Naming candidates as preemptive discursive practice: The 2016 Taiwan presidential race

Abstract

Forms of address have been studied as important discursive strategies in adversary political communication in Western democracies but few studies have looked into how unconventional forms of address are used by netizens to refer to presidential candidates on digital platform. Giving names/nicknames is one of the impoliteness strategies to cause/take offence (Culpeper, 1996, 2011:23; Haugh, 2015). They are part of the comments of netizens to register affective stances such as irony, sarcasm, and/or threats to defend/preempt a status quo over issues of concern during a race. These situated verbal aggressions are not only evaluative of group-based political opponents/policies, affective to in/out group identification but also evoking conflicting norms, thus strategic for relational work in the power struggle among competing political parties. The lexical, referential, and pragmatics of the online naming are evaluative and sensitive to the “threat” of a candidate, an issue, and/or a policy during political campaigning. By comparing both the online and offline naming of politicians, looking into how Chinese language and naming practices can be flouted to relate to a candidate and/or a political party, and stressing that verbal aggression is politic behavior in a high-stakes political game, we conclude that naming presidential candidates on FB walls constitutes a vital part of the acts of (dis)identification among different interest groups over issues of concern in a high-stakes political race.