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Rosa Giménez-Moreno and Eusebio V. Llàcer discuss what motivated their recent Journal of Language and Politics article, 'Exploring the evolution of the concept of liberty in the U.S. presidential inaugurals', and how they hope to build on it in future.
This approach could shed light on the relationship between discourse and liberty in our post-truth and post-pandemic global context, including the dynamics and changes related to illiberal interpretations of "freedom of speech" and how freedom—or its absence—is articulated in political discourse and integrated into contemporary national identities.
Why did you decide to write this piece?
Both of us are Spanish scholars with over three decades of dedication to the study of English and American linguistics, literature, and culture. One of us specializes more in the analysis of discourse and the pragmatics of English in professional, institutional, and socio-political contexts, while the other focuses on the study of U.S. literature and culture. Our previous research on the malleability of common but influential terms of frequent use has revealed clear differences in their meanings, depending on key factors such as the socio-political and ideological orientation of the medium and the context in which they are used. Political discourse has always been a prominent field of research. Still, it has gained even more significance recently due to global political changes, the availability of increasingly sophisticated corpus linguistics tools, and the profusion of high-quality papers and innovative approaches published in recent decades. In our quest to understand the meanings of common and frequently used sociopolitical terms essential in political discourse, we have observed a global shift in the conceptualization and expression of fundamental human rights. Specifically, we were intrigued by the conceptualization of the four rights that have been essential to U.S. politics since the birth of the Republic. This interest led us to analyze the evolution of these concepts by focusing on the specific political subgenre of inaugural addresses. Our initial study focused on the concept of "equality," and the findings, which will be published next year, were quite startling and insightful. In the present paper, we analyze the evolution of the right to "liberty" from its first mention in the U.S. Declaration of Independence to the present day. We are also aware that “liberty” is a prevalent concept used by many politicians worldwide nowadays, though with quite different connotations and meanings, which we abbreviate with the acronym CAR, “Connotative associations to this right”. We thought it would be interesting and groundbreaking to study the evolution of this concept and its CARs from a mixed linguistic-historic point of view, paying due attention to economic, socio-cultural, and political conditions.
What are the key takeaways?
By analyzing U.S. inaugural addresses from a lexical-semantic and evolutionary perspective, this research demonstrates how chronology and historical context shape the development and application of the fundamental right to liberty in the U.S., highlighting the concept's malleability and adaptability. It shows that corpus linguistics allows for quantitative and qualitative observations that exceed the researcher's intuition, thereby providing greater transparency, objectivity, reliability, and replicability. Additionally, it elucidates the intricate lexical-semantic categorization of this mental construct within this specific genre, emphasizing the significance of inaugural addresses in the history of the U.S. Republic, their socio-political relevance, and their communicative complexity across all linguistic levels. This analysis reveals how political and historical events, such as conflicts and conjunctural crises, significantly influence the style of these speeches.
From a closer perspective, the findings show that the ideological profiles of the presidents' parties significantly influence the emphasis allocated to certain CARs of this right. For example, Republicans such as Reagan (1981), George W. Bush (2001), and Donald Trump (2017) appeal more to a sense of national security, foreign intervention, patriotism, and personal liberty. In contrast, Democrats like FDR (1933), Bill Clinton (1993), and Joe Biden (2021) focus on responsibility, the common good, democracy, global identity, and the defense of human rights in the U.S. territory. Moreover, high-impact current events also affect the prominence and interpretation of these cognitive constructs. The results further highlight that the percentages of references to liberty in U.S. inaugural addresses are particularly high in speeches from the early years of the U.S. Republic and more recent times.
Finally, this study underscores how analyzing political discourse through cognitive linguistics and lexical semantics can illuminate social, political, and historical issues, and vice versa.
Where do you plan to go next in your research?
An extension of the current classical lexical-semantic analysis of liberty would involve incorporating advanced frameworks that allow for a deeper examination of the political-ideological implications of our findings. For example, the methodological approach of Discourse-Conceptual Analysis (Krzyzanowski, 2016, 2019) could be applied more intensively and extensively. DCA has gained prominence, enabling a more focused, detailed, and systematic exploration of connotations deeply associated with human rights. This approach could shed light on the relationship between discourse and liberty in our post-truth and post-pandemic global context, including the dynamics and changes related to illiberal interpretations of "freedom of speech" and how freedom—or its absence—is articulated in political discourse and integrated into contemporary national identities.
In addition to examining other fundamental human rights and near-future U.S. inaugural addresses, this interdisciplinary study may be extended to other nations and political systems. It will focus on the configuration of their essential rights, and the interrelation between the linguistic and cognitive-semantic dimensions and other influencing factors, such as governmental, cultural, and rhetorical elements. These insights may benefit politicians, sociologists, philosophers, historians, educators, philologists, translators, and professionals with diverse interdisciplinary interests. Finally, we believe there is a niche for more interdisciplinary and multimodal studies that explore the relationship between these speeches and influential political, historical, interpersonal, psycho-social, and emotive factors.
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