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1 - Literal and Metaphorical Silences in Rhetoric: Examples from the Celebration of the 1974 Revolution in the Portuguese Parliament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2019

By
Michael Billig  and
Cristina Marinho
Edited by
Amy Jo Murray  and
Kevin Durrheim
Amy Jo Murray
Affiliation:
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Kevin Durrheim
Affiliation:
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
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Summary

This chapter examines significant silences in a specific situation: namely, the Portuguese parliament’s annual commemoration of the April 1974 revolution that overthrew the Salazarist dictatorship. By concentrating on a formal occasion of epideictic rhetoric, it is possible to examine rhetorical silences in detail. The analysis makes two crucial distinctions: the differences between literal and metaphorical silences and the differences between absences produced by speakers and those produced by audiences. The analysis concentrates on absences in the ways that the right-wing parties participate in the ceremony. The right-wing parties, especially the CDS-PP, are ambivalent about the 1974 revolution and its symbol of the red carnation. However, this ambivalence cannot be expressed directly in the ceremony but is revealed in absences – whether it be speakers avoiding giving unqualified praise of the revolution or unmitigated criticism of Salazarism, or the audience withholding applause at specific moments, or audience and speakers not wearing the symbolic carnation. The absences, which need not be literal silences, can be subtly managed. One example shows how a CDS-PP speaker rhetorically creates a space for right wingers to applaud the mention of the postrevolutionary defeat of the far left, while not rhetorically creating an analogous space for applauding the revolution itself.

Keywords

literal and metaphorical silencesepideictic rhetoricPortuguese revolution
Type
Chapter
Information
Qualitative Studies of Silence
The Unsaid as Social Action
 , pp. 21 - 37
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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