Revisiting the rhetorical construction of political consent
We-strategies’ and pronouns in British and Russian Covid-19 discourse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6085154 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Douglas Mark Ponton (0000-0002-9968-1162), Vladimir I Ozyumenko (0000-0001-7587-3007), Tatiana V Larina (0000-0001-6167-455X) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 437-459 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/jlp.22199.pon |
| OpenAlex | W4393317103 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 47 |
How political leaders construct consent is a constant theme of studies in political rhetoric and theories of persuasion. We explore how populist linguistic strategies combine with traditional consensus-building to align populations with the speakers’ messages. We observe similarities and differences in discourse strategies across two contrasting polities, the UK, a foundational modern representative democracy and Russia, which is considered more autocratic. The data comes from speeches given by Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin during the Covid-19 crisis. They were analysed using Corpus Linguistics, compared in qualitative analysis that identities key lexico-grammatical features. The findings show a convergence in some of the strategies and linguistic styles, but also key differences which, we suggest, depend on cultural factors specific to the two nations. The results contribute to our understanding of the operation of these resources in modern political discourse, highlighting the way cultural factors influence rhetorical styles in very different political structures
Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Law · Philosophy
Us and Others
Analysing Political Discourse
Discourse and Identity
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
Discourse and Politics
Online incivility in times of Covid-19
Covid-19 trending neologisms and word formation processes in English
Pragmatic and stylistic persperctives on British and American Covid-19 cartoons
“Never in my life have I heard such a load of absolute nonsense. Wtf.” Political satire on the handling of the Covid-19 crisis
The encounter of two cultural identities
“It's a war! It's a battle! It's a fight!”
Communicating Covid-19
Putin as a Non-populist Autocrat
War Metaphors in Political Communication on Covid-19
Tact or frankness in English and Russian blind peer reviews
Semantic prosody revisited
The Calculus of Non-Protest in Russia
The normalization of far-right populism and nativist authoritarianism
Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis
Narrating the ‘new normal’ or pre-legitimising media control? Covid-19 and the discursive shifts in the far-right imaginary of ‘crisis’ as a normalisation strategy
Mourning
Not a Brexit Election? Pessimism, Promises and Populism ‘UK-Style
Gendering political leadership
Populism as a Transgressive Style
On the language of the Clinton-Dole presidential campaign debates
Politeness
A pragmatic analysis of the use of person deixis in political discourse
And I Think That Is a Very Straightforward Way of Dealing With It
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |