Abstract
Daily, the public is plied with political messages from various sources and millions are invested in campaign ads each election year. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the influence of linguistic details in such messages on attitudes about political candidates, especially within the context of Malaysia. The present study is grounded within the structure of framing and grammar, and suggests that grammar can influence attitudes towards a candidate’s electability. The study involved 387 male and female Malaysian university students (19- to 25-year-olds) of various ethnicities. The researcher designed two comprehensive questionnaires based on Fausey and Matlock’s (2011) work. Participants were randomly assigned Version A ( n =192) or Version B ( n =195) of the questionnaire. Both versions were about the conduct of Members of Parliament, unnamed and without party labels, to avoid bias about actual politicians. The conduct or actions were of negative and positive valence; Version A was framed using the imperfective form [‘was verb + ing ’] and employed the modal verb ‘must’, whereas Version B was framed using the perfective form [‘verb + ed ’] and employed the modal verb ‘have to’. Primarily, results revealed that imperfective descriptions of negative actions resulted in negative responses to the re-election of a candidate. However, the participants were largely insensitive to grammatical alteration when judging a candidate’s past positive actions. The results on modality demonstrated a preference for the modal verb ‘must’ which carries more “emotional value” than ‘have to’. The present study is novel in that it covers the dimension of modality (which has never been explored in previous studies) and that to date, there is no available research similar to it in the Malaysian context.
Highlights
AND RATIONALE FOR THE STUDYAccording to Matlock (2012), “how something is said may be as important as what is said” (p. 478)
This study addresses this research question: To what extent does grammar influence Malaysian university students’ attitudes towards a political candidate’s electability?
Grammar and the framing of political messages is presently an understudied area, the relatively few available studies have largely demonstrated a reciprocal relationship between the wording of political messages and attitudes regarding electability
Summary
According to Matlock (2012), “how something is said may be as important as what is said” (p. 478). According to Fausey and Matlock (2011), the wording of political messages is known to affect voting attitudes, which include judgments as to whether a political candidate will be elected to office. Grammar and the framing of political messages is presently an understudied area, the relatively few available studies have largely demonstrated a reciprocal relationship between the wording of political messages and attitudes regarding electability. This is an area worthy of further and more encompassing research, as grammatical information may well have implications of import in terms of how the masses perceive political candidates vying for public office is a likely predictor of election outcomes. Lakoff explained that words are neurally linked to the circuits that determine their meaning and the more a particular word is heard, the more the circuits get activated and grow stronger
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