Pragmatics and Society - Volume 13, Issue 5, 2022

The goal of this special issue is to investigate the forms and functions of dialogicity in political discourse. Starting with the premise that the boundaries between monologue and dialogue are blurred in contemporary political discourse in general and in mediated political discourse in particular, it sets up to explore how dialogical features, manifest in situated discourse in various degrees of explicitness, are exploited by participants in the political arena, be they professional politicians, semi-professional activists or ordinary people, for various purposes.

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.

This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in question-answer-sequences based discourse genres (interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Questions) in mediated political discourse. It considers the multilayeredness of participation and pluralism of discursive action on the one hand, and the delimiting frame of the dialogic discourse genres on the other. It shows that both have a decisive impact on the participants’ meaning-making processes in context: the inherently unbounded participation framework contributes to pluralism of discursive action, while genre- and media constraints narrow down the scope of production and interpretation. This does not only hold for the stage at which a discursive action occurs in the discourse, but also for its degree of explicitness with regard to presuppositions and felicity conditions.

This case study analyses the socio-pragmatic effects of invoked multiple voices in a commemorative speech delivered by Austrian writer Michael Köhlmeier on the occasion of the 2018 Austrian commemoration day against violence and fascism. Köhlmeier uses different forms of discourse representation to blame politicians of the then Austrian government for their political statements and actions. The focus of this article is on the speaker’s combination of (imagined and real) sources and forms of discourse representation, resulting in strategically deployed perspective shifts to express opposition and blame. Furthermore, the sociopragmatic functions of these rhetorical and textual strategies in the context of situation, as well as in the wider context of the Austrian culture of collective remembrance are explored, in particular by showing that by blaming actual Austrian politicians for their political statements and actions, the traditional consensual commemorative discourse is breached. This latter effect is probably responsible for the huge public attention the speech attracted in 2018.

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.

Based on Buber’s dialogic philosophy, ideas from the ethics of dialogue and politeness theory, we analyze letters written by members of an Israeli organization named Besod Siach – who come from both the left and right wings, are both religious and secular, who decided to broaden and deepen the dialogue between different groups in Israeli society against the backdrop of the polarization, alienation and violence threatening the state’s integrity and democratic foundations.

Our analysis has three focal points: the language of the letters themselves, meta-linguistic utterances that appear in the letters and explicitly refer to the language the writers choose to use or refrain from using, and meta-textual utterances that relate more generally to the dialogic approach guiding the members of the group. Harmony is evinced among these three perspectives, thus exemplifying the conditions needed in order to hold an argumentative discourse that promotes dialogue.

This paper studies dialogicity in posts and their comments. Focusing on political slogans in the Facebook page of Israel PM Binyamin Netanyahu, we examine the ways comments meta-represent the posts in various degrees of resemblance. Starting with the premise that comments/post interactions are dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense, we argue that comments are dialogic in yet another way, which is related to the form and degree of resemblance between them. The conceptualization draws on the notion of meta-representation supplemented by insights gained from accommodation theory and Bakhtin’s dialogism. We argue that through resemblance, the propositional content, ideology and viewpoint conveyed by the initiating slogan are incorporated in the comment, and a tacit dialogue is constructed between them. An additional layer of polyphony is added to the multiplicity of ratified voices otherwise manifest in the interaction between separate posts and comments.