Intertextuality in Political Discourse

Introduction

Political speech is the most salient genre introduced in the field of political discourse (Chernyavskaya, 2006). Political speech speaks volumes of how the power is transferred, exercised, and generally perceived in a country. Political speech is a powerful source of influence for the state institutions, that determine political and social processes in the society (Fairclough, 1989); political speech is a powerful tool for shaping the political thinking and political “mind” of a nation, that enables the actors and recipients of the political activity to acquire a certain political vision.

The style of official speech-giving is seen as one of the major cornerstones of communicating the country’s ideology to the public, both domestically-wise and world-wise. As performed by key-politicians of a country, rhetorics of political speech has become identified with the particular political leader and his/her style.

Political discourse encompasses a multitude of rhetoric strategies, tactics and linguistic devices; these are all goal-oriented and depend on the particular goal a politician chooses to pursue. Hence the diversity of discursive strategies is traditionally in the spotlight of linguists and researchers who study and analyze political discourse.

The public use of language has always been a fruitful field of research since Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” dating from the 4^th century BC. In the XXth century it gained its momentum after the World War II, when the power of words and persuasion became tragically obvious. A series of research carried out in late 1940-s and 1950-s got into the limelight: intrinsic links between language and politics were studied in Central Europe and Germany, and this was influenced by the overall usage of propaganda and the Cold war onset (Wodak, R.E. 2018 Language and Politics In: English language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 508 p).

Then, in the 1960-s and 1970-s, the notion of intertext and discourse were brought into the field of linguistics and political studies. According to the concept of discourse by Michel Foucault, discourse is not merely a way of thinking or production of meaning. Discourses deal with the patterns of knowledge which can be found in any disciplinary structure and function by connecting knowledge and power; moreover, they constitute unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern (Foucault, 1972). A major body of research on political discourse focuses on discourse in theory and practice, (Dijk, 1997; Wilson, 2001; Chilton, 2004; Lakoff, 2009); parliamentary (Ilie, 2003; Ilie, 2006; Bayley, 2004; Alvarez-Benito, 2009; Dijk, 2004) and presidential discourses (Carpenter, 1982; Kendall, 1995; Gilmore, J., Rowling, 2018).

The concept of intertextuality originates from the M. Bakhtin’s studies on F. Dostoevsky and F. Rabelais (Bakhtin, 1986) and is based upon the polyphonic nature of literary works; later intertextuality was coined as a term by Julia Kristeva (Kristeva, 1986) when she first introduced it at Roland Barthe’s seminars in Paris.

According to J. Kristeva intertextuality is a continuity of texts referring to one another, producing and reproducing over time other texts/discourses. N. Fairclough argues that all texts are inherently intertextual by their nature, and as such are constituent of other texts (Fairclough, 1992). Dwelling on the notion that texts immersed into one another create a dense and diverse context, G. Genette defines intertextuality as a relationship of co-presence between texts (Genette 1997; Alfaro, 2016).