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Article published In: Dialogicity in Political Discourse
Edited by Elda Weizman and Zohar Livnat
[Pragmatics and Society 13:5] 2022
► pp. 815–836

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Polemic polyphony

Voices of the fools and the righteous in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem

 | Bar-Ilan University
Published online: 6 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21023.noy
Abstract
Bakhtin famously argued that language-as-used is essentially dialogic. One pragmatic implication concerns how dialogicity is established in various contexts. In political discourse, polemic polyphony emerges from the juxtaposition of adversarial voices of political actors: a dialogue in which different voices index different ideological orientations. Polyphonic ensembles establish discoursal scenes and make them recognizable, enabling distinctions such as those between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and between heroes and villains. Overall, they assist speakers in the semiotic mediation of political relations.
The corpus includes eighteen speeches delivered during a dissent event that takes place after the Sheikh Jarrah weekly anti-occupation demonstration in East Jerusalem. The speeches are given in Hebrew by a Palestinian neighborhood resident and activist, to a small audience of regular Jewish-Israeli protestors. Through studying noninstitutionalized political discourse, dialogicity and polemic polyphony are illuminated in an on-the-ground, context-rich, and marginalized setting.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.RSSs in political discourse
  • 3.Corpus and context: The weekly Sheikh Jarrah demonstration
  • 4.Pronouns, heroes, and villains in Mr. Diab’s speeches
  • 5.Constructed dialogue and polemic polyphony
    • 5.1“I don’t speak in vain”: Mr. Diab and Mr. Trump
    • 5.2“It’s not us who killed them”: The fool Netanyahu
  • 6.Conclusions
  • 7.Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Noy, Chaim
2023. “OK guys, thank you for coming today”: Indexicality, utterance events, and verbal rituals in political speeches in Sheikh Jarrah. Journal of Sociolinguistics 27:4 ► pp. 345 ff. DOI logo
Noy, Chaim
2025. "I repeatedly tell you, the future is yours-the righteous, not the liars": Hope in Saleh Diab's political speeches in East Jerusalem. SSRN Electronic Journal DOI logo

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