In recent years, there have been repeated calls to understand applied linguistics as a science of culture (Benke 2003; Kuße 2012), arguing that linguistic discourse analysis is intertwined with cultural studies.
In this paper, I will discuss what this means for contrastive political discourse analysis. I will suggest that we have to assume a context of ‘political culture’ in a broad sense, which needs to include an understanding of discourse history as much as an analysis of political institutions. Such a broad concept of culture has been discussed in semiotics (Posner 2003), but attempts to operationalise it for the theory of political discourse have not had a major impact on discourse analysis, since the term ‘political culture’ is a highly contested, ambiguous and problematic term and was widely associated with positivist research of political attitudes.
Drawing on my research on the linguistic strategies of New Labour in Britain and the SPD of the new centre ground in Germany, and applying Spitzmüller and Warnke’s (2011) model of discourse linguistic multi-layered analysis, I will demonstrate how the assumed context of political culture influences the different linguistic domains. I will discuss how this context variable explains differences on the level of genres such as election manifestos and party conference speeches. I will also demonstrate, how it restricted the use of certain topoi in the discourse of the third way in Germany. In a final step, I will also show how this context influences strategies of political communication on a lexical level.
References
Benke, Gertraud. 2003. “Applied linguistics – a science of culture?” In “Cultural analysis within linguistics: Is linguistics part of cultural studies?” edited by Antje Hornscheidt. Linguistik Online 14. (2): 39–56. https://bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/view/822/1420.
Kuße, Holger. 2012. Kulturwissenschaftliche Linguistik: Eine Einführung. 1., neue Ausg. UTB 3745. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Posner, Roland. 2003. “Kultursemiotik.” In Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen, Ansätze, Perspektiven, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, 39–71. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Spitzmüller, Jürgen, and Ingo H. Warnke. 2011. “Discourse as a ‘linguistic object’: methodical and methodological delimitations.” Critical Discourse Studies 8 (2): 75–94. doi:10.1080/17405904.2011.558680.