On the Notion of Communicational Grammar in Political Linguistics

Abstract

Any communicational grammar may be viewed as a linguistic study concerned with rules responsible for efficient communication, and can be used as a tool for researching almost any issue that falls under the term political linguistics--a sub-field of linguistics which analyzes how ideologies are put into service to legitimate power and inequality. From the linguistic point of view we would perceive discourse to be a dynamic and changing phenomenon, profoundly rooted in its nonverbal context. The core of any discourse is established by particular texts formed by their speaker/writer. The meaning of the texts and their decoding by the hearer/reader seems to depend to a great extent not only on the cognitive processes that take place in the mind of the information receiver but also on the contextual embeddings which are: a) the situational embedding, that is where the text is produced (here: in what type of co-texts the text is situated); b) the social embedding, that is within what social group the text is produced (here: to what type of readers the text is directed to); and c) the cultural embedding, which is apparently the most difficult to grasp, for it directly translates into what we understand under the nebulous term culture (here: what is the cultural preparation of readers who are going to receive the text). The cultural embedding of texts should be held responsible for the projected associations it may induce in the receiver of textual messages and at the same time types of nonverbal cultural scripts and schemata that are supposed to accompany a verbal text. In light of the above, a model in which one has certain verbal texts that trigger certain socially and culturally specific behaviors can be called the communicational grammar of a particular discourse.