Understatement and overstatement: Two powerful persuasive tools in English and Italian political speeches

The main purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the relevant role played by understatement and overstatement in English and Italian political speeches (see also Mattiello 2013), and, on the other hand, to show the persuasion they entail, especially when combined with other figures of speech. The theoretical framework I adopt in the paper is that of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The analysis of data selected from online archives and videos of political addresses demonstrates that, in English and Italian political discourse, rhetoric occurs not only in the form of metaphor, but also, and persuasively, in the form of overstatement (especially hyperbolic statement) and understatement. The analysis also shows that, from the speaker’s stance, the two phenomena of over- and understatement are cognitively different, in that the production of overstatement always involves a broadening operation, whereas the creation of understatement may involve either a broadening or a narrowing process, depending on the trope (meiosis, euphemism or litotes) the speaker uses.