A Critical Study Of Quotation In The Bush Administration's Political Discourse

Quotation is an indispensable part in all human languages.This dissertation is a critical analysis of the quotation in political discourse from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.The analysis of quotation is situated in the Bush administration's propaganda in the building-up six months to the Iraq war from September 8,2002 to March 19,2003.Those political discourses attempted to propagate the war rationales,with the aim to control public opinion and garner support for the war policy,and are hence fundamentally argumentative in nature.While the war rationales and the war policy have sustained world-wide suspect and criticisms,the administration's coordinated sale campaign won popular domestic acclaims in the build-up to the war.Evolutionary psychology makes it clear that human behavior is the joint result of innate equipment and environmental factors.The innate equipment refers to the evolved psychological mechanisms,used interchangeably with cognitive modules.The critical approach the dissertation adopts is based primarily upon the modular concept in evolutionary psychology,with findings in sociology and linguistics incorporated to enhance the objectivity of the critical analysis.The dissertation introduces the functionally-specialized cognitive modules that can inspire the critical analysis of the sequential constituents of quotation,reports and describes the salient features of different constituents,discusses the cognitive or emotional effects of the various quoting strategies in the general public's formation of biased collective mind,and explores how the cognitive and emotional effects successfully addressed the innate cognitive modules.The dissertation finds that the salient features of the sequential constituents of quotation as attitude-motivated quoting modes,evidential markers,cohesive devices,democratic markers,multitude vs scarcity,transparency vs opacity,in-group elevation vs out-group derogation,threat-connoting and fear-mongering rhetoric,could elicit different cognitive biases as validity effects,authority bias,conformity bias,cascading activation,rally effect,and inference bias,and engender polarized emotional effects.The different quoting strategies together with the relevant cognitive or emotional effects either symbolized,or activated,or inhibited,or bypassed the functionally-specialized adaptive modules in such a way that converted a fabricated threat to a real one,and an oligarchic purview to the perception of group members,and hence orchestrated the general public's viewpoint,attitudes,inference and behavior in a common fashion.As such,the different quoting strategies instantiated in the interactional constituents incarnated the Bush administration's constructive power and combined to create a synergy that amplified the manipulative power than each strategy alone could possibly do,and put the general public at the lost stead step by step in the manipulation and counter-manipulation arms race.While America has been proud of its deliberative democracy,what ultimately emerges from the analysis of the quotation is evidence of quotation as rhetoric devices rather than evidential markers,employed by the political actors for their Machiavellian manipulations of the general public.Such manipulation was especially effective when the quotation could address the innate cognitive modules.The findings of this dissertation are significant because they deepen our understanding of the relation between quotation,evolution and politics,and the true nature of quotation and American deliberative democracy.Although the use of various quoting strategies was effective in the short run,it is detrimental to the general public because it worked to undermine rational inference and judgments in the long run.