Building intimacy through linguistic choices, text structure and voices in political discourse

• This work explains the way linguistic means construct, define and redefine political communication.
• This paper proposes new tools to account for intimacy in relation to levels of contextuality in political messages.
• The linguistic variables range from concrete units (lexical choices) to narratives of belonging and voices.
• These linguistic variables evoke two Aristotelian modes of persuasion: Pathos and Ethos.
• The study analyzes different political events (debates and speeches) and different politicians (Palin, Biden, Bush and Obama).

This paper analyzes linguistic variables employed strategically in various instances of political communication to present different levels of intimacy in relation to a continuum between contextuality and formality (Heylighen and Dewaele, 2002) in political talk. Within a given situation, political actors express these choices also in relation to a broader context around their personas: the Message (Lempert and Silverstein, 2012, 2003). The linguistic variables under consideration range from concrete units such as lexical choices (i.e., “marked register usages” [Koven, 2007; Myers-Scotton, 2001], to narratives of belonging (Duranti, 2006), to textual organization and instances of intertextuality (Blackledge, 2005; Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Wodak, 2008), in particular, by means of different voices (Bakhtin, 1981) politicians bring into the here-and-now moment of discourse. The data for the analysis is obtained from different instances of political talk (speeches and debates) and different politicians (Palin, Biden, George W. Bush and Obama). The linguistic variables display different levels of formality indexing two Aristotelian modes of persuasion: Pathos and Ethos.