ABSTRACT

In this chapter, in contrast with the last two, we are not focusing on particular institutions of political talk, but on a certain set of topics and ways of talking about them. The two examples we shall look at are separated partly by time – a political speech given in 1968 and another given thirty-two years later. And they are markedly separated in terms of the social actors and milieu. What both texts have in common is that they refer to, and express attitudes towards the category ‘foreigners’. This category is not fixed and objective, but constituted in discourse by these very types of text and talk.1 As far as our method of analysis is concerned, while the minutiae of interaction still tell us a great deal about political micro-behaviour, we shall concentrate on strategic functions, in the sense discussed in Chapter 3.