Pragmatics and Multimodal Political Input

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to attempt to provide the interpretative keys, through cognitive pragmatics, for aggressive political messages, in this case the political brand of Obama used by his opponents. In principle, we understand pragmatics as the study of verbal communication which aims at understanding utterances on the part of receptors in a known natural language. But utterances are not only accounted for by the semantics of the language but rather by the communicative intentions (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Carston 2002; Escandell 2006), which can only be tackled through non- demonstrative inference.
Now when we approach multimodal messages it is necessary to extend the inferences to material not strictly linguistic that can shed much light as inferable information. Therefore, it is essential to resort to the pragmatic concept of "cognitive context" —a set of initial assumptions or hypotheses— and define their role in multimodal interpretation. The theory of mind as the "inferential system of meta-representations" (Sperber 2000) interprets the behaviour of others by attributing their mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions as intentional (i.e, representing the world).
In this paper we will examine some of the most popular stickers as published by Obama's political opponents, by means of which they attack him thus revealing some political propaganda with a hidden message (covert, according to Tanaka 1994) and conclude that this multimodal discourse has a strong resemblance to the language of advertising.