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Perceived underlying intentions are more important than the literal meanings of politician’s utterances for Polònia’s staff when crafting sketches. Participants approach politician’s speeches by assuming that they are not saying what they really want to say. They make a separation of literal meaning and intended meaning, and focus on the latter. To recall this intended meaning, or intention, as they call it, they start by identifying the most characteristic elements of politicians’ voices as well as phrases actually pronounced by the real politicians. They put together pragmatic and semantic elements to create catchphrases with political force, that is to say, they exaggerate voice elements that add political weight to the text. The formulation of catchphrases can subordinate the exact citation of an utterance’s semantics to the exaggeration of its pragmatics. When acting their characters on stage, actors and actress are compelled to express an intention, which resembles the intentions of the original politicians. If the catchphrase-crafting subordinates text to voice, in the acting, actors can dismiss scripted lines as long as the character’s voice resembles the real-life politician’s intentions. Participants also use fictional characters to be blended with their own characters, as a form to materialise and make more evident the original politician’s intentions.

It is not the aim of this chapter to dismiss the relevance of an utterance’s literal meaning. This data simply suggests that literal meaning is relatively important for participants. It is shown that shearing utterances of their pragmatic elements might cause the loss of important information that allows understanding of political strategies. In this sense, Polònia’s approach to politicians’ utterances may complement text-based forms of political discourse analysis. Both forms aim to understand strategies deployed by politician to attain or contest power, as suggested by Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) when calling for a critical approach to politician discourse.

Participants also look for elements affecting the political processes, as is the concern of Van Dijk (1997). However, as mentioned in the introduction, the political relevance given by Chilton (2004) to the concept of implicature is very important for this chapter’s argument. What really matters is the intended meaning conveyed by words, not the words themselves. Even though it is recognised that words can be a good path to get to the intended meaning, participants say that this is not always the case, and that is why they embark upon the project of understanding the politician’s voice as a whole.

The concept of implicature requires the counterpart to actively engage in the conversation. The hearer is compelled to understand what Lycan (2008, p.161) defined as utterances’ ‘conveyed meanings’, which occurs when “a speaker uses a sentence to convey something other than what that sentence literally means” . For Lycan, it does not matter if what the sentence entails is true or not, because implicatures work on the assumption “that competent hearers do grasp such conveyed meanings without ever realizing that that is what they are doing” (p.165). This concept recognises that hearers and readers tend to skip over the literal meaning of an utterance and go straight to the ‘invited inference’ made by the speaker (Geis and Zwicky, 1971, p.564). Another relevant element of implicatures is the fact that they can occur unwittingly, but at the same time, the speaker may openly use them on the basis that the hearer will understand. Grice (1975, p.52) provides two examples in which, “though some maxim is violated at the level of what is said, the hearer is entitled to assume that that maxim, or at least, the Cooperative Principle, is observed at the level of what is implicated”. One of the examples is ‘irony’, in which it is clear for everyone that “the most obvious related proposition is the contradictory”. Another is ‘metaphor’ which “characteristically involve categorical falsity but the speaker is attributing the audience a certain feature for it to resemble the mentioned substance” (p.53).

Data presented in this chapter gives weight to two concepts: implicature and pragmatics. Neither are shown to be relevant in the literature analysed in the introduction chapter. The normative approach is largely based on methodologies that give relevance to the semantics of politicians’ utterances. An explanation for this bias could be that pragmatics imprints the text with a ‘personal’ touch, as this chapter suggests. Voice, accents, slang and so on, confer a sense of authorship on the semantics of a given sentence. They make present the person of the politician in the act of communication, which is exactly the opposite of the normative prescriptions emerging out of the idealised impersonal agora. However, pragmatic elements can be helpful to reveal politician’s strategies; the challenge is to find a methodology to properly grasp them while identifying the relevance of each one. When it comes to implicature, several authors mention that it requires the counterpart to actively engage in the conversation. Data shown in this chapter – and in previous ones – suggests that this level of engagement cannot be

reached uniquely by semantic deliberation, but also by a personal bodily experience. Yet again, the primary focus on semantics reduces the chances for the normative approach to grasp this kind of engagement.