The role of interdiscursivity in public speaking (on the basis of Barack Obama’s victory
speech (2008))
Чантуридзе Юлия Михайловна
So much discussion has recently been held about discourse. There is a considerable
amount of its definitions, all of them bringing its different peculiarities to the fore. The one
that is essential for the present article has been given by professor Norman Fairclough, who
has defined discourse as “more than just language in use: it is language use, whether speech
or writing, seen as a type of social practice.” [Fairclough 1992a: 28]. From this definition it
follows that the main peculiarity of discourse is the fact that language is not taken into
consideration without its real use, a certain context. Language is not influential on its own. It
is only at the moment of being used when it gets power. That is why discourse is always
coloured by its participants’ social, political and cultural characteristics.
Moreover, in discourse one can notice cooperation of the tones of previous discourses,
no matter if they were created by the same author or belong to the same topic. Discourse
exists in the state of interrelation with other discourses rendering the same social events,
expressing author’s similar point of view and the way of arguing and also the same conditions
of discourse creation. Such an interrelation is often defined as “intertextuality”.
The analysis of intertextuality appeals to the achievements of several studies.
Firstly, it can be traced back to the ideas of neoclassic philosophy, which postulated an
active role of socio-cultural environment in the process of meaning-perception and meaningcreation. As Hans-George Gadamer wrote, “everything said possesses truth not just on its
own but points at something not said. And only when the said is combined with the non-said,
the whole utterance becomes clear” [translated from Новейший Философский Словарь
2003: 429].
Secondly, the world observed the creation of the term “intertextuality” by J.Kristeva in
1967. Intertextuality is the existence of the elements of different texts in one text. R.Bart has
pointed to the main characteristic of an intertext: «Каждый текст является интертекстом;
другие тексты присутствуют в нем на различных уровнях в более или менее
узнаваемых формах» [Барт 1989: 417-418].
These ideas lead one to the necessity of paying attention not only to discourse as it is
when analyzing it but also to its inner and outer connections and to references to other
discourses hidden in it. In some cases (for example, when one deals with quotations) defining
such connections seems to be a rather easy task but usually it appears to be of special
difficulty.
Almost at the same time M.M.Bakhtin made a valuable contribution to the
understanding of connections between several texts arguing that texts appeal to other texts
reflecting in themselves their “voices”. In his works Bakhtin states that language is dialogical
in nature, i.e. in a text one can always find a reference to some previous texts.
Finally, the notion of intertextuality has got a broader field of application. In 1992
N.Fairclough coined the term “interdiscursivity” [Fairclough 1992b: 84] when he realized that
the idea of intertextuality could not be transferred into cognitive linguistics without any
transformations. At present social and political characteristics of the participants of
communication are also taken into account.
Indeed, it is believed that all participants of communication share “common
knowledge” [Краткий словарь когнитивных терминов 1997: 174-175], as E.S.Kubryakova
named it. It contains knowledge of their history, social status, shared concepts and their
understanding and interpretation. Only then communication is successful when the audience
has the same background information as the speaker/writer. That is why when preparing a
public address a speaker can be rather sure that the audience possesses the same knowledge.
So it is of extreme importance for a speaker to use this knowledge so masterfully that a
listener recognizes it in discourse.
What linguists are interested in are the linguistic means that an author uses for
rendering somebody else’s words as they help to understand the cognitive aspect of creating
this or that discourse.
In order to illustrate the idea of interdiscursivity Barack Obama’s victory speech
(2008) is chosen for analysis. The main ideas of Obama’s speech are going to be outlined on
the basis of the examination of interdiscursivity cases. This choice seems relevant as Obama’s
victory speech is characterized by “multi-voiceness” (see [Бахтин 1972]): one can easily
notice the presence of his predecessors’ voices in it.
The speaker’s main tendency here is combining two discourses: that of Abraham
Lincoln and the Founding Fathers of the United States, on the one hand, and Martin Luther
King’s one, on the other. This peculiarity renders Obama’s striving for support not only from
his contemporaries but also from his predecessors.
Obama alludes to Lincoln when quoting first the Declaration of Independence and
then - a well-known phrase from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863): “…a government of
the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth” [Obama 2008].
Lincoln’s purport was reminding people of equality. The only thing that is changed here is the
tense of the verb (“…and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall
not perish from the Earth” [Lincoln 1863]). A shift from Future Simple to Present Perfect
shows that these ideas have remained the same despite a considerable time gap between the
two speeches.
Then Obama again quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words, this time – from his inaugural
address: “We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not
break our bonds of affection” [Obama 2008]. This quotation significantly increases the power
of the idea of unity. Even though a democrat has won the election, the representatives of the
Republican Party are not called enemies.
Indeed, it is such unity of the whole nation that becomes part and parcel of Obama’s
dream of future. In other words, it can hardly come true if people continue pointing to
differences between them. Obama has been trying to persuade people of this since his address
at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, which made him famous: “…there's not a
liberal America, and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's
not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America - there's the
United States of America” [Obama 2004]. It is these lines that are likely to be recalled in
people’s memory when Obama says the following words:
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican,
black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of
individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the
United States of America [Obama 2008].
In this case one can also speak about interdiscursivity due to the syntactic structure of
the sentence: the antonyms (or contextual antonyms) pointing to the diversity of American
society are united with the help of a conjunction “and”. In Barack Obama’s discourse this
structure has got a clear reference to the idea of unity.
Next, there are numerous explicit and implicit allusions to Martin Luther King, Jr. and
his speeches. He is referred to as “a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall
Overcome.’” Here one is faced with ‘multi-layered’ interdiscursivity as the words “We Shall
Overcome” have their own associations and even roots in music. They, in their turn, where
taken from African American evangelical music, which brings biblical motives to the speech.
Martin Luther King masterfully included these words in his speech in Memphis (1968) having
made them even more well-known. Thus, the words emphasize African Americans’ deep
hope of their peaceful future.
One more example of interdiscursivity is worth paying attention to. Obama’s victory
speech has also a reference to King’s most famous speech “I have a dream”. The image of
“beacon burning” (“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as
bright…” [Obama 2008]) imitates one of the first lines of King’s speech: “This momentous
decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared
in the flames of withering injustice” [King 1963]. Thus, the idea of hope gets the shape of a
beacon. This is done in order to show how hope leads people through the world of suffering
and violence.
To conclude, the present article contains only some examples of interdiscursivity in
Barack Obama’s victory speech (2008). They seem sufficient, though, to illustrate the forms
of its presence and role in modern discourse. It is thanks to interdiscursivity based on the
“common knowledge” shared by the author and the recipients of discourse that it is possible
to achieve such proficiency in meaning-expression.
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