When studying political linguistics, one can pay attention to the effects of slogans, mass media, debates and propaganda to persuade the values and identities of individuals.
Erving Goffman believes when "a person volunteers a statement or message, however trivial or common-place, he commits himself and those he addresses, and in a sense places everyone present in jeopardy.
For example, "interpersonal relations are not performed linguistically in the same way in English as in all those other European languages that have a polite form.
"[7] In French, this relationship is performed between the speaker and their interlocutor(s) by the word choice of tu or vous to show intimacy or distantness.
In English, this relationship can be performed by calling the interlocutors by their first name or by their title and surname, but can generally be avoided if they speakers choose to do so.
In March 2021, Chinese interpreter Zhang Jing gained fame after she was able to translate speeches which were at least 10 minutes long in a smooth and accurate manner.
Her capability has prompted many netizens to sing praises of China, saying that she was "calm and collected, could translate and convey the message accurately, fully displaying the country’s diplomatic team’s elegance".
[11] In a sense, Zhang’s capabilities have not just revealed the quality of China’s diplomatic team, but improved the public’s perception of the government as well.
[12] The various scientists working on the project found that the wording of questions had great bearing on whether respondents attributed characteristics to an individual or to their racial group.
Part of the reason could be to insinuate somehow that the systems of control and domination and aggression to which those with power were committed were in fact a kind of freedom.
These posters usually had short captions blaming the Jews for the problems the Germans were facing, but provided no logical explanation for the statements.
To emphasise his point, he mentioned that voters should pay attention to other countries whose political consensus fell after frequent handovers of power.
[16] This change required little effort, replacing "fǎngòng, resist communism" to "fǎngōng, counter-attack" and "kàng'é, fight Russia" to "fùguó, recover the nation" while still retaining the original seven characters in the slogan.
[17] Joe Biden’s campaign message in his political battle with Donald Trump is an example of appealing to the attitudes of the masses.
[23] First, from the Foucauldian perspective, power is not a possession of agents who exercise it to define the options of others, but a set of pressure lodged in institutional mechanisms which produce and maintain such privileged norms as the subject or the primacy of epistemology.
[24]Give concrete examples of this[clarification needed] Meanings are assigned by association with other words put together by other people (usually in the mass media) rather than from direct experience with things and events.
[23] He suggests that a scrutiny on motives not to find out the reasons a given person is engaged in a particular act but about the kinds of justifications for action that are legitimized in a society at a given time.
J. G. A. Pocock speaks similarly to Mills, stating "language is a repository of sedimented power and that to understand the language-power relationship, attention should be focused not on the intention of the individual user but rather on the inheritance of practices and conceptions that precede what comes out of the speaker’s mouth.
For example, when a young boy was accused of a felony, exclaims, ‘Ah ain’t nevah done nothin’ to nobody nohow!’, he is guilty of a quintuple negative at the very least – but his claim to honorable character is being vividly made.
Winston Churchill’s coinage of the phrase Iron Curtain broke pragmatic, if not semantic, rules of English, but it certainly provided an apt characterization of the Cold War situation at the time.
[3] Murray Edelman believes "language used by a particular class of persons both constitutes a kind of political reality that enables or empowers the helping professional and disenables their clientele.
He demonstrates that an appeal to mass attitudes is effective by connecting itself to rhetorical structures which are already a part of general discursive practices and thus generalised understandings.
He references Mein Kampf’s strategy is "the appropriation of ‘church thought’ with its already established script for relating economic ills to problems of personality.
It therefore sets the stage for both scape-goating the Jews and for exalting the dignity of the Aryan, and, ultimately, for legitimizing violence in order to effect the desired movement in status.