1st Edition

Political Discourse as Dialogue A Latin American Perspective

By Adriana Bolívar Copyright 2018
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chávez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

    Introduction: Discourse, Dialogue and Political Change





    1. Perspectives on Dialogue Analysis: Communication, Utopia, 'Love for the People'



    2. A Dialogue-centred- Lingusitic-interactional Approach



    3. Stability and Change in Institutional Dialogue



    4. Dialogue and Confrontation



    5. Interruptions and Apologies in Diplomatic Conflicts



    6. The Dynamics of Personal Pronouns in Political Change





    Conclusions

    Biography

    Adriana Bolívar is Professor of Linguistics and Discourse Studies at Universidad Central de Venezuela. She is author of Dialogue in the dynamics of political practice in D. Koike & L. Rodríguez-Alfano (Eds.) (2010), Dialogue studies: Approaches, functions, context, and language in Spanish (pp. 159-188), New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press.