Paul Danler
Universität Innsbruck
Paul.Danler@uibk.ac.at

Morpho-syntactic and textual realizations as deliberate pragmatic argumentative linguistic tools?


The aim of any political speech is to persuade the audience of selected political goals. The justification of decisions taken or to be taken is an indisputable underlying function.
This is true of political speeches throughout history but particularly true of those of fascist Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The linguistic features of some of those speeches will be the focus of this paper.
When listening to a speech, the audience are first confronted with a series of sentences, which - put together - have to be processed as a textual whole. The speaker, as the initiative part in this particular communicative situation, resorts to various morpho-syntactic and textual means  to convey syntactic and textual meanings which go far beyond the meanings of individual words. He – we are dealing with speeches given exclusively by male speakers – aims at more or less concrete pragmatic goals, which he tries to get across to his audience. More often than not, however, he refrains from stating these goals explicitly, so that the audience, without being aware of the speaker’s skilful use of certain linguistic means, ought to draw their own conclusions and eventually share the speaker’s point-of-view.
The main-idea of valence theory is the fact – or the hypothesis – that the verb is the structural center of the sentence in the sense that it determines the number of complements, whereas supplements supposedly appear relatively independently of the verb.
Complements represent the morpho-syntactically realized arguments present in the semantic structure of the verb. However, not all arguments virtually contained in the verb on an abstract semantic level, need to be realized as complements, others might be realized in several different ways. Pragmatic reasons seem to be responsible for this phenomenon.
This paper investigates two aspects: the means the speaker has at his disposal to leave some arguments unexpressed and to focus on others; it is also about how he manages through a skilful selection of complements in corresponding syntactic constructions to claim general or even universal validity of his ideas; furthermore, it aims to show how the speaker polarizes by means of including and excluding discursive strategies. Besides, two main functions of supplements remain to be mentioned: on the one hand the creation of causal, temporal and modal frames and the building up of suspense.
The corpora to be dealt with are fascist speeches in Romance languages.