Cover not available

In:Singing, Speaking and Writing Politics: South African political discourses
Edited by Mirjana N. Dedaić
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 65] 2015
► pp. 21–42

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Mandela speaks to the nation

The use of metalingual mitigation markers to unify the audience

Published online: 30 October 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.65.02ded
This chapter investigates metalingual mitigation markers, discursive strategies that entice the audience to think and feel in unison, and dress their thoughts and emotions in national colours. I focus on such markers employed by the South African president Nelson Mandela in his annual speeches to the national parliament, 1994–1999. Metalingual mitigation markers are shown to help the speaker hold the floor, redress the potential face threats, and unify the hearers into a community to which the speaker belongs.
References (62)
References
Adam, Heribert. 1994. “Nationalism, Nation-building and Non-racialism.” In Democratic Nation-Building in South Africa, ed. by Nic Rhoodie and Ian Lienberg, 37-51. Pretoria: HSRC Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised edition). London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atkinson, Max. 1984a. Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics. London and New York: Methuen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atkinson, Maxwell J. 1984b. “Public Speaking and Audience Responses: Some Techniques for Inviting Applause.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 370-409. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1985. “Refusing Invited Applause: Preliminary Observations from a Case Study of Charismatic Oratory.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. By Teun van Dijk, Vol. 4: Discourse Analysis in Society, 161–181. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. “Soil, Blood and Identity.” Sociological Review 40: 675–701. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. (ed). 1990. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice. 1975. “Introduction.” In Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. by Maurice Bloch, 1-28. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloom, William. 1990. Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Botha, Willem J. 2001. The Deictic Foundation of Ideology, with Reference to African Renaissance. In Language and Ideology, Volume II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches, ed. by René Dirven et al., 51-76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Breuilly, John. 1993. Nationalism and the State. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 1990. Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coates, Jenifer. 1990. “Modal Meaning: The Semantic-Pragmatic Interface.” Journal of Semantics 7 (1): 53–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comaroff, John. 1975. “Talking Politics: Oratory and Authority in a Tswana Chiefdom.” In Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. by Maurice Bloch, 141-161. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croucher, Sheila L. 2003. “Perpetual Imagining: Nationhood in a Global Era.” International Studies Review 5 (1): 1–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dedaić, Mirjana N. 2004a. “If I May Say, I Would Like To and Let Me Repeat: Modality-Construed Mitigation Markers in Political Communication”. In English Modality in Perspective: Genre Analysis and Contrastive Studies, ed. by Roberta Facchinetti and Frank Palmer, 45-66. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004b. “Discursive Construction of National Identity in American, South African, and Croatian 1999 State of the Nation Addresses.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University.
Degenaar, Johan. 1993. “Beware of Nation-Building.” In Democratic Nation-Building in South Africa, ed. by Nick Rhoodie and Ian Liebenberg, 23-30. Pretoria, South Africa: HSRC Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deutsch, Karl. 1966. Nationalism and Social Communication. New York: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, Susan. 1977. "Wait for me, roller skate!". In Child Discourse, ed. by Susan Ervin-Tripp and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, 165-188. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fowler, Roger, and Gunther Kress. 1979. “Critical Linguistics.” In Language and Control, ed. by Roger Fowler, Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Tony Trew, 185-213. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1980 “Conversational Mitigation.” Journal of Pragmatics 4 (4): 341–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. “Pragmatic Markers.” Pragmatics 6 (2): 167–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-To-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1991. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. by Anthony D. King, 19-39. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myths, Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence Ranger (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horwitz, Murray, and Jacob M. Rabbie. 1982. “Individuality and Membership in the Intergroup System.” In Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, ed. by Henri Tajfel, 241-275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hui, C. Harry, and Harry C. Triandis. 1986. “Individualism-Collectivism: A Study of Cross-Cultural Researches.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 17: 225–248. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunt, Sally A. 1996. “An Investigation into Patterns of Interaction in Small Group Teaching at Rhodes University, with Particular Emphasis on the Effects of Gender and Mother-tongue.” Masters thesis, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Chapter two: "Culture and gender", 1–18.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 1988. Eloquence in an Electronic Age. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 1997. “Persuasion by Inference: Analysis of a Party Political Broadcast.” In Political Linguistics ( =Belgian Journal of Linguistics 11 ), ed. by Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, 121-137. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1973. “The Logic of Politeness; Or Minding Your p’s and q’s.” In Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. by Claudia Corum et al., 292-305. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1977. “Politeness, Pragmatics and Performatives.” In Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presupposition and Implicatures, ed. by Andy Rogers, Bob Wall, and John P. Murphy, 79-106. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lim, Tae-Seop, and John W. Bowers. 1991. “Facework: Solidarity, Approbation, and Tact.” Human Communication Research 17: 415–450. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ramphele, Mamphela, and Emile Boonzaier. 1988. “The Position of African Women: Race and Gender in South Africa.” In South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts, ed. by Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp, 153-166. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Renan, Ernest. 1882. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882 . Paris: Calmann Lévy. (Renan, Ernest. 1990. “What Is a Nation?” Translated and annotated by Martin Thom. In Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha, 8-22. London and New York: Routledge.)
Rhoodie, Nic, and Ian Liebenberg (eds). 1994. Democratic Nation-Building in South Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Safran, William. 1999. “Nationalism.” In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, ed. by Joshua A. Fishman, 77-93. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1980. “Meta-Talk: Organizational and Evaluative Brackets in Discourse.” In Language and Social Interaction. Sociological Inquiry 50 (special edition), ed. by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West, 199–236.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schutz, William C. 1971. Here Comes Everybody: Bodymind and Encounter Culture. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne B.K. Scollon. 1981. Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Seton-Watson, Hugh. 1977. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nation and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London/New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D. 1999. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 1983. Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 1981a. “The Machine-Gun Question: An Example of Conversational Style.” Journal of Pragmatics 5: 383-397. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1981b. “New York Jewish Conversational Style.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 30: 133-149.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Triandis, Harry C. 1988. “Collectivism vs. Individualism: A Reconceptualization of a Basic Concept in Cross-Cultural Psychology.” In Personality, Cognition and Values: Cross-cultural Perspectives of Childhood and Adolescence, ed. by Christopher Bagley and Gajendra Verma, 60-95. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Triandis, Harry C., Robert Bontempo, Hector Betancourt, Michael Bond, Kwok Leung, Abelando Brenes, James Georgas, C. Harry Hui, Gerardo Marin, Bernadette Setiadi, Jai B.P. Sinha, Jyoti Verna, John Spangenberg, Hubert Touzard and Germaine de Montmollin. 1986. “The Measurement of the Etic Aspects of Individualism and Collectivism Across Cultures.” Australian Journal of Psychology 38: 257–267. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2002. “Fragmented Identities: Redefining and Recontextualizing National Identity.” In Politics as Text and Talk: Analytical Approaches to Political Discourse, ed. by Paul Chilton and Christina Schäffner, 143-169. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue