Article published In: Ethnography, discourse, and hegemony
Edited by Jan Blommaert †, James Collins, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck and Jef Verschueren
[Pragmatics 13:1] 2003
► pp. 145–162
Political cross-discourse
Conversationalization, imaginary networks, and social fields in Galiza
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2003
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.13.1.07alv
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.13.1.07alv
Through the analysis of political rallies and parliamentary speech in Galiza, it is shown how conversationalized forms of political discourse enter into ideological manipulation and hegemony-building by professional politicians. The overall resulting phenomenon, cross-discourse, draws from habitual, daily and traditional forms of speech. Political cross-discourse consists of the tactical texturing of traditional political oratory templates through select informal conversational forms and themes. Three main forms of cross-discourse found in the data are exemplified. Cross-discourse indexes and constructs social spaces and networks at several levels of generality: From those of daily interactions to an imaginary supranetwork of common citizens. This form of cross-discursive circulation (from daily speech to politics) gives the illusion of fluidity between social fields in formal democracies, while it hides the very unequal nature of the distribution of discursive resources.
Keywords: Power, Manipulation, Political discourse, Galizan-Portuguese, Hegemony
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