In Chapter 1, we provide an introduction for the present book. First we present our take on language and politics, by outlining how and why our bottom-up, strictly language-anchored and replicable analysis contributes to previous inquiries in the field. Here we also outline the elements of our framework and the ways they are interconnected, as well as the analytic pitfalls that our approach helps to avoid. Following this, we present the contents of the book.

In Chapter 10, we revisit the problem that certain politically relevant, culturally embedded notions are very difficult to translate. A key issue that such a difficulty of translating causes is the following. Often, when we talk about a politically relevant issue in two linguacultures by using English as an academic lingua franca, we may be comparing apples with pears. Such a comparison leads to the previously mentioned problem of ethnocentrism, and so it is important to consider how to resolve it by merging politics and translation studies. As a case study, we examine the problematics of translating the sociopolitically relevant Chinese expression wenming (‘civilised’) into English. Following the translation framework of House, we argue that untranslatability can be overcome by House’s notion of ‘cultural filtering’.

In Chapter 11, we summarise the contents of the book and propose vistas for future inquiries. This conclusion is followed by a glossary, which provides a summary of technical terms used in this book for early-career readers.

In Chapter 8, we consider how sociopolitical ideological convictions impact on how social members such as political activists use language outside political institutions. Due to the popularity of social media, such non-institutionalised language use is becoming important and needs to be studied on a par with institutionalised political language use. Haidt insightfully argued that sociopolitical ideologies manifested through political conviction divide social members, and we believe that it is an important task for the pragmatician to capture this global dividing effect with the aid of strictly linguistic evidence. As a case study, we examine a clash between a radical animal rights protester and the organisers of a children’s party featured in social media. We show that the organisers of the party and the protester put moral oughts representing sociopolitical ideological convictions against one another in an irreconcilable way. Due to this irreconcilability, in their interaction they completely lack alignment with each other. In this case study, we also follow a contrastive view, by considering how clashes driven by sociopolitical convictions differ from more ‘mundane’ clashes.

In Chapter 7, we discuss how best to analyse mediated political monologues. As news and other forms of media present political events, they are important to study, and for the pragmatician a key issue is how to tease out the dynamics of such monologues, making them pragmatically relevant. We believe that it is important to consider how such monologues gain interactional effect with the public because gaining such effect is the goal of these monologues. Thus we focus on textual features through which a monologue covertly interconnects the readers with politicians and political entities. Here we will refer to the concept of alignment, proposed by Goffman, arguing that many seemingly ‘innocent’ phenomena in political monologues aim to trigger the alignment of the public with politicians or political entities represented by the monologue. As a case study, we examine a corpus of political monologues published in Chinese newspapers in the wake of a national crisis. Following our cross-cultural pragmatic contrastive view, we will compare various types of political monologue, in order to tease out the interactional dynamics through which they trigger the alignment of their readers.

In Chapter 2, we first discuss what we regard as three major pitfalls in the field: (1) following an ethnocentric view of one’s data, (2) uncritically associating values with political actors and entities, and (3) using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. We argue that these analytic traps are interrelated and reflect a typically top-down view of political language use. Second, we discuss the three key pragmatic units of expressions, speech acts and discourse in detail. In studying political language use with the aid of these units, it is recommended to look at conventional pragmatic patterns, which allow us to conduct replicable analyses. Further, we argue that political language use can be effectively interpreted if we look at its ritual manifestations. Ritualised political language use imposes a frame on the participants; that is, in many political contexts the rights and obligations of the participants are defined and language is generally used according to such rights and obligations. We finally discuss how our analytic units can be brought together with a contrastive view of language and politics.

In Chapter 5 we present the pitfall of using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. As a case study, we present historical diplomatic correspondence between representatives of China and the US in the time of colonialism. We argue that it is not productive to attempt to demonstrate how evil colonialism was, which is a frequent research goal in spite of the fact that the evil nature of colonialism is an accepted truth. Rather, we believe that it is more productive to look at exactly how the coloniser used language in order to coerce representatives of the colonised country to fulfil their demands.

In Chapter 6, we turn to the difficulty of studying sensitive data. In studying politically relevant issues, one may unavoidably encounter phenomena which are sensitive to talk about because they are painful for many. We point out that such data can best be studied if we distance ourselves from the object of our inquiry, by taking a contrastive look at our data. As a case study, we examine political apologies realised after the Second World War by representatives of the Japanese and German states, following war crimes perpetrated by their respective countries. Japanese and German war apologies are highly controversial and have often been described with sweeping overgeneralisations. We believe that it is important to venture beyond such overgeneralisations and examine in a bottom-up and contrastive way – relying on both qualitative and quantitative evidence – exactly how representatives of these countries realised their apologies.

In Chapter 4 we discuss the pitfall of associating positive and negative values with political actors, including both individuals such as Trump or Biden, and political entities such as the US and the EU. In our view, such an association is problematic and dangerous because it precludes approaching language and politics in a more neutral way. As a case study, we analyse the transcript of an unofficial tape recording in which representatives of the EU – which is often regarded as a democratic organisation – attempted to prevent the newly established Slovenian and Croatian states from declaring independence following plebiscites. We use strictly linguistic evidence to illustrate the rather undemocratic procedure through which representatives of the EU – who were supposed to be the upholders of democracy – aggressively persuaded Slovenians and Croatians to temporally suspend declaring independence, hence opposing the results of valid plebiscites.

In Chapter 9, we look at how the pragmatician can capture the interactional dynamics of seemingly confusing cases of aggression in mediated political settings. In mediated scenes of politics, conflict may evolve in a seemingly ad hoc way, and in order to be able to analyse such settings it is necessary to linguistically analyse exactly what is happening in them. As a case study, we present a corpus of heckling incidents, including cases such as when the previous US first lady Michelle Obama was heckled in public. We argue that while heckling appears as a ‘disorderly’ incident, manifestations of heckling can be systematically categorised into major types, which impose different ritual frames on the public speaker being heckled. Following this view, our analysis shows that heckling is a standard situation in which the participants actually follow conventional forms of behaviour.

In Chapter 3 we discuss the pitfall of following an ethnocentric view in the study of politically relevant data. We argue that it is not fruitful either to associate a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area, or to attribute a political notion or an actor with a positive or negative value. Here we critically consider the universal validity of notions such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, which may appear at first as clearly positive or negative and as such non-controversial from a Western viewpoint. We will refer to cases in which members of non-Western linguacultures conventionally interpret these notions differently from how they are conventionally seen in the West and how they are often used in academic inquiries in a seemingly ‘neutral’ way. We argue that it is ethnocentric to dismiss linguaculturally embedded standard interpretations of such notions as ‘undemocratic’, ‘unenlightened’ and ‘autocratic’ because through such a dismissive attitude one is led to automatically associating a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area.