In the paragraphs quoted in text (x), and indeed in the entire article, bold assertions are made and nothing is mitigated by hedges. Epistemic modality is primarily used in assessments of the likelihood of a victory for one side or the other, while the sustained attack on EU policies that the Morning Starconsiders detrimental to the interests of European citizens conveys the clear message that a vote for Leave is not the less bad option but a positive step forward.
When the article was written most people agreed that the radical left had very little chance of gaining political power in the UK any time soon, so the Morning Star had nothing to lose in electoral terms by eschewing circumspection and shooting from the hip. Labour, in contrast, has been a party of government on numerous occasions and hopes to become so again at a future general election, yet text (xi), from an article by Brendan Chilton, general secretary of the Labour Leave campaign, displays a similarly direct approach with no hedging devices to reduce the risk of hostile responses. It covers similar ground to the piece in the Morning Star: the EU’s lack of democracy and accountability, austerity as a political choice rather than as an economic necessity, and neoliberal policies that benefit multinational corporations but not ordinary citizens. In the part quoted above we may presume that the headline and lead, emphatic capitals included, are the work of a Daily Express editor, while the first three paragraphs of the article are faithful to Chilton’s words.
In text (xi) we find the opposite of hedging; the idiom make no bones about it, the adverb fundamentally and the exclamation what utter nonsense all serve to inform us that Chilton’s assertions are not up for debate. The same tone of certitude is maintained throughout the article.
Instead of epistemic modality, in the second paragraph we have the deontic modals should and must. As noted earlier, should tends to indicate advice rather than a definite obligation that the addressee cannot feasibly refuse to obey, and here Chilton uses it in urging his readers to vote for leaving the EU. Must, in contrast, implies that the speaker or writer has the authority to impose an obligation on the addressee, and in text (xi) it is the ‘international elite’ that instructs Britain to remain part of the European Union. Modality is not used with regard to the factual content of the author’s words – not a hint of doubt appears anywhere in the article – but to draw attention to the high-handed way in which the international elite tell EU nation states what to do.
If The Express is an unlikely place to find an article by a member of the Labour Party, The Guardian is not where one would expect to read a series of pieces expressing understanding of and sympathy with people intending to vote for Brexit, yet Suzanne Moore (2016) did precisely that between February and June. The headline of text (xii) – ‘Voters will stick two fingers up to those lecturing about Brexit’s dangers’ – correctly predicted the outcome of the referendum two weeks before voting day. In an earlier piece, Moore (2016) admitted that her stance had shocked many of her university-educated friends: ‘My instinct now is pretty Brexitty, much to the horror of many of my left/liberal friends who equate being anti-EU with being anti-Europe.’ The extract quoted here is typical of her approach in that it makes a net distinction between Farage, Johnson and other Brexit leaders – men for whom she clearly has no respect – and the ordinary men and women planning to vote Leave more to defy the establishment than because of the specific issue of EU membership.
Text (xii) consists of the concluding paragraphs of the article. The deontic modal verb must is used twice in the first two short paragraphs, first in a passive construction (‘. . .hope must be invested. . .’), then with the impersonal pronoun one (‘. . .one must vote with head. . .’). Although the agent of the obligation signalled by must is not explicit, it is not difficult to work out who is imposing the obligation, and it is the same establishment that Chilton attacks in text (xi). In her final sentence Moore identifies that establishment as ‘government, opposition and businesses . . . speaking with one voice’.
In addition to the modal verb must, a series of other expressions reinforce the idea of a powerful elite ordering people about, from the ‘lecturing’ of the headline to ‘we are told’, ‘we keep being told’ and the England that ‘will not do as it is told’. That Suzanne Moore has little time for the leaders of the Brexit campaign is abundantly clear from her use of the lexical blend Borisconi (Boris [Johnson] + Berlusconi), which equates the most prominent figure in the final weeks of the Leave campaign with Italy’s gaffe-prone and often clownish former prime minister. However, her view of those ‘so often despised, demonised and disrespected by those who claim to represent it’ is entirely different, and it is significant that she does nor write that this part of England may or might not do as it is told, but ‘will not’.
From this and the previous chapter it is clear that Brexit/Lexit supporters couched their arguments in ways that were not necessarily full of W.B. Yeats’s ‘passionate intensity’, but usually exhibited far greater certitude than Remain campaigners’ hedged and cautious warnings. In the next chapter we see that Leave used language to good effect even in an apparently straightforward, optionless matter like the use of the imperative.
3
More to imperatives than meets the eye
The simplicity of certain features of English grammar sometimes reduces our communicative options. Modern English only has one second-person pronoun, so we can neither distinguish between singular and plural (although the plural youse and variations upon the archaic singular thou/thee occur in a number of dialects), nor employ a pronominal honorific as a politeness strategy, to acknowledge our addressee’s age or status, or to establish a certain distance between ourselves and our interlocutor.
The same simplicity is then carried over to imperative sentences, in which the pronoun is usually not stated explicitly but is understood to be you. There is just one way, the use of the base form of the verb, to express a positive imperative, so ‘Listen!’ is the only option available to us whether we are addressing one person, two or more, a naughty child or a dowager duchess. For a negative imperative we are restricted to don’t + base form, as in ‘Don’t tell anyone’. Unlike negative declarative and interrogative sentences, negative imperatives take the auxiliary don’t even when the main verb is be, as in ‘Don’t be late’.
Occasionally the subject you is overtly present, either for contrastive purposes in a sentence such as ‘You wash and I’ll dry’, or ‘when there is a somewhat bullying or aggressive tone’ (Huddlestone 1984: 360) as in ‘You just show a bit of respect’. There is a certain ambivalence when there is an overt third-person subject, as in ‘Somebody call an ambulance!’, although a pragmatic interpretation of that subject would extend its meaning to ‘somebody among you’, and the addition of a tag question would require you: ‘Somebody call an ambulance, will you?’.
Another type of imperative entails the use of letgr, or grammaticalized let, as opposed to letlex, or lexical let (ibid.: 361). Letlex can be used in all clause types, including imperatives that are no different from those considered above in that the unstated subject is you: ‘Let me/us see your tattoo’ directly commands, or more realistically in this case, implores a person to do something. Letgr is only used in imperatives, and when it is followed by the ’s contraction of us the subject is first-person plural, as immediately becomes apparent if we add a tag question: ‘Let’s eat out this evening, shall we?’ As will be investigated further in the next chapter, the pronoun we can be interpreted either inclusively or exclusively; inclusive we includes the interlocutor(s), as in ‘your aims are not so different from ours, so I’m sure we can reach an agreement acceptable to all’, while exclusive we excludes the addressee(s), as in ‘you go your way and we’ll go ours’. The letgr imperative obliges an inclusive interpretation, and some grammarians prefer to call it the cohortative mood (from the Latin hortatorius, meaning encouraging or cheering) since it tends to be used to urge a course of shared action rather than to issue a command in a peremptory fashion.
&nb
sp; Returning to the unequivocal imperative with the implicit subject you, many languages have a far more elaborate system because they also have a more complex pronominal system that distinguishes between singular and plural second-personal addressees as well as between familiar and formal relationships. ‘Tell me!’, for instance, can be translated into Italian in four ways:
•Dimmi
•Ditemi
•Mi dica
•Mi dicano
The first two options are unequivocal imperatives with implicit second-person subjects, the first being the singular tu and the second the plural voi. Neither would normally be used with an adult stranger or strangers, or with a person or people whose age or status the speaker wishes to acknowledge. In such situations, it would be normal to use the third and fourth options, whose implicit subjects are the third-person lei (singular) and loro (plural) respectively, the pronouns required to express courtesy or respect for one’s addressee(s). Technically speaking, the third and fourth options are not imperatives at all, but congiuntivi esortativi, or exhortative subjunctives (Trifone and Palermo 2007: 138), but they are listed here because they are two of the four most direct translations of ‘Tell me!’. The crucial difference, however, is that saying ‘Mi dica’ to an Italian is unlikely to cause offence (in service encounters it is used as a broad equivalent of ‘How can I help you?’), while a blunt ‘Tell me’ will not always be appreciated by an anglophone interlocutor.
Because of the lack of alternative forms in English, there is often the risk of sounding bossy or aggressive if we use the imperative. We can take some of the sting out of the command by adding please or the tag questions will you? or would you?, but we often prefer to use an indirect speech act, typically an interrogative clause to transform the order into a polite request, such as ‘Could you bring me Ms Baker’s file?’. The request formula is generally chosen even when the speaker clearly has the authority to issue an order; most managers have enough sense to understand that barking orders at staff does not produce the best response, and most staff do not confuse a polite boss with a weak boss.
Imperatives are freely used when the unstated you does not refer to anyone in particular, such as in written instructions on how to use a device or machine, or in a recipe. When using a series of imperatives to give street directions, the speaker may be addressing the hapless tourist directly but the information provided would be equally pertinent to anyone standing on that particular spot, so there is again an impersonal element. During elections the most basic campaign slogan of all involves the imperative form of the verb to vote. In the slogans Vote Remain or Vote Leave, the implicit subject is a non-specific you, and those publishing or uttering what is superficially an order know perfectly well that millions of people will disobey. In terms of Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1969), the illocutionary force is one of proffering advice rather than issuing a command, and the speaker or writer knows that in many cases the perlocutionary effect will be the opposite of that which is intended. In a one-to-one situation, however, Vote UKIP might be interpreted as a genuine command, and one quite likely to be resisted.
Given the potential dangers involved in using grammatical imperatives, it is helpful to think in terms of jussives. A jussive may be defined as a clause or verb form that indicates an order or command but is not necessarily an imperative in purely syntactic terms; indeed, imperatives should rightly be considered a subclass of the wider class of jussive clauses (Huddlestone 1988: 133). ‘You will sort this out immediately’ is a declarative sentence but the uncontracted and emphatically pronounced will makes it abundantly clear that the illocutionary force is an order rather than a mere statement of fact. A number of fixed expressions involving the subjunctive mood are non-imperative jussives: So be it, Long live the King and so on. An important jussive when the intention is to depersonalize an order is the employment of an introductory subordinate clause like ‘It is vital that . . .’ or ‘It is essential that . . .’. In this way responsibility for imposing a directive is shifted away from the bossy speaker or writer and towards unspecified external circumstances.
A feature of the Leave camp’s referendum campaign was that one type of imperative sometimes masqueraded as another. The most frequently published slogan was the double imperative Vote Leave Take Control (also the URL of the main pro-Brexit website) or the slight variation Vote Leave, take back control.
FIGURE 1 Downloadable campaign resource from the website of the Vote Leave movement.
Source: http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/campaign_resources.html.
This slogan appeared on billboards, posters, vehicles and, somewhat controversially, was also superimposed upon a photograph of one of Britain’s best-known works of contemporary art, the 20-metre tall Angel of the North sculpture near Gateshead in the north-east of England (prior permission from the artist, Antony Gormley, was neither obtained nor even requested).
Although the slogan appears to involve two standard imperatives with an implicit second-person subject, during the referendum campaign it was often linked to texts or public speeches that suggested that its true illocutionary force was that of a cohortative with an inclusive first-person plural subject. Indeed, when space permitted (e.g. on the side of a truck) the imperative with letgr was preferred: Let’s take back control.
Ambiguous imperatives did not begin with the 2016 referendum campaign. On the eve of voting day, Alice Foster for the Daily Express reminded us that her newspaper had started working for Brexit long before the referendum had even been announced by showing us again the cover of a special edition published in January 2011 (Foster 2016). After the conventional second-person imperative Get Britain out of the EU, St George atop the white cliffs of Dover uses the first-person plural pronouns we and our in an underlined demand that the country be reclaimed, thus suggesting that the preceding imperative should be interpreted as having a cohortative illocutionary force with the initial Let’s unstated but understood.
FIGURE 2 Special edition of the Daily Express, 8 January 2011, republished 22 June 2016.
The words yes and no can function as jussives, as we see in the following ‘Britty Brexit’ downloadable poster from the website of the Better Off Out campaign. Indeed, the slogan No to the European Union, Yes to the Wider World could be converted into two conventional imperative clauses by the simple insertion of the verb say before no and yes respectively. This poster counters one of the main accusations launched at Leave supporters, that is, that they were Little Englanders, nostalgic for past glories and turning their back on internationalism and openness. The implication is that it is the EU that is beset by provincial attitudes and that by saying no to this limited institution we – the pronoun is apposite – would be opening up to genuine internationalism of a global scale. Given the nature of the choice presented, a cohortative interpretation is appropriate since the ‘wider world’, with its connotations of adventure and enormous potential, is obviously the option most of us would prefer. The EU is not explicitly described as narrow or limited, but the very absence of a premodifier to counterbalance wider is a flout of the Gricean maxim of quantity, and this creates the implicature that the European Union lacks the broad range and limitless possibilities offered by the alternative choice.
FIGURE 3 Downloadable campaign resource from the website of Better Off Out.
Source: http://www.betteroffout.net/campaigning/campaigning-materials/.
The same idea that it is the EU that has limited horizons is presented in a poster on the cross-party Twitter account Stop the EU. The main slogan is Think outside the EU box (2015), followed by ‘There’s a world of trade out there’ and ‘Vote no to end this madness’. The confines of the EU box are contrasted with the limitless opportunities offered by the world of trade out there in such a way that the first imperative clause is not so much a command as an inducement to collective action by addressers and addressees together. The images reinforce the contrast as a globe inside a cardboard box and a ballot box symbol
ize entrapment and the route to liberation respectively. The cohortative illocutionary force of the second imperative clause is once again established by rendering the alternative course of action unthinkable; who among us would vote yes to retain madness?
The implicit Letgr of the imperative clauses investigated here leads naturally to further examination of the inclusive we successfully employed by Leave campaigners. In the next chapter we see how the marginalized and the unemployed learnt that they were in the same boat as Old Etonians.
4
Inclusive we, the former City broker as champion of the common man, and good old Bojo: How the pro-Brexit press created the illusion of a classless alliance
The Remain and Leave campaigns were well funded and both received substantial private and corporate donations. According to the Electoral Commission, the independent watchdog set up by the UK Parliament to oversee party and election finances, in the ten weeks to 21 April 2016, registered Remain campaigners raised £7.5 million, which included donations amounting to £2.3 million from the supermarket magnate Lord Sainsbury, as well as other substantial donations from the hedge fund manager David Harding, the Tower Limited Partnership and Lloyd Dorfman, the founder of Travelex. In the same period registered Leave groups amassed £8.2 million, including £3.2 million from the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves and nearly £2 million from companies owned by the businessman Aaron Banks (Leave and Remain EU donations and loans revealed 2016). Both sides also raised funds by appealing to the general public but neither could claim to have organized a Bernie Sanders-style campaign financed by millions of small donations from ordinary men and women.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 5
