Abstract
The interactional organization of leadership was examined in the context of 15 political speeches, delivered by leading politicians from the three major political parties in Britain. The study utilized a sociopragmatic methodology, supplemented by corpus linguistics and social psychology. Leadership was conceptualized in interactional–sociolinguistic terms, as brought in and brought out in the interaction through self-references collocating with four main verb forms (event, communication, subjectification and intention); these generate implicatures targeting political competence and responsiveness. Event and subjectification verbs were found to occur the most frequently, and communication verbs the least frequently, with little variation between politicians from different political parties. It was proposed that action and intention verbs primarily target competence, while subjectification and communication verbs primarily target responsiveness; overall, each of the four principal verb forms may be utilized to perform leadership throughout a political speech as a whole.
Competence and responsiveness in leadership
Political discourse has undergone important changes in our digitalized and mediatized societies. As a consequence, the study of communicative behaviour in the political arena needs to account for politics not only as text and talk (Chilton and Schäffner, 2002), but also as a form of both professional and media discourse (Fetzer and Weizman, 2006). This text-and-talk perspective is based on the premise that ‘political activity does not exist without the use of language. It is true that other behaviours are involved: for instance, physical coercion. But the doing of politics is predominantly constituted in language’ (Chilton and Schäffner, 2002: 3).
The symbiotic relationship between political discourse and the media is interdependent on the medium-as-such in and through which political information, political beliefs and political opinions are transmitted and shaped. The impact of modern mass-media culture on communicative behaviour and performance is further reflected in the conversationalization and professionalization of mediatized political discourse. According to Fairclough (1998: 146f.),
. . . contemporary political discourse articulates together the orders of discourse of the political system (conventional, official politics), of the media, of science and technology, of grassroots sociopolitical movements, of ordinary private life, and so forth – but in an unstable and shifting configuration.
From an ethnomethodological perspective (e.g. Garfinkel, 1994), politicians ‘do’ politics in and through their acts of communication. In Gumperz’s (1996) frame of reference, politicians can be seen both to bring their discourse identities as political agents into a communicative setting, and to bring them out in that setting. However, politicians ‘do’ more than simply ‘talk politics in the media’. At the same time, they present their multiple roles and functions, and, what is even more important, successful politicians ‘do leadership in context’.
In this article, an analysis is presented of 15 British political speeches, delivered at annual party-political conferences either by the leaders of the three major political parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat), or by candidates for the 2005 Conservative Party leadership election. All the speeches were broadcast in full on UK television, thus in effect not only to the audience physically present in the auditorium, but also to the nation as a whole. As a consequence, they are very much a showcase for each politician, given that social comparisons are inevitably made between them in terms of their respective leadership qualities.
The conceptual framework for this analysis is derived from a study of voter perceptions reported by Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley (2004). They factor-analysed voter ratings of political leaders in the British general election of 2001, and identified two important dimensions, labelled competence and responsiveness. Ratings of ‘keeps promises’, ‘decisive’ and ‘principled’ loaded on competence; ratings of ‘caring’, ‘listens to reason’ and ‘not arrogant’ loaded on responsiveness. The same two factors were identified by Stewart and Clarke (1992) in an analysis of leader ratings during the 1987 British general election (when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister).
Although the concepts of competence and responsiveness were derived from leader ratings, they may also be understood as reflecting tacit assumptions about the accepted code of political practice, indicating voter expectations about how good leaders should behave. Notably, the concept of leadership cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the integral role of what has been termed ‘followership’. Followers may comprise members of a company or institution over whom the leader exercises her/his leadership; they may also be members of a political party who vote for a particular person (or persons), ratify them and accept them as their leader. In the majority of contexts, leadership is hardly ever a permanent role but needs to be renewed after a certain period of time. Given that members of a political party (or of other institutions and companies) may withdraw their followership, leaders need to perform successfully in order to be re-elected. Specifically, our proposal is that leaders need to ensure continued support by ‘doing’ competence and responsiveness, for example by keeping promises, acting in a decisive and principled manner, listening to reason and not being arrogant.
Furthermore, political leaders also need to ‘do’ competence and responsiveness in their discourse. In the setting of a leadership speech at a party-political conference, this can be done by demonstrating determination through displaying plans and intentions, by demonstrating responsibility through displaying preconditions and consequences of intentions, plans or agendas, or by demonstrating responsiveness through displaying attitudes and interpersonal communicative skills. In our view, competence and responsiveness represent scalar rather than absolute categories. Thus, for one particular communicative goal, one dimension may be foregrounded and thereby assigned a higher degree of relevance than its counterpart, while for another goal, it may be backgrounded in relation to the other dimension. In short, political leaders do not ‘do’ either competence or responsiveness, they do both, but with a greater emphasis on one or the other at any particular point in time.
The overall research aim of this study was to investigate how both competence and responsiveness are realized in the discourse of political leaders. A sociopragmatic methodology was utilized, supplemented by corpus linguistics and social psychology. The article is organized as follows. The next section provides the linguistic rationale for this study. This is followed by the method, the results of a quantitative analysis, those of a qualitative analysis and, finally, a conclusion.
Competence and responsiveness in political discourse
From our perspective, leadership and leadership work are ‘endogenously generated within talk’. According to Arundale (2006: 201), ‘To paraphrase Heritage’s (1984) observations with regard to conversation and context, communicative action is both relationship-shaped and relationship-renewing (p. 242), and like context, relationship is endogenously generated within talk, not simply exogenous to it’. From an ethnomethodological perspective, social identities are not just communicated but rather are interactionally organized in context – they are constructed, reconstructed and possibly deconstructed.
To illustrate, the following two extracts come from a speech to the Labour Party annual conference (28 September 2004) by Tony Blair (British prime minister, 1997–2007). He is responding to criticisms that depict him as a leader who no longer cares: 1
(1) And (....) I hear people say ‘I want He then goes on to say: (2) I don’t think
In these extracts, by explicitly referring to his former leadership style in which he was depicted as a caring leader, Tony Blair attempts to deconstruct criticism of his present leadership style, put forward by an unidentified group of ‘people’. First, he does that by contextualizing the term ‘caring’ and anchoring it to the private domains of life (‘a human being’, ‘a family man’). Second, he demonstrates that leadership in the public domain of politics is more refined and more complex, thus projecting an alternative conceptualization of leadership. In that frame of reference, the overarching base of ‘caring’ acquires a public, political and moral interpretation, namely that of ‘doing what is right and sticking to it’. By explicitly connecting responsiveness and competence, namely ‘caring’ and ‘doing the right thing’, Blair projects an alternative conceptualization, that of a leader who is caring not only in the private domains of life, but rather succeeds in connecting private (moral) needs with public political ones.
Politicians may not only deconstruct unfavourable conceptualizations of self. They may also opt for the deconstruction of others, such as opposition leaders. This takes the form of aggressive facework, as is reflected in an excerpt from a speech by Michael Howard (2004):
(3) What people want from their politicians is: Accountability. Responsibility. And a little humility.
Excerpt (3) is a good example of aggressive facework through which politicians intend to deconstruct the leadership qualities of their opponent, while at the same time intending to construct the leadership qualities of self. Michael Howard refers to his opponent Tony Blair by naming him explicitly and, moreover, by spelling out what qualities a good politician needs to have, and what Blair does not have: ‘accountability’, ‘responsibility’, ‘and a little humility’, while at the same time implying that he, Michael Howard, has those qualities. In other words, Michael Howard constructs himself implicitly as a decisive, principled and caring leader, while deconstructing Tony Blair as a good and popular leader, enforcing the implicatum of Blair as an irresponsible, non-principled leader who has lost all sense of proportion.
Furthermore, competence and responsiveness can usefully be conceptualized in terms of politeness theory, specifically in terms of what Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) call on-record and off-record strategies. On-record expressions are those which have ‘one unambiguously attributable intention with which witnesses would concur’, while off-record are those which can have ‘more than one unambiguously attributable intention’ (Brown and Levinson, 1978: 73–4). At first sight, on-record strategies might seem the most effective for optimal leadership, since they allow the speaker to opt for clarity, perspicuousness and demonstrable non-manipulativeness.
For example, consider the following extract from Tony Blair, again from his conference speech (28 September 2004):
(4) and to demonstrate to Muslims here in Britain that these are
In this extract, Tony Blair utilizes on-record strategies to display appropriate levels of both competence and responsiveness. Thus, he portrays himself as decisive (‘we change the law to make religious discrimination unlawful’, ‘I will make its revival a personal priority’); principled (‘[let us] demonstrate to Muslims here in Britain that these are values we apply to all our citizens’); and caring and listening to reason (‘values we hold dear’, 2 ‘the depth of my commitment’). By going on record about his attitude towards Muslims and by connecting them explicitly with ‘all our citizens’ ‘here in Britain’ as well as by unambiguously expressing the future plan for himself, the Labour Party and the government to ‘change the law to make religious discrimination unlawful’, Blair invites implicatures which assign him the leadership qualities of ‘caring and listening to reason’. Hence, all these devices are employed strategically to generate implicatures to guide the audience in their interpretation of meaning.
However, too much on-record competence and responsiveness could achieve the opposite effect. For example, a speaker who said something like ‘I have the solution to all of the problems this country has encountered, and I will speak to every single citizen, listen to him or her with great patience and try to explain all the cuts necessary to rebuild a fair and caring society’, would probably be understood as ironic or even as patently insincere or scornful.
An off-record strategy also runs the risk of being taken as ironic, or as deliberately ambiguous or evasive, for example if a speaker were to say ‘It was a wonderful journey to change this party and this country’. But an off-record strategy can have its advantages. Although it may be seen as insufficiently precise, it does allow the speaker to satisfy the hearer’s face, while also avoiding insincerity or ‘the inescapable accountability, the responsibility for his action, that on-record strategies entail’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 73).
Consider the following example of an off-record strategy, again from Tony Blair’s conference speech (28 September 2004):
(5) And when was the last time we heard of a winter crisis in the health service or the scandal of outside toilets in primary schools.
Notably, in this extract, Blair never explicitly claims that the Labour government had succeeded in reforming the health service and the education system. Rather, he leaves it to the audience to draw the inferences that (1) the last winter crisis in the health service, and (2) outside toilets in primary schools, occurred under the last Conservative government and have not occurred since, thereby creating the implicature that the Labour government has kept its promises. Accordingly, Blair cannot be held accountable for having boasted in an inappropriate manner and for not having observed the modesty maxim (Leech, 1983).
The linguistic realization of competence and responsiveness in political discourse also needs to be considered in relation to social context. For example, doing leadership in the context of a broadcast interview will differ from doing leadership in a political speech. In the dialogic configuration of an interview, the interactional organization of leadership and references to competence and responsiveness are employed and negotiated by both interviewer and interviewee. Conversely, in the context of a political speech, leadership tends to be performed in a more explicit manner. However, because party-political speeches are transmitted through the media, they may also be seen as interactive and multilayered events in which the politician positions her/himself, considering their political party and followers as well as possible opponents. Thus, although political speeches are often classified as a monologic genre, they may also be understood as interactive events, comprising individual (micro) speech acts which make up the (macro) speech as a whole (Van Dijk, 1981; Fetzer, 2000).
In our analysis, it is not the macro speech act or genre of a political speech as a whole which is of relevance, but rather the individual micro speech acts and their local contexts. Specifically, our proposal is as follows. From a language-use perspective, a necessary condition for doing leadership is a self-reference and a predication of a relevant leadership quality, for instance being charismatic, competent, reasonable, sensible, responsive and caring, as discussed above. In line with the principle of sociolinguistic variation (Brown, 1995), the self-reference and predication of a relevant quality can be represented either explicitly or implicitly (i.e. on-record or off-record). Thus, the predication of a relevant quality may be either explicit (e.g. tough, decisive or principled), or implicit through illustrative examples, such as meeting relevant heads of state. Similarly, the self-reference can rely either on terms directly connected with the semantics of leadership (e.g. leader, leadership, prime minister, member of government), or performed through indexical expressions, such as personal pronouns or other generic expressions. In the context of a political speech, speakers may not only self-reference with the first-person singular pronoun I, but may also use the first-person plural pronoun we, thus indexing a social group on whose behalf they are speaking, thereby expressing solidarity as well as group identity, while at the same time laying claim to leadership.
Hence, doing leadership is intrinsically connected with the predication to which the self-reference is anchored. The predication is linguistically represented with a verb phrase. Our proposal is that the semantics of the verb phrase lie at the heart of doing leadership. Specifically, self or other references in spoken English can be accomplished through four principal verb forms (event, communication, intention and subjectification). Event verbs are defined as those denoting a material action, which may or may not have been completed, thereby capturing the dynamics of a changing scenario. Communication verbs denote an action anchored to the domains of language production and language reception (e.g. say, tell or hear). Intention verbs (e.g. intend or want) and subjectification verbs which denote a speaker’s mental process (e.g. assume, think or believe) or emotional disposition (e.g. feel, like or fear) may be seen to define a cognitive state or cognitive activity.
Furthermore, each of these four verb forms can be seen to correspond to four agency-anchored domains: (1) action, (2) reports about the reports of others, (3) intention, and (4) thoughts and feelings. Each of these can be seen to represent different ways of doing competence and responsiveness in political leadership. 3 Thus, just as a person’s material actions may reflect well on them and their leadership qualities, so too may their intentions be deemed praiseworthy, determined and principled. Likewise, their thoughts and feelings may project them as responsive and caring leaders; they may also find favour in the narratives or reports of others.
Accordingly, we further propose that this rationale can be usefully conceptualized in terms of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), as adapted to political discourse by Bull et al. (1996) and Bull and Fetzer (2010). Specifically, self-references co-occurring, in particular with subjectification and communication verbs, may be seen to target positive face, in other words, ‘the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 62), thus portraying the politician in question as ‘desirable’. The politician, however, does not only aim at being ‘desirable to at least some others’, but rather at being desirable to as many potential voters as possible. In sociolinguistics, references to positive face are assigned the status of expressing solidarity (Holmes, 1995). In the context of party-political speeches, the expression of solidarity is multi-layered. Leaders express solidarity first with the delegates and members of the party, thereby expressing collective solidarity with the party as a whole. Second, solidarity is expressed with the people representing the electorate, thus extending the domain of reference from the subset of a political party to the superset of a nation. Third, solidarity can also be expressed with another superset, namely international allies. Of course, this multi-layered framework may be further refined to accommodate the expression of solidarity with other subsets, such as particular ethnic or professional groups. Because the semantics of the personal pronoun we entail collectivity and solidarity (viz. collective intentionality, collective action or collective feelings), first-person plural self-references may be seen to foreground responsiveness per se.
However, whether competence or responsiveness is foregrounded will also vary according to each of the four different verb forms. Specifically, we hypothesize that whereas self-references with communication verbs and subjectification verbs primarily target responsiveness, self-references with event verbs and intention verbs primarily target competence. The rationale for these hypotheses is as follows. Self-references collocating with communication verbs may signify the speaker’s communicative skills and responsiveness to others’ wants and needs. Self-references collocating with cognitive verbs denote the speaker’s emotive disposition and psychological states and actions, thus contributing to the expression of subjectification. With the help of those collocations, a speaker paves the way for an account in which s/he provides reasons for a particular action, thereby generating implicatures along the lines of the politician being a caring leader who listens to reason, hence showing responsiveness. Conversely, self-references with either event or intention verbs will primarily target competence, because they are concerned with the actions the politicians have performed or intend to perform with regard to particular political issues.
In summary, our argument is as follows:
The semantics of leadership in the westernized sociocultural context 4 is anchored to competence on the one hand, and responsiveness on the other.
Leadership is interactionally organized in discourse, in other words is brought into the discourse and is brought out in discourse through explicit and implicit self-references and explicit and implicit predications.
Self-references with communication verbs and subjectification verbs will primarily target responsiveness, while self-references with event verbs and intention verbs will primarily target competence.
However, because context-dependent implicatures triggered by the semantics of the verb may be refined by the local linguistic contexts, these may override the hypotheses proposed in (3) above.
The analyses we performed were both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analysis (see below) was intended to assess the relative distribution of the four principal verb forms in relation to the party membership of the politicians under scrutiny. The qualitative analysis (see later) was intended to evaluate the communicative functions of the four verb classes with regard to the particular purpose of the speech (e.g. to construe solidarity after an unpopular decision or to display decisiveness after having been criticized for non-action.). This qualitative analysis was also intended to illustrate the hypotheses proposed in (3) above.
Method
The speeches
The 15 political speeches are all listed in Table 1. There were eight speeches from Conservative politicians, four from Labour and three from the Liberal Democrats. There were nine from leaders of the three respective parties, and six from leadership contestants.
Speeches at annual party-political conferences.
Procedure
Collocations comprising a verb phrase plus a singular/plural first-person self-reference were identified by the first author and her research assistant. 5 These were further categorized into the four verb forms listed in the section ‘Competence and responsiveness in political discourse’ earlier (event, communication, intention and subjectification). A verb phrase (VP) not falling within the scope of these four classes was classified as other VP, listed as ∑ I/we + other VP in Table 2.
Analysis of the collocation [I /we + VP] in the political speeches.
In addition to the quantitative analysis, an in-depth qualitative analysis was carried out on a speech by Tony Blair (28 September 2004). Blair was at that time prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, with an established reputation as an orator.
Quantitative analysis
The results for all 15 political speeches are presented in Table 2 for each of the four verb forms and for the non-classified other VPs.
These results were reformulated (see Table 3) to show mean frequencies for each of the four verb categories for each of the three main political parties represented in these speeches.
Frequency of different verb forms.
Note: The number of speeches for each political party is in parentheses.
A Friedman (non-parametric) two-way analysis of variance was conducted on these data, which showed a highly significant chi square of 8.2 (p.017, Siegel, 1956). A posteriori analyses for multiple pairwise comparisons were then performed using t tests for related samples. To ensure sufficient degrees of freedom to assess t value statistical significance, the data for Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians were collapsed into one category (N = 7, d.f. = 6); separate t tests were conducted for the Conservative politicians (N = 8, d.f. = 7).
The most frequently occurring category was that of event verbs (M = 41%, SD = 18.5%). For both groups of politicians, event verbs occurred significantly more frequently than communication verbs (Labour/Liberal Democrats T = 7.287, p.0003; Conservatives T = 4.7585, p.002). For Labour/Liberal Democrats, event verbs occurred significantly more frequently than intention verbs (T = 3.487, p.013); the corresponding analysis for Conservatives just missed statistical significance (T = 2.0306, p.08). There were no significant differences between event and subjectification verbs for either group of politicians (Labour/Liberal Democrats T = 1.179, p .283; Conservatives (T = 0.3344, p.748).
The next most frequently occurring category was that of subjectification verbs (M = 40.1%, SD = 15.3%). For both groups of politicians, subjectification verbs occurred significantly more frequently than both intention verbs (Labour/Liberal Democrats T = 4.495, p.004; Conservatives T = 3.3114, p.013) and communication verbs (Labour/Liberal Democrats T = 12.408, p.0001; Conservatives T = 6.0367, p.0005).
The third most frequently occurring category was that of intention verbs (M = 16.6%, SD = 12.1%), the least frequent that of communication verbs (M = 1.9%, SD = 2.9%). For both groups of politicians, intention verbs occurred significantly more frequently than communication verbs (Labour/Liberal Democrats T = 5.892, p.001; Conservatives T = 2.5023, p.04).
Thus, with only one marginal exception, all statistically significant pairwise comparisons were significant for both groups of politicians; there was little variation in the distribution of the four verb classes between the different political parties. Event and subjectification verbs occur most frequently, and thus seem to be prime candidates for doing leadership in a political speech.
Qualitative analysis
In this section, self-references co-occurring with event, communication, intention and subjectification verbs are examined in detail, paying particular attention to context: 6
[I/we + event verb]
This category conveys information about the politician’s material actions and activities in the domain of party politics. Depending on its contexts and collocations, it can be used to portray the speaker as a decisive and principled leader who knows what he does and therefore is in control of the situation. For example, a politician presents himself as a competent politician who performs appropriate communicative actions in relevant political contexts, as in this extract from Tony Blair’s speech (27 May 2005):
(6) When I became Prime Minister
The VP become and take with the participant role agent (‘I’ referring to politician himself) portrays the politician as an intentionally acting, active, competent leader, who is ‘at the forefront where decisions are made’, foregrounding competence and backgrounding responsiveness in that particular context.
The construction [I/we + event verb] indicates that the speaker is actively engaged in performing material actions, thus portraying himself as a decisive and principled political agent and as a competent political leader. In (7) Tony Blair (28 September 2004) presents himself as a decisive political agent who has taken decisions, made judgements and delivered speeches at trade-union meetings.
(7) … it’s over the decisions
The references to his decisions are realized in the perfective aspect (‘I have taken/made’), signifying that they have been made in the past, and are relevant to the present moment and future (‘our future’). The other event verb is realized in the simple past (‘I stood’) and co-occurs with the place deictic expression ‘here’, connecting a single event in the past with the present, indicating its relevance to present time.
Through first-person plural self-references collocating with event verbs, the politician presents himself and his political party or government as active, decisive and principled political agents, while at the same time demonstrating unity. This is also reflected in the linguistic contexts, in which first-person singular and plural self-references occur. In (8), from the same speech, the event verbs ‘introduce’ and ‘build’ co-occur with first-person plural self-references. They refer to a sequence of chronologically ordered collective material actions, which demonstrate the politician’s and the government’s decisive and principled actions:
(8) . . .
While first-person plural self-references entail collectivity and solidarity per se, first-person plural self-references with event verbs indicate collective action, thus not only signifying solidarity but also decisiveness. For this reason, they score high on competence while at the same time implicating responsiveness.
[I/we + subjectification verb]
This category conveys information about the politician’s subjective thoughts and feelings and foregrounds the process of subjective qualification, which depicts the politician’s leadership style regarding responsiveness. By saying
The construction [I + subjectification verb] indicates that the speaker does not communicate purely objective information. Instead, he attributes some degree of subjectivity to its truth-value. Subjectification is not only achieved through subjectification verbs, but also through possessive pronouns collocating with nouns denoting a subjective psychological disposition, such as my commitment, my frustration and a personal priority, in (9) (Tony Blair, 28 September 2004):
(9) And
The construction [I + subjectification verb] realized through ‘I never expected’, in which the self-reference and negation marker are reduplicated, and through ‘I never anticipated’, refers to a past event, making explicit the politician’s psychological disposition, personal beliefs and emotive commitment (Fetzer, 2008). The collocation ‘I know’ specifies his subjective beliefs by connecting them explicitly with a reference to his knowledge domain and particularizing it with the self-characterization of progressive politician. The degree of subjectification is further intensified in the explication of the politician’s stance towards the present situation with ‘the irony for me is’. The construction of personal and ideological coherence is supported by the collocation [I + event verb] realized with perfective aspect ‘I’ve done’, thereby extending the domain of validity from the non-expected and non-anticipated past to the present and the future. The strategic move of making inner thoughts and commitments public targets responsiveness from the audience, that is the delegates of the conference, from the Labour Party as a whole and from the general public.
Extract (10) comes from the same speech. Here, the construction [we + subjectification verb] is used in order to index the collective face of Labour as a whole:
(10) And this will be
The construction [we + subjectification verb] realized by ‘we remember’ and ‘we understand’ occurs in a context in which the politician intends to construe collective identity by referring to ‘our struggle’, while at the same time portraying himself as the leader of the collective, contrasting alternative conceptualizations of ‘freedom for the individual’ and arguing for a ‘progressive future’ with a ‘just and strong community’. Unlike (9), where subjectification paves the way for an argumentative sequence, the subjectification-verb construction in (10) is intended to signify solidarity between the speaker and his party, constituting an act of responsiveness par excellence.
Because of its semantics, the construction [I/we + subjectification verb] entails the speaker’s subjective thoughts and feelings. Depending on its contexts and collocations, it can be used to hedge the truth-value of a proposition, to support the politician’s argumentative move or to construe solidarity.
[I/we + intention verb]
This category conveys information about the politician’s intentions and foregrounds those activities in the domain of party politics which depict the politician’s leadership style regarding competence. By saying
The construction [I/we + intention verb] indicates that the speaker makes explicit his intention to perform a particular action, thus portraying him as a decisive political agent leading his party or government in accordance with his plans. Intention verbs were used much less frequently than event or subjectification verbs (see Table 2), possibly because as an on-record strategy they may be taken as promises or pledges, thereby making the politician vulnerable should he not be in a position to keep the promise or the pledge.
In (11) Tony Blair (28 September 2004) presents himself as a decisive political leader who knows exactly what he wants to do and who informs his party explicitly of his intentions:
(11) There was talk before this Conference that
He spells out his communicative intention by referring to an other-assigned intention (‘there was talk’), which he corrects and recontextualizes (‘that was never my intention’), making explicit his intended action which is qualified by a time adverbial anchoring the speech act to the here-and-now (‘I want to deal with it head on’). Not only does Blair demonstrate decisiveness, but he also demonstrates that he keeps his promises, thus presenting himself as a competent leader who is fully aware of his intentions and actions and of their perlocutionary effects and consequences.
With first-person plural self-references collocating with intention verbs, the politician presents himself and his political party or government as a decisive collective. Extract (12) comes from a speech by David Cameron (4 October 2005) (at that time a contender in the Conservative Party leadership election, and prime minister since 11 May 2010). Here, a first-person singular self-reference collocates with an intention verb co-occurring with a first-person plural self-reference:
(12)
The referential domain of the politician’s self-reference (‘I want to’), which counts as a personal promise, is extended to that of his political party (‘we want to’), thus intensifying the pragmatic force of the promise while at the same time qualifying it (‘we also know’) by a reference to the social-context constraint (‘good public transport’) pointing at the complexity of social change. The semantics of the construction [I/we + intention verb] entails the speaker’s plans and intentions. Depending on its contexts and collocations, it can portray the speaker as a decisive and principled leader, who knows what s/he wants and is in control of the situation.
[I/we + communication verb]
This construction portrays the speaker as an active communicator who speaks and listens to relevant people from different domains of society, thus loading on responsiveness. In (13) Tony Blair (28 September 2004) presents himself as one who does not keep relevant information to himself but distributes it to and shares it with relevant members of his political party as well as with members of British society.
(13) Like someone And
Moreover, he presents himself as a politician who cares about other people and their opinions and lets them take part in his decision-making processes.
In (14) (from the same speech), the communication-verb construction ‘I was telling you’ co-occurs with an event verb (‘I bumped’); ‘I quote’ is used as a performative. Both introduce a short narrative sequence which counts as a humorous aside – in that particular context, a joke against the speaker himself signifying that the following speech is going to be (too) long. Both can be classified as instances of positive facework, targeting solidarity while at the same time portraying the politician as a responsive leader, who is not only task- and goal-oriented, but also interpersonally oriented.
(14) Anyway
In excerpt (15) (from the same speech), the communication verb occurs with a first-person plural self-reference realized in the past tense:
(15) But any party activist who wants an answer to the question about trust
Unlike subjectification-verb-based constructions, the first-person plural self-reference with a communication verb does not convey subjectification but rather objectification. This is supported by a reference to facts, namely the printed value of public information (‘read what we said’ and the implicated promise ‘what we said we would do in 1997 and 2001’), with the implicatum indicating that the promise has been fulfilled.
Communication verbs co-occurring with a self-reference are used rather sparingly in the context of a political speech, possibly because the genre tends to contain few dialogic sequences (such as short narratives). The semantics of the construction [I/we + communication verb] entail the speaker’s communicative actions. Depending on its contexts and collocations, it can be used to portray the speaker as a caring leader who listens to reason and is not arrogant.
Conclusions
In this article, political discourse has been examined both as professional and media discourse in and through which political agents not only ‘do’ politics, but also ‘do leadership’ and ‘do facework’, thereby demonstrating how charismatic, decisive and principled they are. The context under investigation has been that of the primarily monologic genre of British party-political speeches. In a political speech, it has been argued that leadership work is performed essentially by doing competence and responsiveness. Competence may be foregrounded by self-references collocating with cognitive verbs denoting intentionality, thus putting the politician’s goals and plans on record, and by self-references collocating with event verbs putting a politician’s actions on record. Self-references with intention verbs realized in the past tense refer to past time. They are used strategically to re-contextualize a controversial issue, concept, decisions and the like, assigning it a different interpretation in order to make it more acceptable to the audience. For example, in excerpt (4) legislation against religious discrimination was considered, which entailed a recontextualization of the position of Muslims in UK society. When doing competence, the politician portrays her/himself as acting in an autonomous and self-determined manner. Responsiveness may be foregrounded by self-references with subjectification verbs, signifying the speaker’s cognitive and emotive dispositions, and with communication verbs, signifying the speaker’s involvement with others.
In the speeches examined, self-references with event verbs were the most frequent strategy employed, followed closely by self-references with subjectification verbs. Thereby, the politician may display both competence, through presenting her/himself as decisive and principled, and responsiveness, through presenting her/himself as caring and emotionally balanced. Less optimal strategies for doing leadership in party-political address are self-references with intention verbs, which may count as on-record promises and which might be rather risky endeavours, and self-references with communication verbs, which might reflect negatively on self-determination.
In addition, the analysis presented here was conceptualized in terms of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), as adapted to political discourse by Bull et al. (1996) and Bull and Fetzer (2010). From a linguistic perspective, our proposal is that the necessary conditions to perform facework in political monologue are a self or other reference, and the predication of a quality for leadership, such as being charismatic, competent, responsive, incompetent or arrogant. Both the self or other reference and the predication of a relevant quality may be realized either explicitly or implicitly. Notably, monologue is a distinctive genre of communication, which provides politicians with a platform whereby they can present themselves to best advantage, thereby enhancing positive face. Overall, our research aim has been to show how, through the analysis of individual micro speech acts and their local contexts, the semantics of each of four principal verb forms, their collocates and local contextual configurations may be exploited to perform leadership throughout a political speech as a whole.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to our reviewers for helpful comments on the first version of this article.