How South African members of parliament 'talk past' each other

What is it about?

This article describes how members of South Africa's parliament used language to argue about the right procedure to follow in a meeting of the Portfolio Committee on Transport. Participants on both sides of the argument (the ANC and opposition parties) use value-laden language to portray their version of the procedure to be followed as being morally superior to that of their opponents. They also reinforce their positions by making apparent concessions to those on the other side of the argument. Their use of language shows that they are 'talking past each other' by drawing on competing visions of what it means to be ‘pro-democracy’ in post-apartheid South Africa.

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Why is it important?

This article shows how Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) can be used together to analyse how language is to group people and ideas together, and then charge these groups with negative or positive values. It is one of the first linguistic studies to enact the LCT concept of axiological condensation. Here this concept is used to describe the ways in which evaluative language is used to position one group as being more morally virtuous than another.

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