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Article published In: Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 9:2 (2018) ► pp.232–251

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Language, attitudes and party politics

The representation of Republicans and Democrats in Presidential weekly addresses

 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Published online: 28 June 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16059.fen
Abstract
This study investigates Barack Obama’s attitudes towards Republicans and Democrats by analyzing a corpus of 249 Presidential weekly addresses. Analysis shows that Obama’s attitudes towards the Republicans are characterized by a negative judgment of propriety, creating a negative image of the Republican Party, whereas when Republicans and Democrats are mentioned together, his attitudes are characterized by his hopes for and commendations on bipartisan collaboration. An analytical model based on the attitude schema is proposed to explicate the strategies for encoding attitudes. It is found that negative attitudes are always expressed implicitly by recounting events that elicit the attitudes (i.e. behaviors of the Republicans) and performing speech acts that are motivated by the attitudes (i.e. urging the Republicans to stop the wrong behaviors). The patterns of attitudes reflect bipartisan conflict and cooperation on the one hand, and constitute an important strategy to battle against the opposition party and build coalitions on the other.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Political discourse analysis and studies of Obama’s speeches
    • 2.1Political discourse analysis
    • 2.2Studies of President Obama’s speeches
  • 3.Analytical method: Corpus-based appraisal analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Attitudes towards the Republicans
    • 4.2Attitudes towards Republicans and Democrats together
    • 4.3Attitudes, power, and party politics
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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