Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis: A cross-disciplinary inquiry

Abstract

This paper discusses important and fruitful links between (Critical) Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. In a detailed analysis of three utterances of an election speech by the Austrian rightwing politician Jörg Haider, it is illustrated in which ways a discourse-analytical and pragmatic approach grasps the intricacy of anti-Semitic meanings, directed towards the President of the Viennese Jewish Community. The necessity of in-depth context-analysis in multiple layers (from the socio-political context up to the co-text of each utterance) moreover emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches when investigating such complex issues as racism and anti-Semitism as produced and reproduced in discourse. More specifically, the relevance of pragmatic devices such as insinuations, presuppositions and implicatures, is discussed when analyzing instances of ‘coded language’, i.e., utterances with indirect and latent racist and anti-Semitic meanings as common in official discourses in Western Europe.