Cover not available

Article published In: Dialogicity in Political Discourse
Edited by Elda Weizman and Zohar Livnat
[Pragmatics and Society 13:5] 2022
► pp. 747–768

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

Virtual dialogues in monologic political discourse

Constructing privileged and oppositional future in political speeches

 | University of Łódź
Published online: 6 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21027.cap
Abstract
This paper describes ways in which political speakers define and legitimize future policies by construing different policy options in terms of ‘privileged’ and ‘oppositional’ futures. Privileged and oppositional futures are conceptual projections of alternative policy visions occurring in quasi-dialogic chunks of speech, revealing specific evidential, mood, and modality patterns. Privileged future involves the speaker’s preferred, or at least acknowledged vision and is articulated through absolute modality and evidential markers which derive from factual evidence, history, and reason. Oppositional future involves an antagonistic and plainly threatening vision, expressed by probabilistic modality and (usually) the interrogative mood. Following the principle of psychological consistency in belief, oppositional future is normally communicated first, allowing for a swift and strong response from the privileged future expressed in the speaker-preferred vision.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Privileged and oppositional futures in political discourse
    • 1.1Political communication as the site of alternative futures
    • 1.2PF and OF as forms of virtual dialogue
    • 1.3Extending the analytical toolkit for alternative futures
      • 1.3.1Rhetorical structure theory
      • 1.3.2Consistency and credibility
      • 1.3.3Cheater detection and displays of coherence
  • 2.Lexico-grammatical and pragmatic markers of alternative futures
    • 2.1Grammatical mood
    • 2.2Modality and nominalization
    • 2.3Evidentiality
  • 3.A case study of alternative futures in Polish anti-immigration discourse
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
References
Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2002. Explorations in Political Discourse. Methodological and Critical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Legitimization in Political Discourse: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Follow-ups in the US Anti-Terrorist Discourse. Proposal for a Macro-discursive Approach to Monologic Follow-up Sequences”. Discourse & Society 261: 543–561. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. The Discourse of Conflict and Crisis. Poland’s Political Rhetoric in the European Perspective. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr, and Urszula Okulska (eds). 2013. Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory in Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cosmides, Leda. 1989. “The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Studies within the Wason Selection Task”. Cognition 311: 187–276. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunmire, Patricia. 2005. “Preempting the Future: Rhetoric and Ideology of the Future in Political Discourse”. Discourse & Society 161: 481–513. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Filardo Llamas, Laura, Christopher Hart, and Bertie Kaal (eds). 2016. Space, Time and Evaluation in Ideological Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flowerdew, John, and John Richardson (eds). 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gough, Val, and Mary Talbot. 1996. “‘Guilt over Games Boys Play’: Coherence as a Focus for Examining the Constitution of Heterosexual Subjectivity on a Problem Page”. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 214–230. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graham, Phil. 2001. “Space: Irrealis Objects in Technology Policy and Their Role in a New Political Economy”. Discourse & Society 121: 761–788. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1994. Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and James R. Martin. 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2014. Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher, and Piotr Cap (eds). 2014. Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hodge, Bob, and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics (2nd ed.). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O’Donnell. 1992. Propaganda and Persuasion. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. 2000. “A Cognitive-pragmatic Approach to Situation-bound Utterances”. Journal of Pragmatics 321: 605–625. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2013. “Blogging as the Mediatization of Politics and a New Form of Social Interaction: A Case Study of ‘Proximization Dynamics’ in Polish and British Political Blogs”. In Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Theory and Practice, ed. by Piotr Cap and Urszula Okulska, 379–422. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mann, William, and Sandra Thompson. 1988. “Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organization”. Text 81: 243–281.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob. 2013. “Sequential Acts”. Paper presented at the 13th IPrA Conference, New Delhi.
Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oddo, John. 2018. The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silberstein, Sandra. 2004. War of Words. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan. 2000. “Metarepresentations in an Evolutionary Perspective”. In Metarepresentation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. by Dan Sperber, 117–138. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stengel, Frank, David B. MacDonald, and Dirk Nabers (eds). 2019. Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsohatzidis, Savas (ed.). 1994. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun. 2008. Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Eemeren, Frans, and Rob Grootendorst. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Windt, Theodore. 1994. Presidential Rhetoric. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall & Hunt.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xie, Chaoqun, Francisco Yus, and Hartmut Haberland (eds). 2020. Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Wang, Jiayu & Yaru Zhao
2025. “Why does he appear so ordinary, but he can be so confident”. Pragmatics and Society 16:4 ► pp. 568 ff. DOI logo
Rasulova, J
2024. REPETITION IN INAUGURAL ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENTS OF AZERBAIJAN. Mìžnarodnij fìlologìčnij časopis 15:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue