“Strict vs. Nurturant Parents? A Corpus-Assisted Study of Congressional Positioning on the War in Iraq”

Synopsis: 1. Introduction, or locating the study; 1.1 The issue; 1.2 Research rationale; 1.2.1 Theoretical perspective; 1.2.2 Methods; 1.2.3 Theoretical/ Practical problems in marrying CL & SFL; 1.3 Research design: our corpus; 2. The study; 2.1 Getting underway; 2.2 The node words examined; 2.2.1 Thesaurus classifications; 2.2.2 Reference corpora comparisons; 3. Findings; 3.1 What Democrats and Republicans appraise [sub-sections for each of node words investigated throughout section 3]; 3.2 Negative vs. positive appraisal; 3.3 inscribed vs evoked appraisal; 3.4 Engagement, or rhetorical potential; 3.4.1 Mono-logistic or dialogistic positioning?; 3.4.2 Contracting or expanding meaning?; 3.4.3 Register-specific resources?; 4. In closing ABSTRACT: In Moral Politics (2002 [1996]: 11), G. Lakoff alleges that: 1) Conservatives and Liberals misread one another due to conflicting moral systems, and 2) these are expressed in ‘lexical metaphors’ connected to the ‘Strict Father’ Mentality and the ‘Nurturant Parent’ one. We consider these claims: 1) an oversimplified dichotomy of political positioning and, 2) a too-circumscribed classification of the linguistic resources construing it. More profitable in our opinion is to hypothesize subtler positional shadings located along a cline between these extremes and to investigate these with a model of evaluation (e.g. Martin and White 2005). This we do in the TEI-tagged Iraq sub-corpus of the 135 US House of Representatives sittings for 2003, of just over 1,500,000 and structured into 1, 5 and 60 min speeches, and full debates. Speakers are tagged for sex, party affiliation, and institutional role. Presented are the results of investigation into recurring patterns of potentially [+ strict] and [+ nurturing] meanings across the corpus in the environment of node words that have been chosen in part according to Lakoff’s own cues, but also with reference to relative ‘keyness’, to the semantic categories of Rogets’ Thesaurus, and finally, intuitively. Included in an initially hypothesized ‘strict’ category were just*, *puni*, and the (in)famous shock and awe and in the ‘nurturing’, to protect, car*, help* and compassion*, while *tolera*, *fair* and right* and wrong* were theorized as yielding bidirectional instantiations. Interestingly, The words in both moral systems have to do – and to a similar degree - with the exercise of ‘Volition’, as well as with the Emotion, Religion and Morality spheres, but only the liberal one with ‘Intellect’. Before analysis, these nodes’ were examined to see if the powers of close collocation stretched to indicating reliably just what was being Appraised. The BNC and a large reference corpus of US political speeches (1960-2004) were also tapped for comparative data. Research questions include: whether it is only, or even just mainly, the conflicting ideologies of political opponents which make for the alternative patterns of evaluation they may construe when disagreeing, or whether it is not rather, or at least also, what it is that they’re evaluating that brings about divergences in those patterns. In brief, to what degree is the clue to ideology-promotion the apprais-er, or the apprais-ee/ apprais-ed? (Besides, of course, the appraisal itself.) With the similarities among many experiential and interpersonal meanings apparently emerging from the study of the various Iraq corpora in the CorDis* project, regardless of the register, one hypothesis to be tested is that certain linguistic resources for Engagement may be to some extent register-specific, i.e., determined by, in SFL terms, the Field (‘deliberate dispute’) and Tenor (‘ritualistic politeness’) variables that may be seen to be activating the degree(s) of explicitness sanctioned in deliberative discourse. Also to be probed, however, is the significance of the specific, alternative, cultural paradigm(s) within which such debate, intertextually, takes place.