Language and Politics: Indirectness in Political Discourse

Abstract

Politicians, in talking about potential face-threatening acts or politically risky topics, avoid the obvious and communicate indirectly in order to protect and further their own careers and to gain both political and interactional advantage over their political opponents. The indirectness may also be motivated by politeness. This obliqueness in communication may be expressed through evasion, circumlocution, innuendoes, metaphors, etc. Language as well as varying social conventions of the relevant culture as well as differing degree of personal danger inherent in the sociopolitical situation in which politicians operate may also affect the degree of indirectness as well as the kind(s) of obliqueness employed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 147 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.