Pratiche di (de)legittimazione a confronto nei discorsi di Benito Mussolini e Palmiro Togliatti

Political discourse implicates a frame in which politicians, insofar as they are recognized as such, speak in a public context (Chilton & Ilyin 1993; Chilton 2004). The pragma-linguistic events involving the political actor normally realize in public forums in which the involved persons try to legitimize their own political agenda or delegitimize the agenda proposed by opponents. It is generally assumed that the politicians embody the symbolic power (Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Bourdieu 2001) – inherent in the linguistic practice – in order to legitimize or rather «naturalize» their own objectives (Fairclough 2003). Thus, political discourse is a classical instance of persuasive discourse, conceived and codified for carrying “official” aims (van Leeuwen 2007; Cap 2008, 2013). The most deep-set and classical persuasive essence of political discourse manifests itself in allowing the political actors to characterize their own aims as shared and necessary for their target audience (Martin Rojo & van Dijk 1997;).