Transitivity processes as pragmatic markers of ...

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Ideologically speaking Transitivity processes as pragmatic markers of political strategy in the ‘state of the nation’ speeches of the first Orbán government in Hungary* Attila Krizsán

University of Turku

This article offers a politolinguistic analysis of four ‘state of the nation’ speeches delivered by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 1999 and 2002. The analysis focuses on the ways in which Orbán’s self-representation, his discourse strategies and the tone of the speeches changed in response to changes in the ideological background over the four years in question. The findings demonstrate that Orbán’s voice was most active in the pre-election speech of 2002, that he had become increasingly interpellative (in the Althusserian sense) over this period and that he increasingly tried to conversationalize the dominant ideology. Keywords: Central European right-wing political discourse, Hungarian politics, Fidesz Hungarian Citizens’ Party, politolinguistics, quantitative systemicfunctional analysis, discourse analysis, indexicality, transitivity

1. The ‘state of the nation’ speeches of the first Orbán government The present study analyzes the texts of four annual ‘state of the nation’ speeches delivered by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 1999 and 2002. These speeches cover and encapsulate a four-year period in which the Fidesz Hungarian Citizens’ Party1 was the majority partner in a coalition government. The texts convey a certain image of the government and its view of the country over the four years in question. By comparing the speeches, it is possible to observe a change in tone which reflects changes in the dominant ideology during this period.2 The fact that the Prime Minister’s speeches were broadcast live on Hungary’s national public-service television and then repeated showed their importance for Pragmatics and Society 4:2 (2013), 177–199. doi 10.1075/ps.4.2.04kri issn 1878-9714 / e-issn 1878-9722 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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the government’s Public Relations Office. One aspect of this broadcasting strategy was evident in the Hungarian general-election campaign in 2002. According to Róka (2006), the campaign divided and antagonized the great majority of Hungarians and received heavy media coverage all over Europe. The polarizing nature of the campaign was well reflected in Orbán’s description of the elections as a choice between “two worlds” or “past and future”. The outcome was one of the most polarized and intense electoral campaigns in the post-communist era3, leading to the highest-ever turnout in parliamentary elections in Hungary.4 The result, writes Róka, was a narrow victory for the Socialists but a dramatic failure for the Young Democrats [Fidesz]. Some communication experts and political scientists claimed that the failure was due partly to the aggressive communication style and overstrained, negative campaign of the Alliance of Young Democrats and partly to image problems. (Róka 2006: 350–351)

Moreover, the campaign occurred in a society that was already polarized (Palonen 2009: 320–324; Tóka 1998: 24). And since 2002 the polarization of the Hungarian society has intensified (Palonen 2009: 324–326), which is well illustrated by the fact that scholars (in agreement with opinions heard from the civil society) currently often talk about two separate Hungaries (Palonen 2009; Vásárhelyi et al. 2005). Palonen argues that this situation is maintained by both political sides and the populist parties they center around: the ‘conservative’ party Fidesz and the ‘socialist’ party MSZP. In this sense, it is not only the political ‘right’ which is solely responsible for the polarization of the Hungarian society; critical analyses of leftist Hungarian political discourse are also needed. However, Orbán’s personal role is rather substantial in maintaining the current situation. As Palonen argues: Political polarisation produces strong leaders due to the lack of contestation from within the party or coalition. They in turn secure their position by strengthening the polarisation. This has been the main rhetorical strategy of Viktor Orbán, a key politician in postcommunist Hungary, the leader of the Fidesz party and in 1998–2002 the Hungarian PM. (Palonen 2006: 328)

In this article I claim that the tradition of Orbán’s ‘state of the nation’ speeches contributed to the further polarization of the Hungarian society by strengthening the public representation of the PM as a strong and active leader and by helping to unify the ‘right pole’ of the Hungarian society. The reason why I find it sensible to criticize the discursive practices of the Fidesz side before the socialist one lies in the fact that the Fidesz government is currently in power in Hungary (it has been since 2010) and a so called ‘authoritarian slide’ can be observed in their policy. Among other things this authoritarian slide is realized by the Fidesz government’s gradual

© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Ideologically speaking 179

increase of their power by, for instance, what they call ‘constitutional revolution’ and by bringing independent political institutions, such as the public prosecutor or the state audit office, under governmental influence. These moves and many others have recently received strong criticism5 from the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. A strong strategic attempt to manipulate public opinion was already visible in the speeches discussed in this article, in which I underline the ideological significance of these texts. My analysis focuses on the discourses which initially constructed Orbán’s institutional voice as Prime Minister. I argue that Orbán’s self-representation in his ‘state of the nation’ speeches served propagandistic purposes for the coalition government and the Fidesz party. Consequently, his selfrepresentation changed according to the public-image strategy needs of the party. Such a change, however, cannot be understood exclusively in terms of linguistic factors. Other factors will also be considered, such as the timing of the speech (pre-election, post-election, between elections), the popularity of the party and changes in the party’s self-representation. 2. Indexicality, representation and ideology in political discourse In this study I adopt a critical standpoint towards the ideological investments of the selected speeches as is common in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is a politically motivated form of research aimed at criticizing various forms of dominance, it is “discourse analysis with an attitude (…) [it] is biased and proud of it” (van Dijk 2001: 96). Hence my position is meant to enact a social critique (cf. Hennessy 1993; van Dijk 1993; Fairclough 1995; Calhoun 1998) of the communicative practices of the Hungarian government between 1999–2002. In my view social critique in linguistic analysis consists in exploring ideological systems of meaning in accordance with Fairclough’s (2003) definition of ideologies: Ideologies are representations of the social world which can be shown to contribute to establishing, maintaining and changing social relations of power, domination and exploitation. (Fairclough 2003: 9)

My approach is critical in the sense that it considers discourses (various systems of meaning) as effects of relations of power and asks how certain power positions are enacted through particular forms of language use. I consider these positions to be employed either in order to maintain dominance – hence to regenerate the status quo – or to resist and even subvert the dominant ideology (cf. Fairclough 2003: 206) and, by extension, produce non-ideological meanings.


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The analysis is based on variation in tendencies in the speaker’s use of pronominal indexes (i.e. personal pronouns and/or inflectional suffixes). Wilson (1992) demonstrates how politicians manipulate the usage of personal markers to avoid responsibility, to show solidarity or to fill their speeches with ideological content. Since the early 1990s, there have been numerous analyses of the effects of the use of pronominal indexes in political discourse (e.g. Fairclough 1989; Gastil 1992; Johnson 1994; Zupnik 1994; Arroyo 2000; Pearce 2001). The interactive effects of pronominal indexes are also central to studies in conversation analysis (CA) and sociolinguistics. In the present study, I take an analytical position different from that of CA researchers and sociolinguists (cf. Sidnell 2010) in that I do not see the text/context distinction as pre-given but analyze the representative function of language use and, to a lesser extent, its function to encode meanings of attitudes, interaction, and relationships (i.e., the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions, respectively in Halliday’s terminology) as a dialectical process. The present analysis is based on the degrees of responsibility outlined in Mühlhäusler and Harré’s (1990) definition of modulated indexicality. For this reason, I employ the scheme developed by Barát (1999),6 who applied Mühlhäusler and Harré’s theory to the Hungarian conjugation system7. Currently there is a tendency among political theorists to view political speeches as examples of ‘public conversation’ as opposed to the longstanding tradition of seeing them simply as examples of oratory (Remer 2008: 183). This more recent view operates with an understanding of the genre of political speeches as dialogic (cf. Bohman 1996: 17 and Chilton and Schaeffner 1997: 216). This understanding is shared in the present study as well. In this article, pronominal indexes are investigated with a focus on the representative aspect of discourse, in line with M. A. K Halliday’s dialectic position on the relationship between language (the mind) and reality; a position which informs his systemic-functional approach to grammar (cf. Halliday 1994: xiii). The choice of Halliday’s theory of transitivity was based on the fact that transitivity is primarily concerned with the construction of reality through discourse, i.e. the construction of ideologies. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) define the clause as the basic unit of meaning, and meaning as a form of representation: thus, in their view, through language, one builds a mental picture of reality. This ‘reality’ is inherently positioned, which means that it is represented from a particular point of view favoring particular values and interests while disfavoring others. These favored values and interests, or ‘ideologies’ are then ‘propagated’ in these representations. That is to say, one constructs or reconstructs ideology through language. This is done grammatically via the processes of representation in the clause (transitivity). For the purposes of ideological criticism, the system of transitivity thus specifies the types of processes which function to regenerate the ideologies working in the discourses of a speech event. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) categorize our conceptions of reality according to ‘goings-on’, such as doing, happening, feeling and being. They distinguish between six ‘process types’ on the basis of how we represent these ‘goings-on’ in our use of verbs. These are: doing (material processes), sensing (mental processes), being or being identical to something (relational processes), behaving (behavioral processes), saying (verbal processes) and existing (existential processes). My aim is to investigate how these ‘goings-on’ are represented by the speaker (Orbán) in his ‘state of the nation’ speeches; I will pay special attention to how these representations vary across the different texts. Thus my linguistic analysis centers on the following questions: i. Are there any identifiable trends of the usage of pronominal indexes across the speeches? ii. Is there any difference in the amount and type of verbal usage of the speeches in terms of transitivity processes connected to various grammatical persons? My linguistic findings will be discussed with a special focus on how they are related to ‘who does what to whom’ (cf. Iwamoto 1995) in the differing political contexts of the speeches. In order to do this, I first outline a general, comparative picture of the texts, which is based on the different kinds of process types they contain, but I will also take into consideration the length of the texts and the change in their political context. Then I examine three deictic categories (‘I’ én, ‘we’ mi and ‘you’ önök8) and their role in the speeches, and discuss the ways these pragmatic markers reflect the speaker’s response to the political situation by altering his selfrepresentation. I compare the frequencies of each of these categories for all the speeches and analyze typical sequences of the texts to illustrate some of their main features. In these close textual analyses, I examine marked cases, since they reflect the speaker’s emphasis and a higher degree of speaker responsibility. My purpose in exploring the pragmatic relationships in the analyzed discourse is to investigate how language is used to construct reality,9 including the speaker’s identity, by the speaker’s discursive practices. As a text’s actual context is of special importance for understanding its function, the next section will provide a detailed discussion of the discursive context of the speeches under analysis. In this study, I also wish to contribute to present-day CDA research by performing a quantitatively based critical linguistic analysis of transitivity processes in political discourse10. In order to verify the representativeness of my comparative results of transitivity systems, I apply statistical significance tests as part of my data processing methods. The relevance of quantitatively based studies for CDA has long been argued for by Stubbs (1997), who considers quantitative CDA analysis as necessary in order to make up for the lack of statistical and theoretical representativeness of the randomly chosen material in traditional CDA analyses. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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3. The discursive context of the speeches Prior to analyzing the texts themselves, I will describe their contextual features, as it is important in CDA to consider context beyond the text. These features, such as where and on what occasion the speeches were given, influence their discursive design. They therefore have a communicative and an ideological significance which must be taken into account in the overall analysis. The ‘state of the nation’ speeches were given in response to a pseudo-invitation. According to the narrative Orbán gave at the beginning of his first speech, he was invited to deliver his speech by an association which represents the citizens of the country: Indeed, it is a long desire of the citizens of Hungary to be informed as soon as possible – and most precisely – about everything that the members of the government carry out each year, about what they plan to do in the near future and on what basis they plan to do it. Up until now, I myself missed such reports too. So I accepted the invitation of the Hungarian Association of Civic Cooperation [Magyar Polgári Együttműködés Egyesület] with enthusiasm. Eventually, I got the opportunity to do my best here to reveal what I can tell you about the current state of Hungary: the problems we must face, the goals we have had the opportunity to set, what we (SN111, lines 7–15) have achieved together with you.

Orbán attributes the necessity for his speech not to the government’s wish to give an annual report, but to the needs of others. In referring to these ‘others’ by the ambiguous term polgár (citizen), a key term in rightist Hungarian political discourse, Orbán conflates two possible referents, Hungarian citizens and Fidesz supporters12. Exploiting the ambiguity of this term (Fidesz supporters / Hungarian citizens), Orbán represents himself and the Fidesz party as possessing a much broader basis of legitimacy than they enjoy; by doing this, he excludes the views of Fidesz opponents from the Hungarian position. What is more, there is another group of ‘others’ implicitly referred to: Orbán’s political opponents in power before him. By saying that he missed similar types of reports before, he implicitly criticizes their communication towards the Hungarian people since ‘they had the possibility to deliver similar reports, but did not do it’. Interestingly, as its name might suggest, the association which invited Orbán to report on the state of the nation operates in the interests of the Fidesz party. Hence, the institutions whose ideological dominance the speech was designed to maintain provided the pretext for the speech event itself. The speeches were given, not in the Hungarian Parliament building, but – out of any official political context – in the Vigadó concert hall. Once frequented by the Hungarian aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, then by the communist nomenklatura,



the hall is now patronized by the business and cultural elite, thus reinforcing the elitist aspect of the word polgár as an ideological symbol for the party. Additionally, the choice of location implies an element of entertainment (Vigadó literally means ‘place of merriment’), thus licensing the use of a different register than would have been the case for a more ‘official’ setting. This was reflected in the ways abstract rhetorical tools were used in the speeches, i.e. in the frequent uses of narratives, metaphors and other figures of speech that result in making the speeches more entertaining and less factually oriented. Moreover, a speech delivered in the Vigadó instead of the Parliament building projects an image of being less political, and less conventional, thus facilitating the conversational tone of the speeches. Furthermore, since the audience of the speeches consisted of invited guests (as opposed, for example, to MPs in the house of Parliament), the occasion was contextualized as a special type of festivity, a celebration of the government and its supporters or of the polgár. Before discussing common aspects of the contexts of the four speeches, I would like to specify some of the differences between them. These differences were rooted in the different political situation each year, which resulted in a change in the basic themes of the speeches. The two most significant speeches in this respect are the first (SN1) and the last speech (SN4). SN1 was delivered as a statement by the leader of a newly-formed government: it was the first of the ‘state of the nation’ speeches in Hungary and marked the beginning of the government’s communication of its ideology to the public. SN4 was intended to function as a sort of a summary of the previous four years and to operate as part of the electoral campaign of 2012. These two speeches, however, are much shorter than the others and contain the highest proportion of first-person plural (henceforth P1) and the lowest proportion of first-person singular (henceforth S1) indexes (see Figures 1 and 2). By this, they seem to express collective responsibility more often and refer more frequently to the institutional role of the speaker, rather than to his individual role. In the Fidesz propaganda, the year 2000 was dedicated to celebrating the Millennium and the thousandth anniversary of the Hungarian state. Consequently, the speech given in 2001 (SN3) and to some extent the speech delivered in 2000 (SN2) are devoted to this topic. Through the Millennium theme, the government attempts to define Hungary and Hungarian identity. They do this in a way that represents their own value system as the values of all Hungarians, excluding (as non-Hungarians) alternative views, such as those of the government’s political opponents. Hence, they use these occasions to strengthen their political position by naturalizing and popularizing the dominant ideology.


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4. Findings The transcripts of the four speeches contain 16,013 tokens, distributed as follows: SN1: 2981 words; SN2: 5081 words; SN3: 5016 words; and SN4: 2935 words. To measure the text’s possible differences in ‘active lexis’, they were analyzed for what I call ‘process density’. Process density shows the proportion of the total number of processes in each text expressed in percentages of the total number of words. I calculated the total number of processes as the number of active verbs in terms of transitivity. Higher process-density, meaning a more concentrated amount of ‘goings-on’, can indicate an increased amount of ideological content. The reason for this is that ‘goings-on’ represent the world ‘as it is’, i.e. as it is constructed via experiences which are used to transmit the particular worldview of the speaker. The more frequently this is done, the stronger the intention of the speaker to produce such an effect on the audience. My findings in relation to the process densities in the four speeches are summarized in Figure 1. PROCESS DENSITY (PD)

Speech

Words

Number of processes

PD

SN1

2981

199

6.67%

SN2

5081

331

6.51%

SN3

5016

317

6.31%

SN4

2935

224

7.63%

Figure 1. Process density in the speeches

Statistically, there is no significant difference between the process densities of the first three speeches. However, p