Abstract

The emergence of the field of political marketing has highlighted the prominence of communication towards shaping the candidates’ image and building long-term relationships with voters. The linguistic characteristics of the political speech presented by candidates allow them to communicate to voters the superiority of his or her attributes over those of opponents (Kaid, 1999). Political campaigns are dynamic struggles between candidates to define the informational context for voters. Early researches (Kaid, 1981, 1986) suggested that political advertising has cognitive and behavioral effects on voters. It communicates the brand promise of a candidate blending functional and emotional benefits that voters gain from their relationships with a candidate.

This study, based on Jef Verschueren’s (1999) Linguistic Adaptation Theory (LAT), proposes a pragmatic model for the analysis of a political election discourse. In this pragmatic model, it is shown that in such a discourse the process of adaptation to variables of the physical, social, and mental world is used. Such a process can be understood as the outcome of politicians’ choice making, dynamic negotiation and linguistic adaptation. The interpretation of a political discourse, on the other hand, can be better achieved by tracing the specific ways of meaning generation from the four focal points of context, structure, dynamics, and salience.

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