The Pragmatics of Lobbying in Diplomatic Discourse: A Study of United Nations Texts

Abstract

The study of pragmatic strategies in the language of diplomacy provides an innovative
perspective on how lobbying, a form of institutional indirect persuasion, is linguistically
realized. Linguistic subtlety pervades diplomatic discourse, which enables its participants
to, as in the case of the UN, engage in diplomatic negotiation on substantive issues behind
the veil of diplomatic protocols. This article analyses the pragmatics of lobbying devices
in the light of several texts at the United Nations, focusing on speech acts, implicatures
and presuppositions. Based on the qualitative pragmatic-based analysis, the results
indicate that lobbying is mostly realized by means of indirect directive speech acts,
conversational implicatures as well as factive and existential presuppositions. These
mechanisms prove to be effective in tacitly reinforcing the persuasiveness and then
diplomatic player could continue to influence policy change without direct coercion. This
study confirms that pragmatics is instrumental in shaping diplomatic lobbying strategies
and points toward additional insights on international political communication