Metaphorical scenarios in the 2004 American presidential debates and their relevance for persuasion

Abstract

I. IntroductionThe speeches delivered during the American presidential campaigns have been scrutinised for decades; their rhetorical dimension has been analysed, their words have been counted, themes' recurrence has been discussed. All these and more have been the result of researchers' attempt to see what makes such speeches more or less persuasive.The present article will analyse three metaphorical scenarios present in the 2004 US presidential debates in an attempt to uncover the way in which G. W. Bush Jr. and John Kerry used them to frame the most hotly debated issues. It will also try to offer an explanation on how these scenarios may have increased the persuasiveness of the messages put forward by the candidates.Thus, in Section 2 I propose and discuss briefly definition of persuasion and suggest possible link between this process and relevance theory. Before turning in Section 4 to metaphorical scenarios and their embodiment in the 2004 US political debates, I consider framing and verbalization in Section 3. Section 5 is dedicated to several concluding remarks, underling the link between metaphorical scenarios, relevance theory and persuasion.II. Relevance theory and persuasionAs stated in the Introduction, I claim that there is link between the relevance of message and its persuasiveness. According to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1985/1996; Wilson 2004; Wilson & Sperber 2004) communication is ostensive and the presence of ostensive stimuli triggers the audience's attention; these stimuli bring about predictable expectations of relevance. Moreover, verbal communication is inferential, in that hearers have to recognise the fact that speakers intend to affect their cognitive environments and also to recognise that they have this intention. One may define political debates as ostensive stimuli because, by producing them, politicians draw, or at least they want to draw, their audience's attention; thus, hearers expect that the information contained in the speeches will yield positive cognitive effects at low processing effort. The informative intention may be fulfilled in such cases only if the speakers are trustworthy, if the audience believes in them and consequently in their message.An utterance creates predictable expectations of relevance; it is said to be worth the hearers' attention when the information put forward can be linked with background information they possess, in such way as to yield positive cognitive effects, that is a worthwhile difference to the individual's representation of the world - true conclusion for example (Wilson & Sperber 2004: 2)1. Positive cognitive effects are of several kinds - contextual implications, strengthening of contextual assumption or contradiction and elimination of contextual assumption. The most important of them is the first, defined as (...) conclusion deducible from the input and the context together, but from neither the input nor context alone (Wilson & Sperber 2004: 2). I have started out from the assumption that political debate could be relevant to an audience if the information it contains combines with the context in which it is delivered, yielding contextual implications; its relevance may also strengthen an already held assumption or lead to its contradiction and elimination.Persuasion has been mainly discussed when talking about politics. This could be because persuasion was initially linked with rhetoric, the art and science of elaborating discourse. Persuasion is also great candidate for an interdisciplinary approach, since it is multi-facet process, merging together elements that can be studied from different perspectives such as rhetoric, linguistics, sociology or psychology.Speech act theory has identified persuasion as the perlocutionary effect. Several studies (Campbell 1973; Cohen 1973; Davis 1980; Gaines 1979; Gu 1983; Kurzon 1988; Marcu 2000; Zhu 2004) dedicated to these effects have failed to propose fully explanatory and plausible definition of persuasion, being mostly interested in proposing different classifications of perlocutionary effects (for discussion, see Niculescu-Gorpin 2007). …