POLITICAL SPEECH, DOUBLESPEAK, and CRITICAL-THINKING SKILLS in AMERICAN EDUCATION by Doris E. Minin-White a Capstone Project
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POLITICAL SPEECH, DOUBLESPEAK, AND CRITICAL-THINKING SKILLS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION by Doris E. Minin-White A capstone project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English as a Second Language. Hamline University Saint Paul, Minnesota December, 2017 Capstone Project Trish Harvey Content Expert: Joseph White 2 My Project In this project, I will attempt to identify and analyze common cases of doublespeak in selected samples of political discourse, delivered by the two most recent U. S. presidents: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The sample will include the transcripts from two speeches and two debates for each of the speakers. The speeches chosen will be their inaugural addresses and their presidential nomination acceptance speeches. The debates will be the first and second debates held, as part of the presidential campaign, in which the selected speakers participated. I chose to include speeches from the presidential inaugural address because they represent, perhaps, the greatest opportunity for presidents to speak with impact to the people they represent and to their fellow lawmakers who are generally present at the inauguration. I also chose the speeches they made when accepting the presidential nominations of their respective parties, because it is their opportunity to outline what their party’s platform is, what they feel are the important issues of the day, and how they intend to pursue those issues. Finally, I chose presidential debates because political discourse in this context is more spontaneous. According to the Commission on Presidential Debates (2017), a non-partisan entity that has organized presidential debates in the United States since 1988, political debates are carefully prepared and organized. In the first debates, both candidates agreed, in advance, about the topics on which they would be questioned and upon which they would be invited to make comments. The second encounter, was a town hall-style debate in which the candidates would answer questions from the audience. In this case, the candidates were not given the questions in advance, so the second debate was more spontaneous than the first one. Another important characteristic of presidential debates is that they make it easier to compare the two speakers, 3 since they are given a similar amount of time to answer, and they share a comparable context and audience. The transcripts of the speeches and debates used in this project, may be found in Appendix A (page 27). The paragraphs of these transcripts are numbered and these numbers are used to reference he paragraphs when they are cited in this project. Procedures Quantitative Analysis Each discourse sample will be examined to determine which forms of doublespeak occur. A quantitative analysis of the data will consist of the creation of a table in a spreadsheet document, which will show in the first column, the transcript of the political discourse sample to be analyzed, followed by the columns for classifying the instances of doublespeak into the following categories: ● Euphemism: an expression that avoids mentioning an unpleasant reality. For example: the use of the word “conflict” instead of “war” (Lutz, 1996). ● Jargon: vocabulary from a specific field or group that creates confusion if the person is not acquainted with such language. For example, the use of military acronyms amongst civilians. ● Gobbledygook: these are long phrases that do not convey any meaning. For example: “It is a tricky problem to find the particular calibration in timing that would be appropriate to stem the acceleration…” (Gibson & Lutz, 1991, p 20). ● Exaggerations: include inflated language, overstatements and intensifiers to make ordinary things seem extraordinary. The speaker tends to exaggerate statements to persuade the audience of the speaker’s positive attributes or the opponent’s faults 4 (Williams, 1980). For example, the use of extreme adjectives like “exorbitant”, “terrible”, or “huge” may indicate inflated statements. ● Minimizations: understatements used to downplay the speaker’s negative attributes (Blass, 2005). For example, statements that contain expressions like “it’s just” or “practically nothing” or “not a big deal”. Minimizations are also used to downplay the opponent’s positive attributes. ● Repetitions: messages that are intensified through the use of reiteration and redundancy. For example, political slogans are simplifications of ideas, which, if repeated often enough, may become part of people’s beliefs (Hahn, 1989). ● Association: a strategy that links a person with an idea, attribute, or a known figure through metaphors, allusion, and similes (Rank, 1976). ● Diversion: techniques that help to stray from or change the focus of the topic, in the absence of valid arguments (Rank, 1976). For example, criticism, interruptions and humor are used to direct the attention of the audience or the opponent candidate to a different topic. ● Meaningless Promises: in this analysis, claims made by the speaker or “benefit-giver” are limited to promises that are too general, broad or ambiguous (Rank, 1980). For example, the speaker promises to defeat poverty. ● Labeling: abstract or double standard concepts that could hide biased attitudes or political agendas. For example, different ideologies may be represented in expressions such as “global warming” and “climate change” (Poole, 2006). 5 After performing a few pilot analyses, I decided to exclude some categories, such as omission and composition, because they include complex syntactic and semantic forms that would go beyond the scope of this project. Each instance of doublespeak identified in the text (transcript) will be color coded and tallied in the corresponding category column, as shown in figure 2. When an overlap of doublespeak devices occurred in a statement, it was necessary for the researcher to subjectively choose one form over the other for the sake of simplicity. CATEGORIES OF DOUBLESPEAK found in President Obama Inaugural Address January 20, 2009 Jargon Labeling Promises Diversion Repetition Association Meaningless Minimization Euphemisms Exaggeration Gobbledygook TOTAL NUMBER OF SPECIFIC INSTANCES 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 OF DOUBLESPEAK 1 …but I will only send our troops into harm's 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 way with a clear mission… 0 Figure 2: Spreadsheet table created for this project The table will automatically add up the instances of doublespeak identified in the text, by category, and calculate the rate at which it is used in number of instances per 1,000 words. I called this average of misleading devices employed by speakers the Beguilement and Sophistry Index (hereafter referred to as the B.S. Index). The name was inspired by the way deceptive language was described by the theologian, Will D. Mitchell, in the following quotation: It is those people in high places, clothed in purple and fine linen, who by their words of sophistry and beguilement seek to dominate and lead. You may desire to be freed from your doubts and perplexities, but these self-acclaimed leaders and teachers only plunge you deeper into the slough of ignorance. (Mitchell, 1911, p. 169) 6 Because the speeches may be of different lengths, the total from each category will be divided by the total number of words in the document, then multiplied by 1,000, thus giving the average number of instances per 1,000 words. So, for example, if there are three instances of euphemisms in a speech of 600 words, it means that there is an average of five euphemisms per 1,000 words (see below). 3/600 *1,000 = 5 instances per 1,000 words Figure 3 shows the table used to identify, categorize, and tabulate the instances of doublespeak found in the texts. Figure 3: Example of the Beguilement and Sophistry Index Technique 7 Qualitative Analysis A qualitative analysis will help interpret the quantitative data provided in the first part of this project. The statistical values obtained in the analysis will be used to compare the two different speakers in our study and see if they reveal anything about whether or not the speaker is being straight forward. The results from the B.S. Index will be then compared with data from the table to verify the validity of this technique. This analysis could be used as a model to analyze television commercials or news stories, as long as one compares within the same category. It would be meaningless to compare news stories to insurance commercials to try to evaluate how straightforward they are. Findings and Interpretations of the Data I will begin by discussing each president’s doublespeak style, based on the types of doublespeak that characterized his speeches and debates. I will then compare the presidents’ doublespeak characteristics and what that comparison might indicate. The results derived by the Beguilement and Sophistry technique will then be measured against the raw data to verify the technique’s validity. Please note that, when percentages are used in describing the individual president’s use of doublespeak, the percentages refer only to his use od doublespeak. For example, if I say president A used jargon 10% of the time, I am saying that 10% of the time that he used doublespeak, it was in the form of jargon. Doublespeak Style Based on the Number of Occurrences President Obama. Barack Obama’s doublespeak style was dominated by association. More than one third of the time that he employed doublespeak, it was in the form of association (35.6%). This was particularly noteworthy in his debates, where he used association to link his opponent, Senator John McCain, with previous Republican administrations. For example, he 8 said: “it's been your president who you said you agreed with 90 percent of the time” “failed economic policies of the last eight years, strongly promoted by President Bush and supported by Senator McCain”, and “Senator McCain voted for four out of five of those George Bush budgets”, (The American Presidency Project [APP], 2008a, para.