Political discourse as social actions: A study of selected campaign texts

Abstract

Scholars and philosophers have at one time or the other described man variously as:(i) a social animal, (a) essentially a linguistic animal, and (in) a political animal. All these views suggest that politics and language are important social phenomena that are inextricably bound up with man’s existence in society. By implication, in every human society there exist some forms of political activities where linguistic facilities play a central role in prosecuting these activities. Being a pragmatic and dynamic social activity, politics involves actions, contests, competitiveness, campaigns, debates, and other action- oriented activities; and language no doubt plays an important role in encoding and transmitting political thoughts and messages which usually engender social actions. 

Linguistic and discourse approaches are adopted to describe how campaign utterances constitute discourse acts. Insights from the Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962 and Searle, 1969) provide the theoretical standpoint, from which the essay describes political campaign utterances as social actions.

The data set for the study was taken from the written documents (e.g. adverts, press reports) produced during the 1993 presidential election campaigns in Nigeria. Two presidential candidates, Chief M.K.O. Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP, henceforth) and Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC, henceforth) contested the election.

In this essay, we explore the features and functional patterns of discourse during a typical political campaign activity where English serves as the language of political discourse. We demonstrate, using different categories of speech acts found in the texts, that political utterances are not mere utterances that convey propositional meaning alone, but that they are deliberately crafted and communicated to accomplish actions.