University of Aarhus 2005
Watching out for manipulation
Humanists make an important contribution to understanding how to interpret the mass of news that bombards the information society every day.
By Jakob Kehlet
Associate Professor Alexandra Kratschmer from the Department of Classical and Romance Studies (Italian) at the University of Aarhus also has a background in French. She has studied the language used by French opinion makers in the past and has revealed their use and abuse of the effects of language. Although the words of these Frenchmen date back about three centuries, an analysis of their techniques still applies to the politicians of today.
“I research what a language can and cannot do, and how the world is portrayed via language,” Associate Professor Kratschmer explains.
Her Habilitation dissertation, which she defended in 2004, examines the way the French author and philosopher Montesquieu treated language. Through her research, she has determined the important role of two filters that come between the world being described and the language actually used to describe it.
“The first filter is made up by the thoughts of the language user and may influence the words chosen. The language user may make a genuine attempt at describing the world, but subconscious patterns that colour this description can also be present. And of course, the language user may consciously cheat and manipulate the description,” Associate Professor Kratschmer says.
The other filter is the language system itself. It comprises a number of rules that determine the language user’s options and limitations.
“If, for example, you describe an event in the past tense in Italian, you have to make a grammatical choice to indicate whether the event is completed or incompleted,” says Associate Professor Kratschmer, and gives the following example.
“If I want to say: ‘I called my cousin yesterday’, the language system requires that I decide whether the act was one of a series of acts in sequence, or whether it gave background information about another act: ‘Yesterday, I was talking to my cousin when the door bell rang’. As a language researcher, I have to look at how these two filters affect the description of the world around us,” Associate Professor Kratschmer says.
The language of Montesquieu
In her Habilitation dissertation, she examined Montesquieu’s description of the world as a series of historical phenomena. She delved into the finer details and studied the Frenchman’s analysis of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
“I was able to demonstrate that, in French, you can describe a world event in two ways: either as a relationship between phenomena by combining two nouns with a causative verb, as in ‘Decadence destroyed Rome’, or by describing the world indirectly by placing it in a context of logical rules and laws, and presenting a logical conclusion. The latter can be done by using sentence clusters, for example: ‘Rome declined because the Romans were decadent’. It is the language user who chooses which form to use. The message is the same, but it is presented in different ways,” says Associate Professor Kratschmer.
Montesquieu uses both methods, but prefers the one with logical conclusions.
“He wants to map historical laws, and I was able to demonstrate that his personal convictions are evident in his use of language,” Associate Professor Kratschmer says.
Language is a reflection of ideology
She has compared Montesquieu with two almost contemporary Frenchmen – the author Voltaire and the priest and historian Bossuet – and demonstrated that the way in which a text is constructed is a direct reflection of the author’s ideology.
“The more of an idealist you are, the greater your desire to convince, and this leads to the use of a wide range of rhetorical techniques. Ultimately, this results in rhetorical manipulation,” she says.
In this context, Montesquieu’s use of rhetoric is moderate, whereas Voltaire is a fiery reformer. He clearly aims at convincing, and his texts are therefore full of rhetorical tricks.
Bossuet is a priest and believes that the world is governed by divine foresight. He would like to convince the world that he is right, but because his explanations are based on metaphysics, he has a problem explaining himself, according to Associate Professor Kratschmer.
“The logical argumentation does not work so he is forced to cheat. He does that by using what I call ad hoc explanations, i.e. explanations based on implied premises that do not match the other premises in the text. In other words, he contradicts himself,” she says.
Associate Professor Kratschmer distinguishes between the use of rhetoric and spin, another concept that is prevalent in modern politics.
“You use rhetoric to sell a consistent ideology, but spin is used to cover a lack of consistency. You twist the entire story in order to justify it, but it does not necessarily fit into an ideology,” she says.
Associate Professor Kratschmer sees lots of spin in the political debate in Denmark, and she thinks language researchers play an important role by teaching citizens to communicate effectively, while at the same time enabling them to see through rhetorical manipulation.
Her latest research focuses on the Italian language, which in her own opinion amounts to basic research. She analyses Italian constructions such as “it seems” or “it is obvious that” in order to map how they present the mental processes that make the language user choose these expressions.
Alexandra Kratschmer works with two filters in language and communication. The first is the language user’s thoughts, and the other is the language system itself.