The document provides an overview of the student's thesis which analyzes and compares election rallies in Italy and Spain given by Matteo Renzi and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The thesis contains an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion examining the persuasive language and rhetorical strategies used by politicians to obtain consensus from audiences. It discusses topics such as the performative nature of political language, differences between political and specialized language, and analyzes lexical, syntactic and rhetorical elements of election rallies.

1. University of Roma Tre
Faculty of Humanities
Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Cultures
Degree in Languages and Cultural Mediation
Track in Linguistics and European Languages
Thesis in Spanish Language and Translation
Election rallies in Italy and Spain:
a comparison between Matteo Renzi and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
Supervisor: Dr. Monica Palmerini Student: Martina Mori
The research and analysis work I have done for my thesis contains an introduction, three
chapters and a conclusion. However, I will not report the index nor divide the text into
sections, though I will follow the original structure trying to give a homogeneous and
complete overview of my work.
My thesis is devoted to investigate the interactive process through which the words used
by politicians wields enormous power in the reality, being the deep-rooted relationship
between language and politics indissoluble since antiquity.
Politicians exploit the performative properties of the language to shape the minds and
behaviour of the audience, using also marketing strategies in political communication,
and especially in electoral meetings, in order to obtain the necessary consensus.
The interest in this field has grown in the last decades since Europe lived radical
changeovers to new political systems and modern means of communication, which also
affected the ideological references conveyed by the traditional political language. In
particular, historical, social and cultural changes which involved Italy and Spain have
modified the relation between politicians and citizens; these changes led to a different
approach in some textual genre of political discourse, now characterized by everyday
life language, multi-disciplinary aspects and covering a wide range of communicative
occasions.
1

2. In general, we can observe several similarities between the political language and the
specialized discourse, although there are striking differences as well. In both we can
distinguish a horizontal dimension (the thematic component which depends on the
contents), and vertical dimension, the relational component which is predominant in
political discourse, being related to the context and the pragmatic purpose of persuading
of the audience. A pragmatic approach is essential to the study of scientific and
technical language, and it is also the key to explore the characteristics of political
discourse, which presents many functional varieties according to their context.
The contextual functions affecting the production of political discourse seem to have
more in common with professional jargon than with scientific language, whose primary
purpose is epistemology rather than action in the reality and its scientific popularization
prevails over the persuasion of the public.
Moreover, specialized languages have their own technical lexicon and syntactic
structure which are easily recognizable and have a precise function in communication.
Conversely, political language borrows specialized terms from other disciplines (like
economics and law), and the polysemous political lexicon is always susceptible to the
personal interpretation related to everyone's experience and cultural references.
Therefore, we can say that political language takes advantage of the scientific veneer of
technical lexicon, and uses it not to result clearer to the audience and avoid ambiguity,
but to elevate the politician giving both a technical and vague image of himself.
In general, we can observe that political language has much in common with the
advertising language, being strongly symbolic, connotative and redundant (repetitions,
enumeration, synonyms) in many occasions; while sometimes, especially if the topic is
a delicate matter, it appears elusive and euphemistic.
From the point of view of the register, political expressive code can be extremely formal
and uses a bombastic language, or else gets closer to informal speech, with idiomatic
expressions and lexical and syntactic simplification. This tendency lies also in the
widespread diffusion of political discourse through the mass-media, which has
contributed to a process of spectacularization in political communication. This, together
with the presence of a bipolar political system, implies that every coalition needs to find
a strong leader who can meet the citizens' expectations, which in turn means a loss of
radical ideologies that reveals itself in a lexical homogeneity.
2

3. Since characteristics of political language depend on the historical, political, social and
situational context and function, we can now investigate more deeply what are the
different aspects of the pragmatic notion of “political discourse”.
It has been stressed the importance of the persuasive function in political discourse, an
event in which the language acts in the reality: a perlocutive act is produced to convince
who is listening to do something in particular, that would be the realization of such act.
For this reason it is clear that the pragmatic approach to analyze not only the linguistic
but also the socio-cultural context of any political discourse, as well as its specific
function and the nature of the subjects who takes part to the communicative act, an
interactive process between the speaker and the listeners.
From the lexical point of view, apart from the above-mentioned semantic simplification,
political discourse seems to produce a vagueness in meaning, where lexemes are mostly
generic and belonging to recurring semantic fields like new, future, change and
movement in contrast with old, past and static.
The objective of the politician is to persuade the audience, by impressing and more
importantly moving them, building his discourse on universal feelings like love,
enthusiasm and happiness distracting attention from the ideological and programmatic
contents. Every word has its own emotional charge, and connotation is largely exploited
in political discourse of different coalitions, selecting the vocabulary in which the
speaker wants the audience to feel recognized.
Lexicon is extremely important for the persuasive intent of political discourse, and in
actual facts it is the level of analysis more often taken into consideration in the study of
this kind of speech act.
We can notice that many neologisms appears in the political language for the first time,
and many times they have an English matrix, being European politics immersed in the
international language par excellence. Moreover, anglicisms somehow make modern
political discourse seem more efficient. In Italy loan words appearing in their original
language are more frequent than in Spain, where casticismo imposes a preference for
loan translations in Spanish.
Moving from the lexical to the syntactic, we can affirm that simplification and low
register affect also this level of language in political discourse.
3

4. Politicians generally tend to use short sentences, exploiting syntactic devices of oral
realizations to focus the attention of the listeners on the topics they want to highlight,
using pleonastic phrases, thematic constructions, cleft sentences, dislocations, and
pronominal redundancy.
We said that political language differs from specialized languages also for not having
specific grammatical constructions, but it is possible to identify some tendencies in the
use of particular syntactic units like personal pronouns, nominalizations, impersonal
sentences, passive form, negative and interrogative constructions and deictic
expressions.
The use of the first-person plural pronoun “we” reveals a complexity in the political
speaker, in which co-exist several individual and collective identities, and a desire to
mitigate the statements and not take all responsibility about them. Moreover, the feature
of ambiguity is inherent in “we”, because it can include the speaker and someone else,
or the speaker and the listeners.
Nominalization and passive form too are clever devices to withhold information about
the subject and the action of the utterance, aim attainable also by using non personal
(using the third person to talk about himself) and impersonal sentences which have no
grammatical subject.
Continuing with a pragmatic approach to the study of political discourse, we can
distinguish many type of texts with different functions relating to the context and
recognizable in specific textual genres, which is indeed the interface between textual
and contextual, linguistic and extra-linguistic elements.
The multitude of ways and situations in which nowadays political communication
occurs has produced a significant number of genres of political discourse.
First and foremost there are parliamentary discourses, purely monologues pronounced
during the debates which characterize the democratic rituals. Then we have the typical
genres of political communication through the mass-media: television debates and
interviews implying a dialogue with at least one interlocutor. Last but not least, there are
the persuasive genres of political propaganda, used mostly during election campaigns:
pamphlets, slogans and election rallies. These texts have a clear conative function,
producing a perlocutive act: not only do they want to convince the electorate to accept
an idea, they also want to produce a certain behaviour in the community, that is the vote.
4

5. The principal instrument of persuasion is rhetoric, the art of convincing and persuading
in situations where practical matters are discussed, without which it could not exist any
type of political communication and was born together with politics and oratory in
Ancient Greece. In the classical antiquity, a well-built political discourse had to be
planned following the six rhetoric operations or partes artis (intelectio, inventio,
dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio), and most of all it had to show a structure in which
were recognizable the four compulsory sections of the discourse or partes orationis
(exordio, narratio, argumentatio with probatio and refutatio, and lastly peroratio with
recapitulatio). Today the canons are more flexible than in the classical model; however,
previously planning and clearly structuring a discourse are still the basis for its
communicative effectiveness.
The purpose of a rhetoric discourse is the demonstration through argumentation the
acceptability of determined opinions. Classical or creative rhetoric coincides with the
technique of persuasive argumentation, using the concatenation of arguments as a
knowledge instrument and rhetorical devices to underline the validity of the discourse
structure.
However, another kind of rhetoric exists in discourses thought to hide, behind pompous
expressions a substantial vacuousness: this is modern degenerate rhetoric. It can be
revealed by the use of widespread premises (endoxa) or of complex rhetorical formulae
to hide some tough decisions and to distort reality by manipulating it.
Identifying the type of rhetoric that a politician uses in his discourses help us to define
what kind of relationship he establishes between himself and the audience, and if he
thinks they can unmask demagogy and populism or not.
Regardless of different connotations of rhetoric, we can assume that political discourse,
and especially election rallies are based on argumentation and definitely want to
convince who is listening about the validity of the proposed arguments.
Therefore, the necessary rhetorical devices exploited by modern election rallies to
obtain consensus and votes are evident during election campaigns, in which politicians
often use personal style and exhortations. The emphasis they put on slogans and key-
words is caused also by the personalization and spectacularization of political discourse,
which many times exploits marketing strategies to capture the attention of the public.
5

6. During election campaigns political discourse exploits propaganda, a kind of
communication which uses conditioning techniques to influence and modify opinions
and behaviours of a determined social group, for the prime objective of reaching and
maintaining power. Like rhetoric, political propaganda too has negative connotation,
due to the fact that during electoral meetings every politician uses advertising
techniques together with rhetorical elements in his own personal style to persuade the
audience.
The election rally usually occurs in a public meeting with several speakers pronouncing
discourse on social or political issues, and in classical tradition it was a logically
structured argumentation, with thesis and evidence to outline the political action in front
of a limited audience. Modern election rallies have some different characteristics mostly
due to the evolution of the means of communication. Politicians speak directly to the
listeners, using a simple language and sometimes populist arguments, in addition to
devices like jokes and quotations to create a sort of empathy and identification between
them and the public. By means of a strongly connotative and seductive language they
try to establish a direct emotional relationship with who is listening their discourse,
which is based on sharing feelings rather than ideas and political choices, using lexical
and rhetorical pathos rather than logical argumentation to incite the audience to vote and
so obtain a positive reaction to persuasion. Lexical connotation has an inherent
evaluative force, that is really important inasmuch as every election rally has a
polemical character: each candidate have at least one competitor in every election
campaign, and the positive or negative value of connotative lexicon clearly depends on
the political perspective.
Keeping in mind our pragmatic purpose in studying the main variables of the situational
context in which an election rally takes place, we have to consider the communication
dynamics in which the speakers and the listeners are involved, like size, heterogeneity
and ideological principles of the audience.
Firstly, we can say that electoral rallies are monologues, a unidirectional type of
communication, although politicians try to maintain a high level of participation in the
audience and approaching them by promoting a positive image of themselves and
strengthening the process of identification, in contrast to the negative representation of
their political opponent.
6

7. We already talked about the complexity of the political speaker, which have a natural
polyphony and referential ambiguity, being representative of a group of people. The
most interesting manifestation of this multitude of subjects is the use of the first-person
plural pronoun (we), the correspondent possessive adjective (our) and the according
verbal forms (being Italian and Spanish two flectional languages).
The receiver too presents a complex nature in election rallies: assuming that a part of
the public is physically present at the moment of the discourse production, we can
distinguish a real, direct audience, to whom the politician explicitly appeals through
allocutive forms like personal pronouns. While and an indirect, potential audience is
identifiable in every citizen able to receive the discourse when it will be spread by the
mass-media.
The channel of communication used to broadcast the discourse also is a fundamental
variable which affects the features of the political textual genres involved. Many times
television is the main channel of distribution of some political events and meetings, as it
can reach a vast audience in such little time.
Expressive code also change according to means of communication, and in general we
can say that in electoral meetings there is a tendency to use a medium and semi-formal
register, which in some occasions can become purposely simple and colloquial, features
that belong to the modern political discourse.
Despite being the election rally an oral text, it is not a typical example of a spontaneous
speech: it is rather a highly structured discourse, a planned spoken discourse genre
which can be named “spoken-on written”, because it is conceived to be orally realized
but it is based on a written and well planned text in which every argumentative section
makes part of a hierarchical structure. Then, the discourse needs to be planned and
contextualized to the communicative event in which it will occur, in order to obtain a
clear and elaborate argumentation, which is the technique by means of which the
speaker wants to fulfil the persuasive function.
When planning an argumentative macro-structure, it is crucial that the preliminary
evaluation of the knowledge shared by the politicians and the audience, to make several
references to the cultural background full of implicit meanings that will be taken for
granted, together with other implicit premises, that sometimes represent an example of
violation of the correctness principle in political communication (cliché, endoxa).
7

8. It is important to underline that shared premised are never subject to argumentation, but
they represent the basis to start building argumentation. In this way the speaker has the
possibility to create a sort of tacit agreement on hierarchies about core values, which
distinguish different groups of people. It is essential for politicians to have the audience
approval about the proposed implicit premises and the abstract hierarchy that is
functional to the organization of arguments.
As we have said, the polemical character of election rallies implies a positive evaluation
of the proper system of values through lexical connotation, which is also exploited to
create by contrast a negatively evaluated system of “dis-values” for other competitors.
This in turn implies the presence of strong semantic contrasts like the above-mentioned
new/old, past/future, static/change and also the important “we/they”, that is related to
the semantic polarization and the “rhetoric of opposites” often realized through figures
of speech like antithesis.
The use of rhetorical devices in election rallies is legitimate, being persuasion the
primary purpose of any discourse, while manipulation is not considered an acceptable
result of argumentation, because it is the mere effect of the violation of truth and
argumentative correctness principles regulating every honest communicative exchange.
Rhetorical and stylistic devices have the function of giving personality and originality to
the rally, and every politician needs to find his own personal style to capture the public's
attention. The linguistic expressions more suitable for this are the figures of speech and
other devices that can mitigate or intensify the connotative force of the discourse.
Mitigation is often obtained by using nominal and passive phrases and also euphemistic
expressions, while intensification aims to put emphasis on connotative meanings, also
by using superlative adjectives, redundancy and culturally marked fixed expressions.
Among all figures of speech, metaphor can both mitigate or intensify the abstract
meaning conveyed for its object, as it is a figure based on the transference of meaning,
just like metonymy, euphemism, personification and periphrasis.
There are also figures of thought which concern the way of perceiving and expressing
ideas like antithesis, oxymoron, simile and rhetorical question, and other figures that
affect the way words are arranged in one or more sentences (anaphora, anadiplosis,
anacoluthon, epanalepsis, ellipsis, paronomasia, pleonasm, synonymy and tern) and for
this reason they are evident in the syntactic level, like interrogative sentences too.
8

9. On the contrary, semantics and lexicon are fertile ground for rhetorical devices such as
metaphor, antithesis and euphemism.
Metaphor draws an analogy between two elements producing a direct shift of meaning
which has a strong impact on the expressive effectiveness. This figure of meaning is
also a strategy used by politicians to create a set of images related to specific ideas and
meanings to share with the public also in the future. The favourite semantic fields of
metaphor in the Italian and Spanish political discourse are war, medicine, religion and
sports.
Antithesis is a figure of thought that establishes a relationship of antonymy between
lexical elements, and it is extremely used in election rallies for their inherent polemical
character implying a contrast of ideas and feelings between two opposite systems of
values.
Euphemism is the most suitable device to obtain mitigation through a semantic shift,
and to avoid saying something unpleasant or offensive. Also the use of economics and
law technical lexicon can be seen as a euphemistic device, being such terms neutral and
sometimes ambiguous.
We have already observed that there are no specific syntactic structures in political
discourse, but some tendency exists in the use of certain syntactic units both in Spanish
and in Italian (personal pronouns, nominalizations, impersonal sentences, passive form,
negative and interrogative sentences) with mainly mitigating functions.
Rhetorical devices in syntax are mostly repetition and accumulation figures of speech,
whose redundancy have an amplification function within the persuasive discourse.
Anaphora (the repetition of one or more words at the beginning of two or more
utterances) sometimes focuses on itself all the attention of the listeners, who should
rather examine every single argumentation. Like anaphora, also anadiplosis, epanalepsis
and tern are intensifying rhetorical devices. Ellipsis is often used to create evocative
electoral slogans.
From a pragmatic point of view, deixis is obviously exploited during election rallies,
being suitable to set the discourse in the time and place it happens and clearly identifies
the subject taking part to the communicative event, by using linguistic elements like
pronouns and adverbs. Exclamations and rhetorical questions also are very common
because they attract the attention of the audience.
9

10. In addition to stylistic and rhetorical devices, also the extra-linguistic contextual factors
contribute to the persuasion purpose in election rallies. In the modern society the image
of politicians and their meetings are broadcast by the mass-media, which has become
one of the main instruments of political communication.
Together with a semiotic analysis, non-verbal communication like body language is a
potent indicator of the relationship between the speaker and the audience of an election
rally. The lack of ideology and the dominance of marketing strategies in modern
political language, the image of a candidate are extremely important, and in many
occasions politicians make also use of multimedia elements like music and videos.
Comparing the two election rallies I analyzed in my thesis, it is fundamental to set them
in their political and historical context, considering the institutional system, the party
and coalition of the candidate and his opponent, the kind of elections and electorate, and
finally the historical and political events occurred in the socioeconomic situation in
Spain by 10th
February 2008 and in Italy by 24th
November 2013.
In the five years between the two election meeting the global capitalism were
characterized by the deepest economic crisis of modern times, which produced
widespread discontent among several social groups in Italy, then Matteo Renzi needs to
give a reliable and positive image of himself to the PD (Partito Democratico) electorate.
Conversely, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is living a positive moment after four years
as Prime Minister of his leftist PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español).
Spain is a parliamentary monarchy with a democratic and bipolar political system, and
showed a greater political stability from the transitional period after the deposition of
the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
Italy is a parliamentary republic with the same constitution from 1946, although people
talk of “second republic” to refer to the new political system resulted from the passage
from a centrist to a bipolar system occurred after the crisis of trust in politicians due to
the scandals of the early Nineties. Italy, since 1994, has lived a period of instability and
saw the birth of a new simplified political communication.
When Zapatero is living the campaign for the general election of 9th
March 2008, Silvio
Berlusconi wins the national election in Italy for the fourth time, until giving in his
resignation in November 2011, just like Zapatero.
10

11. After a year of technical government, Italy lives new elections in February 2013, when a
new (anti)political movement called M5S is elected as the third force which changes the
equilibrium of the Italian bipolar system. Two months later Italy finally has its
government, but it does not reflect the results of the elections: it is a cross-party
coalitions with PD and a part of rightist politicians together that causes a polarization
inside PD, with Renzi contesting for the leadership of the party since 2012.
The election campaigns of the two politicians here examined differ significantly from
each other because Zapatero wants to win the general election in Spain and remain the
Prime Minister, while Renzi aims to become the national secretary of the PD. However,
both politicians manage to achieve their objectives by convincing their audiences,
different in size and context, to vote for them. Two orators, two leaders, two winners.
Zapatero and Renzi are two innovative personalities in the Italian and the Spanish
political communication, making use of technology and rhetorical techniques, and I
consider the two election rallies analyzed highly representative of their personal style,
identity and attitude in politics.
As for the sources, I took the transcription of Zapatero's rally from the PSOES website
www.psoe.es and watched many videos on www.youtube.com , then I dedicated my
time to the difficult transcription of Renzi's rally, trying to divide the text into sections
coherently with the oral production (the video is available on www.youdem.tv). Both
transcriptions were included in my thesis with reference in the text to appendix A and B.
The first difference is evident in the speed of the speech: Renzi speaks three times more
rapidly than Zapatero, continuing to talk over applause without taking a breath.
Zapatero has always a clear elocution while Renzi sometimes makes mistakes in
pronunciation and syntax.
For the textual analysis of the two election rallies, I opted for a qualitative methodology,
privileging a direct and traditional approach to linguistic data, without the mediation of
machinery. I know that the qualitative analysis has some limit, but it gives the
possibility to consider also inter-textual elements (cross-party messages, polyphony,
meta-discursive devices).
Comparing the two texts I then analyzed the situational context, the stylistic features of
the two politicians, the argumentative structure and the rhetorical devices that appears at
lexical and syntactic level.
11

12. As regards the context, we can say that the stadium of Vistalegre with more than 20,000
Spanish citizens is much bigger than the Hotel conference room hosting 1,000 delegates
of PD. This is due to the kind of election campaign, which explains also another
difference: both politicians pronounce their rally at the end of the meeting, but the
speakers who precede Zapatero's discourse are not competing with the final orator like
the competitors who speak before Renzi do.
Zapatero satisfies the tendency to spectacularization by multimedia elements, while
Renzi uses his sense of humour to entertain the public. We already talked about jokes,
which like endoxas, quotations, and the personal attack of the opponent (argumentum
ad personam) are considered like argumentative fallacies.
Talking about the personal style of the two leaders, we can say that Renzi wants to give
a young, modern image of himself by using an informal, regional and colloquial
register. He continuously changes position and moves his hands while adapting his
facial expressions.
Zapatero has a more traditional communicative style, with a clearer speech and a more
formal register, much closer to the written expressive code, which suggests a meticulous
planning of every word of the discourse.
Two different styles in different contexts, with different direct and indirect audiences
and political opponents.
The polemical speech has different realizations in the two discourses which correspond
to the opposition of values and emotions between the PSOE and PP (Partido Popular)
in Zapatero's rally, and to a multilateral conflict with several political subjects in the
speech of Renzi. This premise is important to understand the disposition, in the structure
of the discourses, of polemical sections among narrative and argumentative ones.
The election rally of Zapatero is highly structured and very well-ordered, alternating
and distributing exhortations, descriptive, narrative and polemical sections: his
discourse apparently follows the classical model.
The leader of PSOE starts with an emotional appeal repeating the slogan and reusing it
in several sentences, and immediately refers to core values for socialist political identity
(democracy, freedom and progress), to which in opposition there are the negative
feelings and image related to the politicians of PP.
12

13. Then there is a narrative passage in which Zapatero retraces the most important moment
in the Spanish socialist history, from Pablo Iglesias to Felipe Gonzales, who is present at
the electoral meeting, insisting on socialist identity. The historical narration is followed
by a polemical section, using numbers and percentages to proof his argumentation, in
which there is an opposition between ellos, la derecha (they, the rightist party) and
nosotros (we, the socialists). Connotation and rhetoric prepare the ground for the final
exhortation, in which he repeats the anaphoric expression No me callo (I don't keep
quiet) for twelve times, and he addresses every sentence to a specific category of
population: foreign and honest people, women, young people, homosexuals, the infirm,
ecologists, researchers, intellectuals and, most generally workers, which are the basis of
his electorate. The closing part of the rally is full of rhetorical devices, and in the
recapitulatio phase he explicitly ask for the vote on the next 9th
March, date that is
repeated four times in the beginning of the discourse and three in the final part.
Starting from this data to compare the two argumentative structures, we can notice that
Renzi repeats the date of the election day five times, all in the beginning of the
discourse and without putting much emphasis on it. As we said the young leader wants
to provide a spontaneous and unconventional image of himself, and for doing this he
does not use a complex argumentation: his main objective is entertaining the audience
also in polemical sections mostly against journalists and bankers.
His rally is full of implicit messages and identification strategies using some peculiar
technique and the captatio benevolentiae, which in classical model was accepted only in
the exordio and peroratio parts is continuously used through the discourse to win the
public's sympathy, rather than to identify an ideology shared with the audience.
Emotional appeal is also present in Zapatero's rally, but universal feelings are not the
unique values conveyed in his discourse.
Renzi uses the antithesis by opposing loro (them) and noi (we) like Zapatero, but it is
only used in a metaphorical discourse about the difference between fear and courage.
A peculiar feature of Renzi's discourse is enumeration: he always starts by saying that
there are three points to solve a problem, but he never develops all of them, sometimes
even not mentioning the third one. He frequently makes historical and personal
digressions from the main subject, and his argumentation can be extremely summarized.
13

14. The core argumentation is that international, European and Italian politics have been a
total failure, that it is possible to change without ignoring history, and to imagine the
future we have to fight against poverty by bringing foreign investments to Italy, selling
also public Italian companies which otherwise would be full of corruption. Electoral law
and the jobs act too are divided into three ambiguous points, and we can observe a
violation of the truth principle when he uses a percentage to give a wrong piece of
information, which is potentially manipulating. He also makes use of endoxas and
explicit, implicit, and fictitious quotations, another argumentative incorrectness using
the argumentum ad verecundiam, which also includes mentioning famous people.
From the lexical point of view, according to Italian general tendencies, we can notice
that Renzi uses many colloquial expressions, regionalisms and technical anglicisms.
Both politicians exploit the semantic connotation, but with a difference: Zapatero uses
connotative lexicon in the antithesis we/they opposing the positive values and feelings
belonging to PSOE and the negative ones given for PP. In this semantic polarization
Zapatero makes use of a wide range of vocabulary, while Renzi builds up a simple
antithesis, by the sole opposition of feelings between the deceptive past and the future
full of opportunities. The Italian politician exploits more lexical properties of language
for intensification, idioms for identification and euphemisms for mitigation. Zapatero
never uses euphemisms, while he makes large use of metaphorical expressions about
movement and climate. To conclude with figures of meaning, Renzi uses personification
while talking about Italia as it had the characteristics of a human being. Moreover, the
name of his country is much less recurring in his discourse than España is in Zapatero's
rally.
From the syntactic point of view, there is a use of the first-person plural personal
pronoun in both discourses, but in Zapetero's one it is necessary to build a political
identity, while in Renzi's one it expresses a shared system of feeling.
In general, the main difference between the two rallies is the presence in the Spanish
one of formal cohesion and logical coherence, and the absence of them in the Italian
one, full of hanging sentences and parenthesis.
The more common figures of speech in both rallies are the tern of nouns and adjectives
and anaphora. Moreover, while anadiplosis is more exploited by Renzi, Zapatero shows
a predilection for epanalepsis in his discourse.
14

15. In order to summarize the results of my thesis, it is important to remember that every
text is too rich to consider a qualitative analysis complete, and that my observation
about Matteo Renzi and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are limited to the two election
rallies examined, although they are highly representative of the styles and personalities
of the two politicians.
In conclusion, Zapatero and Renzi are both innovative communicators in their cultural
and political area, in a context of general personalization of politics that occurred in
occidental democracies in the last three decades. The relationship that the two leaders
establish with the audiences, the one listening to the discourse through the mass-media
and the direct one, is based on the promotion of the personal image and style of the
candidate, who wants to reach and maintain a large consensus.
The sociocultural and situational contexts of the two political discourses are quite
different, both for the different economic and historical moments in which the election
campaigns take place, and for the number of participants present in the location of the
meetings. However, we can find some analogy in the presence of spectacular elements,
multimedia for Zapatero and comedy for Renzi, a strong non-verbal communication and
frequent emotional evocations.
From the linguistic point of view, both rallies show strong lexical connotation and
intensification, reached also using semantic figures of speech like metaphor, other
figures that affect also the syntactic level such as tern and anaphora, and also figures of
thought among which antithesis plays a fundamental role. However, they have a
different argumentative and polemical layout: semantic polarization is obtained through
antithesis between ideological values of two political parties in Zapatero's rally, while
Renzi proposes a dichotomy between the past and the future, associating negative
emotions to the former and positive feelings to the latter, and considering every political
subject a real or potential opponent.
With regard to syntax, the discourse of Zapatero remains always coherent and cohesive
despite showing high complexity, which is the result of an accurate planning in written
form. On the contrary, Renzi wants to give an ad-lib image of himself, also to the
detriment of textual coherence and cohesion. He uses an informal register and colloquial
expressions in addition to regionalisms and loan words.
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16. In respect of the relationship the two politicians want to establish with the audience, by
analyzing the semantic and syntactic features of the two election rallies we can deduce
that Renzi exploits identification strategies and widespread premises to reach an
agreement of feelings rather than values, while Zapatero clearly defines his electorate
by expressing the traditional ideas in his leftist ideological background.
The main difference between this two rallies lies in the type of rhetoric Zapatero and
Renzi use: while the former exploits figures of speech (anaphora, epanadiplosis,
epanalepsis) to articulate argumentative sections in an ordered structure, the latter uses
degenerate rhetoric, where devices like euphemism contribute to distortion of reality
and manipulation of the audience, with argumentative fallacies (endoxas, quotations,
jokes) and occasional violation of the objective truth in order to exert demagogy and
populism to persuasion aim.
Taking all things into account, critical analysis is important to decode political
communication, and the knowledge of linguistic devices allows to recognize which type
of rhetoric politicians use to persuade the electorate. Indeed unmasking incorrectness in
political discourses whose real purpose is to prevaricate the audience is necessary for
citizens to appropriate truth and freedom, fundamental rights in our European
democracies.
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