This paper examines the linguistic devices and patterns of argumentation that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) use to hide their racist attitudes and ideology through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. It demonstrates how the... more
This paper examines the linguistic devices and patterns of argumentation that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) use to hide their racist attitudes and ideology through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. It demonstrates how the populist right-wing political party makes use of nomination, predication and argumentation strategies to construct in-groups and out-groups which form the basis of discriminatory discourse. The Discourse-Historical Approach is embraced for the analysis of these strategies and their linguistic means by utilising its understanding of critique and the four levels of context. Intratextuality and intertextuality proved key to identifying the social actors of the out-group who were often suppressed via abstractions and nominalizations amongst other nomination strategies. It was discovered that predication strategies of metaphor, insinuations, allusions and presuppositions were utilised by UKIP to implicitly ascribe negative attributes to the out-group revealing racist attitudes. The study discovers that container metaphors are a consistent linguistic device and a common theme throughout the analysis of the texts, where it is used in topoi of threat. These type of topoi are also recontextualised throughout the texts via metaphors in an attempt to reinforce the racist ideology. Fallacious hasty generalisations and the topos of danger or threat are the most frequent types of argumentation strategy as is common in past CDA research of more explicit racist groups in the UK political context.
