Harris’s Coercive Discourse Is Stabilizing: Discourse Strategies and Effects

Abidi Hajer

doi:10.11648/j.ash.20210702.15

Abstract

Since politicians make use of language in their quest to garner support and credibility, among other things, many coercive strategies are utilized by recourse to some manipulative avenues. These same coercive strategies happen in the matrix of a peculiar socio-cultural environment independently from ideologies and common or shared goals. The latter claims make this paper’s focus manifold. Kamala Harris, the vice US President, opted for a number of stabilizing, as it seems, linguistic choices of diction, and thus messages to yield an automatic effect at a time of crisis. This research, in view of this, applies of qualitative method to analyze Harris’s victory speech while implementing van Dijk’s framework adopted from <i>politics, ideology and discourse</i>. In order to attain persuasive ends, some ideological macro-strategies have been widely invested in the speech like emphasizing Our Good things, de-emphasizing Their Bad things and so forth. Shaping public opinion has, thus, been coercively perceived via some ideological discourse categories like lexicalization, consensus and counterfactuals. Results show that coercive discourse has a stabilizing effect and is significantly linked to ideologies and political quibbles dissident from her predecessors. Results also show that coercion is endemic in political discourse and is overtly swinging in various directions to meet many ends.

Highlights

The pre-election era in the United States has been stamped by a daunting economic, social and political state
As discourse is the real manifestation of language, and as a vice president of the United States, Harris, in her victory speech and to adapt to the shifting needs of the current perilous situation, opted for some strategies complying with the status quo
In a critical discourse analysis of the victory speech of the US vice president, kamala Harris, some analytic tools are deployed adopted from the theoretical approach of van Dijk [23]

Summary

Introduction

The pre-election era in the United States has been stamped by a daunting economic, social and political state. Each candidate placed the onus of instability on his opponent’s party leaders which lucidly reflected unrelenting convergence. As discourse is the real manifestation of language, and as a vice president of the United States, Harris, in her victory speech and to adapt to the shifting needs of the current perilous situation, opted for some strategies complying with the status quo. Dismantling the rhetorical strategies presupposes demystifying quibbles deployed in discourse via a critical discourse analysis framework. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How efficient are the rhetorical strategies deployed by the vice president? How did they reflect ideological mechanisms governing discourse? This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How efficient are the rhetorical strategies deployed by the vice president? How did they reflect ideological mechanisms governing discourse? What makes Harris’s discourse different?

Methods

Results

Conclusion