Democracy and Language: Exploring Semantic Transformations

Abstract

In political studies, the concept of democracy has been addressed time and again, most often from an institutional or normative point of view. To the contrary, studies on the rhetorical use of the term as a catchword within strategies of argumentation have been quite few. It seems that ‘democracy’ has been treated mostly as a phenomenon at the expense of studying ‘democracy’ as a word. We think, however, that this concept is too powerful to be assessed without due attention to its instrumental or poly-semantic capacity. ‘Democracy’ has been frequently used as a keyword in political oratory in order to persuade voters and to support even controversial policies. In addition, its linguistic variations have allowed a number of creative uses of the idea that is allegedly shared by everybody. Free translations, the use of synonyms, derivatives or composites, the transplantation of the word in new contexts, as well as its use in combination with other words are all rhetorical moves, which have brought about conceptual flexibility that may well explain the survival and proliferation of the idea today. The aim of this panel is to bring to the fore these discursive uses of ‘democracy’. They may appear in political speeches, parliamentary debates, media, literature, or any other written or oral source from the past or present. For this purpose, politico-linguistic analyses of ‘democracy’ could be optionally studied along with the actors’ motivations, in political contexts where the term appears, and as a part of, or move against, linguistic conventions. We thus welcome proposals that take into account the linguistic dimension of the idea of democracy and its political and historical contingency.

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