engleski

Language as a Means of Polarization in Society

Language and politics have been intertwined for centuries and the question always emerges to which extent and in what way they are related. Every traditional rhetorical school of thought, from Sophism to the Enlightenment, sought to determine the nature of the relationship between persuasion, manipulation, truth and morality, with linguistic power in mind. Contemporary academic linguistic and political circles still question many of these perspectives. Such research requires detailed study of the utilization of language in situations that we deem political, that is to say, communicational situations in which politicians, political institutions, governments and supporters, as well as everyone involved in the political environment, participate in order to achieve certain political goals. The “politicians' group“ is polarized with regards to party affiliation and political beliefs. This polarization is most evident in the linguistic means used in public political address. This paper analyzes the most commonly used mechanisms of language polarization/manipulation which appear in political campaigns opposing political parties. These mechanisms can appear on multiple levels of discourse: semantic, pragmatic, contextual, etc. Based on the collected corpus (election rallies in Croatia 2015 and latest US presidential race 2016, this paper will try to show how language serves as a means of polarization and how language politicians affects the public and social environment.

Language, manipulation, politicians, political institutions, governments

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