Presidential Language Research Articles

Latvijas prezidenta Egila Levita runu valodiskais profils: ceremoniālā, juridiskā vai politiskā retorika?

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as the art of observing the available means of persuasion is one of the most widely used quotations not only in linguistics but also in social, political, and communication sciences. Aristotle, apart from defining the elements of rhetoric (logos, ethos and pathos), has proposed three types of rhetoric that refer either to the present situation (ceremonial), the past (judicial), or the future (political). The current president of Latvia and his language use is one of the most widely discussed topics across the media and academia due to the register, style, and content of his speeches. Moreover, the president of Latvia has a direct impact on how the state is perceived nationally and internationally; thus, it is significant to investigate the linguistic profile of the linguistic expression of the ideas communicated by the president to the wider public. The current study analyses 160 speeches given by president Egils Levits on nationally significant occasions as well as internationally with the aim to investigate whether the speeches of the president of Latvia correspond to the ceremonial, political or judicial rhetoric because the president represents both legal and political discourse as the former judge of the European Court of Human Rights and the former minister of Justice, and as the head of the Republic of Latvia represents the state nationally and abroad. The study is grounded in the theories on rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis applied to political discourse and presidential language and discussed by scholars such as Aristotle (1959), Van Dijk (2006), Chilton and Schäffner (2002), O’Keeffe (2006), Van Dijk (2008), David (2014), Wilson (2015) and Wodak and Mayer (2016). The results of the current study reveal that the speeches are a clear representation of a combination of legal, political, and ceremonial rhetoric and cross various semantic fields that are marked by the use of field terminology in combination with topos of definition and name interpretation to explain the terms directly in the speeches. The speeches by Levits are furthermore marked by relatively frequent use of loanwords, neologisms, obsolete words, and compounds that is one of the main characteristics of the linguistic profile of his speeches. Additional characteristic features are the use of parallel sentence constructions, inverted word orders, rhetorical questions, and pronominal referencing to attract the listener's attention and emphasize the thematic areas of the speeches. Nevertheless, it has been concluded that such linguistic techniques as metaphors, metonymies, synecdoche, or hyperbole are used comparatively less frequently, thus making the speeches appear more formal and less emotional from the linguistic point of view.

The Effect of COVID-19 On Presidential Language

Coronavirus COVID-19 has its effect on all the aspects of life. The research is oriented towards exploring to what extent COVID-19 affects the presidential language, and whether this effect leads to the use of indirect speech in the presidents’ speeches about COVID-19 instead of talking directly about such unprecedented crisis. Three presidents’ speeches are chosen arbitrarily since the effect of COVID-19 overcomes all countries equally: President Trump’s Speech on Coronavirus Pandemic on March 11, 2020, speech by M. Emmanuel Macron, President of France, on the COVID-19 coronavirus on 16 March 2020, president Cyril Ramaphosa: South Africa's response to Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic on 23 Apr 2020. By adopting Searle’s speech acts (1969), the researcher makes a comparison by the qualitative and quantitative analysis leaving the readers to decide to what extent COVID-19 has indelible mark on the presidential language.

“The Power of the Presidency to Hurt”: The Indecorous Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the Rhetorical Norms of Democracy

AbstractPresidents are both individual agents who make rhetorical and political choices and discursive nodes through which political discourse circulates. As both agents and nodes, when presidents engage in educative, vituperative, and performative rhetoric, they are positioned to influence the form and content of the national discourse. Donald Trump largely eschews educative rhetoric. He depends heavily on vitriol, primarily using demeaning language, false equivalency, and exclusion. As an individual actor, these tactics characterize his rhetoric. As a discursive node, the effects are far more broad ranging, circulating and reinforcing deleterious language in both form and content. Trump’s example indicates that scholars of the presidency and presidential rhetoric need to think differently about presidential language as it circulates and influences broader political processes.

J. Wilson (2015). Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

This article reviews Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language 978-0-19-985879-8$35

Book review: John Wilson, Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

Book review: John Wilson, <i>Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language</i>

Pragmalinguistics of Richard Nixon’s stylistic behavior (research into the president’s selected speeches)

The paper seeks to analyze pragmalinguistic features of the politician&rsquo;s stylistic behavior by studying nominative and syncategorematic parts of speech in his discourses. The hypothesis is regardless extralinguistic factors in a communicative situation the stylistic behavior can be seen as the touchstone of the politician&rsquo;s success. A deficient stylistic behavior is fraught with communicative flops. The paper discusses theoretical grounds of pragmasemantic analysis of the politician&rsquo;s stylistic idiosyncrasies, suggests a classification of categories for pragmasemantic analysis, pinpoints a cluster approach to studying lexical and syntactic units, and provides new insights into semiotics of the status-bound type of language identity. This article drawing on Richard Nixon&rsquo;s selected speeches, The Checkers Speech (1952), The Great Silent Majority Speech (1969), and The First Watergate Address (1973), specifies the concept of presidential language identity. A determining factor moulding the stylistic behavior of this kind of people is a stressful or semi-stressful situation. The method of research in the article is termed as &lsquo;pragmasemantic analysis of the politician&rsquo;s language identity&rsquo;. It is yet to be elaborated in detail. The article attempts to define it as focusing on interrelated grammar categoties, like personal pronouns, verb tense, functional and auxiliary verbs, article, numerals, and prepositions, along with communication-bound categories of optimism/pessimism, diplomatic/bossy, president-like speech/unpresident-like speech, age, gender, vested interests group membership in order to find out the politician&rsquo;s idiosyncrasies and communication strategies and tactics. The article argues that whatever strategies and tactics Nixon persued in his discourses, his stability in the domestic political arena was guaranteed only by truthful verbal behavior. The Watergate speeches failed him and he paid the price for it. The paper, hence, highlights the problem of studying truth/lie verbal markers which largely depend on the author of the text in question.

Book review: John Wilson, Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

Book review: John Wilson, <i>Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language</i>

Book Review: Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language by John Wilson, Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences by Geoffrey Craig

Book Review: <i>Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language</i> by John Wilson, <i>Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences</i> by Geoffrey Craig

John Wilson. Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

<b>John Wilson</b>. <i>Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language</i>

Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language

Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language. By JohnWilson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 274 pp.

Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language. By John Wilson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 274 pp. For many years, presidential rhetoric has been a significant object of analysis in the fields of political science and communication studies. Political scientists have tracked the changes in the substance of presidential rhetoric over the course of the twentieth century and have commented both on the turn public rhetoric as a mode of influence and on the different styles of various presidents. Communication studies scholars have considered what presidential rhetoric does, what effects it has, and how it helps frame or constitute American identity. John Wilson's book Talking with the President addresses the concerns of both disciplines, albeit from very different methodological perspectives. Wilson begins with a brief overview of issues in linguistics and philosophy of language in the twentieth century. The purpose of this overview is twofold: on the one hand, he wants demonstrate the advantages of pragmatics over other forms of linguistic analysis. On the other hand, he argues that others have rarely, if ever, analyzed presidential rhetoric with the methodologies that he uses. For those not trained in linguistics, this introductory material offers an accessible account of some of the major theoretical issues that have emerged from the philosophy of language in the twentieth century. Thereafter, Talking with the President tries show what pragmatics, as a form of linguistic analysis, can reveal about presidential language that other methodologies cannot. Wilson returns repeatedly his contention that pragmatics offers key insight into presidential language. He analyzes Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama support his position. This is a substantive range of examples from which draw, and that range certainly bolsters the argument for the utility of pragmatics. In each of these cases, Wilson shows how context informs meaning. Unlike semantics, which examines how meaning is coded into the propositional forms of sentences, pragmatics concerns the ways in which meaning depends on the context of an utterance, the intention of a speaker, the preexisting knowledge of those involved in communication, and other social factors. This basic perspective then anchors Wilson's reading of each of the presidents that he analyzes. Two important broad claims issue from this analysis. First, the aim of the book is be descriptive and, therefore, Wilson wants to descriptively highlight the way in which linguistic forms become utilized in context and for what purpose, without, as far as possible, imposing any prescriptive values on linguistic choices in specific political contexts (p. …

Constituting "The People": National Identity Under William H. Taft and Richard M. Nixon

This project is focused on the long-term constitutive elements of presidential discourse; in other words, how rhetoric helps frame and determine national identity. Seemingly innocuous, and appearing in both ceremonial and policy addresses, presidential language concerning national identity helps shape the context, and thus sets the terms for more substantive, issue-laden debates. While one cannot measure the impact of this type of rhetoric in terms of specific issues and time frames, its influence is apparent in a broader and more diffuse perspective. This research compares the public rhetoric of presidents William H. Taft and Richard M. Nixon specifically in terms of their definitions of national identity. Both Republicans, albeit with very different political contexts and time periods, exhibited marked similarities in their strategies for defining the American polity, particularly with respect to their view of the president as the national representative, the idea that the nation is a unified whole, the belief that the nation follows the greatest good for the greatest number, the belief that each citizen occupies a natural place in the hierarchy of American society, and finally, the conviction that liberty is the most important foundational value of the country. The evidence suggests that rhetorical conceptions of national identity are important over time in the United States. Enjoying a broad audience, the president has the ability to shape national debate according to which groups and issues he includes or excludes from the polity.

Imagery, Emotion, and Cause and Effect in Presidential Language

The language of Presidents Reagan, Nixon, and Kennedy is examined for imagery, emotional, and cause-and-effect linguistics. Imagery and emotion are associated with the right hemisphere of the brain, and cause-and-effect language is associated with the left. Reagan's language is relatively high on imagery, slightly high on negative emotion, and low on cause and effect. Nixon's language is similar to Reagan's but generally lower in emotion. Kennedy's language profile is quite different from that of the other two Presidents, in that Kennedy is high on cause-and-effect language, low on imagery, and relatively high on positive emotion.