The paper surveys alternative ways of research on political language use. Taking sides with linguistics-based, quantitative alternatives, the authoress analyses the role of metaphors in political propaganda. Choice of metaphors is an important ingredient of power discourse, especially in periods of dictatorship. Using results of cognitive linguistic approaches, the authoress presents examples from the Hungarian press of the mid-twentieth century and shows how metaphors, constituting the culmination of political communication, were projected to the various areas of life, how they tried to affect people's thinking. The sense networks of the editorials analysed emphasise the negative participant of the BATTLE metaphor, the attacker, forcing opponents of the party-state system into that role. The study of metaphor use, therefore, supports the claim that the metaphor was selected consciously, with pragmatic factors in mind. Its textual function was to establish an emotional link between political power groups (as opposed to dissidents) and the consumers of political propaganda.
Results of pragmatic research, including the distinction between semantic and referential meaning, the exploration of deictic phenomena and pronominal reference, as well as the elaboration of general communicative principles governing the process of communication, have created a theoretical basis for an objective linguistic analysis of texts the interpretation of which is debatable. Given that pronominalization is a prominent method of exophoric and endophoric reference, playing an important role in staking out the circumstances of an utterance and in organising the sense of a text, its study offers a fertile approach for the interpretation of various politically motivated types of text. Exploring the reference fields of pronouns helps us define the political groups participating in the discourse, whereas studying the organization of pronouns facilitates the determination of the relative distance of discourse participants. In functionalist examinations of pronominalization, the Hungarian literature has been concentrating on the anaphoric text-forming role of third person singular pronouns. The present paper tries to contribute to the issue of pronominal deixis by a pragmatically based study of the anaphoric use of first person plural pronouns, in harmony with the face-forming role of those pronouns in political discourse.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.