This thesis seeks to investigate the usage of hedges in political discourse in the Tampa City Council for the purpose of examining whether or not women hedge more than men in this area. An analysis of the occurrence of hedges illustrated that women hedged more than men for various purposes in this meeting. These occurrences mostly involved the epistemic modal function and shields which indicate uncertainty about the utterance and certainty about the utterance respectively. The results also illustrate how political discourse is still an area dominated by men in the sense that men had significantly more speech time than women during this meeting. However, the results also disprove Lakoff’s claim that women hedge simply to signal uncertainty and tentativeness.

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Pronouns play a key role in the construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’. They are not merely a way of expressing person, number and gender as is suggested by traditional grammarians nor do they only do referential and deictic work. Rather, they must be thought of in the context of interaction and in terms of the ‘identity work’ that they accomplish. In this thesis, it is argued that pronouns are used to construct favourable images of themselves, and ‘others’.¶ The context of this study is the Australian political media interview. In this study, the pronouns ‘I’ ‘you’ ‘we’ and ‘they’ are examined individually, then, as they occur in sequence. This investigation reveals that pronouns are used to construct politicians’ multiple ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and that as they occur in sequence, the changing ‘selves’ of politicians and different ‘others’ are created. The construction of these multiple ‘selves’ and ‘others’ is a version of reality that politicians construct discursively and is not an objective representation of facts.¶ This analysis of pronouns in political interviews also reveals striking and hitherto unresearched uses of pronouns, which can be used to show affiliation or create distance between people where it would not traditionally be expected. Politicians actively exploit the flexibility of pronominal reference to construct the different identities of themselves and ‘other’ and use them to create different alignments to, and boundaries between, their multiple ‘selves’ and ‘others’. Thus, pronouns are pivotal in the construction of reality – a reality that is created and understood in the discourse of the moment.

abstract: The ways in which human relationships are managed via language is a topic of particular interest in the area of sociolinguistics where work into the study of such topics as politeness, impoliteness, and rapport management have attempted to shed light on this phenomenon. This study examines two segments of extended discourse by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia at the 2008 Summit of the Rio Group where he addressed a gathering of Rio Group members comprising heads of state from Latin American and Caribbean nations. Faced with serious accusations about his nation's military actions into Ecuador a few days before the meeting in question, Uribe engaged the group through two extended statements where he defended his government's actions. In these two segments of discourse Uribe changed his tone; it is this change that the present study attempts to describe in terms of modification to the effects of his discourse on the relationship between himself and the other interlocutors. To this end, an analysis is done classifying Uribe's utterances as polite, per Brown and Levinson's politeness model, and impolite, per Culpeper's impoliteness model. Additionally, Spencer Oatey's model of rapport management is used to classify Uribe's utterances according to their effect on the components of rapport. These classifications are examined alongside an analysis of factors related to rapport management such as frame, purpose of the exchange, and participants, for the purpose of understanding how these many factors work together to generate a changed effect to rapport. Of greatest significance in this study is the relationship between (im)politeness strategies and components of rapport. This dynamic provided an interesting way of examining (im)politeness in a new context, one that factored-in the effects of (im)politeness to the relationship between interlocutors. The study, as described above, showed that Uribe's change in tone was indeed a change to approach to rapport management characterized by an initial focus on the transactional and relational goals rapport component in the first of two segments, that then changed in the second part to a focus on face and association rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2011

Catchwords and catchphrases denoting crucial ideological concepts or disqualifying an opponent serve as indices pointing to the line of demarcation between political camps. Using the example of three catchwords (Patriotyzm genetyczny genetic patriotism, pka kulturowa cultural shelf, Palikotyzacja X-a Palikotization of X) emerging in the aggravated political debate in Poland between 2000 and 2009, and mainly signaling affiliation with the national conservative PiS-party, a twofold approach combining methods from discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics is proposed. On the one hand, the lexical items are analyzed as keywords in statu nascendi which are disputed, quoted or ridiculed and serve as intertextual hinges which still have the potential to evoke the communicative situation in which they have been created. On the other hand, the selected newly created lexical items are analyzed as conceptual integration networks within the framework of blending theory. The blending analysis reveals the underlying logic of the novel conceptual structure and displays the explanative and argumentative pattern suggested by the blend and condensed in the catchword. By tracing the disputes elicited by these catchwords and analyzing sequences in which these newly created concepts are contested or maintained from a cognitive perspective, we can see how the logic suggested by the blend is either perpetuated or perverted in the process of the ongoing dissemination of the catchword.

This ethnography is writing about the popular resistance of villagers in postreform China. It focuses on the political discourse of villagers who imagine, create and transmit it in everyday life. When they carry out resistance to the state, they speak about how they view their government, what the ideal government-villager relationship is, what the principle of justice and equity is, as well as what their relations with their family, kin and village are, and how they view the good life. In their everyday practice, the evidence shows that there is an elaborate and pervasive principle of social contract or reciprocity, which underlies everyday social relationships. This principle is not only applied to person to person (e.g. villager and villager, villagers and cadres), it is also extended to the relationship between state and villagers. But the findings also tell that this principle is not an external norm/rule or institution/system which is static and unchangeable. It is transformed and reproduced by the villagers in everyday practices. The villagers strategically defined the meaning of zeren in terms of social contract for their own interest. When the state or the cadres violate their principle of zeren, villagers carry out resistance. In Ku Village, villagers' resistance is always in everyday form in order to avoid open confrontation and direct challenge to the state, because such open and organized activities are still dangerous and will probably be met with aimed force and bloodshed in socialist China. In their resistance, they are capable of formulating the rationale for their action discursively via defining and redefining the zeren of the government and their relationship with the state. They draw upon the memory and a rich variety of information from different sources for constructing their models of "good government" and "good cadre", with which they judge the government and local cadres, and then justify their resistance to the state policies. In post-reform China, collecting taxes, imposing fees and enforcing birth control have become the main arenas of conflict between state and villagers. The village cadres are always situated in a dilemma, which formulates an important characteristic of Chinese local politics. On the one hand, they have to implement the state policy; on the other hand, they do not want to hurt the personal relationship with the villagers because they are also bound by the principle of social reciprocity. So normally, they collude with the villagers and keep "one eye opened and one eye closed". At the specific historical moment, however, some village cadres collude with the state and do things against the interest of the villagers.

In this thesis, I analyse apologies produced by British political figures from a pragmatic perspective. In particular, I seek to explain the function of political apologies and describe the form they take. In order to give a thorough account of the speech act of apologising in the public sphere, I look to a variety of genres for data. The set of remedial acts scrutinised in this study come from debates and statements in the House of Commons, the Leveson Inquiry and news interviews. The differences in communicative practices between these data sources mean that the types of apology that come about within each genre are varied. Many of the parliamentary apologies are monologic, whereas the apologetic actions found at the Leveson Inquiry and in news interviews are dialogic and, to some extent, co-constructed between participants. These differences mean that a variety of theoretical approaches are taken in analysing the data – speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and generalised conversational implicature theory (Levinson,2000) feature heavily in the discussion of monologic apologies. Apologies produced within an interactive, ‘conversational’ setting are treated using developments in conversation analysis (amongst others see: Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007). I attempt to reconcile these two, quite different, approaches to discourse at various points in the thesis, arguing that conversation analysis lacks a theory of how interlocutors understand what actions are happening in interaction (and this is provided by speech act theory) and speech act theory lacks a detailed focus on what actually happens in language as interaction (provided by conversation analysis). On the basis of the apology data scrutinised in the thesis, I propose a set of felicity conditions for the speech act of apology (chapter 2) and discuss how the apology (and speech acts broadly) should be considered as prototype entities (chapter 8). I show that when apologising for actions which they have committed, politicians are more fulsome in their apologies than we are in everyday conversation. I also show that they use more explicit apology tokens than is found in quotidian talk (chapter 3). When apologising for historical wrongs, I demonstrate that apologising is a backgrounded act and the focus of the statement is on being clear and unequivocal about the nature of the offences for which the government is apologising (chapter 6). I also argue that political apologies in interactive settings are best thought of as action chains (Pomerantz, 1978). That is to say, apologies in these environments may elicit a response from an interlocutor, but do not need to (chapters 4 & 5). This is quite unlike everyday talk (cf Robinson, 2004). I discuss how apology tokens may be used in the performance of other acts, including introducing dissent and undertaking serious face threat. I suggest that this comes about because apology tokens exist on a cline of pragmaticalisation (chapter 7).

The Clash of Civilization thesis by Samuel Huntington and the claims of other scholars such as Bernard Lewis reinforced the impression in the West that the Arab world is a homogeneous and rigid entity ready to clash with other civilizations. In fact, some in the West argue that world civilizations have religious characteristics, for that reason the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will be primarily cultural and religious. However, other scholars argue that there is no single Islamic culture but rather multiple types of political Islam and different perception of it. Therefore, the monolithic aspect of Islam is no longer a credible argument. Furthermore, they assert that there are many examples of harmonious relations between countries that came from different civilization than those of the same civilization. The Purpose of my thesis is to investigate whether there is actually a diversity and plurality of thoughts within the contemporary Arab discourse. Research was conducted through a qualitative that was made possible during a careful exploration of the biography and the scholarly work of many scholars with diverse cultural tone and beliefs; mainly through Arabic primary sources that were translated by the author. The principal finding was that all tendencies were and are present within the political culture of the Islamic and Arab world, from the extreme left to the extreme right. Yet, the political scene looks chaotic, tense and leaving many important questions unanswered.

In convention speeches and inaugural addresses, presidential candidates and newly-elected presidents attempt to persuade listeners to vote for and support them. One persuasive tool that they use in these speeches is metaphor, considered a fundamental form of reasoning (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The present study focuses on three conceptual metaphors (POLITICS IS WAR, POLITICS IS A JOURNEY, and POLITICS IS LOVE) used in 40 speeches given by American presidents from 1944 to 2021 in order to see if there are differences in metaphor usage across political party (i.e., Democrat and Republican) and across speech type (i.e., nomination acceptance and inaugural address). All speeches were double-coded for the three metaphors by a group of trained raters, and the average count for each metaphor type per speech was found using a many-facet Rasch measurement. Mixed-effects regressions were then conducted to determine differences across political party and speech type. No quantitative differences were found in the use of these metaphors, suggesting the possibility that these speeches represent a genre of political discourse with particular patterns of metaphor usage. Some qualitative differences between political party and speech type are discussed, as well as limitations and future directions for research.

Both African writers and literary critics have long used the ideology of "Négritude" and the political commitment it generated as the theoretical basis for their works. However, since independence in Africa, this common practice started to lose momentum due to a shift in the social and political realities. Furthermore, in recent decades, new generations of African writers have moved away from the "Négritude" movement's beliefs. Nevertheless, there are still some nostalgic writers and critics who cling to this historic movement that shaped African literature and thought for half a century. The above two trends paved the way for my starting hypothesis: is it still possible to evaluate what Abiola Irele calls the "African imagination" in the narrative, and especially novels, without the traditional criteria of political commitment and ideology? To answer this fundamental question, I define my analytical method as a "politiscopie." This neologism is formed in the image of the word "radioscopie." "Politiscopie" combines the stem for politics, "politi-," with the suffix "-scopie," from the Latin scopium (instrument for viewing) and the Greek skopein (to look at). And I define "politiscopie" as the analytical examination of political discourse in literary text. This examination is stripped of the conscious or unconscious analytical tendency that I call "l'humeur idéologique des critiques," or "the ideological mood of critics. "This dissertation is divided into two parts and an introduction, in which I define political discourse based on L'archéologie du savoir by Michel Foucault. The first part--chapters one and two--is a "politiscopical" examination, an examination of political discourse in African novels since 1990. I discuss the explicit and implicit political discourse present in the considered novels. In the second part--chapters three and four, I attempt to tease out the triangular relationship between Africa, the writer, and the relevant political realities. I investigate the political representation of Africa by the new generations of African writers, and then I look at the impact of distance on those writers to see whether the location of the authors--abroad or on the African continent--affects the way they treat African political debates.