Abstract
Political discourse may be analyzed from a pragmatic perspective by considering the way in which politicians make use of "implicative relations ". By implicative relations is meant those aspects of meaning which go beyond the surface structure i.e. the underlying aspects of meaning. It is noted that implicative relations frequently lead to inferences and not statements of fact. In this sense implicative relation would seem to provide public figures in general and politicians in particular with an important communicative tool in their efforts to present the world in any specific ideological manner. For political analysts it would seem to be important, then, they are capable of locating and analyzing implicative relations and their use in specific political contents.
This paper presents an example of actual political discourse and provides a pragmatic analysis for it making use of a number of implicative relational types. The aim is twofold: first, to clarify, by example, how a pragmatic analysis of political contexts might proceed; second, to introduce a number of basic and significant pragmatic concepts which underlie the analyses to be presented in our corpus.
The data come from a question and answer session in the British House commons, which took place in 7 May 1986 concerning U.S.A. military aids to the Contras and international terrorism.
The paper comes up with several conclusions the most important of which is that in political discourse the way the politician manipulates language is no less important than the content he wants to convey and here pragmatics enters.
