La costruzione dell’identità nel discorso di sostegno. Il caso Matteo Renzi - Victor Ponta (2014)
The construction of identity in endorsment discourse. The case of Matteo Renzi endorsing Victor Ponta (2014)

Summary/Abstract: A politician’s identity, which, in contemporary discourse, often combines the professional ethos with a more or less fabricated personal one (Burger 2006), is one of the fundamental elements which may generate a perlocutive effect on electoral masses, namely influence the voting intention in favour of the candidate. Therefore, during electoral campaigns, many politicians use the endorsement discourse, presented by another politician who brings authority or in any case might prove useful in underlining a certain aspect of their political project. This study aims to analyse the linguistic structures used in the construction of face (Goffman 1955) which Matteo Renzi – then Prime Minister of Italy and President of the Council of the European Union – was proposing for Victor Ponta, a candidate in the presidential elections in Romania in 2014, during a press conference in the headquarters of the Romanian Social Democratic Party in Bucharest and in a live interview for a Romanian channel, Antena 3, with Victor Ponta also in the studio. By the means of conceptual metaphorical frames (Lakoff / Johnson 2012[1980], Croft / Cruse 2010[2004]) or pragmatical phenomena like boosting or hedging (Fraser 2010), the ethos is constructed not only for the Romanian candidate, but also for Matteo Renzi, who stresses the value of friendship. In fact, the analysis of the corpus shows that Matteo Renzi seizes the opportunity to present his political actions in a positive perspective, as a model.

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