Harris’s Coercive Discourse Is Stabilizing: Discourse Strategies and Effects

Abstract

Since politicians make use of language in their quest to garner support and credibility, among other things, many coercive strategies are utilized by recourse to some manipulative avenues. These same coercive strategies happen in the matrix of a peculiar socio-cultural environment independently from ideologies and common or shared goals. The latter claims make this paper’s focus manifold. Kamala Harris, the vice US President, opted for a number of stabilizing, as it seems, linguistic choices of diction, and thus messages to yield an automatic effect at a time of crisis. This research, in view of this, applies of qualitative method to analyze Harris’s victory speech while implementing van Dijk’s framework adopted from politics, ideology and discourse. In order to attain persuasive ends, some ideological macro-strategies have been widely invested in the speech like emphasizing Our Good things, de-emphasizing Their Bad things and so forth. Shaping public opinion has, thus, been coercively perceived via some ideological discourse categories like lexicalization, consensus and counterfactuals. Results show that coercive discourse has a stabilizing effect and is significantly linked to ideologies and political quibbles dissident from her predecessors. Results also show that coercion is endemic in political discourse and is overtly swinging in various directions to meet many ends.