SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND DISTANCES FROM THE SELF
SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND DISTANCES FROM THE SELF

Summary/Abstract: In presidential debates, the individual floor getting is conditioned by what the participants assume about each other’s cognitive experience, emotional involvement. During the public political confrontation, the participants use repeated attempts to destabilize the opponent’s position, on the one hand, and restore one’s own political power, on the other. In what follows we will try to show that the effectiveness of Obama’s speech lies in the coherence of his representations and the preservation of arguments in supporting his standpoints. Obama establishes his authority by categorizing his target audience, i.e. the middle class, placing them first in the order of priorities and on the other hand, by resorting to modal verbs with their deontic value for the audience to take his statements as right and reliable pointing, at the same time, to his realistic views.

• Details
• Contents