Geoff Nunberg, a leading linguistics professor from UC Berkeley, delivered a symbolic systems distinguished speaker lecture concerning the differences between political language and normal spoken language. Generally, linguists look at one word and the attitudes it evokes in politics. Instead, Nunberg decided to look at linguistic generalizations that can be drawn and themes that keep recurring in the study of political language. He emphasized two main features of political language, the contestation of this language and the persistence of expressive character. He briefly mentioned a third feature, dog-whistle literalisms. However, because he did not have very much time left in his lecture, he didn’t truly elaborate on this idea.
Before Nunberg could delve into his intended message, he first defined the concept of political language. Political language, according to him, “is the language of public discourse that shapes public opinion on matters of politics and other (below other fold) social and cultural issues.” There are certain basic words that are essential to the formulation, justification, and explanation of political issues. These words are almost always contested words. These basic words are broken down further into categories such as hardy perennials (words that have been used for many consecutive generations such as freedom, liberty, patriotism, etc) governmental/ secular language (have increased in popularity over the last 75 years such as liberal, conservative, terrorism, etc), issues-specific language (only pertaining to one topic such as undocumented, green, bailout, etc) and then there also uncontested terms (election and regime). However, Nunberg stressed the importance of vocabularies as well as individual words.
Nunberg also went onto explain why political language is so different from normal speech. He stressed two key differences – the unique speech situation and the object of communication. Political language is usually aimed at many diffent audiences at the same time – plurality of addressees. The speaker has to be cognizant of the fact that not only are supporters listening to him, but also dissenters as well, dissecting every sentence of his speech. This obviously creates complexities to political language that are not found in normal language. In addition, the object of communication argument depicts the functionality of this political language. Normally, political language is assumed to be used for persuasive purposes. However, this is not completely true today. Not only employed to rationalize, mobilize, legitimize, and justify, political language is even used in the realms of entertainment. Therefore, the exact purpose of political language is not always completely clear. And his example of contested language again highlighted the ambiguities rampant in political language.
The use of contested language inevitably involves serious arguments about the correct usage/definition of the words in question, which cannot be settled by appealing to reason or evidence. Contested language is normally employed either aggressively or defensively. People argue about certain words because they believe that there should be one agreed-upon definition – not that it is necessarily morally appropriate but just so that everyone can understand the implications of the word if they choose to use it. However, that being said, no true compromises have been reached concerning contested language.
In addition, Nunberg described the persistence of expressive character, or in other words, the trend that the symbolic connotations of a term persist after its meaning or denotation has changed. The associations with old words persist even when the reality behind them has changed. His most potent example was that of the word “socialism.” The term socialism has been used more and more frequently, but it has been completely stripped of any previous historical connotations.
All of the topics Nunberg presented raise interesting questions about the foundations of political language. If investigated more thoroughly, these ideas could revolutionize the way political language is viewed.
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