Fictionalizing scenarios in political discourse

Abstract

This chapter shows how political discourse uses covert fictional construals to persuade audiences. It argues that the use of specific linguistic and conceptual strategies guides their interpretive processes to a point where the distinction between reality and fiction becomes unclear. The study focusses on four areas of a specific discourse event and shows that they can assist in the generation of persuasive effects. The chapter deals with the organization of information in the specific speech event, the way attention patterns and focal adjustment collaborate as potential resources of persuasion, the role of deixis in the speech event, and how the deontic force of modal verbs may be minimized to help engage the audience into the belief of the existence of an alternative reality.

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