speeches: slogans and speeches of the Romanian recent election campaigns. The most frequently encountered discourse strategies are: i) the use of various types of fallacious reasoning and ii) vague language.
Highlights
The subject of this paper is Romanian political discourse from the perspective of relevance theory (Sperber& Wilson, 1995)
To what extent and why is the receptor’s interpretation of political speech influenced? “[...] a context is not given once and for all, but is constructed, enunciation after enunciation, by the interlocutor, on the basis of information coming from different sources and on the basis of the principle of pertinence” (Sperber & Wilson, 1995)
In discursive practice, we do not address the real recipient, but the one built by our subjectivity, and the recipient decodes the message according to what he thinks he knows about the emitter. This is the struggle in the political speech of the campaign: politicians try toconstruct their image in such a way that voters can no longer reach the real image
Summary
The subject of this paper is Romanian political discourse from the perspective of relevance theory The corpus mainly comprises the slogans and speeches of the political actors involved in the election campaign for the parliamentary elections held on 11 December 2016 and for the local elections held on 5 June 2016. Given the necessity to take into consideration the context as well as the parameters of the situation of enunciation which are specific to the analysed discourses, it will be compulsory to resort to the instruments furnished by the lexical-semantic and pragmastylistic analysis. This two-fold methodology is based on “a correlation between pragmatic and rhetoric resources of speech-building”. The receptor is drawn into a sort of communicational complicity which is often founded on false assumptions, with a definite intention to convert the assent of the receptor—who is already a partaker of the statements, ideas and interpretations of the respective discursive political figure—into a favourable vote
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