ABSTRACT
This is the first chapter to approach PDA at the discourse semantic level. In this book, a political event is interpreted as a goal-oriented social activity in which the participating political actors make use of different political moves to achieve their political agendas. Based on van Leeuwen and Wodak’s notion of macro-strategy, this chapter differentiates six types of political moves: perpetuation, reformation, abolition, legitimization, modification and destruction. Then, based on the discourse of the televised meeting between the five officials of the HKSAR government and the five student representatives of the HKFS in the middle of the Umbrella Movement, this chapter constructs twelve political acts: through personal experience, through issuing one’s belief, through claiming membership, through differentiating ‘otherness’, through critical/adversarial questions, through evasion, through a hypothetical future, through voice of expertise, through rationality, through making comparison, through claiming common interest and through altruism. This chapter then establishes the relationship between the political agendas, political moves and political acts of the two political parties in this political event. Finally, the chapter takes one political actor as an example to illustrate how he makes use of a sequence of political acts to realize the political moves in order to achieve the political agenda of his political party.
