Follow-ups in the US anti-terrorist discourse: Proposal for a macro-discursive approach to monologic follow-up sequences. (September 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cap, Piotr
• Is Part Of: Discourse & society. Volume 26:Number 5(2015)
• Page Start: 543
• Page End: 561
• Publication Date: 2015-09
• Subjects: Context analysis -- follow-ups -- Iraq War -- legitimization -- political macro-discourse -- proximization; Discourse analysis -- Periodicals; Communication -- Periodicals; 302.2
• DOI: 10.1177/0957926515581155
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0957-9265

Abstract

Follow-ups have been routinely considered a dialogic/conversational phenomenon. In this article, I demonstrate that the concept of follow-up could be extended to cover monologic discourses as well, especially those in which the speaker realizes a macro-goal over a number of texts produced in different contextual conditions. These dynamically evolving conditions make the speaker – as happens in dialogue – continually update and redefine his or her rhetorical choices to maintain realization of the macro-goal intact. Such an approach subsumes a 'dialogic' relation between the speaker and the shifting discourse context – rather than between the speaker and his or her specific interlocutor – and views follow-up as an instance of rhetoric that has been forcibly modified from the previous/initial instance, to keep enacting the speaker's macro-goal against requirements of the new context. As an illustration, I show how monologic follow-ups work in George W. Bush's War-on-Terror discourse. In particular, I discuss how the macro-goal of Bush's 2003–2004 rhetoric of the Iraq War (legitimization of the pre-emptive military strike and the later US involvement) has been maintained in the 'follow-up speeches' responding to loss of the initial legitimization premise, that is, the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.