ABSTRACT
When studying political language, researchers tend to follow three different but related paths. The first is to concentrate principally on the mere content of political language. These studies mostly relate to ethos, the norms and values that are hold by the communicator or the ideological content of the message. This type of research is commonly practiced in communications and in political science. The second is followed by researchers who try to unravel what politicians say by focusing on the structuring of arguments and their validity. Turning to the popular terminology of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, these researchers focus on logos (Covino and Jolliffe 1995; Herrick 2001) or the appeal to logic. This type of research has persisted in almost all branches of the study of political language. The third is somewhat less obvious, though at least equally rewarding: by focusing on the style of political language or its form, researchers try to complement studies that take only manifest content into account. They argue correctly that how politicians say things and how they verbally express their thoughts both affect the meaning the words acquire. These studies are rooted in rhetoric and mostly relate to pathos (Covino and Jolliffe 1995; Herrick 2001), because they examine language in its concrete use and because they look for connotative meanings and emotional effects. More and more researchers turn to analyses of style in order to penetrate deeper into the complex ways political language generates meaning and aims to persuade. In the ‘sound byte culture’ that influences contemporary politics, the importance of the use of persuasive style becomes more and more apparent. In line with the rhetoricians Windt and Ingold (1987) we call this communicative style ‘impressive’, because making impressions on the public becomes more important than the actual communicative content or meaning.
