Doing leadership in political speech: Semantic processes and pragmatic inferences

Abstract

The interactional organization of leadership was examined in the context of 15 political speeches, delivered by leading politicians from the three major political parties in Britain. The study utilized a sociopragmatic methodology, supplemented by corpus linguistics and social psychology. Leadership was conceptualized in interactional –sociolinguistic terms, as brought in and brought out in the interaction through self-references collocating with four main verb forms (event, communication, subjectification and intention); these generate implicatures targeting political competence and responsiveness. Event and subjectification verbs were found to occur the most frequently, and communication verbs the least frequently, with little variation between politicians from different political parties. It was proposed that action and intention verbs primarily target competence, while subjectification and communication verbs primarily target responsiveness; overall, each of the four principal verb forms may be utilized to perform leadership throughout a political speech as a whole.