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power relations helping political actors to persuade others
to accept a particular
ideological representation of reality (e.g. Wilson 1990, Chilton and Schaffner
2002, Chilton 2004, van Dijk 1997, 2002, 2006, Wodak 2007a). As previous
research has clearly shown (e.g. Wodak 1996, 2009, Simon-Vandenbergen 1997,
Fetzer 2002, Honoban 2008, Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012), the interpretation of
meaning conveyed in political discourse is heavily dependent on multifaceted
contextual factors. Consequently, in the process of discourse comprehension,
interactants establish complex intertextual, interdiscursive, social and (inter-)
cultural connections which may yield variation in the resulting interpretations.
Thus research into political discourse is bound to explore not only the linguistic,
but also the socio-cultural, psychological and ideological factors affecting the
ways in which political actors convey social meanings and make rhetorical and
linguistic choices in order to legitimate their ideological views and to guide the
audience towards a discourse interpretation which
suits their communicative
purposes.
Coherence, viewed here as the subjective perception of meaningfulness and
purposefulness of discourse, is obviously an essential aspect of political discourse,
as political actors need to take into consideration to what extent the potential
discourse interpretation derived by the audience would be in agreement with the
one intended by them. Moreover, constructing coherence in political discourse
is closely related to persuasion, i.e. it is associated with making others accept
the speaker’s point of view. My understanding of the interconnection between
coherence and persuasion draws on Sperber et al.’s (2010)
approach to discourse
processing, which is related to the concepts of epistemic trust and vigilance.
Within this approach, the assessment of the trustworthiness of a message is
carried out on the basis of two types of epistemic vigilance processes, namely
assessment of the reliability of the speaker and assessment of the reliability of the
content conveyed. In order to be accepted as a trustworthy
source of information,
a politician needs to represent him/herself as a competent and authoritative
political actor of impeccable reputation who possesses reliable information
and is willing to share this information with the audience (cf. Sperber et al.’s
(2010) competence, attractiveness and benevolence). This is associated with
the establishment of consistent and continuous interpersonal relations between
the speaker and the audience and the perception of the ‘existential coherence’
of
the political actor, i.e. the projection of a coherent image of him/her and of
the institution he/she represents, which is constantly under construction in the
negotiating of the relationship between the self and the other(s) (Duranti 2006:
469). Content reliability is to a large extent dependent on discourse coherence
in terms of assessment of the consistency of new information with background
knowledge and previously processed information. The persuasive force of
political discourse can therefore be enhanced by a well-constructed argumentation
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based on coherent shifts of topic, consistency of the
viewpoint projected in the
discourse and the use of explicit markers of logical relations helping the listener
to follow and accept the discourse interpretation intended by the speaker.
This investigation into coherence in political speeches strives to explore how
strategies for the construal of discourse coherence are closely interwoven with
persuasion strategies which political speakers use to achieve their communicative
goals, and if necessary get past the epistemic vigilance of the audience. The
working assumption taken as a starting point for this analysis is that while striving
to persuade the audience to accept their ideologically biased representation
of reality, political speakers endeavour to enhance their credibility through
the establishment of a dialogic framework for the
negotiation of a coherent
representation of identities, social roles, value systems and relationships with the
audience, and by constructing a coherent logical argumentation to support their
claims and actions.
The chapter proceeds as follows: firstly, the framework for
the analysis of discourse coherence is presented to explain the approach adopted
in the present study; secondly, since coherence strategies are conceived as genre-
dependent (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012), a brief description of the rhetorical
structure of political speeches is given; the analysis then relates the persuasive
strategies used by different political speakers to
various linguistics devices
contributing to the perception of coherence in political discourse.
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