- Email: [email protected]
War Rhetoric
516 Wang, NianSun (1744–1832)
Guangya shuzheng (Annotations and evidence on Guangya), was the result of a ten-year effort. Guangya is a dictionary compiled by Zhang Yi of the 3rd century. Wang’s Shuzheng cannot simply be treated as an annotation. It also contains emendations and corrections of Guangya, often with examples from other documents to support his argument. His profound knowledge of Chinese phonology lead to the following breakthroughs: 1. In the preface of Shuzheng, Wang stated that words that sound the same or similar have related meanings. Thus, studies on the old meaning of words should be based upon their old sound, not on the meaning radicals of the Chinese characters, as had been the practice up to that time. Wang’s theories brought us a better understanding of the nature of Chinese word families. 2. Wang was able to identify old phonetic uses of characters (jiajie in Chinese; using a character for one word for its sound value alone to represent another word) by examining their sounds. Many misinterpretations in classical texts were thus corrected. Wang’s theories in phonology were elaborated in his Shijing qunjing Chuci yunpu (Manual of rhymes in the Shijing, other classical texts and Chuci), Jingyi shuwen (A description on the meaning of classical texts), Yu Li Fangbo shu (A letter to Li Fangbo), and Yu Jiang Jinsan shu (A letter to Jiang Jinsan).
He divided Old Chinese into 21 rhyme categories, a result that is almost identical to the works of his contemporaries Duan Yucai (see Duan Yucai (1735– 1815)) and Jiang Yougao (?–1851). Interestingly enough, they worked independently but arrived at very similar conclusions. Wang’s theories represented the peak of Qing phonological studies. Many modern scholars have followed the main body of Wang’s system with only minor modifications. Wang Niansun’s elder son Yinzhi (1766–1834) also contributed to the field of Chinese philology. While following the principles set up by his father, Wang Yinzhi focused more on grammatical words. His Jingzhuan shici (Explanations of words in classical texts) is a pioneer work in the field. See also: Chinese; Duan Yucai (1735–1815); Wang Li (1900–1986).
Bibliography Baxter W H (1992). A handbook of old Chinese phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hummel A W (ed.) (1967). Eminent Chinese of Ch’ing period (1644–1912). Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Company. Wang Li (1981). Zhonguo yuyanxue shi. Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe. Wang Li (1992). Qingdai guyinxue. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.
War Rhetoric T van Leeuwen, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction With its massive conscript armies and unprecedented carnage, the First World War required greater support and greater sacrifices from the population than any previous war. As a result war propaganda grew in importance, and the then relatively new medium of the mass press played a crucial role in mobilizing public opinion in favor of the war. Soon after, the study of war propaganda, and of public opinion generally, became a new field in American political science. Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda techniques in the World War (1927) is still a classic in the field. In this book Lasswell identified key propaganda strategies, such as the demonization of the enemy leader,
the need to couch war propaganda in terms of defense, the exaggeration of atrocities, and the need to devise different justifications for different groups in the population on the basis of their different interests. All these strategies can still be seen at work in contemporary war rhetoric. Lasswell was no linguist, and in subsequent years propaganda would primarily be studied by historians and political scientists, with relatively little systematic analysis of the linguistic means by which it was realized. The use of language in Nazi propaganda, with its vast set of bureaucratic terms and acronyms and its astounding euphemisms, such as Sonderbehandlung ‘special treatment’ for ‘execution,’ and Endlo¨sung ‘final solution’ for ‘the extermination of the Jews,’ was an exception. A well-known example is the work of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of linguistics in Dresden who, in 1933, was forced out of his job and forbidden to publish by the Nazis, and
War Rhetoric 517
who throughout the subsequent years recorded his observations of Nazi language, eventually publishing them as The language of the Third Reich–LTI–Lingua Tertii Imperii: a philologist’s notebook (2000). More recent discussions of Nazi language include Wodak and De Cilla (1988) and Ehlich (1989). Several lexicons of Nazi language have appeared (e.g., Michael and Doerr, 2002).
Critical Linguistics In Europe, linguistic analyses of war rhetoric reappeared from the 1970s onward, especially in relation to Cold War rhetoric and the nuclear arms debate, and, more recently, in relation to America’s interventions in the Middle East and the so-called ‘war on terror’ that followed the events of September 11, 2001. This work formed part of the activities of the ‘critical linguistics’ movement that began in the mid–1970s at the University of East Anglia, and in the 1990s evolved into the broader movement of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA). The analyses were written as immediate interventions in the debates of the moment and aimed at undermining the justifications of specific wars and aggressive policies in speeches by government leaders and in mainstream media. A key collection of critical linguistic essays on war rhetoric was Chilton (1985). CDA-oriented papers on war rhetoric have mainly appeared in journals such as Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and the Journal of Language and Politics, which will publish a special issue in 2005 on this theme. The critical linguists of the 1970s and 1980s took inspiration from the work of George Orwell, who had criticized political language in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (2000) and in his description of ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen eighty-four (quoted in Chilton, 1985: 45): The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the dominant ideology], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted . . . a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.
Chilton made a similar though perhaps slightly diluted claim for ‘Nukespeak’ (ibid: 44): To coin the term Nukespeak is to make the claim that talk about nuclear weapons, nuclear war and nuclear politics is carried out by distinct words and phrases, and this in itself has important consequences for thought and action.
To analyze these words and phrases, critical linguists used a wide range of methods, including systemicfunctional grammatical analysis (e.g., Moss, 1985), semantic field analysis and metaphor (e.g., Chilton, 1988), Greimasian semiotic analysis (e.g., Van Belle and Claes, 1985), Goffmanian frame analysis and Gricean conversation principles (e.g., Richardson, 1985), but by and large the critique was based on identifying linguistic manipulations (or ‘transformations’, e.g., Hodge, 1985), which were then interpreted as ideologically motivated distortions, in Chilton’s words, on showing how the ‘local organization of lexis and syntax . . . highlights certain meanings and obfuscates others’ (1985: xiv). Some of these linguistic manipulations are relatively obvious and have also been commented on by many media commentators. These include euphemisms, such as the relatively neutral ‘strike’ for a nuclear attack, or to take a more recent one, ‘collateral damage’ for the death of innocent civilians; technical terms, especially acronyms (e.g., WMD for ‘weapons of mass destruction’); and the names of weapons and military operations, e.g., the name of the MX missile in the Reagan era (‘Peacekeeper’) or the name of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (‘Little Boy’). In his description of Newspeak (‘War is Peace and Peace is War’ was one of its slogans), Orwell had already identified these phenomena and pointed at the way they constitute ‘doublespeak’ – the dissolution of the oppositions without which debate about issues such as war and peace becomes impossible (see Orwell, quoted in Chilton, 1988: 80; cf. also Hodge, 1985: 136): ‘Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets . . . this is called ‘‘pacification.’’’ Other, less obvious local organizations of lexis and syntax included grammatical agency, nominalization, and metaphor. In ‘call to arms’ speeches, for instance, the ascription of agency fluctuates between the addressed audience (‘we’), the nation (‘America,’ ‘this country’), and the moral cause that justifies war (‘Western commitment to democracy’), thus conflating the three, while the actions ascribed to these agents tend to be referred to in abstract terms, as in Bush’s speech of March 16, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ re/cases/2003/03) (‘‘We work towards a great cause, and that is peace and security in this world’’). The actions of the enemy tend to be more concrete and are ascribed to a personified and demonized enemy, as in the same speech (‘‘The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations’’). This then creates an us-them contrast. The nominalization of war actions and the use of agentless passive constructions obscures agency, as in the Times’ headlines at the time of the
518 War Rhetoric
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of April 7 and 10, 1945: ‘Rain of Ruin from the Air’ and ‘Second City Hit.’ Metaphors can make new and unprecedented events appear familiar, natural, and acceptable, as in the now increasingly common descriptions of war as a ‘job’ and as ‘business.’ Chilton (1988: 72) quotes an example from the Daily Mail of May 3, 1982: ‘‘An Argentine submarine appears to be hit. All this means is that the British forces are getting on with the job they were sent down to the South Atlantic to do, namely to remove the Argentines.’’ The importance of metaphor for our understanding of the world we live in has been powerfully argued by Lakoff and Johnson (1981); at the time of the first Gulf War, Lakoff wrote a paper on metaphor and war (1991), which he published on the Internet to avoid delay in publication and make it more widely available.
Critical Discourse Analysis Already in the mid-1980s, critical linguists also began to analyze war rhetoric in terms of discourses, ‘belief systems,’ for example in relation to the long-lasting antinuclear demonstration by women at Greenham Common (Fowler and Marshall, 1985). Here the focus was not on words and phrases but on particular complexes of ideas, such as that women are less rational than men, should confine themselves to domestic and maternal tasks, and so on. Such belief systems then manifested themselves through a range of lexical and syntactic means and in a range of contexts, for example through the use of terms such as ‘peace hysteria’ and ‘protesting peace mums’ in the popular press. Chilton (1988) related this to work on scripts and schemas in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence (e.g., Abelson, 1973, who had used the ‘Cold War script’ as one of his examples), pointing out that metaphors can often trigger whole complexes of ideas without referring to them in explicit and detailed ways. More recent work in critical discourse analysis has increasingly moved in the direction of identifying broad discursive strategies, focusing especially on the ‘legitimation’ of war (at other times the term ‘justification’ is used). Several articles of this kind can be found in a special issue of the journal Discourse and Society (15: 2–3) on the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. Graham et al. (2004), for instance, point at the remarkable consistency of the strategies used in call to war speeches over the past 1000 years. Studying a hundred such speeches, they found that all (1) refer to an ultimate moral force to legitimate the war (although the nature of this moral force evolved from ‘God,’ to ‘God and Country,’ and then to ‘Country’ or ‘People’ alone); (2) embed the
discourse in the history and culture that binds ‘us,’ the addressed audience that must be rallied behind the war, together; (3) construct the enemy as an evil other; and (4) provide unifying constructs for the people addressed. Lazar and Lazar (2004) deal specifically with ‘enemy construction’ and discuss strategies of ‘criminalization,’ ‘orientalization,’ and ‘vilification.’ Although they specify linguistic realizations of these categories in some cases (for instance, ‘criminalization’ is realized by the use of criminal vocabulary and ‘overlexicalization’), in other cases the realizations are semantic categories (for instance, ‘orientalization’ can be realized by ‘moral degeneracy,’ ‘bellicosity,’ and ‘duplicity’). In short, there has been a gradual move from an emphasis on ‘local’ lexical and syntactic features to an emphasis on overall rhetorical strategies and discourses (in the sense of belief systems). However, in most cases the argumentation still rests primarily on the use of discourse analytical methods. Relatively little connection is made with literature on the specific wars and conflicts discussed, or with literature from other fields, such as media studies, where less attention is paid to language but more to the context, e.g., to documenting forms of wartime media censorship (see, e.g., Schlesinger et al., 1983, which appeared roughly at the same time as Chilton, 1985).
Rhetoric The American approach to war rhetoric has by and large based itself on traditional rhetorical analysis, with explicit reference to Aristotle and the classic rhetoricians, and often also with reference to the work of Kenneth Burke (e.g., 1969), who saw rhetoric as language’s essential function of inducing social cooperation. This work is closely linked to the American tradition of public opinion and mass communication research that started in the 1920s with the work of Lasswell, Lippman, and others, and has never lost sight of rhetoric’s time-honored connection between political speechmaking and political action, a connection that critical linguists had to regain after having been trained in the formal and decontextualized linguistics of the 1950s and 1960s. American journals such as Communication Monographs and Quarterly Journal of Speech have been publishing articles on war rhetoric for a long time (e.g., Brockriede and Scott, 1969 Medhurst et al., 1982), and while war rhetoric has not become an area of specialization among critical discourse analysts (Chilton is perhaps the single exception), in America war rhetoric did become a specialized area of scholarship (see, e.g., Medhurst et al., 1997). A glance at the Internet soon shows in just how many
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American universities courses on war rhetoric are taught, with syllabuses that are sometimes preceded by the warning that controversial issues will be on the agenda. Textbooks and syllabuses use a variety of methods for the analysis of war rhetoric, including strategies, from the classic Aristotelian notions of ‘ethos’ (establishing the credibility and trustworthiness of the speaker), ‘pathos’ (appealing to the emotions of the audience), and ‘logos’ (providing evidence to back up what is proposed) to strategies such as ‘evasion’ and ‘diversion,’ as well as specific rhetorical techniques, including euphemism, jargon, and metaphor, as well as, for instance, repetition and specific techniques for the analysis of argumentation and the discovery of fallacies.
Conclusion The European and American approaches to war rhetoric are motivated by the same concern: a concern for maintaining the reasoned and critical forms of debate that have been fundamental to democracy since the days of Plato and Aristotle. More recently they have also grown more closely together in terms of their methods. American work has started to incorporate notions such as ‘genre’ and ‘intertextuality,’ and European work has become more interdisciplinary, linking up with historical and politicological approaches to war propaganda and with the specific histories of the discourses that are being analyzed and critiqued, and paying attention to nonlinguistic forms of war rhetoric, realizing, for instance, that images can play a particularly important role in strategies such as the demonization of enemies and the exaggeration of atrocities. And while most analyses have focused on political speeches and media reports and commentaries, there is now also an increasing realization of the importance of entertainment media in war propaganda, something which had already been noted in the context of media studies (see Schlesinger et al., 1983). The link between entertainment and propaganda goes back at least as far as the 1930s, when Goebbels (1948: 122) wrote that ‘argument is no longer effective’ and looked toward popular song, humor, and movies as key media of propaganda: ‘‘With films we can make politics too. It is a good expedient in the struggle for the soul of our people’’ (quoted in Bramstedt, 1965: 278). Today there is close cooperation between the Pentagon and the producers of the computer war games and Hollywood war movies (see Machin and Van Leeuwen, in press) that disseminate demonized images of the new ‘terrorist’ enemy and allow people to identify with American heroes.
In the current political climate it is clearly important that critical work on war rhetoric continues and that it is written accessibly and disseminated effectively, not least so that it can feed into the work of the journalists and media commentators who continue to write critically about the war rhetoric of today’s world leaders; a glance at the Internet shows that many still do. See also: Critical Discourse Analysis; Discourse of Nation-
al Socialism, Totalitarian; Media Panics; Media, Politics, and Discourse: Interactions; Politics and Language: Overview.
Bibliography Abelson R P (1973). ‘The structure of belief systems.’ In Schantz R C & Colby K M (eds.) Computer modes of thought and language. New York: W. H. Freeman. 85–101. Bramstedt E K (1965). Goebbels and National Socialist propaganda 1925–1945. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Brockriede W & Scott L (1989). ‘Moments in the rhetoric of the Cold War.’ Communication Monographs 56, 273–285. Burke K (1969). Motives of rhetoric. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chilton P (ed.) (1985). Language and the nuclear arms debate: Nukespeak today. London: Frances Pinter. Chilton P (1988). Orwellian language and the media. London: Pluto Press. Ehlich K (1989). Sprache im Faschismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fowler R & Marshall T (1985). ‘The war against peacemongering: language and ideology.’ In Chilton P (ed.). 3–20. Goebbels J (1948). Diaries 1942–1943. London: Hamish Hamilton. Graham P, Keenan T & Dowd A-M (2004). ‘A call to arms at the end of history: a discourse-historical analysis of George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terror.’ Discourse and Society 15(2–3), 199–223. Hodge R (1985). ‘Getting the message across: a systemic analysis of media coverage of a CND march.’ In Chilton P (ed.). 131–141. Klemperer V (2000). The language of the Third Reich–LTI– Lingua Tertii Imperii: a philologist’s notebook. New Brunswick, N. J.: Athlone Press. Lakoff G (1991). ‘Metaphor and War.’ http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/lakoff-l.htm. Lakoff G & Johnson M (1981). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lasswell H (1927). Propaganda techniques in the world war. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lazar A & Lazar M (2004). ‘The discourse of the New World Order: ‘‘out-casting’’ the double face of threat.’ Discourse and Society 15(2–3), 223–243.
520 War Rhetoric Machin D & van Leeuwen T (in press). ‘Computer games as political discourse: the case of Black Hawk down.’ To appear in Journal of Language and Politics. Medhurst M J (1982). ‘Cold War rhetoric.’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, 240–257. Medhurst M J, Ivie R I, Scott R L & Wander P (1997). Cold War rhetoric: strategy, metaphor and ideology. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Michael R & Doerr K (2002). Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi German: an English lexicon of the language of the Third Reich. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Moss P (1985). ‘Rhetoric of defence in the United States: language, myth and ideology.’ In Chilton P (ed.). 45–65.
Waray
Orwell G (2000 [1946]). Collected essays, journalism and letters. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Richardson K (1985). ‘Pragmatics of speeches against the peace movement in Britain: a case study.’ In Chilton P (ed.). 23–44. Schlesinger P, Murdock G & Elliott P (1983). Televising ‘terrorism’: political violence in popular culture. London: Comedia. van Belle W & Claes P (1985). ‘The logic of deterrence: a semiotic and psychoanalytic approach.’ In Chilton P (ed.). 91–102. Wodak R & DeCilla R (1988). Antisemitismus: Ausstellungskatalog. Vienna: Institut fu¨ r Wissenschaft und Kunst.
See: Samar-Leyte.
Ward, Ida Caroline (1880–1950) B S Collins, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands I M Mees, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ida Caroline Ward, one of the leading Africanists of the 20th century, was born in Bradford, England, on October 4, 1880, the eighth child of a prosperous Yorkshire wool merchant. She was educated at the University of Durham, and then embarked on a long and successful career in school teaching. When in her thirties, she began to interest herself in linguistics, attending classes at Daniel Jones’s newly established department of phonetics at University College London, Jones offered her a full-time post in 1919 at UCL, where initially she specialized in English phonetics and speech pathology. Her early books, Speech defects: their nature and cure (1923), A handbook of English intonation (1926, written with her departmental colleague Lilias Armstrong), and the popular Phonetics of English (1929), reflect these enthusiasms. Ward soon began to focus more on the languages of West Africa and in 1932 moved over to London University’s School of Oriental Studies (later renamed School of Oriental and African Studies), where she could indulge this interest to the full. With Diedrich Westermann, she wrote the wide-ranging survey
Practical phonetics for students of African languages (1933) and in the same year produced her pioneering Phonetic and tonal structure of Efik; for the latter she was awarded a D.Lit. from London University. Further groundbreaking research on tone systems gave rise to a series of publications on West African languages, in particular her Introduction to the Ibo language (1936), which also explored vowel harmony. Her final major work in this area was the Introduction to the Yoruba language, published posthumously in 1952. Ida Ward is notable not only for the accuracy and meticulousness of her empirical research but also for the lucid exposition of theoretical principles of tonal analysis, which she developed at a point when this study was in its infancy. She carried out all her work through direct contact with native-speaker informants, undertaking long linguistic field trips to West Africa even in the hazardous travel conditions of World War II. Ida Ward was arguably the most brilliant of Daniel Jones’s many talented pupils, and her contribution laid the foundations for much subsequent research into African tone languages. In 1937 she established a department of West African languages in SOAS with herself at the head, where in 1944 she was appointed to a chair. She was unquestionably one of the most important driving forces that made London University in her lifetime the chief center of research into African linguistics. She retired in 1948, but continued to work right up to her death in 1949.
Guangya shuzheng (Annotations and evidence on Guangya), was the result of a ten-year effort. Guangya is a dictionary compiled by Zhang Yi of the 3rd century. Wang’s Shuzheng cannot simply be treated as an annotation. It also contains emendations and corrections of Guangya, often with examples from other documents to support his argument. His profound knowledge of Chinese phonology lead to the following breakthroughs: 1. In the preface of Shuzheng, Wang stated that words that sound the same or similar have related meanings. Thus, studies on the old meaning of words should be based upon their old sound, not on the meaning radicals of the Chinese characters, as had been the practice up to that time. Wang’s theories brought us a better understanding of the nature of Chinese word families. 2. Wang was able to identify old phonetic uses of characters (jiajie in Chinese; using a character for one word for its sound value alone to represent another word) by examining their sounds. Many misinterpretations in classical texts were thus corrected. Wang’s theories in phonology were elaborated in his Shijing qunjing Chuci yunpu (Manual of rhymes in the Shijing, other classical texts and Chuci), Jingyi shuwen (A description on the meaning of classical texts), Yu Li Fangbo shu (A letter to Li Fangbo), and Yu Jiang Jinsan shu (A letter to Jiang Jinsan).
He divided Old Chinese into 21 rhyme categories, a result that is almost identical to the works of his contemporaries Duan Yucai (see Duan Yucai (1735– 1815)) and Jiang Yougao (?–1851). Interestingly enough, they worked independently but arrived at very similar conclusions. Wang’s theories represented the peak of Qing phonological studies. Many modern scholars have followed the main body of Wang’s system with only minor modifications. Wang Niansun’s elder son Yinzhi (1766–1834) also contributed to the field of Chinese philology. While following the principles set up by his father, Wang Yinzhi focused more on grammatical words. His Jingzhuan shici (Explanations of words in classical texts) is a pioneer work in the field. See also: Chinese; Duan Yucai (1735–1815); Wang Li (1900–1986).
Bibliography Baxter W H (1992). A handbook of old Chinese phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hummel A W (ed.) (1967). Eminent Chinese of Ch’ing period (1644–1912). Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Company. Wang Li (1981). Zhonguo yuyanxue shi. Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe. Wang Li (1992). Qingdai guyinxue. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.
War Rhetoric T van Leeuwen, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction With its massive conscript armies and unprecedented carnage, the First World War required greater support and greater sacrifices from the population than any previous war. As a result war propaganda grew in importance, and the then relatively new medium of the mass press played a crucial role in mobilizing public opinion in favor of the war. Soon after, the study of war propaganda, and of public opinion generally, became a new field in American political science. Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda techniques in the World War (1927) is still a classic in the field. In this book Lasswell identified key propaganda strategies, such as the demonization of the enemy leader,
the need to couch war propaganda in terms of defense, the exaggeration of atrocities, and the need to devise different justifications for different groups in the population on the basis of their different interests. All these strategies can still be seen at work in contemporary war rhetoric. Lasswell was no linguist, and in subsequent years propaganda would primarily be studied by historians and political scientists, with relatively little systematic analysis of the linguistic means by which it was realized. The use of language in Nazi propaganda, with its vast set of bureaucratic terms and acronyms and its astounding euphemisms, such as Sonderbehandlung ‘special treatment’ for ‘execution,’ and Endlo¨sung ‘final solution’ for ‘the extermination of the Jews,’ was an exception. A well-known example is the work of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of linguistics in Dresden who, in 1933, was forced out of his job and forbidden to publish by the Nazis, and
War Rhetoric 517
who throughout the subsequent years recorded his observations of Nazi language, eventually publishing them as The language of the Third Reich–LTI–Lingua Tertii Imperii: a philologist’s notebook (2000). More recent discussions of Nazi language include Wodak and De Cilla (1988) and Ehlich (1989). Several lexicons of Nazi language have appeared (e.g., Michael and Doerr, 2002).
Critical Linguistics In Europe, linguistic analyses of war rhetoric reappeared from the 1970s onward, especially in relation to Cold War rhetoric and the nuclear arms debate, and, more recently, in relation to America’s interventions in the Middle East and the so-called ‘war on terror’ that followed the events of September 11, 2001. This work formed part of the activities of the ‘critical linguistics’ movement that began in the mid–1970s at the University of East Anglia, and in the 1990s evolved into the broader movement of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA). The analyses were written as immediate interventions in the debates of the moment and aimed at undermining the justifications of specific wars and aggressive policies in speeches by government leaders and in mainstream media. A key collection of critical linguistic essays on war rhetoric was Chilton (1985). CDA-oriented papers on war rhetoric have mainly appeared in journals such as Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and the Journal of Language and Politics, which will publish a special issue in 2005 on this theme. The critical linguists of the 1970s and 1980s took inspiration from the work of George Orwell, who had criticized political language in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (2000) and in his description of ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen eighty-four (quoted in Chilton, 1985: 45): The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the dominant ideology], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted . . . a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.
Chilton made a similar though perhaps slightly diluted claim for ‘Nukespeak’ (ibid: 44): To coin the term Nukespeak is to make the claim that talk about nuclear weapons, nuclear war and nuclear politics is carried out by distinct words and phrases, and this in itself has important consequences for thought and action.
To analyze these words and phrases, critical linguists used a wide range of methods, including systemicfunctional grammatical analysis (e.g., Moss, 1985), semantic field analysis and metaphor (e.g., Chilton, 1988), Greimasian semiotic analysis (e.g., Van Belle and Claes, 1985), Goffmanian frame analysis and Gricean conversation principles (e.g., Richardson, 1985), but by and large the critique was based on identifying linguistic manipulations (or ‘transformations’, e.g., Hodge, 1985), which were then interpreted as ideologically motivated distortions, in Chilton’s words, on showing how the ‘local organization of lexis and syntax . . . highlights certain meanings and obfuscates others’ (1985: xiv). Some of these linguistic manipulations are relatively obvious and have also been commented on by many media commentators. These include euphemisms, such as the relatively neutral ‘strike’ for a nuclear attack, or to take a more recent one, ‘collateral damage’ for the death of innocent civilians; technical terms, especially acronyms (e.g., WMD for ‘weapons of mass destruction’); and the names of weapons and military operations, e.g., the name of the MX missile in the Reagan era (‘Peacekeeper’) or the name of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (‘Little Boy’). In his description of Newspeak (‘War is Peace and Peace is War’ was one of its slogans), Orwell had already identified these phenomena and pointed at the way they constitute ‘doublespeak’ – the dissolution of the oppositions without which debate about issues such as war and peace becomes impossible (see Orwell, quoted in Chilton, 1988: 80; cf. also Hodge, 1985: 136): ‘Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets . . . this is called ‘‘pacification.’’’ Other, less obvious local organizations of lexis and syntax included grammatical agency, nominalization, and metaphor. In ‘call to arms’ speeches, for instance, the ascription of agency fluctuates between the addressed audience (‘we’), the nation (‘America,’ ‘this country’), and the moral cause that justifies war (‘Western commitment to democracy’), thus conflating the three, while the actions ascribed to these agents tend to be referred to in abstract terms, as in Bush’s speech of March 16, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ re/cases/2003/03) (‘‘We work towards a great cause, and that is peace and security in this world’’). The actions of the enemy tend to be more concrete and are ascribed to a personified and demonized enemy, as in the same speech (‘‘The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations’’). This then creates an us-them contrast. The nominalization of war actions and the use of agentless passive constructions obscures agency, as in the Times’ headlines at the time of the
518 War Rhetoric
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of April 7 and 10, 1945: ‘Rain of Ruin from the Air’ and ‘Second City Hit.’ Metaphors can make new and unprecedented events appear familiar, natural, and acceptable, as in the now increasingly common descriptions of war as a ‘job’ and as ‘business.’ Chilton (1988: 72) quotes an example from the Daily Mail of May 3, 1982: ‘‘An Argentine submarine appears to be hit. All this means is that the British forces are getting on with the job they were sent down to the South Atlantic to do, namely to remove the Argentines.’’ The importance of metaphor for our understanding of the world we live in has been powerfully argued by Lakoff and Johnson (1981); at the time of the first Gulf War, Lakoff wrote a paper on metaphor and war (1991), which he published on the Internet to avoid delay in publication and make it more widely available.
Critical Discourse Analysis Already in the mid-1980s, critical linguists also began to analyze war rhetoric in terms of discourses, ‘belief systems,’ for example in relation to the long-lasting antinuclear demonstration by women at Greenham Common (Fowler and Marshall, 1985). Here the focus was not on words and phrases but on particular complexes of ideas, such as that women are less rational than men, should confine themselves to domestic and maternal tasks, and so on. Such belief systems then manifested themselves through a range of lexical and syntactic means and in a range of contexts, for example through the use of terms such as ‘peace hysteria’ and ‘protesting peace mums’ in the popular press. Chilton (1988) related this to work on scripts and schemas in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence (e.g., Abelson, 1973, who had used the ‘Cold War script’ as one of his examples), pointing out that metaphors can often trigger whole complexes of ideas without referring to them in explicit and detailed ways. More recent work in critical discourse analysis has increasingly moved in the direction of identifying broad discursive strategies, focusing especially on the ‘legitimation’ of war (at other times the term ‘justification’ is used). Several articles of this kind can be found in a special issue of the journal Discourse and Society (15: 2–3) on the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. Graham et al. (2004), for instance, point at the remarkable consistency of the strategies used in call to war speeches over the past 1000 years. Studying a hundred such speeches, they found that all (1) refer to an ultimate moral force to legitimate the war (although the nature of this moral force evolved from ‘God,’ to ‘God and Country,’ and then to ‘Country’ or ‘People’ alone); (2) embed the
discourse in the history and culture that binds ‘us,’ the addressed audience that must be rallied behind the war, together; (3) construct the enemy as an evil other; and (4) provide unifying constructs for the people addressed. Lazar and Lazar (2004) deal specifically with ‘enemy construction’ and discuss strategies of ‘criminalization,’ ‘orientalization,’ and ‘vilification.’ Although they specify linguistic realizations of these categories in some cases (for instance, ‘criminalization’ is realized by the use of criminal vocabulary and ‘overlexicalization’), in other cases the realizations are semantic categories (for instance, ‘orientalization’ can be realized by ‘moral degeneracy,’ ‘bellicosity,’ and ‘duplicity’). In short, there has been a gradual move from an emphasis on ‘local’ lexical and syntactic features to an emphasis on overall rhetorical strategies and discourses (in the sense of belief systems). However, in most cases the argumentation still rests primarily on the use of discourse analytical methods. Relatively little connection is made with literature on the specific wars and conflicts discussed, or with literature from other fields, such as media studies, where less attention is paid to language but more to the context, e.g., to documenting forms of wartime media censorship (see, e.g., Schlesinger et al., 1983, which appeared roughly at the same time as Chilton, 1985).
Rhetoric The American approach to war rhetoric has by and large based itself on traditional rhetorical analysis, with explicit reference to Aristotle and the classic rhetoricians, and often also with reference to the work of Kenneth Burke (e.g., 1969), who saw rhetoric as language’s essential function of inducing social cooperation. This work is closely linked to the American tradition of public opinion and mass communication research that started in the 1920s with the work of Lasswell, Lippman, and others, and has never lost sight of rhetoric’s time-honored connection between political speechmaking and political action, a connection that critical linguists had to regain after having been trained in the formal and decontextualized linguistics of the 1950s and 1960s. American journals such as Communication Monographs and Quarterly Journal of Speech have been publishing articles on war rhetoric for a long time (e.g., Brockriede and Scott, 1969 Medhurst et al., 1982), and while war rhetoric has not become an area of specialization among critical discourse analysts (Chilton is perhaps the single exception), in America war rhetoric did become a specialized area of scholarship (see, e.g., Medhurst et al., 1997). A glance at the Internet soon shows in just how many
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American universities courses on war rhetoric are taught, with syllabuses that are sometimes preceded by the warning that controversial issues will be on the agenda. Textbooks and syllabuses use a variety of methods for the analysis of war rhetoric, including strategies, from the classic Aristotelian notions of ‘ethos’ (establishing the credibility and trustworthiness of the speaker), ‘pathos’ (appealing to the emotions of the audience), and ‘logos’ (providing evidence to back up what is proposed) to strategies such as ‘evasion’ and ‘diversion,’ as well as specific rhetorical techniques, including euphemism, jargon, and metaphor, as well as, for instance, repetition and specific techniques for the analysis of argumentation and the discovery of fallacies.
Conclusion The European and American approaches to war rhetoric are motivated by the same concern: a concern for maintaining the reasoned and critical forms of debate that have been fundamental to democracy since the days of Plato and Aristotle. More recently they have also grown more closely together in terms of their methods. American work has started to incorporate notions such as ‘genre’ and ‘intertextuality,’ and European work has become more interdisciplinary, linking up with historical and politicological approaches to war propaganda and with the specific histories of the discourses that are being analyzed and critiqued, and paying attention to nonlinguistic forms of war rhetoric, realizing, for instance, that images can play a particularly important role in strategies such as the demonization of enemies and the exaggeration of atrocities. And while most analyses have focused on political speeches and media reports and commentaries, there is now also an increasing realization of the importance of entertainment media in war propaganda, something which had already been noted in the context of media studies (see Schlesinger et al., 1983). The link between entertainment and propaganda goes back at least as far as the 1930s, when Goebbels (1948: 122) wrote that ‘argument is no longer effective’ and looked toward popular song, humor, and movies as key media of propaganda: ‘‘With films we can make politics too. It is a good expedient in the struggle for the soul of our people’’ (quoted in Bramstedt, 1965: 278). Today there is close cooperation between the Pentagon and the producers of the computer war games and Hollywood war movies (see Machin and Van Leeuwen, in press) that disseminate demonized images of the new ‘terrorist’ enemy and allow people to identify with American heroes.
In the current political climate it is clearly important that critical work on war rhetoric continues and that it is written accessibly and disseminated effectively, not least so that it can feed into the work of the journalists and media commentators who continue to write critically about the war rhetoric of today’s world leaders; a glance at the Internet shows that many still do. See also: Critical Discourse Analysis; Discourse of Nation-
al Socialism, Totalitarian; Media Panics; Media, Politics, and Discourse: Interactions; Politics and Language: Overview.
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See: Samar-Leyte.
Ward, Ida Caroline (1880–1950) B S Collins, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands I M Mees, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ida Caroline Ward, one of the leading Africanists of the 20th century, was born in Bradford, England, on October 4, 1880, the eighth child of a prosperous Yorkshire wool merchant. She was educated at the University of Durham, and then embarked on a long and successful career in school teaching. When in her thirties, she began to interest herself in linguistics, attending classes at Daniel Jones’s newly established department of phonetics at University College London, Jones offered her a full-time post in 1919 at UCL, where initially she specialized in English phonetics and speech pathology. Her early books, Speech defects: their nature and cure (1923), A handbook of English intonation (1926, written with her departmental colleague Lilias Armstrong), and the popular Phonetics of English (1929), reflect these enthusiasms. Ward soon began to focus more on the languages of West Africa and in 1932 moved over to London University’s School of Oriental Studies (later renamed School of Oriental and African Studies), where she could indulge this interest to the full. With Diedrich Westermann, she wrote the wide-ranging survey
Practical phonetics for students of African languages (1933) and in the same year produced her pioneering Phonetic and tonal structure of Efik; for the latter she was awarded a D.Lit. from London University. Further groundbreaking research on tone systems gave rise to a series of publications on West African languages, in particular her Introduction to the Ibo language (1936), which also explored vowel harmony. Her final major work in this area was the Introduction to the Yoruba language, published posthumously in 1952. Ida Ward is notable not only for the accuracy and meticulousness of her empirical research but also for the lucid exposition of theoretical principles of tonal analysis, which she developed at a point when this study was in its infancy. She carried out all her work through direct contact with native-speaker informants, undertaking long linguistic field trips to West Africa even in the hazardous travel conditions of World War II. Ida Ward was arguably the most brilliant of Daniel Jones’s many talented pupils, and her contribution laid the foundations for much subsequent research into African tone languages. In 1937 she established a department of West African languages in SOAS with herself at the head, where in 1944 she was appointed to a chair. She was unquestionably one of the most important driving forces that made London University in her lifetime the chief center of research into African linguistics. She retired in 1948, but continued to work right up to her death in 1949.