Political Speeches Research Articles

Ideological Positioning in War Discourse: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected American and Syrian Political Speeches on the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War

Ideological Positioning in War Discourse: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected American and Syrian Political Speeches on the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War

*Corresponding author: suwandi.sumartias@unpad.ac.id E-ISSN: 2289-1528 https://doi.org/10.17576/JKMJC-2024-4002-01 Portrait of Hate Speech Propagators' Behaviour in Indonesia Twittersphere: A Comparative Virtual Ethnography Study

Political life in Indonesia today cannot be separated from the social media platform Twitter (X) because it is often used to express opinions freely. Unfortunately, a handful of parties misused the freedom of communication and expression offered by Twitter (X) to spread hate speech. One of the biggest phenomena is “Cebong” and “Kadrun”. This research examines the characteristics of hate speech spreaders in the political context of "Cebong" and "Kadrun". This study employed virtual ethnography to interpret the phenomenon of political hate speech on Twitter (X) in May 2022. The hate speech made by "Cebong" and "Kadrun" can be concluded as two hostile political camps. They argued with each other to show their identity as supporters of one of the camps and aimed to bring down the opposing political camp. The tweets made by “Cebong” were dominated by arguments classified as arguments by analogy; meanwhile, "Kadrun" was dominated by discovery arguments: arguments from cause to effect. The manipulation strategy carried out by "Cebong" is dominated by connotations, and "Kadrun" is dominated by specific warrants and connotations. The fallacy expressed by "Cebong" is dominated by persuasive definitions; meanwhile, "Kadrun" is dominated by hasty generalizations. These findings could be suggestions for creating a healthier ecosystem in the digital public sphere in Indonesia. Twitter (X) users should be more aware of reporting content that indicates hate speech. By knowing the characteristics of hate speech and the characteristics of hate speech spreaders, Twitter users can stop the spread of hate speech. Keywords: Cebong, Kadrun, hate speech, propagators, Twitter.

False friends in political dogwhistles

ABSTRACT Philosophers have studied various ways in which things can be said implicitly, and how this can be exploited in both derogatory and political speech. The present paper follows this tradition by focussing on a linguistic phenomenon which has so far received little attention from philosophers, i.e. (linguistic) false friends. In linguistics, false friends are understood as bilingual homographs or homophones which differ (significantly) in some kind of conventional linguistic meaning. We will argue that such false friends can be used for (political) dogwhistling. Hence, by providing a better understanding of the linguistic phenomenon of false friends, the present paper aims to provide a better understanding of dogwhistling, possibly opening up new ways of preventing or at least containing the negative consequences of these speech acts.

Elementi ratne propagande u kriznoj komunikaciji Volodymyra Zelenskog

Propaganda refers to the conscious or unconscious attempt to manipulate a specificgroup in order to achieve a desired goal. Particularly in English-speaking countries it becomes synonymous with deceit and falsehood. While scientific literature abounds with studies on wartime propaganda in various historical periods, only a small portion delves into the analysis of propaganda usage by individual politicians during wars. Similarly, a limited number of studies focus on the analysis of wartime propaganda in the public speeches of politicians during contemporary conflicts in a technologically advanced information and communication context. This paper examines the communication aspects of the Russian-Ukrainian War, with a specific focus on the communication of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. By analyzing publicly available speeches of President Zelenskyy, the study explores whether elements of wartime propaganda are recognizable in his speeches and to what extent they occur. The analysis is based on the systematization of Anne Morelli’s ten principles of wartime propaganda, serving as the foundation for a generic framework or analysis matrix. The research has shown that Zelenskyy consistently employs elements of wartime propaganda in his speeches, with a twofold higher occurrence in international compared to national speeches. In international speeches, Zelenskyy tends to strongly focus on accusing the enemy of atrocities and initiating war, while in national speeches, he leans more towards boosting the morale of his own people, emphasizing the struggle for justifiable goals, and highlighting enemy losses. The examination of the occurrence of propaganda elements throughout the analyzed period indicates a constant presence in national speeches, while in international speeches, the occurrence increases over time.

ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSLATION OF NEOLOGISMS AND LEXICAL AND PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS OF VARIOUS STYLES IN VLADIMIR PUTIN’S PUBLIC SPEECHES: A CASE STUDY OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

The paper is focused on the issue of lexical-phraseological composition of modern public political speeches, which has been significantly changed over the past few decades as a result of such linguistic and extra-linguistic factors as the rise of verbal aggression in non-cooperative speech acts due to language democratization; the emergence of new trends in economic, socio-political and cultural areas of society; the removal and destruction of speech taboos between the 20th and 21st centuries. These factors have shifted from the peripheral part of political discourse to its center such lexical units which previously were practically never found in institutional types of discourse and were exclusively the prerogative of personality-oriented discourse. A massive use of stylistically marked and culturally determined lexical units, along with various neologisms, has prompted a need to find solutions to overcome lexical-grammatical and stylistic difficulties in public political translation. Public speeches of the Russian President Vladimir Putin over the period from 2015 to 2022 served as the source of the analysis, because they have a marked interstyle nature

PROSODY OF THE ADDRESSING IN FRENCH POLITICAL SPEECH

Political speech (hereinafter PS) is a monological public speech of a political figure, which relies on a written text, the informative component of which is created at the lexico-grammatical level by the speechwriter, and the task of the politician is to ensure that the information is adequately understood by the listening audience. One way of doing this is to reduce the distance between the speaker and the audience. To achieve this “understanding”, the speaker uses the opportunities provided by the oral channel of communication both at the verbal level - the means of phonetic expression that create the prosody of the address - and at the non-verbal level - from body posture to gestures and eye expressions. In linguistics and psycholinguistics the synergetic interaction between prosody and kinesics is increasingly discussed today. How is this interaction realised in PS and what is its effectiveness? Is it possible to consider the realised PS as a multimodal speech utterance? In order to answer these questions this article examines the current approaches to the study of French PS presented in corpus linguistics [Goldman et al., 2009; Simon et al., 2010, 2013] and interdisciplinary linguistics [Kibrik, 2018; Guaïtella, 2014] and discusses the relevance of their results to describe the prosody of address as a strategic component of PS.

The syntactic position of the “people” in the political discourse of left and right populism (NLP-based syntactic analysis experience)

This paper attempts to measure populism in English-language speeches of politicians using computational linguistics methods. The relevance of this study is related not only to the rise of populism in the world and the importance of understanding the mechanisms of political discourse, but also to the lack of linguistic research in the context of corpus studies. Most of the methods proposed to date require significant resources or suffer from structural limitations, especially when they rely heavily on the human annotation process to analyze extensive corpus data. The material for the study was public speeches and interviews of right-wing populist politician and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump and political rhetoric of left-wing populist politician Senator Bernie Sanders. The corpus analysis was based on transcripts downloaded from The American Presidency Project and Miller Center websites. The syntactic position of key lexical units is determined using a comprehensive method based on dependency grammar combined with natural language processing (NLP) and van Leeuwen’s linguistic theory. The application of natural language processing methods confirms the assumption that the frequency of politicians’ reference to the people is not the only relevant indicator for measuring people-centrism in (populist) political discourse, as usually proposed in the political science literature. The results of the study indicate that there is no predominant role of the people in the discourse of Trump and Sanders. In most cases, the people appear in a complementary or adjunct position, indicating their secondary importance in their rhetoric. Given that populism implies proximity to the people and is positioned as “vox populi” – “the voice of the people”, it can be assumed that for both Trump and Sanders, addressing the people is only a way to achieve their political goals.

Analyzing politeness and refusal speech acts in popular Chinese television drama series

Analyzing politeness and refusal speech acts in popular Chinese television drama series

Речевой акт призыва как компонент англоязычного политического дискурса (на материале специального обращения Урсулы фон дер Ляйен, Давос, 2023 г.)

The aim of the research is to reveal the features of the functioning of direct, indirect and hidden appeals in English-language political discourse on the basis of the statements of the speech act theory. The scientific novelty of the study consists in disclosing the essential characteristics of different types of appeals in a socially significative political speech in English. The differentiation of direct, indirect and hidden appeals is revealed when being investigated in juridical and linguistic aspects. An appeal, inducing the addressee to perform a socially political action, is treated as part of social-political communication. This property turns appeals into an important tool that is often used in speeches by Western political leaders in order to influence the opinion and actions of the addressee. The results showed that indirect and hidden appeals are used in the studied political text, in which the illocutionary force of motivation is transmitted by formal means expressing other functional semantics. The use of indirect and hidden appeals is a feature of modern English-language political discourse, which is especially evident in the speeches of politicians calling for action against Russia.

When minds meet machines: A pilot programme of using Chat-GPT to teach political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom

This piece of reflection draws on a pilot programme of using Chat-GPT in the teaching of political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom. The conduction of this pilot was driven by, among others, a growing concern by the third-year undergraduates doing Chinese-English translation as their major; they have aired worries that human translators might be replaced by large language models capable of doing the translation. The students observed and compared the human translation (by institutional interpreters) and the Chat-GPT translation of four political speeches delivered by Chinese government officials at the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly. While acknowledging some strengths of Chat-GPT, they found that the GPT translation stayed too ‘close’ to the source text Chinese, potentially leading to issues at the lexical, sentence, and contextual levels. The author (also the course convenor) then reflected on the strengths and limitations of Chat-GPT in conjunction with pedagogical considerations regarding the ethical and practical implications of GPT-enabled machine translation. The paper concludes that GPT is not, and will not be, an adequate substitute for the language expertise, cultural awareness, ideological sensitivity, and creative abilities to ‘re-write’ on the part of professional human translators.

Discovering Politeness Strategy in Vladimir Putin’s Speech on the Russian-Ukraine War 2022

The implementation of politeness strategy can be found in social interactions, such as in political speech. On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech that justified a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Putin’s communication often fails to adhere to or intentionally deviates from typical norms of politeness. The study aims to analyze politeness strategies in Vladimir Putin’s speech on the Russian-Ukraine conflict in 2022. It employed a qualitative approach and applies politeness theory for analysis. The results revealed that Vladimir Putin employed bald-on-record, positive, negative, and off-record politeness strategies, which are divided into several variations of specific strategies. Bald-on-record is the most frequently used, followed by positive and negative, with off-record politeness being the least frequently used strategy. The bald-on-record strategy dominated Putin’s speech because he wanted to increase his efficiency in communicating rather than being long-winded and minimizing face-threatening acts (FTAs). He also had much higher power than his audience, which allowed him to give orders, commands, decisions, and even threats to his audience or political opponents.

A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis on Political Speech by Presidential Candidate for the Republic of Indonesia 2024

A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis on Political Speech by Presidential Candidate for the Republic of Indonesia 2024

Exploring the intricacies of politeness and impoliteness in Acehnese speech variations

This study examines politeness and impoliteness in Acehnese speech variations conveyed through various linguistic features, including honorifics, politeness markers, and respectful forms of address. The research employed a descriptive qualitative method, commencing with observation in different social settings in Acehnese society to identify instances of polite and impolite speech. The data for this study consists of oral data obtained from 13 informants residing in North Aceh, Aceh Pidie, Aceh Besar, and South West Aceh. Data were collected using direct observation techniques and free recall techniques. To ensure well-documented data collection, the researcher recorded the data in manual notes and electronic recordings. Data analysis was conducted using contextual methods. The results demonstrate that in Acehnese language, the politeness and grammaticality of an utterance are highly dependent on the region of use or dialect. Generally, in Acehnese, language is considered polite if the utterance uses proclitics corresponding to the actor in a sentence. However, in the South West Aceh dialect, this rule does not apply. In this dialect, language politeness does not rely on the regular use of proclitics. Proclitics are usually not used in speech and should be attached to the verb, given in the repetition of the subject as the doer of the action. Additionally, politeness in this language is highly dependent on pronouns. Conversely, the rules for using honorific pronouns in other dialects do not measure politeness and grammaticality.

Does Leadership Matter? Ahmadinejad, Rouhani, and the Change in Iranian Foreign Policy

Following Rouhani's victory in the 2013 presidential elections, Iran's foreign policy (IFP) underwent significant changes after over a decade under Ahmadinejad. To date, only a few academic studies have attempted to incorporate a specific individual-level theory into their respective analyses, even though a large body of literature contends that leadership change is the decisive factor in differences in Iran's policy towards the US and the EU. This study analyzes the leadership styles of Ahmadinejad and Rouhani to reveal the possible impact of decision-maker personalities on foreign policy, and to develop an account of the moderation in IFP. Accordingly, it asks, “How does leadership style influence IFP towards the 'Western world'?" Theoretically, the study benefits from Hermann’s ‘Leadership Trait Analysis’ to find out the impact of leaders’ personalities on foreign policy behaviors of states. Empirically, it analyzes both presidents’ spontaneously selected political speeches, consisting of their answers in interviews and press conferences. Methodologically, the study utilizes the software Profiler Plus to assess individual traits of leaders. Interpreting leadership trait scores of two presidents, the study concludes that certain leadership features allow the construction of foreign policies that are more moderate.

Mixing Codes in Comments on Youtube Video Posts Debate for Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates for the 2024 Election

This February, Indonesia will hold a democratic party to elect members of parliament and the president. Of course, the political and national atmosphere became warm with various political ripples and upheavals occurring, including political campaign activities, both political party campaigns and campaigns for Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates. Various attributes and activities of political campaign speeches are interesting to study from various aspects, including the aspect of language use. This research aims to identify forms of code mixing found in KompasTV YouTube comments. This research method uses a descriptive method with a qualitative approach. The data for this research are comments from internet users (netizens) that researchers observed through screenshots from the comments column on the KompasTV YouTube channel. The data comes from the comments column of the KompasTV YouTube channel which contains elements of code mixing. Data collection techniques use listening, note-taking and documentation techniques. Data were analyzed using the Mills and Huberman model through the stages of data identification, data reduction, data analysis, and data presentation. Based on the research results, it was concluded that the code mixing that many netizens do in the comments column occurs at the word level. This is very possible because comments in word form are simpler, more practical and "to the point".

Tautology and Pleonasm in Political Interviews: A Semantic study

Pleonasm refers to the involvement of unnecessary words or morphemes represents pleonastic words which repeat a mentioned information elsewhere, whereas tautology refers to the inacceptable repetition of the same ideas, words, or phrases by using diverse words. In English, there is a perplexity to distinguish some elements that may be misled to be regarded as pleonastic or tautological. The current study aims at analysing two political interviews in the light of pleonasm and tautology concepts and find out the differences between them semantically. The data analysis is taken from two presidential interviews for the American presidents Trump and Biden in 2020. The study has concluded that tautology and pleonasm can be used in disparate degrees in political speeches. Using tautology is more necessary than pleonasm in political speeches, in which pleonasm concentrates on ideas and implied meaning, which can be misled to simple, ordinary people, while tautology is clear and can be understood by any simple brain in spite that it is dull and boring sometimes if the repetition is exaggerated, but can be perceived easily to focus on some important ideas the politician sees it is significant.

Ideological and Linguistic Features Analyses of US Presidential Written Discourse addressing Immigration and Terrorism Issues

The aims of this study seeks to examine the underlying linguistics features and ideological concept found in the political speech of American EX President, with a specific emphasis on tweets related to Islamophobia and immigration. The study employs a descriptive and interpretive research design. The corpus of the study consisted of 50 purposely selected Tweets, spanning from 2nd January 2015 to 20th May 2020. Data analysis were conducted using Fairclough's ten-question model (1993). It is found that Trump strategically employed his presidential authority to target Islam and immigration, portraying them as the root cause of terrorism and economic challenges. Trump employed favourable terms while referring to Americans and his supporters, while associating Islam and immigrants with unfavourable descriptors. The findings of this study revealed that Trump employed hyperbole to magnify the perceived threat posed by Islam and immigrants. Trump predominantly employed modal verbs expressing certainty rather than those indicating likelihood in order to demonstrate authority. The future and simple present tenses were commonly used to depict the current threat posed by immigration and the terrorism perpetrated by Islamic groups. The comparative and superlative forms were employed to compare the current state of brightness in the US with its past. The pronouns "we, our, us" were used most frequently to convey a sense of oneness and reduce the perceived barrier between Trump and the audience. Declarative sentences were the most expressive and meaningful acts.

LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This article give brief information about linguistic aspects of political discourse as well as in line with the categorization of language levels namely morphological, lexical, and syntactic and the system of functional dominants of political discourse is examined, along with the primary theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of political speech.

VERBAL AGGRESSION AND FALSE ARGUMENTS IN CRISIS POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

In this study we focus on political discourse and political communication in periods of crisis in order to characterize the speech of public figures from Bulgarian and Czech political life. The text examines political discourse in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic in the context of important crisis events in the political life of both countries - votes of no confidence in the governments. In the studied linguistic material analogical patterns of realization of communicative strategies are observed: linguistic aggression, use of false argumentation, expressed in accusing the opponent of incompetence and committing fraud, excessive use of lexemes with negative connotation, suggesting a sense of catastrophe and misfortune. The intensification of the message is also achieved through the use of a number of lexemes with a negative connotation, which is characteristic of aggression in political speech. As a means to achieve these goals, communication in political discourse usually uses expressive or other marked lexical expressions, as well as false argumentative strategies, aimed not at the content and nature of the problem, but at attacking the positive image of the communication partner. In the corpus of linguistic material studied, linguistic aggression based on the assertion of one's own personality, independently of the communication partner, was identified with high frequency. In the examples given, there is always a conscious linguistic strategy and intent that is clearly identifiable in a given communicative moment.

National specificity of Kyrgyz and English gender political discourse

Relevance. Since the modern world is constantly transforming in terms of linguistic means, i.e. communication is undergoing several changes, there is a high need to study the national peculiarities of political gender discourses. Purpose. The study aims to provide a national interpretation of political discourse regarding gender aspects manifested in the context of linguistic and communicative parameters in the speech activities of male and female politicians. Methodology. The study analyzed political speeches by Kyrgyz and British politicians, examining linguistic parameters such as hesitation, categoricity, irony, and tone, to compare gender-specific communication strategies in both countries' political discourses. Results. This study presents the national specificity of Kyrgyz and British political gender discourse. The analysis identified the main differences between the speech activities of men and women politicians. In the Kyrgyz political discourse, men are characterised by hesitations, categorical and directness, irony, raising the tone of voice, active metaphorisation and hidden meanings. British political discourse in terms of male communication is characterised by a high degree of categoricity, almost no pauses, active use of irony, metaphorical and implicit means, and a moderate degree of emotionality. Conclusions. The Kyrgyz discourse reflects "soft power" approaches, while the British discourse shows women more actively defending their positions. Both discourses employ metaphorical language. These findings highlight the interplay between gender, national culture, and political communication styles. Keywords: speech; linguistic resources; implicitness; categoricity; emotionality