Clusivity: A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse

Dealing with the concepts of inclusion and exclusion encoded linguistically, both implicitly and explicitly, this book develops an original framework for the analysis of these phenomena in political discourse. The approach taken situates political discourse in a broader context of social and psychological relations between groups and their members which influence the manner in which the speaker's message is constructed and construed by individuals. The present study proposes a pragmatic-cognitive model which underlies and explains the conceptual representation of belongingness and dissociation it in terms of conceptual location of various discourse entities in the Discourse Space (cf. Chilton 2005). The model in question is concerned with three mechanisms which, combined, form a fully-fledged apparatus for the analysis of legitimising power of association and dissociation in political discourse through positive self and negative other presentation tactics. The first of the mechanisms, point-of-view operations, has been first discussed from the angle relevant to the aims specified in the project, e.g. in Bakhtin (1981); Gumperz (1982) or Voloshinov (1986) and later in e.g. Waugh (1995); Hanks (2005); Hunston and Thompson (2000); Groom (2000); Martin and White (2005) and Wieczorek (2009a,b, 2010). It is, however, Vandelanotte's taxonomy of what he has dubbed Speech/Thought Representation (henceforth STR) that provides a valuable insight into the subject matter of this book. The original categorisation has been revisited and redefined to account for the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of belongingness represented discursively via so called perspective shifts and switches (cf. Wieczorek 2009 a, b, 2010). The term referring to the second mechanism, distanciation, is widely applied in the literature concerned with media and globalisation studies (e.g. Giddens 1981, 1990). The concept discussed here, however, differs significantly, as it refers to a discursive strategy whose aim is to represent particular entities in Discourse Space as spatially, temporally and/or ideologically remote. Distanciation is a natural discursive and cognitive reaction to dissimilarity and socio-ideological dissociation from ideas, individuals and groups that cause fear or oppose values and ideology commonly held by in-group members. Finally, proximisation, the third of the model's components, has been vastly investigated as a cognitive-linguistic concept that brings particular entities conceptually closer in spatial, temporal and/or ideological dimension of Discourse Space (cf. Cap 2006, 2008, 2010; Chilton 2005, 2010). All in all, the aims of the present study are to: investigate selected clusivity markers and their application in electoral discourse as a legitimisation-driven means of positive self and negative other-presentation; examine the three complementary components of the model proposed; and, test the feasibility of the Perspective-Distanciation-Proximisation model (the PDP model) in the study of electoral discourse based on a collection of approximately 30 speeches delivered by Barack Obama between 10th February 2007 and 4th November 2008, as well as other non-inaugural American and European discourses. The analysis of the excerpts used to exemplify how the selected mechanisms work ignores other aspects than the written text, prepared for delivery in front of a public. Although Barack Obama's pre-election speeches were written by a team of speechwriters, among others Jon. Feiphluo and Ben. Rhodes, rather than the candidate, no distinction is made here between the author(s) and the speaker: the study makes reference exclusively to the speaker as such, irrespective of the amount of contribution on the part of speechwriters and Obama himself. The present study is thus an essentially theoretical enterprise which, however, includes a comprehensive