Page 4 - Book Review Interactional Orderliness and Disorderliness

Book Review / Ulasan Buku 199

Question time and exchanges within a narrower framing. This is of
course not a fault. What this book demonstrates is that discourse is
a fertile field of investigation. The decay of language in democratic
governance can be a precursor to authoritarian rule.
David Yoong’s work contributes to the investigation of political
discourse in practice and in action as the dissemination of the “many
genres of political discourse : political speeches of all kinds , televised
press conferences , broadcast or televised interviews with politicians,
snippets on the Internet (e.g. you Tube …” (Ruth Wodak , Politics as
usual Investigating political discourse in action (Chapter37) in The
Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, James Paul Gee ad Michael
Handford (eds.) (2012) ).
David Yoong’s eight chapters in his book capture a broad and in-
depth analysis of Malaysian Parliamentary discourse. He concludes
that “The findings show that people generally regard Malaysian
Parliamentary discourse as being chaotic and disorderly.” As this
review suggests, if the prized value of parliamentary debate is
devalued in IOD, there may be an erosion of respect for the dignity
of elected representatives leading to depredation of legitimacy of
parliamentary democracy as a system. This is not to say that other
nations do not suffer from IOD as many fascinating examples culled
from Commonwealth demonstrate that Malaysian parliamentarians
are far from being alone in street bazaar language exchanges with
unacceptable expletives. David Yoong is measured and solicitous in
his evaluation of the evidence from Malaysian Hansard perhaps as
part of political theatrics of all elected MPs. The period of study is
confined to period of August – December 2006. The learned author
mined a rich field of Dewan Rakyat Hansards and negotiated well the
terrain of Bahasa Malaysia. He also harvested from Question Time
video clips made available to him only from some parties.
UM Press is to be congratulated for enriching this area of
scholarship with the publication of David Yoong’s contribution. The
book deserves a wide readership and is an encouragement and spur
to further fruitful work in this sphere.