Abstract
This chapter investigates labels and attributes employed to debase political opponents. The corpus consists of 70 statements of various politicians and political parties from Montenegro, published on the political parties’ official websites and Facebook pages in early 2022, addressing a tumultuous political situation during which a new parliamentary majority was being formed. The study’s approach is based on Critical Discourse Analysis. Debasement is here seen as a delegitimizing discursive strategy and for the purpose of this study it is understood in its broadest sense. As such, it refers to the use of linguistic and rhetorical devices aimed at discrediting and decreasing the quality, reputation, worth, standing etc., of political opponents. One of the most obvious ways in which this can be achieved is through word choice, i.e. lexicalization, and that is the focus of this chapter. More specifically, we analyze labels and attributes meant to debase political opponents, identifying their referents and classifying them along semantic lines. Their pragmatic meanings are also discussed in the examples presented. The corpus was replete with debasing labels and attributes, mostly those denoting criminal and faulty character. They formed a salient, lexical coherence across individual statements, strongly polarizing the country’s political discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms cigars and bananas here refer to smuggling cigars and cocaine (cocaine is often delivered in banana packages).
- 2.
After secret negotiations with the ruling DPS party, Darko Pajović and most other members of his political party, Positive Montenegro, did not vote no-confidence against the government in 2015, even though earlier they had announced that they would do so; this enabled the ruling party to remain in power.
- 3.
The former State Security Administration.
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Ivanović, L., Vuković-Stamatović, M. (2023). Use of Labels and Attributes for Degrading Opponents in Montenegro’s Political Discourse. In: Feldman, O. (eds) Political Debasement. The Language of Politics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0467-9_8
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