In this book, we study political language from a cross-cultural pragmatic point of view. By political language we mean the language use of professional politicians inside and outside institutions, mediated descriptions of political-language use such as those appearing in news articles, and the language used in sociopolitically relevant situations centring on burning issues such as the welfare of children or animals. Our definition of politically relevant data also includes public discourse with potential political consequences: due to the effect of social media, public discourse and political discourse cannot be neatly separated any longer, and indeed we interpret politically relevant public discourse as a form of political discourse in this book. The approach we use in this book is strictly linguistic. By this we mean that through studying the language of politics we are looking at politically relevant data without any previously held political conviction at the outset of our investigation. Rather, we attempt to examine politically situated data with the cold eye of the linguist.

Why is having such a strictly linguistic viewpoint crucial? The field of language and politics tends to be an emotively and ideologically loaded area, and in particular when one analyses how politicians speak it may be tempting to set out to prove, in an uncritical and moralising way, what the researcher already knows. For example, many academic articles have been devoted to controversial statements made by Donald Trump at some point in his career, in order to prove his negative effect on US American political language use. For instance, Körner et al. (Reference Körner, Overbeck, Körner and Schütz2022: 631), in their study of the language used by Trump and Joe Biden, argue as follows: ‘Whereas Biden emphasizes dignity, respect, and social responsibility, Trump uses derogation and celebrates egocentrism.’ This claim is produced at the very beginning of Körner et al.’s work, only to be proven later, and one may indeed wonder what the merit is of proving something that one knows from the very beginning! Further, by attempting to validate a pre-held conviction through academic argumentation, one ultimately associates preconceived values with political actors, which unavoidably determines the way in which one looks at the language use of these actors. Having a strictly linguistic approach to political language use allows the analyst to leave behind – as far as possible – personal sympathies and antipathies, ideological presumptions, convictions and prejudices, which are all lurking in many accounts of language and politics. We believe that a fruitful way to do this is to adopt a bottom-up approach to language and politics anchored in the field of pragmatics.

Pragmatics is a key area in linguistics which originates in the philosophy of language. Until the 1960s, linguistics had been dominated by concerns about the way sentences are formed, as well as the truth conditions of the meaning of sentences, while the way in which linguistic structures such as sentences are used by human beings was backgrounded. The language philosopher John Austin – whose work was published posthumously in 1962 – and his student John Searle (Reference Searle1969; Reference Searle1979) famously challenged this view, by introducing the concept of speech act, which is also a key concept in this book. As Austin (Reference Austin1962: 20) argues, ‘The more we consider a statement not as a sentence (or proposition) but as an act of speech … the more we are studying the whole thing as an act.’

Pragmatics later developed into a field in which scholars examine contextually embedded language use in different units of analysis. As we will point out in Chapter 2, the most important units of analysis in the field include expressions, speech acts and discourse (see also House and Kádár Reference House and Kádár2021b). Since, in the study of language and politics, the notion of context is of primary importance, discourse is naturally the central unit of analysis in this book. Discourse, however, often needs to be broken down into replicable components, particularly when we take a contrastive view of discourse (see more below), and so we prefer treating discourse as inseparable from the other two units – expressions and speech acts.

From the perspective of language and politics, the salient features of pragmatics are the following:

1. 1 Linguistic anchor. Pragmatics operates ideally with linguistically based concepts and methodologies, reflecting an endeavour to avoid using cultural and psychological concepts, such as ‘values’, ‘attitudes’ and ‘identity’.

2. 2 Bottom-up approach. Pragmatics, as we interpret it in the present book, follows a typically Popperian bottom-up view of language use. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that in any respectable empirical research one should aim to disprove rather than confirm one’s hypothesis.

3. 3 Pursuit of replicability. In pragmatic analysis one is advised to exclude idiosyncratic behaviour from the scope of one’s inquiry, considering that one can only capture and contrast conventionalised patterns of language use by looking at replicable pragmatic patterns. This focus on conventionalised language use can be best done through the empirical study of corpora. Corpora encompass collections of machine-readable oral or written texts of varying size and nature.

4. 4 Geographical, social and temporal variation and/or more than one language. It is also recommended to take a contrastive view of the analyst’s data because such a view allows the analyst to distance himself from his object of analysis and put political language use in perspective.

We discussed the foundations outlined above of pragmatic research first in House and Kádár (Reference House and Kádár2021b), arguing that the pragmatic approach we are proposing here represents contrastive cross-cultural pragmatics. In this book, we will attempt to overview methodological issues and key topics in language and politics by relying on the four features of pragmatics outlined above.

1.1 Situating Our Approach

Let us discuss previous accounts of language and politics here, in order to position the present book. John Joseph (Reference Joseph2006) provided a broad overview of the field of language and politics, describing many key issues well beyond the realm of politics in a narrower sense, such as the relationship between ‘linguistic correctness’ and social politics. Joseph’s broad interpretation also motivated us: for example, following Joseph, in this book we venture beyond the study of language use of professional politicians. Similarly, in his now classic study, Geis (Reference Geis1987) provided a broad overview of the relationship between language and politics, describing issues such as the use of tense and aspect in mediated political speeches. Geis’s study also influenced our thinking because he draws attention to the importance of foregrounding language rather than other phenomena such as culture in the study of politics. This is a fundamental point also in this book. Another important source for our work is the now widely used textbook of Beard (Reference Beard2000), who overviewed the main issues of analysing English political data, providing insight into many phenomena, such as how various political actors take stances in interaction. Similar to Beard, we have an interest in a wide variety of linguistic phenomena. Finally, Chilton (Reference Chilton2004) offered a thought-provoking overview of language and politics, describing language use in various political arenas, such as parliamentary interaction. Similarly to Chilton, in this book we also feature a variety of politically relevant contexts.

To the best of our knowledge, no book has taken a strictly language-anchored and contrastive cross-cultural pragmatic view of language and politics. By a contrastive cross-cultural pragmatic view, we mean different but potentially interrelated analytic procedures:

1. 1 Using multilingual data. In attempting to study language and politics from a pragmatic angle, we prioritise data from different linguacultures. An advantage of such a multilingual and cross-cultural approach is that it allows us to avoid relying on ethnocentric views, and also helps us to relativise our own analytic stances. While we do not think that any of the aforementioned books are actually ethnocentric, they mainly used English as their data, and we believe that it is more productive at present to study language and politics by focusing on other linguacultures as well, such as Chinese, and comparing them with anglophone data. An advantage of this approach is that it helps us to avoid certain pre-held assumptions which seem to be unavoidable if one uses English as one’s exclusive data source. For example, in Chapter 8 of this book, we will demonstrate that many politically relevant notions are difficult to translate; nevertheless their English version is often used in academic research as the ‘gold standard’. This practice is clearly misleading because it tends to lead to the irretrievable loss of finer nuances of the linguaculturally embedded meanings and uses of such notions. Further, we will argue in Chapter 2 that ethnocentrism manifests itself not only in foregrounding certain languages and the terminological repertoire expressed in these languages, but also by exoticising certain political linguacultures. Such exoticisation is very common in inquiries which pit ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ political linguacultures against one another in a dichotomic way. For example, Bull (Reference Bull2017) compared the language use of US, British and Japanese politicians, arguing that speakers from anglophone countries are from ‘individualistic’ cultures, while the Japanese represent a ‘collectivistic’ culture. According to Bull, this cultural background automatically influences the pragmatic behaviour of politicians belonging to different national groups. We decidedly distance ourselves from such an essentialist view: we intend to pursue a more linguaculturally diverse approach to language and politics without ever exoticising our data.

2. 2 Approaching political language in comparison with ‘ordinary’ language use. We will also consider how the language of politics differs from the way in which social members who are not professional politicians communicate in settings outside politics. For example, we will examine how political convictions change the language of arguments in politically relevant settings in comparison to arguments in ‘ordinary-life’ scenarios.

3. 3 Comparing the language of politicians in different participation roles. It is rewarding to consider how the phenomenon of participation framework (Goffman Reference Goffman1981) influences the ways in which politicians speak, by comparing their language use in different participation roles. For instance, when a political actor is speaking in his institutionally ratified role, he is in a very different position from cases where he takes up the role of an animator; that is, ‘the talking machine, the body engaged in acoustic activity’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1981: 144). We will compare realisations of language use produced in such different roles with one another. For example, Chapter 4 of this book features a case study in which participants in a political negotiation – where they were essentially powerless – report to other politicians on the outcomes of the previous negotiation during a debriefing. It is fruitful to compare the language use of these politicians during and after the negotiation because such a comparison allows us to capture issues such as how the lack of power in diplomacy manifests itself in the pragmatic behaviour of the politicians involved.

Apart from these contrastive viewpoints, we believe that it is also rewarding to engage in other forms of contrasting because any comparative viewpoint helps us to move one step towards having a more objective view on politically relevant data.

The pragmatic approach to language and politics that we propose here is different from critical discourse analytic (CDA) inquiries, in particular the area of political discourse analysis (PDA) in CDA (see e.g. Dunmire 2012; Fairclough and Fairclough Reference Fairclough and Fairclough2012). PDA represents a body of CDA-grounded research which deals especially with the reproduction of political power, power abuse or domination through political discourse. In this book, we will use CDA as a collective term for both CDA and PDA inquiries. Our approach is different from CDA for the following reasons.

A particular agenda of CDA has been critiquing ‘the dominant discourses and genres that effect inequalities, injustices and oppression in contemporary society’ (Van Leeuwen Reference van Leeuwen and Renkema2009: 278). Further, as Meyer (Reference Meyer, Wodak and Meyer2001: 15) argued,

Although pragmatics and CDA have various commonalities when it comes to the study of political language use (see e.g. Blommaert and Verschueren Reference Blommaert and Verschueren1991; Wodak Reference Wodak2007), unlike CDA scholars, in this book we do not pursue an underlying agenda to identify social injustices. Rather, our aim is to stick to the subject of language use and its relation to politics, without considering social woes and attempting to resolve them in any way. In line with Joseph (Reference Joseph2006: 130), we do not intend to criticise CDA in this book, particularly not on the basis of the fact that ‘CDA has its own strong political commitments, i.e. it does not provide any “objective” analysis of texts, but a politically interested analysis.’ As Joseph rightly states, a politically motivated analytic focus by itself does not necessarily invalidate the power of CDA analysis. Rather, in our opinion, pragmatics provides an important conceptual and methodological alternative for mainstream CDA, in particular if pragmatic analysis is conducted in a strictly language-anchored and bottom-up way, as promoted in this book. As we will point out in various parts of the present book, CDA and our pragmatics-anchored framework have many common interests, with the main difference between these two approaches being that we radically foreground language over any other phenomenon. This practice of foregrounding language over social injustices allows us to look at politically relevant data from an alternative angle. For example, when it comes to a particular social injustice, we will concentrate on patterns through which this injustice is talked into being and whether these patterns are recurrent in other linguacultures as well, instead of considering whether linguistic pragmatics can help resolve this injustice.

Let us consider, for example, ideology. As CDA experts like Van Dijk (Reference van Dijk and Teun1998) and Krzyżanowski and Tucker (Reference Krzy, anowski and Tucker2018) point out, language is a carrier of political ideologies. An important goal of CDA analysis is to uncover and challenge hidden political ideologies which negatively influence the lives of certain members of societies. True, in our methodological framework, we also consider how ideology can be pinned down from a pragmatic point of view. However, where we substantially differ from CDA is that we have little interest in ideology per se as a phenomenon to be unmasked and challenged. Rather, we try to unmask exactly how ideology gives rise to ethnocentric views of language and politics, and also how ideology manifests itself in political language use through the expression of individual convictions in actual politically relevant interactions. Thus, even if we do not agree with an ideology, for us it is simply a factor which needs to be taken into account in order to understand why and how language use is realised in a particular politically relevant context. CDA scholars like Krzyżanowski and Tucker (Reference Krzy, anowski and Tucker2018), on the other hand, are more interested in how language builds up and conserves ideologies.

Another important difference between CDA and cross-cultural pragmatics as we interpret these fields is the following: while many CDA scholars pursue their analysis with the agenda of contributing to the cause of the political left, we believe that this is somewhat problematic in pragmatic research, particularly in cross-cultural pragmatics. Aligning cross-cultural research with any side of the political palette would only compromise our strictly bottom-up view of language use. To illustrate this difference between CDA and our own framework, let us cite here a section from the work of the renowned CDA scholar Norman Fairclough (Reference Fairclough2003: 26–27), who described the politically relevant notion of ‘political correctness’ in his study as follows:

Clearly, Fairclough, like many CDA experts, is interested here in contributing to the cause of left-wing politics – this is why he talks about the problem that a more appropriate use of ‘political correctness’ ‘is missing on the left’. While no scholar of language and politics might be entirely free from political predispositions, in this book we try to distance ourselves from any predisposition.

Finally, as already mentioned above, we aim to keep our analysis strictly linguistic. This is another key difference from CDA research which is conventionally multidisciplinary due to its extralinguistic interest. As Dunmire (Reference Dunmire2012: 735) argues,

While in the cross-cultural pragmatic study of language and politics we also need to draw on the outcome of research on areas such as diplomacy studies, as far as methodology is concerned our analysis is strictly anchored in language-based approaches.

What we propose in this book is not unheard of in pragmatics: a number of scholars have approached language and politics from a clearly pragmatic point of view outside the CDA paradigm (see e.g. Obeng Reference Obeng1997; Ilie Reference Ilie2003; Ihalainen Reference Ihalainen2006; Bull et al. Reference Bull, Fetzer and Kádár2020). However, we believe that there is a need for a book-sized pragmatics-anchored framework to be devoted to language and politics. While Chilton and Schäffner (Reference Chilton and Schäffner2002), Fetzer and Lauerbach (Reference Fetzer and Lauerbach2007), Fetzer (Reference Fetzer2013) and other scholars edited volumes dedicated to the pragmatics of language and politics, these edited volumes naturally did not follow a single coherent framework.

1.2 Contents

In the following, we summarise the contents of the present book.

Part One presents our methodology and illustrates its use by discussing how it helps us to avoid several frequent pitfalls in the study of language and politics. In Chapter 2 we first discuss what we regard as three major pitfalls in the field: (1) following an ethnocentric view of one’s data, (2) uncritically associating values with political actors and entities and (3) using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. We argue that these analytic traps are interrelated and reflect a typically top-down view of political language use. Second, we discuss the three key pragmatic units of expressions, speech acts and discourse in detail. In studying political language use with the aid of these units, it is recommended to look at conventional pragmatic patterns, which allow us to conduct replicable analyses. Further, we argue that political language use can be effectively interpreted if we look at its ritual manifestations. Ritualised political language use imposes a frame on the participants; that is, in many political contexts the rights and obligations of the participants are preset and language tends to be generally used according to such rights and obligations. We finally discuss how our analytic units can be brought together with a contrastive view of language and politics.

In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 we discuss what we believe are the major pitfall types in the field. Furthermore, in each chapter we use case studies both to illustrate these pitfalls and to show how they can be overcome. In these case studies, we focus on various units of analysis: in our first case study we consider the use of politically relevant expressions, whereas in the other two case studies we break down discourse into speech acts. Furthermore, in each case study we engage in a contrastive procedure using different data. The second and third case studies will also illustrate how and why the concept of ritual frame becomes important in the study of language and politics. We will point out that many aspects of political interaction, such as diplomatic language use in our third case study, can be best interpreted if one considers the ritual rights and obligations influencing the behaviour of the participants.

First, in Chapter 3 we discuss the pitfall of following an ethnocentric view in the study of politically relevant data. We argue that it is not fruitful either to associate a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area, or to attribute a political notion or an actor with a positive or negative value. Here we critically consider the universal validity of notions such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, which may appear at first as clearly positive or negative and as such non-controversial from a Western viewpoint. We will refer to cases in which members of non-Western linguacultures conventionally interpret these notions differently from how they are conventionally seen in the West and how they are often used in academic inquiries in a seemingly ‘neutral’ way. We argue that it is ethnocentric to dismiss linguaculturally embedded standard interpretations of such notions as ‘undemocratic’, ‘unenlightened’ and ‘autocratic’ because, through such a dismissive attitude, one is led to automatically associate a particular positive or negative value with a specific country or area.

Second, in Chapter 4 we discuss the pitfall of associating positive and negative values with political actors, including both individuals such as Trump or Biden, and political entities such as the US and the EU. In our view, such an association is problematic and dangerous because it precludes approaching language and politics in a more neutral way. As a case study, we analyse the transcript of an unofficial tape recording in which representatives of the EU – an entity which is often regarded as a democratic organisation – attempted to prevent the newly established Slovenian and Croatian states from declaring independence following plebiscites in the 1990s. We use strictly linguistic evidence to illustrate the rather undemocratic procedure through which representatives of the EU – who were supposed to be the upholders of democracy – aggressively persuaded Slovenians and Croatians to temporally suspend declaring independence, hence opposing the results of valid plebiscites.

Finally, in Chapter 5 we present the pitfall of using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. As a case study, we present a historical diplomatic correspondence between representatives of China and the US at the time of colonialism. We argue that it is not productive to attempt to demonstrate how evil colonialism was, which is a frequent research goal in spite of the fact that the devastating nature of colonialism is an accepted truth. Rather, we believe that it is more productive to look at exactly how the coloniser used language in order to coerce representatives of the colonised country to fulfil their exploitative demands.

Part Two of the book discusses key topics in the pragmatic study of language and politics. In Chapter 6 we turn to the difficulty of studying sensitive data. In studying politically relevant issues, one may unavoidably encounter phenomena which are sensitive to talk about because they are painful for many. We point out that such data can be best studied if we distance ourselves from the object of our inquiry, by taking a contrastive look at our data. As a case study, we examine political apologies realised after the Second World War by representatives of the Japanese and German states, following war crimes perpetrated by their respective countries. Japanese and German war apologies are highly controversial and have often been described with sweeping overgeneralisations. We believe that it is important to venture beyond such overgeneralisations, and examine in a bottom-up contrastive way exactly how representatives of these countries realised their apologies.

In Chapter 7 we discuss how mediated political monologues can be optimally studied from a pragmatic point of view. Considering that news and other forms of media often present political events, it is important to investigate them in the field of language and politics, and for the pragmatician a key issue is how to tease out the interactional dynamics of such monologues, hence making them pragmatically relevant. We believe that it is particularly important to consider how such monologues gain an interactional effect with members of the public because gaining such an interactional effect is the very goal of these monologues. Thus we focus on textual features through which a monologue covertly interconnects the readers with politicians and political entities. Here we will rely on the concept of alignment, proposed by the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1981). We will argue that many seemingly ‘innocent’ phenomena in political monologues aim to trigger the alignment of the public with politicians or political entities represented by the monologue. As a case study, we examine a corpus of political monologues published in Chinese newspapers in the wake of a national crisis. Following our cross-cultural pragmatic contrastive view, we will compare political monologues of various types in order to tease out the interactional dynamics through which they trigger the alignment of their readers.

In Chapter 8, we consider how sociopolitical ideological convictions impact on how social members, such as political activists, use language outside political institutions. Due to the global popularity of social media, such non-institutionalised language use is becoming important and needs to be studied on a par with institutionalised political language use. Jonathan Haidt (Reference Haidt2012) insightfully argued that sociopolitical ideologies manifested through political conviction divide social members worldwide, and we believe that it is an important task for the pragmatician to capture this global dividing effect with the aid of strictly linguistic evidence. We examine a clash, featured in social media, between a radical animal rights protester and the organisers of a children’s party. We show that the organisers of the party and the protester put moral oughts representing sociopolitical ideological convictions against one another in an irreconcilable way. Due to this irreconcilability, their interactions completely lack alignment with one another. In this case study, we also follow a contrastive view, considering how clashes driven by sociopolitical convictions differ from more ‘mundane’ clashes.

In Chapter 9 we look at how one can capture the interactional dynamics of seemingly confusing cases of aggression in mediated political settings. In mediated scenes of politics, conflict may evolve in a seemingly ad hoc way, and in order to be able to analyse such settings it is necessary to linguistically analyse exactly what is happening in them. As a case study, we present a corpus of heckling incidents, including cases such as when the former US first lady Michelle Obama was heckled in public. We argue that the disorderly manifestations of heckling incidents can be categorised into major types, imposing different ritual frames on the public speaker being heckled. Following this view, our analysis shows that heckling represents a standard situation in which the participants actually follow conventional forms of behaviour.

In Chapter 10 we revisit the problem that certain politically relevant, culturally embedded notions are very difficult, if not impossible, to translate. A key issue that such a difficulty of translating causes is the following. Often, when we talk about a politically relevant issue in two linguacultures by using English as an academic lingua franca, we may be comparing apples with pears. Such a comparison leads to the previously mentioned problem of ethnocentrism, and so it is important to consider how to resolve it by merging research on language and politics with translation studies. As a case study, we examine the problem of translating the sociopolitically relevant Chinese expression wenming (‘civilised’) into English. Following House’s (Reference House2024) translation framework, we argue that untranslatability can be overcome by her notion of ‘cultural filtering’.

In Chapter 11 we summarise the contents of the book and propose vistas for future inquiries. This conclusion is followed by a glossary, which provides a summary of technical terms used in this book for early-career readers.

1.3 Conventions

The present volume addresses both advanced scholars and students. For the benefit of this latter audience, the book has the following textbook features. Firstly, all chapters include a section of recommended readings, consisting of excerpts drawn from sources representing key research in the area discussed in the given chapter. Second, as the present chapter has already illustrated, we highlight keywords in bold. All the keywords are included in the glossary. Third, whenever we present a transcript of an interaction, we use simple, reader-friendly transcription conventions.

We freely alternate male and female references in this book. After we introduce our typology of speech acts in Chapter 2, we indicate speech acts in capital (e.g. ‘Apologise’ instead of ‘apology’). We also capitalise broader speech act categories (e.g. ‘Informative’).

1.4 Recommended Readings

Paul Chilton. Reference Chilton2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.

Chilton’s book is one of the best-known summaries of language and politics, which we highly recommend to our readers. In the section quoted below, Chilton discusses speech acts, which play a central role in our book:

Patricia L. Dunmire. Reference Dunmire2012. Political discourse analysis: Exploring the language of politics and the politics of language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(11): 735–751. https://doi.org.10.1002/lnc3.365.

In the present chapter, we have outlined how our pragmatic approach relates to CDA and PDA. Readers with interest in a concise overview of these areas are advised to consult the work of Dunmire. In the following excerpt, Dunmire outlines the relationship between CDA and PDA: