The visibility of aggressive political discourse. A pragmatic-cognitive interpretation of one anti-Obama’s poker racist billboard

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe, discuss and eventually interpret a multimodal communicative representation of an external billboard. It falls within the context of a pre-electoral political campaign under considerable strain and polarized opinions. We have characterized its political discourse as potentially aggressive. We start from this assumption because, as translators and cognitive interpreters, we are playing the role of receptor on a secondary communication message simply because we are members of another cultural, cognitive and emotional environment. We believe that the basic attempt of the billboard is to stigmatize the political opponent and the party he is representing. Using Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory as a framework (1986, 1995, 1998, 2002, Wilson & Sperber 2012), communication is best described as a cognitive computation –which aims at the achievement of relevant information - that allows us to interact with the symbols and words ostensibly sent out by the communicator. In order to understand the features of this political discourse, we interpret the information drawn from their specific codes and then we sieve them through the filter of our inference ability. Interpretation as a cognitive dynamic process should allow us to construct a set of ad hoc concepts depending on the notions of contextual effect and processing cost put forward by Relevance Theory.