Clusivity A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse

Dealing with the concepts of inclusion and exclusion encoded linguistically, both implicitly and explicitly, this book develops an original framework for the analysis of these phenomena in political discourse. The approach taken situates political discourse in a broader context of social and psychological relations between groups and their members which influence the manner in which the speaker's message is constructed and construed by individuals. The present study proposes a pragmatic-cognitive model which underlies and explains the discursive representation of belongingness and dissociation in terms of the conceptual location of various discourse entities in the Discourse Space (cf. Chilton 2005). The model in question is concerned with three mechanisms which, combined, form a fully-fledged apparatus for the analysis of the legitimising power of association and dissociation in political discourse through positive self and negative other presentation tactics. The study is a theoretical enterprise which, however, includes a comprehensive empirical part whose aim is to evaluate and confirm the theoretical assumptions made. The focus is essentially on the relationship between the speaker and the addressees and the speaker's attempt to maintain it discursively. Thus, Clusivity: A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse will appeal to discourse analysts, pragmaticians, and cognitive analysts, as well as to political and social sciences analysts, social psychologists, journalists and speechwriters.