Political Language

Politics is routinely prosecuted through the strategic crafting of representations of the social and material world designed to recruit support for the speaker’s social and political project. Such arguments routinely feature: constructions of the audience’s social identity that imply the speaker’s project is to be taken on by that audience as their own (and those of their opponents, rejected), interpretations of diverse culturally available resources (e.g., holy texts, national myths, metaphors) that lend authority to the speaker’s version of social and material reality, attacks on others’ constructions, and rebuttals of others’ attacks on one’s own position. This chapter reviews research addressing such features of political language across diverse domains (e.g., concerning abortion, industrial disputes, war), involving state and non-state actors, in both electoralist and non-electoralist politics.