Abstract
This article aims to investigate narrative reports based on the use of reported speech frames from a pragmatic-cognitive perspective. As rhetorical means of image creation and (de)legitimisation, they are frequently employed to represent utterances that constitute integral elements of short narratives incorporated into American presidential speeches. This paper’s main objective is to propose an original taxonomy of sayers, namely speakers of words reported (Halliday 1981, 1985; Vandelanotte 2006) in political discourse and to investigate their potential for self- and other-presentation and (de)legitimisation of one’s stance, actions and decisions. The data used for illustrative purposes comprise extracts from Barack Obama’s speeches delivered during his presidency (2009 and 2016) and have been selected from a bigger corpus of 125 presidential speeches by three American presidents: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Findings in this study indicate that specific sayer types have greater potential for effective image formation and contribute to (de)legitimisation of events.
Highlights
Presidents as public speakers are often seen as individuals wielding a great amount of power to affect reality with their ‘authoritative speech’, which makes them ‘more persuasive, more convincing and more attended to’ (Philips 2004, 475) in their attempt to convince various audiences – local, national and international alike
Based on reported speech frames (Silverstein 1976; Bauman 1986; Clark and Gerrig 1990; Irvine 1996; Tannen 2006, Tannen 2007), which index utterances made by actors other than the current speaker or those the speaker made in different circumstances, narrative reports are deliberately incorporated into speeches, as a meta-commentary on utterances represented
This article aimed to investigate the use of narrative reports in presidential speeches and their potential for image construction andlegitimisation
Summary
Presidents as public speakers are often seen as individuals wielding a great amount of power to affect reality with their ‘authoritative speech’ (see e.g. Gal and Woolard 1995; Martín Rojo and van Dijk 1997; Duranti 2004; Philips 2004), which makes them ‘more persuasive, more convincing and more attended to’ (Philips 2004, 475) in their attempt to convince various audiences – local, national and international alike. This cognitive approach reflects Chilton’s major assumptions, revised and elaborated on in Cap’s (2006, 2013) thorough investigation of proximisation strategies, as well as for the purposes of this study: a) entities (i.e. actors, events, etc.) represented are conceptually ‘positioned’ in relation to the current speaker in a three-dimensional space, represented via spatial, temporal and modal (S-T-M) axes (Figure 1.), b) the speaker is located ‘at the intersection [of three axes representing the three dimensions] that is conceptualized as [spatially] ‘here’ and [temporally] ‘now’ and as [modally] ‘right’ and ‘good’’ (Chilton 2004, 204-205), and c) the speaker relies on pre-existing common ground with the addressees and sharedness of experience These assumptions establish the speaker as a focal figure in what I refer to as the Frame Discourse Space (FDS) tied to him/her, in which other DSs may be embedded (see Figure 1.), constructing multi-layered representations. This aspect will be discussed in more detail
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