الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract This study examines the language of politicians when addressing different cultures. This qualitative study aims to describe how politicians modify their address in order to suit the cultural background of their addressees. Also, it aims at exploring the linguistic as well as contextual and functional features of these types of modifications. Data for the current research consists of a collection of 29 political speeches given by a number of European and American politicians and covers the time span from 1979 to 2015. The study seeks to answer the following questions: 1- How do politicians modify their speech to suit the cultural background of their audience? 2- How and to what extent can the different culture of the addressees affect the language of a given political speech? 3- What are the linguistic features that characterize a speech directed to foreign audience? 4- What are the strategies employed by the addressers in the data to approach their addresses and what are the possible aims behind them? For answering the research questions and tackling the hybrid features which characterize this type of discourse, the study adopts an eclectic approach that uses tools of analysis from three theories: Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory, Fairclough’s (1989) theory of Critical Discourse Analysis, and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness theory. The features explored could be classified into three categories: lexico-syntactic features, figurative features, and socio-cultural features. On the lexical level, the employment of culturally-based terms has been considered the most prominent phenomenon. On the syntactic level, three features have been highlighted; nominalization, pronoun usage, and rhetorical questions. On the figurative level, the researcher has discussed the use of metaphors, analogy, and spin. Besides, strategies of Communication Accommodation Theory, namely, approximation strategies, interpretability strategies, discourse management and emotional expression have been applied to the data. Data analysis has revealed that when the politicians under the study address audience of different culture, they consider the cultural difference of their audience and accordingly they modify their speech to suit the cultural background of their addressees. |