The Ideological Remapping of Semantic Roles in Totalitarian Discourse, or, How to Paint White Roses Red

Abstract

This article proposes a pragmatic analysis in terms of semantic roles of the ideologically based linguistic manipulation underlying the rhetoric of totalitarian discourse with special reference to dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's speeches in communist România. The analysis focuses on the linguistic violations that consist in demoting the Agent role, normally associated with humans, to the status of Instrument or Patient semantic role, while promoting the Instrument and Patient roles to the status of institutional Agent roles. Three such instances are discussed in detail: deagentivized active constructions, agentless passive constructions and agentless reflexive passive constructions. A major claim made in this article is that the distorted image of social reality which is encoded in recurring institutional linguistic structures produces deliberate meaning violations, which in turn contribute to gradually reshaping social reality through social norm violations.