Xenophobia in American Political Discourse: A Sociopragmatic Study

Abstract

This study sociopragmatically deals with xenophobia in American political discourse. Understanding xenophobia in American political discourse through a sociopragmatic perspective highlights the importance of addressing the root causes and underlying issues. Xenophobia is mainly selected because it has not been given a close analysis by researchers from a sociopragmatic perspective, as much as the researcher could investigate. Consequently, this knowledge gap needs to be bridged by socipragmatically examining xenophobia in the context of American political discourse. This study, hence, is an attempt to achieve the following aims: pinpointing the sociopragmatic indicators that mark the existence of xenophobia; finding out the pragmatic strategies used to reflect xenophobia in the context of American political discourse; and showing the effect of the social variable of authoritative power of xenophobic speakers on their language. In accordance with its aims, this study hypothesises that: xenophobia socipragmatically manifests through certain sociopragmatic indicators such as the use of out-group markers, negative stereotyping, scapegoating, fear mongering, and policy proposals; xenophobia is pragmatically manifested in the activation of the pragmatic strategies of  assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative speech acts in addition to the strategies of repetition, dehumanization, and hedging; and xenophobic speakers use their authoritative power to influence their audience by employing several strategies. To accomplish its aims, this study follows certain steps. It briefly reviews the related literature about the sociopragmatics of xenophobia and develops a model of xenophobia to analyse the data. It also analyses five extracts qualitatively using the model developed in this study for this purpose and discusses the findings to arrive at some conclusions. This study concludes that xenophobia is a negative attitude towards people from different countries or cultures that is sociopragmatically recognized by certain indicators and demonstrated by several pragmatic strategies.