Gestures and Words in Political Discourse: A Case Study of the Obama-McCain Encounter

Abstract

Our purpose in the present paper is to analyse the discourse strategies, both verbal and nonverbal, used by the Senators Barack Obama and John McCain in the last presidential campaign in the USA (14th October 2008). In a televised political debate everything counts: words, the way words are organised into sentences (syntactic and thematic structures), expressions of (dis)agreement, equivocation strategies, terms of address, physical appearance, facial gestures, body movements, hand movements, eye contact, pauses, silences, initial and final handshakes, and even the politician’s sweat. For this reason, our analysis will focus on the interplay between Obama’s and McCain’s verbal and nonverbal discourse strategies used to defend their faces and their nonverbal behaviours. Politicians know that being a good orator is not enough because the audience will decode not only what they say but also the way they say things and the way they behave. Conscious though they are of the importance of all the above-mentioned verbal and nonverbal devices, they are not always in control of all of them. Consequently, what they say verbally does not always coincide with what they express nonverbally and, in some occasions, the audience may get much more information from decoding what politicians do than from decoding what politicians say. Analysing nonverbal devices, we can know much more about politicians’ intentions, feelings, or even know whether they are lying or telling the truth