A sign of war: The strategic use of violent imagery in contemporary Lebanese political rhetoric

On ‘flip‐flopping’: Branded stance‐taking in U.S. electoral politics1

“…This question may be restated, more fundamentally, as a question of ‘addressivity,’ which Bakhtin (1986: 95) defined sweepingly as an utterance's ‘quality of being directed to someone.’ Addressivity involves, minimally, a two‐place relationship, where some utterance in the proximal speech event – the here‐and‐now participation framework, the zero‐point from which addressivity occurs – is interpreted as ‘directed’ to someone in a second event (the same event for the case of interactional co‐presence; a different event for the case of interdiscursive interaction). Addressivity may be motivated through denotationally explicit means, as in an Islamist political leaflet in Lebanon that speaks ‘to the citizens of Beirut,’‘to the noble Beirutis,’‘to all Islamic societies, organizations, and forces,’‘to those whose children … have been killed at the hand of the criminal Lebanese Forces’ (Riskedahl 2007: 316), but more often addressivity is motivated through denotationally implicit means. Gaze direction and bodily orientation have long been identified as means for selecting addressees and vectors of address (Holmes 1984; Kendon 1990), for instance.…”