Publication details
Topical coherence in political speeches
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Ostrava Journal of English Philology |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | coherence - discourse topic - thematic progression - cohesion - political speeches -persuasion - rhetorical structure |
| Description | The article is an outccome of the research of the author within the project 405/08/0866 Coherence and Cohesion in English discourse, supported by the Czech Science Foundation. Coherence, regarded as a context-based interpretative property of discourse, is a complex phenomenon encompassing conceptual connectedness, evaluative and dialogical consistency and textual relatedness. This paper focuses on topical coherence, whichis typically associated with thematic, action frame, spatio-temporal and participant continuity. The investigation is carried out on a corpus of opening addresses delivered in the UNESCO context, and explores how politicians try to impose on the audience an interpretative perception of the semantic unity and purposefulness of their discourse which reflects their context-dependent communicative intentions. The analysis relates topical coherence to the rhetorical structure of addresses and argues that topic continuity based on the hierarchy of discourse topics, the pattern of thematic progression, and temporal, spatial and referential continuity, is closely interwoven with coherence on the interpersonal planes of discourse. |
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