Political Implicature in Parliamentary Discourse: an Analysis of Mariano Rajoy’s Speech on the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is a speech made on 2 November 2005 by Mariano Rajoy, leader of Spain’s Partido Popular (henceforth PP), during the parliamentary debate on the then draft Catalan Statute of Autonomy, a proposed replacement for the statute ratified in 1979. I have chosen to analyse this particular speech for two reasons. The first is its key importance in the parliamentary debate of one of the most highly publicised and contentious pieces of legislation approved by the Spanish Parliament in this decade — the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia that came into force in 2006. The second reason is that it illustrates the construction of in-groups and out-groups within the institutional activity type (cf. Chapter 7) of parliamentary speeches in Spain. My aim, however, is not just to describe the rhetorical construction of these groups in the speech selected but also to offer an explanation of this construction by means of van Dijk’s (2005b) concept of political implicature. Clearly, in democratic political systems, parliamentary debates are a key component of the process of ‘doing politics’ and, as such, an important source of data for analysis of political discourse. As van Dijk furthermore argues, access to privileged social resources by elites is a fundamental aspect of the power wielded by politicians through ‘preferential access to the mass media and public discourse’ (2006: 362). This has become increasingly true of parliamentary debates in recent years in Spain through their television coverage and the availability of parliamentary speeches on the Internet. Moreover, parliamentary debates are highly performative in the sense that their results can lead to concrete action including, as in this case, legislation that affects people’s daily lives.KeywordsPolitical ImplicatureCritical Discourse AnalysisPerson PluralParliamentary DebateCatalan ProductThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.