1schaffner_christina_editor_analysing_political_speeches

President Reagan, do it sequentially, and so we can follow the sequences. If there was a sequence which was essential to a certain public, it can be put forward to the news reporter. Here

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the signals are more indirect. But there are always clear shifts and signals that help the journalists to establish what the essential topic is.

Titus Ensink: I wonder whether journalists need these signals. For example, when you consider media analysis, e.g. writings by Galtung and others, a question is: what does it mean to establish newsworthiness? You approach it from the text, but I think you might try a different approach.

Take, for example, an average Dutch journalist who is accompanying the Queen on her visit. What is most novel in a speech for him/her? I mean most novel in its own right, apart from the way it is signalled or formulated.

Christoph Sauer: Novelty functions as a signal too . What I did was to show the embeddedness of novelty, but novelty as such is a signal. All the things that are novel would be interesting to a journalist.

Brevity and Topicality

Norman Fairclough: I would like to ask Christoph where brevity would come in. You have explicated your notion of deviation, but you also seem to be saying that the speech had the qualities of brevity and topicality, but I do not see that brevity.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: I can see topicality, in the sense of the whole subject of coming to terms with the past. A lot of documents are coming out that have been hidden for the past 50 years, and now some myths are blown up. If you have a skeleton in the cupboard, then it is better to open it up and say 'Oh, I had forgotten about it', than have your neighbour do it. The journalists have picked this up because it was an internal Dutch matter, but I think that they missed why it was in the speech in the first place. This is why you could say that the speech is going either in two different directions or that it is very coherent.

Julian Edge: Perhaps that is not a case of 'eitheror'. There are different voices speaking to different addressees, and you can read different things into it. What I understood Christoph to be saying in this respect is that one of the strands here was particularly aimed at the home audience, and that, separate to anything specifically signalled in the text, the spin doctors were there to brief the Dutch press. That is, they would say something like 'Just listen to what she will say about. . .' and given they were listening to that, it was therefore necessary to have a clear and brief sentence in the speech, so that the Dutch press, having been briefed to watch out for it, could pick out the sentence in Paragraph 6 that said 'the people of the Netherlands could not prevent the destruction of their Jewish fellow-citizens'.

Norman Fairclough: But is it a matter of the properties of the text or of the pre-history, in that they knew there was something in there to look out for?

Titus Ensink: In order to answer this we may have to speculate about how a journalist's mind works.

Christoph Sauer: The German Bundestag President Jenninger was reproached for the way his

text was delivered, and he had to resign. The reproach was that as a representative politician you have to take into account the possible media coverage of what you are saying, and this may indeed be very critical. But let me

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add some comments on the aspects of direct contact in classical rhetoric versus mass media coverage in modern political communication. The features I listed in my paper, i.e. brevity, topicality and increasing frequency, are general statements on normal political addresses. Queen Beatrix is returning to a certain extent to classical rhetoric. She does not accept these forms of brevity, topicality and increasing frequency which politicians normally make use of. She returns to classical rhetoric and establishes the idea of direct contact'it is me who says so and it is me who is giving my voice to this topic'. She refuses to be a machine which is putting out political statements. She wants to affect and she wants to intervene in ongoing discourses, that's why she acts more in the way of classical rhetoric. However, it is only for this specific address to the Knesset that these three features are not applicable.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: Yes, because she is not a politician. Her role is that of an ambassador, so the three features you mention as normally appertaining to political speeches do not apply here. However, she has to put a greater deal of phatic communion in the speech, and coax and cajole her audience in order to deliver the last part of her speech, which is a sort of moral indictment of the attitude of Israel towards its neighbours.

Stephan Elspaß: It's also related to the text type, i.e. the speech being an epideictic address. You don't expect to find these features in an epideictic address, but you would expect them in other text types, for example in election campaign speeches.

Norman Fairclough: But in your paper, you seem to be saying that in fact she is doing all those things, i.e. making use of brevity, topicality, increasing frequency, and also resorting to classical rhetoric.

Christoph Sauer: Maybe I would say that her brevity depends on other speeches. By giving only a small amount of novelty to her speech, she has her own way of arriving at brevity. The same goes for topicality. And as to increasing frequency, she delivered several speeches during the past two years, and this is her specific way of establishing direct contact with people. In this way she gives a specific interpretation to this aspect of frequency which is necessary for a politician.

Intertextuality

Titus Ensink: Her 1994 Christmas radio address had some considerable impact on Dutch society because of one short passage in which the Queen said that the Dutch were used to thinking about the war in terms of right and wrong. But that is wisdom in hindsight, because at that time this was not so clear. But in saying this she actually paved the way to position herself as somebody who is able to calibrate the moral standards by which these very sensitive periods of history have to be measured. I agree with Christoph that she does not devote much space to this in her address, but she is not making these statements for the very first time, she has said so before, and that makes it recognisable.

Christoph Sauer: In Paragraph 11 there is another quote from her Christmas address. She says

'Once peace is concluded reconciliation must follow'. This was a central statement in her 1994 Christmas address. For this statement she was awarded a prize, the Karlspreis, by the German president Herzog. In his laudatio,

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Herzog quoted this sentence as an important contribution to peace and freedom in Europe. Establishing the concatenations of topics by giving her voice to them may be her specific way of managing both modern and old-fashioned forms of acting as an orator.

Christina Schäffner: You know this because, as a Dutch person, you have the intertextual knowledge. But how would other people know that she is quoting herself when there is no explicit signal?

Christoph Sauer: There are different signals, such as the strangeness of some passages, at least in the last parts of her address. In Paragraph 11 there is her attempt to describe the historical development. This stops at a certain moment because history has not yet been fulfilled, and then she starts to say something about the future. But this is not only saying something, but advising people what to do.

Stephan Elspaß: I think this is where the concept of the multiple addressees comes in. She is not just addressing the Knesset, she is also addressing the Dutch people. They will recognise the sentence.

Titus Ensink: I have already referred to the general 'we' that most speakers in these situations tend to use. 'We' is used to present moral statements of a very general character, hand in hand with a point of view belonging to just about everyone. This technique is used by the Queen too, but it can be recognised in other speeches as well. I think it is a technique which is typical of this genre of political speeches.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: It gives you more authority: you speak in your name and in the name of all those people who are supposed to agree with you. But we are talking about Queen Beatrix as the representative of the Netherlands, when in fact she mentions the European Union several times. As one of the 15 heads of state of the European Union, she carries the weight of that community behind her, as well as being constrained by it on the political level in what she says.

Christoph Sauer: And such constraints influence the formulations. Why is she saying 'Once peace is concluded reconciliation must follow'? Is this old-fashioned wisdom? Why doesn't she say 'we hope that you reach reconciliation with your neighbours'? In such choices of formulation you can prove not only the distance of the speaker, but also the control of intertextuality and the specific audience-orientation.

Choice of Formulations in Relation to Intention and Effect

Christina Schäffner: Consideration of the audience and their specific attitudes and feelings is certainly an important factor in writing a speech. I wonder whether you have any information about how the speech was received in Israel. What and how did the Israeli media report about the event?

Christoph Sauer: We do not really have enough information about this. There were pressure groups in Israel, for example Dutch immigrants. But in general, this visit was not of much

interest to the people of Israel.

Titus Ensink: The speaker of the Knesset had some trouble in filling the room. Not all the Members of Parliament had come and so he had to find some retired

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Members to increase the audience. Maybe they thought they had heard enough philo-Semitism in the Knesset. In fact, the situation was not really a difficult one for the Queen, but she herself made it difficult. If Paragraphs 6 and 7 had been left out, no one would have been really concerned.

David Pritchard: Yes, because the speech is fairly inoffensive until Paragraph 6. It refers to what we have got in common, how friendly we have beennothing to upset anyone. And then suddenly a contrast, a change: the 'safe place' in Paragraph 5 is said not to have been a safe haven at all.

Sue Wright: I am really surprised that the speech had such an impact. It seems to me to be a reaffirmation of traditions and a celebration of all the Dutch qualities and high moral standards. In Paragraph 4 she speaks of the 'safe haven' back in the past, in Paragraph 5 of 'Mokum, the safe place', in Paragraph 6 of 'courageous resistance'. Then there is the concession that these Dutch people were the exceptional ones, but she does not say that the others collaborated, but just that 'they could not prevent the destruction of their Jewish fellow citizens'. And then she goes on speaking about the support of the Dutch people for the Israeli state. Reading that for the first time it did not strike me at all that there is in fact criticism or recalibrating of what happened. That must be a dialogue which is going on within the Netherlands, and this is brought into the interpretation, or added to it. It is not really in the text. In the text, the Queen does not criticise the collaborators.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: The criticism is easy to sense when you look at her formulations. She is using modals: 'they would eventually meet their death', and in the last sentence 'could not prevent'. This modalisation tends to attenuate the responsibility of the Dutch 'agents' regarding what happened to the Jews which a sentence such as 'they eventually met their death' or 'did not prevent' would increase.

Titus Ensink: The whole textual environment is by implication rather negative. When you read on to Paragraph 7, we have 'in bewilderment and dismay', and then 'it is an urgent duty, not only for governments but also for every single citizen, to be on the alert and react without hesitation .

. .'. The implication is that the Dutch were not on the alert, they did not react, but they hesitated.

Sue Wright: But does this make them agents? The implication is they too were cowed by the evil. As a reader, these sentences do not strike me as an attack.

Julian Edge: But if the field in which this appears is that 'we were the brave resistance fighters and we did everything we could', if this is the myth that people live with, then to raise this issue in this way is indeed a criticism.

Sue Wright: But 'safe haven, courageous resistance, exception . . .' it's the Dutch within a greater whole. I think you could still read it in the sense of the 'Dutch as heroes'.

Anita Fetzer (University of Stuttgart): But if we have a close look at the actual surface structure of the text and analyse it in a Gricean framework, that is to say, not just look at what is said, but also what is implicated, there is evidence that her utterance 'But we also know that they were the exceptional ones . . .' implicates, firstly, that we know something else. However, this 'something else'

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is not explicitly stated in the text and has to be interpreted by the audience. This implicature is triggered by 'also'. Then there is a second implicature, more precisely, an entailment, triggered by 'the exceptional ones', which supports the previous claim. I think there are strong hints, especially when we take the cultural context into consideration, that the Queen was conversationally implicating that not all Dutch citizens were part of the resistance but that some were in fact collaborating. Had she delivered that speech in a purely Dutch context, almost every member of the audience would have detected this indirect criticism of the myth that all Dutch were heroes.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: When I read the second sentence in Paragraph 8, 'The founding of the State of Israel was welcomed with great enthusiasm in the Netherlands', I thought it could be understood in two different ways: the Dutch were happy for the Jews who at last had found their own home, or the Dutch saw the potential departure of the Jews as a 'good-riddance' type solution to any problem which may arise between the two communities.

Christoph Sauer: I hope to have demonstrated in my comments on perspectivisation in my paper, that it is extremely complicated to effect shifts in perspective. I think these shifts are done in order not to make it so explicit that she is blaming her own people. This is a very crucial message, not only from the point of view of media coverage, but also when you look at the content of the speech. It is given complicated perspectives by various means: by a historical description, by referring to general knowledge, e.g. saying 'we know that', by mentioning the visit to Yad Vashem, giving names, the signal 'but', and also by saying 'could not prevent' instead of 'did not prevent'. These are different aspects of a very dynamic perspectivisation, and this is done in order to make the criticism not so explicit, but to express it nevertheless. These two paragraphs function as an epideictic address within an otherwise structured address. An epideictic address gives people a chance to act and to react on norms and values even if there is a risk that this will be harmful. This is one of the ways why epideictic addresses are useful as an old-fashioned rhetorical address. And it was also very important for the Dutch media.

Titus Ensink: The message concerns the Dutch self-image which the Queen represents, but at the same time she uses her position to make a correction.

Eve-Marie Aldridge: She is using a historical perspective in order to put her point across, which may be that although the Jewish community was not as well received and treated by the Dutch as was currently believed, it is now really up to them to fight their own fight. Her emphasis is on what is happening now to the Jews who, if they want to survive as a nation-state, have to come to an agreement with their neighbours and stop the endless fighting, as the lessons of history show that such fighting can only endanger and possibly destroy Israel's existence.

David Pritchard: It is partly in mitigation of the later demands that they make peace, but it is also what they are expected to doi.e. apologise.

Representativeness and Power