RE-CONTEXTUALIZING POLITICAL DISCOURSE: An analysis of shifting spaces in songs used as a political tool

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Ham...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical discourse studies 2015-07, Vol.12 (3), p.279-296
Main Author: Filardo-Llamas, Laura
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition
critical discourse analysis
Discourse
Linguistics
mental space
multimodality
Music
Political speech
Songs
spatial cognition
Text-World Theory
YouTube
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Summary:This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Hampshire 2008 speech. In Will.i.am's music video 'Yes, we can', uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama's speech. This type of communicative strategy results in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world.
ISSN:1740-5904
1740-5912
DOI:10.1080/17405904.2015.1013478