Political speeches: interactive and heteroglossic elements

This chapter discusses interactive and dialogical elements of political speeches. The interactive element involves the design of a speech for one or more audiences that the speaker addresses and whose applause they strive for (and whose disapproval they sometimes cause). The dialogical element involves explicit or implicit references to previous speeches, texts or common stocks of shared knowledge in order to bolster the speaker’s own standpoint or to contradict a previous speaker. The chapter argues that these two aspects of political speeches require different frameworks and methodologies of socio-pragmatic analysis to investigate their significance in and for political discourse. The first one relates to interactive facets of political speech, i.e. its audience design and its characteristics as moves in a very specific kind of talk-in-interaction. The second one requires analysts to deal with ‘heteroglossic’ aspects of utterances and different kinds of discourse representation and references to common knowledge. The chapter closes with an assessment of prospects for a possible combination of these two frameworks.