In written and spoken texts produced by Remain supporters during the referendum campaign, the following structure was used with extraordinary frequency:
Finite clause critical of EU + BUT + Finite clause presenting Remain as preferred option
In the language of anti-Brexit politicians, journalists and bloggers this coordinative construction was ubiquitous and even occurred in the headlines or leads of articles. In the following examples, the first two are the headline and the lead respectively of two articles written by George Monbiot (2016) for The Guardian. The third quotes both the headline and the lead of a piece written by Adam Ramsay (2016) for the website of openDemocracyUK.
(iv)I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in
(v)The EU is a festering cesspool. But it’s a crystal spring compared with what the outers want to do – surrender Britain’s sovereignty to the United States
(vi)I hate the EU. But I’ll vote to stay in it
The European Union is an undemocratic corporate stitch-up. But leaving would be worse
Although most of us can remember a teacher of English telling us that you cannot start a sentence with but, here we have four cases in which a journalistic convention prevails over the grammatical rule that a conjunction should not be placed in initial position. By making the clause that precedes the word but a sentence in itself, these two writers stress the fact that the two clauses on either side of the conjunction are of equal syntactic status. Had they opted for subordination, the subordinating conjunction although in initial position would have immediately signalled to the reader that the proposition of the first clause would be overridden by that of the main or superordinate clause (in as much as language as strong as ‘festering cesspool’ and ‘undemocratic corporate stitch-up’ can be overridden).
In their less-than-ringing endorsement of the European Union, Monbiot and Ramsay appear to be practically in agreement with the central argument of the Lexit campaign, that is, the EU is fundamentally undemocratic and has come to represent the interests of multinational corporations rather than those of the public at large. Their unenthusiastic vote to maintain membership is based on nothing more than the fear that stepping out of the frying pan will lead to somewhere even hotter, so it is hardly surprising if they do not present their case with a great deal of fervour. One would expect a little more vim from professional politicians known for their pro-EU stance or from an online newspaper that supported the case for remaining a member from the moment the referendum date was announced, but in the following examples the same coordinative construction is evident: (vii) is the concluding sentence of an open letter written by five senior figures in the Labour Party, including Jack Straw, a minister in Tony Blair’s government and father of Will Straw, executive director of the Britain Stronger in Europe movement (Nelson 2016); (viii) comes from an article written by Labour MP Yvette Cooper (2016); (ix) is from an unsigned editorial in The Independent entitled The right choice is to remain (2016).
(vii)The EU is not perfect and improvement is always worth making, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
(viii)Europe’s not perfect and there’s plenty we should keep campaigning to change. But we still get a better deal if we work together than if we walk away.
(ix)The institution is not without its flaws of course – there is bureaucratic inefficiency and the maintenance of Strasbourg as the official seat of the European Parliament is wastefully expensive. But membership of the EU benefits our economy, boosts global security and aids our connectivity with the rest of Europe.
The ‘five Labour heavyweights’ (The Mirror’s description) – Neil Kinnock, David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett, Jack Straw and the rather more middleweight Hilary Benn – might argue that in ending their twelve-sentence open letter as they did, their intention was to show that they had reached their pro-EU position after an honest appraisal of the merits of both sides of the issue, and had elected to eschew the simplistic and exaggerated approach of the Brexiteers. That they were capable of understanding the Leave supporters’ point of view is clear from their admission at the start of the letter that in the 1975 referendum (see Chapter 11) all five had voted against Britain’s continued membership of what was then the European Economic Community. Given their political history, it is remarkable that so little of the zeal of the convert entered their prose that in their concluding sentence they did not even downgrade the reference to the EU’s imperfections to a subordinate clause.
In content as well as in structure, Yvette Cooper’s words in (viii) are similar to those of the five heavyweights: in both cases the first clause acknowledges the EU’s imperfection and the need for improvement while the second features a comparative (outweigh and better deal respectively) to illustrate the advantage of staying in. There is no sexing up of the message to make it more persuasive, which once again can be seen as either admirable honesty or ineffectual campaigning by an experienced politician.
In (ix) it could be argued that the first sentence actually has more impact than the second in that it contains a highly specific example of one of the EU’s flaws – the cost of maintaining Strasbourg as the seat of the European Parliament – while the second mentions general benefits without saying anything concrete. Indeed, it is not even clear what is meant by ‘our connectivity with the rest of Europe’.
David Cameron’s great gamble was that he could emulate Harold Wilson in 1975 and convince a majority of voters that he had renegotiated Britain’s conditions of membership to such an extent that Eurosceptics’ worries had already been addressed. On 19 February 2016, in an official statement to the media just one hour after the conclusion of talks with the European Council, he began by reassuring TV viewers in the UK that ‘Britain will be permanently out of ever closer union – never part of a European superstate’, then made his case for voting to stay in the EU. Given that he had failed to make any headway on the one issue that might have persuaded some Brexit supporters to change their voting intentions – the thorny question of the free movement of citizens within the Union – he could hardly assume a gung-ho attitude. Instead he emphasized his ‘hard-headed assessment of what is in our national interest’, but in doing so he also found himself admitting that he could understand public discontent with the EU:
(x)Like many, I have had my doubts about the European Union as an organisation. I still do. But just because an organisation is frustrating it does not mean that you should necessarily walk out of it, and certainly not without thinking very carefully through the consequences. (Cameron 2016)
One has the impression that Cameron would not even give the EU a mark of seven and a half out of ten. He conceded that the doubters were not an insignificant minority and that his own misgivings had not been completely assuaged. After the coordinating conjunction but, a subordinate clause provides more negativity concerning the EU, then the advice not to walk away is hedged (see Chapter 2) by the adverb necessarily. The concluding nonfinite clause creates an interesting implicature: perhaps it is all right to walk away from the European Union if you have carefully thought through the consequences.
Ross Clarke (2016) in the Daily Express reports that two days later, Cameron’s defence secretary, Michael Fallon, sounded even less enthusiastic when speaking on BBC radio’s Today programme:
(xi)No one likes commissioners, harmonisation or directives. It has its faults but if you were outside the European Union it would still be there.
The subject of the first sentence makes dislike of three aspects of the EU universal, while the clause after but in the second sentence presents the existence of the European Union as just a disagreeable fact of life that we must learn to live with because it will not go away.
Posters designed by the German fine arts photographer Wolfgang Tillmans were among the most effective propaganda materials used by the Remain campaign. Tillmans focused on themes to which the Brexit camp had no real answer, such as the emergence of a de facto European identity as greatly increased mobilit
y, particularly among the so-called Erasmus generation, has led to a situation in which huge numbers of Europeans live and work in nations other than that of their birth and the continent is now home to more mixed-nationality couples (with their bi- or trilingual children) than ever before. One poster from his Between Bridges pro-EU collection (Tillmans 2016) follows the same structure of acknowledging the EU’s defects before saying something positive (the graphical layout has been modified):
Flawed? Yes Slow? Yes Attractive? Uhh
So, why?
The EU has brought peace to 28 member states.
In Poland and Hungary the EU is seen as the last defence against their authoritarian governments.
Don’t leave them alone.
Tillmans presents the view that the 1957 Treaty of Rome set in motion a process that has brought nearly sixty years of peace to countries that were twice ruined by war in the first half of the twentieth century. Like the politicians and journalists discussed earlier, Tillmans also acknowledges the EU’s faults before making the case for voting Remain. The difference, however, is that the second part of his message is a great deal more powerful than the less-than-inspiring appeals to opt for the lesser evil in the quotations considered previously. In texts (iv) to (xi), the second part of the coordinative construction presents staying in the EU as being in Britain’s interest. In Tillmans’s poster, the issue is not Britain’s interests; it is Europe’s interests and the multinational project that has guaranteed peace and democracy in the greater part of the continent, which takes the debate to a higher level than calculations of benefits outweighing costs or securing a better deal. It is actually a claim that can easily be challenged – some would argue that peace in Europe has had more to do with NATO and the mutually assured destruction of the nuclear arms race than with developments following the signing of the Treaty of Rome – but it is a theme that can raise passions in a way that appeals to maintain access to the single market cannot.
By repeated use of coordinative constructions, anti-Brexit politicians and journalists showed that they had sufficient confidence in their pro-EU arguments to allow them to be ‘susceptible to questioning’ (to repeat Jeffries’s words) in a main clause, but the question remains as to why they decided to give equal prominence to the Brexiteers’ views, not even relegating them to the lower syntactic level of a subordinate clause. It is difficult to believe that career politicians were so committed to telling the unvarnished truth that they elected to forego even mild subterfuge and spin to downgrade the validity of the case for leaving the EU and render more persuasive the counterargument. In the short texts quoted here, very little editing would be required to make the case for staying in the club a little more convincing; in (vii) and (viii), for instance, it would be sufficient to insert a factive verb, that is, a verb such as know, learn, realize or regret that presupposes the truth of its clausal complement:
(xii)The EU is not perfect and improvement is always worth making, but we have realized that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
(xiii)Europe’s not perfect and there’s plenty we should keep campaigning to change. But we know that we still get a better deal if we work together than if we walk away.
The next chapter looks at further syntactic and most of all lexical characteristics of the language used by the Remain campaigners, linguistic features that give the impression that they were not wholly convinced by their own arguments. In contrast, the Leave campaigners opted for bold claims and seemed untroubled by doubts or the need to exercise caution.
2
Hedging and modality versus strident claims and apparent absence of doubt
In everyday speech we talk about ‘hedging your bets’ when you reduce your risk of serious loss by placing money on at least two possible results, the principle being that the gain made on one bet will at least partially compensate for the loss made on another. The expression is then extended beyond the domain of gambling to all transactions or dealings in which one tries to be prepared for two or more outcomes. We also say that people hedge when they do not make a firm commitment or do not give a direct response, and in this case the word has mildly negative connotations as it implies that our interlocutor is not being entirely straight with us.
When linguists talk of hedging, the word is stripped of its negative connotations and assumes the status of a technical term. For Bloor and Bloor (2013: 103), ‘Hedging is a linguistic avoidance of full commitment or precision. It is a vague but useful term covering a range of phenomena.’ This brief definition provides no information as to why people resort to hedging, and for this we can turn to Machin and Mayr (2012: 192): ‘Hedging can be used to distance ourselves from what we say and to attempt to dilute the force of our statements and therefore reduce chances of unwelcome responses.’
A ‘bald on-record strategy’ (Brown and Levinson 1978) – that is a direct, clear, concise and unambiguous assertion – can lead to a range of unwelcome responses: direct contradiction in an equally bald on-record way, a challenge to provide proof or at least evidence, and, in some cases, an accusation of slander or libel. Tabloid newspapers dedicate considerable space to gossip about celebrities and the objects of such treatment can hardly complain about invasion of their privacy when it is in their interest to be in the public eye as frequently as possible. If a newspaper oversteps the mark, however, those same celebrities do not hesitate to sue. In the following text about the model Kate Moss, the expressions in italics show how an unnamed reporter for the Daily Mail employed hedging strategies to avoid the risk of legal action in an article with the clumsy headline What’s that party girl Kate Moss has popped out for? (2008).
(i) Kate Moss popped out for a spot of shopping last night – and returned home with two bottles of what could have been amyl nitrite.
The substance, also known as ‘poppers’, is not illegal but is popular among clubbers who sniff its vapours to achieve a head rush. It is also often combined with other drugs.
. . .
Speculation has been mounting in recent weeks that Moss could be pregnant, although health experts have warned against the use of amyl nitrite during pregnancy. Moss has also been spotted drinking alcohol in recent weeks.
The reporter uses the modal verb could and a past conditional construction rather than the unequivocal affirmation that Kate Moss bought amyl nitrite; it is merely a hypothesis and s/he does not exclude the possibility that the bottles actually contained mineral water. We learn that the substance is popular among ‘clubbers’ but it is not explicitly stated that Kate Moss leads that kind of hedonistic lifestyle, while the passive voice is used to avoid stating directly that Moss herself would ever do something as reprehensible as to combine amyl nitrite with other (illegal?) drugs. The passive voice is again used to hide the identity of those responsible for fomenting ‘mounting speculation’ and the question of whether the famous model is indeed pregnant is again no more than a hypothesis signalled by a second use of the modal could. We have no information about the identities and medical credentials of the ‘health experts’ and a third use of the passive voice avoids any suggestion that it was paparazzi employed by the Daily Mail who spotted Kate Moss drinking alcohol. Any reader of normal intelligence would interpret the article as an accusation that the selfish and irresponsible Kate Moss is guilty of the despicable act of endangering the health of the baby she is carrying by indulging her own appetites and desires, but the judicious use of hedging techniques means that the text is almost certainly not actionable (note almost, a hedge used by someone who is not qualified to make authoritative pronouncements on legal matters).
Text (i) feature two of the most frequently employed hedging strategies: the use of modal auxiliary verbs that indicate ‘speakers’ attitudes towards the factual content of an utterance’ (Crystal 1994: 257) and passive constructions without an explicit agent. Other techniques to avoid appearing excessively assertive or dogmatic include:
•Non-factive verbs such as seem, appear and sugge
st that allow the possibility that superficial appearances do not correspond to reality.
•Lexical verbs that indicate that what is stated is an opinion, not an objective fact: I think, it is believed to be, we suppose etc.
•Adverbs of frequency like sometimes, often or usually.
•Modal nouns: likelihood, assumption, possibility etc.
•Modal adjectives and adverbs: (un)likely, conceivable/conceivably, probable/probably etc.
•The use of approximators: sort of, more or less, roughly etc.
•Attributing responsibility to an anonymous third party: they say, a lot of people think etc.
•Metalingual glosses that diminish the speaker’s or writer’s authoritativeness: as far as I know, to the best of my knowledge etc.
A theory of communicative behaviour that has stood the test of time is Grice’s Co-operative Principle (1975), which is concerned with the extent to which we comply with four maxims of collaborative interaction. We normally tell the truth or what we believe to be the truth (the Quality Maxim), we endeavour to give enough but not too much information (the Quantity Maxim), we try to make our contribution pertinent (the Maxim of Relation) and we try to express ourselves clearly without obscurity or ambiguity (the Maxim of Manner). Grundy (2008: 299) defines a hedge in relation to the Co-operative Principle as ‘a means of indicating weak adherence to a conversational maxim’.
If the relevant maxim is that of quality, weak adherence implies questionable sincerity, or at the very least a certain evasiveness: ‘Hedging is the use of language features that allow a speaker or writer to avoid coming cleanly and quickly to the point, to avoid being specific and therefore providing ‘padding’ to the consequences of what they say.’ (Bloor and Bloor 2013: 13).
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 2