Kim Ty jesteś? Ja kontra Adwersarz w polskiej debacie przedwyborczej. Język a rzeczywistość w kategoriach ekspresji, polityki, ideologii
Who You are? I versus the Adversary in a Polish election debate. Language and reality in the categories of expression, politics, and ideology

Author(s): Piotr Czerwiński, Aneta Banaszek-Szapowałowa, Maciej Walczak
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: the language of politics; assessment; valuation; prosody; phonetics; communication tactics; semantics; imagery models
Summary/Abstract: This monography attempts to answer the question about the role and significance of the Other under circumstances of political communication. What interests the authors are mostly relations between active participants of political debate (I versus the Adversary) that point to both their self-image and how they construe their political competitor. The said images may be provided by a given politician either explicitly or transmitted in a covert manner, including innuendos or prosodic and phonetic markers. The presented analysis is based on the text of a pre-election debate between Jarosław Kaczyński and Donald Tusk in 2007, yet it is not aimed at assessing those two particular political opponents, their views, and programmes; it rather endeavours to depict objectively what is divulged by the politicians’ public statements and utterances. The authors are first and foremost focused on how individuals utilise language and on language itself in the sphere of politics, especially when interlocutors confront each other in a pre-election debate.The monography commences with a theoretical introduction that outlines the notion ofother which is fundamental for the issues discussed in the book; the said notion is consideredin terms of political communication not only in its linguistic, but also philosophical andpsychological aspects.Chapter one is devoted to prosodic-phonetic exponents of assessing one’s political opponent and, furthermore, to emotionality of utterances displayed at acoustic, intonation, and sometimes purely articulation level. The following chapter searches for covert (non-verbalised) elements of the politicians’ mutual characteristics, oftentimes hidden in a subtext of communication strategies deployed by sides of political struggle. The final chapter is a proposition of unveiling and characterising particular language components that interact with one another during a confrontation of debate participants, in addition to their formalisation in a form of models pertaining self-images and images of one’s political adversary.The monography’s appendix contains a transcript of the debate in its entirety, whose particular elements were subjected to closer analysis in the main body of the book.

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