Language and Nation

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

A specific sense of common sense in a community can be shaped directly through the government and its policies, and also, more indirectly, through the media. Both of these carry out their agenda through the language of the speech community. This book analyses the political speeches of Australian politicians and the rhetorical strategies adopted in taking a stance and in creating alignment between speaker and addressee. Taking its cue from the theories of critical linguistics, the study focuses on identification and analysis of implicit assumption in political discourse in English and the ways in which discourse can be constructed to maintain and reinforce existing cultural biases. The ideas underlying this type of analysis are based on the theory that it is the text that constructs the reader, the reader interprets the text in relation to her/his own cultural stance and that the constructor of the text and the reader of the text may already have some presuppositions in common.

SINTESI