Training, Language and Culture (Jun 2021)
The phenomenon of fascination in political discourse (by Italian examples)
Abstract
The article presents a study of the phenomenon of fascination as a functional effect of the text, or particular units of the text, in political discourse. Fascination is the highest point and a part of the communicative impact which a politician exerts on the mass addressee. Fascination characterises the integrative impression that the text and its particular units provide in their formal aspect – an expressive or a conceptual one. Fascination is treated as a complex and multilevel textual phenomenon. Poetic, rhetoric and figurative lexical levels are distinguished where a fascinative effect can be rendered. Fascination is totally communicative, but at the same time it belongs to discourse. The essence of the fascination consists in iteration, intra-textual or external, coming from discourse. A speech unit which produces a fascinative effect (text utterance or lexical nominative unit) evokes a conceptual or expressive association with something said before, i.e. said before in this text or kept in the cultural and expressive memory of the discourse. Fascination represents the effect of identification of what comes from the cultural experience of the language and what then virtually or otherwise reappears in the new speech conditions. The iteration means reassessment and conceptual regeneration of what is recalled. Fascination in its conceptual status stands above the pragmatics, it crowns the semiotic growth of the sign in speech. But in political discourse, fascination does not bear its own conceptual function, being subject to pragmatics, where the main role is given to the evaluation (axiology of the sign). The effect of fascination in political discourse reinforces the evaluative meaning of the sign and consequently its pragmatics as a whole. Special attention must be paid to the lexical level of fascination which, more than other levels, correlates with axiology. At the lexical level the effect of fascination appears when a pragmatic evaluation is substituted by a nomination bearing a supreme conceptual value. In Italian political discourse, the clearest examples of it can be the official names that some political parties choose to denominate themselves. These political parties’ names include figurative lexical elements referring to cultural associations. Such names may be used for the purposes of political manipulation. The article may be of interest to specialists in general linguistics, text linguistics, the theory of communication and to anyone investigating the discursive reality of a language.
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