Research analyzes the presidential speeches of the Dominican Republic's democratic period
Santo Domingo. An 2012 investigation of Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) analyzed from a historical-linguistic perspective the swearing speeches of the Dominican presidents from 1963 to 2008, a subject little studied, but with special relevance for democratic political systems and regarding the act of presidential inauguration of 16 of August.
The study, carried out by the historian and research professor Reina Rosario Fernández and the writer, linguist and discourse analyst Manuel Matos Moquete, both professors of the Social Sciences and Humanities Area of INTEC, analyzed the historical context and the rhetorical and pragmatic components of this type of political discourse, to identify common and particular characteristics of the swearing-in speeches of the six presidents who have governed the country during the last five decades (1963-2008): Juan Bosch, Joaquín Balaguer, Salvador Jorge Blanco, Antonio Guzmán, Hipólito Mejía and Leonel Fernández, during which 17 elections have been held.
The research analyzed five indicators in each discourse: the expository structure, the reference to the oath, the topics, the speech acts and the types of arguments.
"The analysis of swearing speeches allows us to follow the trajectory of the nation, because they collect the expressions that little by little form the ideology of a nation, as in the United States and France, for example," explains Matos Moquete.
Its importance lies in the fact that no other document expresses with more precision and clarity the purposes and plans of the president of the republic and the expectations of the nation, which then remains as a reference and guide to evaluate the management at the end of his mandate.
The swearing speech is a genre, a type of communication at once: political, institutional and epidictic. The epidictic genre is one of the three defined in Rhetoric (the others are judicial and deliberative) and refers to commemorative meetings that serve to meet and share current common values.
The study concludes that the swearing speech in the Dominican Republic from 1963 is a text whose structure and meaning have the following characteristics in the texts analyzed:
• The "Never Before" Common Place
• An expository structure of the problem-solution type that consists of introduction, development and conclusion
• An intertext, the reference to the oath
• A set of topics that, according to the time, represents the conceptual universe and the ideology of the speeches
• Assertive, declarative, compromising, and directive speech acts
• Three types of argument: by comparison, by sacrifice and by overcoming among which the argument by comparison is the main one
Most of the Dominican presidents of the last decades have followed a very similar structure in their swearing-in speech, according to Matos Moquete, also a member of the Dominican Language Academy's number:
• Justify and measure their arrival: "Never before ...".
• Diagnose some type of crisis (which shows the need for their leadership)
• Some reference to historical dates and circumstances
• Raise the opportunity and the moment to face the situation
• Main proposed solutions and Government program
The INTEC research establishes that there is a revelation of the social interaction and the socio-historical context of the discourses. "There is correspondence between text and context; to the first, the speeches are explained by the second, that is, the data of linguistic-cognitive agreements between the speaker and the audience. But also the context is recreated in the text, giving a dimension of superior sense to the primary data ", cites the study.
The document, of a transdisciplinary nature, was based on Discourse Analysis and integrated other particular disciplines: Rhetoric, Pragmatics, Social Sciences and Cognitive Linguistics.
It also relied on a participatory methodology through workshops and seminars in which other specialists from the areas of social sciences and humanities contributed their knowledge and insights in the analysis of the swearing-in speeches.
The complete document touches the following points:
• General characteristics of the speeches during the Trujillo era, as well as the speeches of the last six presidents of the Republic
• Importance and order of the protocol of the act, both in the country and internationally (moments that implies)
• Oath (what elements does it contain, what does it indicate)
• Cultural reference data on what this moment has been like in the country and in others, such as the United States.