What is it about?
The aim of the article is to identify and examine the functions that intertextual strategies of metaphor-based argumentation perform in Romanian political and media discourse. The analysed corpus is made up of parliamentary declarations and newspaper articles concerning the political crisis caused by the February 2014 government reshuffle in Romania, when PNL (the National Liberal Party) decided with an overwhelming majority to leave the ruling USL (the Social-Liberal Alliance) coalition. While both parliamentary declarations and related newspaper articles are targeting multi-layered audiences, each of them displays specific genre-related rhetorical features and purposefully designed agendas.
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Why is it important?
This investigation focuses on intertextual strategies of metaphor-based argumentation in two types of discourse genres, i.e. Romanian parliamentary declarations and newspaper articles concerning the political crisis caused by the 2014 government reshuffle in Romania. The findings show that intertextual commonalities of the two discourse genres are grounded in crisis-related conceptualisations based on rhetorical doxa (proverbs, key words, culture-specific symbols/scenarios). At the same time, the same type of metaphor-based arguments may sometimes be valid and sometimes fallacious, as for example the ad populum argument, which tends to function more as a ‘mob-appeal’ argument, i.e. an appeal to prejudice, in parliamentarians’ declarations, and more as a ‘bandwagon’ argument, i.e. an appeal to common knowledge, in media professionals’ discourses.
Perspectives
The identification of the interdiscursive functions of central keywords related to the concept of ‘crisis’ was made possible by the use of the conceptual framework developed by Koselleck (1996, 2002). The data analysis showed instances of intertextual argumentation at three overlapping communication levels: (i) institutional (e.g. conceptual stereotypes, such as cross-references and quotations); (ii) discursive (various communication practices, such as repetitions and buzz words); and (iii) rhetorical (interdiscursive structuring mechanisms, such as negative politeness and linguistic aggressiveness).
Professor Cornelia Ilie
Strömstad Academy, Sweden
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This page is a summary of: Interdiscursive strategies of metaphor-driven rhetoric in Romanian discourses on a political crisis, Zeitschrift für Slawistik, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/slaw-2016-0008.
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