Anita Fetzer

Negotiating validity claims in political interviews

This contribution presents an investigation of the interactional organization of the media event and discourse genre of political interview in the framework of the communicative act of a plus/minus validity claim based on the contextualization of Jurger Habermass (1987) theory of communicative action. In this setting, political interviews are defined as negotiating validity claims with regard to the first-frame interaction of interviewer and interviewee and the second-frame interaction, which consists of the first frame (interviewer, interviewee) interacting with the media frame. The first section investigates political interviews with regard to their dual status as process and product, and their attribution to media communication. Section 2 discusses the communicative act of a plus/minus validity claim from both micro- and macro-viewpoints. Here special reference is given to the accommodation of genre-specific constraints and requirements. The third section applies the functional grammar concept of markedness to the analysis of discourse genre and investigates the communicative function of explicit references to the media frame, such as television, program(s), the institutional roles of interviewer, interviewee, and audience, and discusses when, where, and how these references are realized and what communicative function(s) they fulfill. Since explicit references to the media frame are generally restricted to the opening section of the interview, any deviation from the standard, routine interview represents a marked variant, in which the first- and second-frame presuppositions are exploited in order to communicate conversationally implicated meaning. In conclusion, the analysis of political interviews requires a dynamic framework which not only accounts for their dual status as both processes and products but also for the constitutive multiframe interactions and multiple discourse identities.

AND I THINK THAT IS A VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY OF DEALING WITH IT: THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION OF COGNITIVE VERBS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This contribution examines the distribution and communicative function of cognitive verbs in political discourse, giving particular attention to their impact on the expression of commitment. From a semantic viewpoint, cognitive verbs are seen as a means of subjectification expressing the speakers attitude towards proposition and force whereas, from a discursive perspective, they are assigned the status of multifunctional devices expressing different types and different degrees of commitment. Part I analyzes the semantics and pragmatics of cognitive verbs, in particular those of think. Part II examines their particularized form and function in political discourse, accommodating both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It shows that cognitive verbs tend to co-occur with other linguistic devices expressing commitment, thus illustrating their fine-grained interplay in the presentation of the political agent. The particularized use of cognitive verbs is assigned the status of a contextualization device, inviting the addressees to adopt the speakers perspective and interpret a communicative contribution accordingly.

Doing leadership in political speech: Semantic processes and pragmatic inferences

The interactional organization of leadership was examined in the context of 15 political speeches, delivered by leading politicians from the three major political parties in Britain. The study utilized a sociopragmatic methodology, supplemented by corpus linguistics and social psychology. Leadership was conceptualized in interactional–sociolinguistic terms, as brought in and brought out in the interaction through self-references collocating with four main verb forms (event, communication, subjectification and intention); these generate implicatures targeting political competence and responsiveness. Event and subjectification verbs were found to occur the most frequently, and communication verbs the least frequently, with little variation between politicians from different political parties. It was proposed that action and intention verbs primarily target competence, while subjectification and communication verbs primarily target responsiveness; overall, each of the four principal verb forms may be utilized to perform leadership throughout a political speech as a whole.

Contexts of social action: guest editors' introduction

In traditional linguistic accounts of context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is, a situation in which an expression is uttered. Thus, features such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse are all parts of context. But context is a wider and more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. For one thing, context is a relational concept relating social actions and their surroundings, relating social actions, relating individual actors and their surroundings, and relating the set of individual actors and their social actions to their surroundings. Social actors select and construct the appropriate contexts for their social actions. Against this background, social context is regarded as given. Context is also a constitutive part of the research paradigm of speech act theory. Just consider felicity conditions as social and linguistic context categories (Austin, 1975; Searle, 1969), and language games where language is conceived as a form of action and as a form of life (Wittgenstein, 1958). The impact of social context on language, language use and linguistic performance is also of importance in the field of sociolinguistics. For example, code-switching is anchored to the differentiation between the value-free conceptions of biand multilingualism and their value-loaded highand low-variety counterparts of diglossia, and to different styles and registers (Fasold, 1990; Holmes, 1992; Wardhaugh, 1993). Social context is not only conceived of as presupposed and given, but also as interactionally organized, which is reflected in the research paradigms of conversation analysis (Heritage,1984; Schegloff, 1991), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1994) and ethnography of speaking (Saville-Troike, 1989). Here, context is generally differentiated with regard to a spatio-oriented frame of reference and a socio-oriented frame of reference, namely the immediate physical surroundings, Language & Communication 22 (2002) 391–402 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

The negotiation of discourse relations in context: Co-constructing degrees of overtness

Abstract This paper examines the linguistic realization of discourse relations in the discourse genre of commentary. Based on a “bare” source text from which all extraclausal constituents had been removed, the linguistic realization of discourse relations is compared across three dyadically co-constructed experimental texts. The methodological framework integrates Segmented Discourse Representation Theory with functional grammar and psycholinguistic models of discourse processing, and describes discourse relations (DRs) that tend to be indexed implicitly only, that is, via intraclausal cues, and others that tend to be indexed with a mix of intra- and extraclausal cues. Continuation and Result; Continuation and Elaboration; and Elaboration, Explanation, and Background show some overlap in their definitions, and that is why their realizations may remain vague unless they are supplemented with extraclausal cues. Salience can account for the overspecifications observed, while underspecifications may be accounted for in terms of cognitive economy. Order of authorship is arbitrary.

Prologue Analyzing the Fine Details of Political Commitment

The goal of this introduction is to contextualize the multifaceted notion of commitment. It examines its conditions of use in ordinary language and in the research paradigms of pragmatics, social psychology, and discourse analysis. Particular attention is given to the microanalysis of commitment in ordinary language and in political discourse as well as to its subjective and intersubjective dimensions.

Non-acceptances: Re- or Un-creating Context?

Non-acceptances are discussed in speech act theory, logic & conversation and conversation analysis with special reference to how context is accommodated. The results are systematized in the framework of plus/minus-validity claims based on the contextualization of Habermass theory of communicative actions [18], defined as minusvalidity claims anchored to an interactive tripartite system of objective, subjective and social worlds subdivided into further textual, interpersonal and interactional sub-systems. Non-acceptances of the objective world are represented explicitly (syntactic, semantic negation), non-acceptances of the subjective world represented non-linearly (negative non-verbal behaviour), and nonacceptances of the social world explicitly and implicitly (denials, rejections, negative contextualization cues). Context is both micro & institutional, and process & product. Minusvalidity claims are not only calculated in a bottom-up manner with regard to their references to the three worlds, but also with regard to institutional contexts. Before this type of presupposed context may be rejected, it is re-created by being made explicit. Only then is it possible to reject and un-create it.

Evidentiality in discourse

The investigation of the theoretical concept of evidentiality has originated from the analysis of languages like Kwakiutl (Boas [1911] 2002), where evidentiality is coded in the system of grammar. In recent years, however, the focus has shifted more and more to its pragmatic functions: by marking the source of information and thus the commitment of, or attitude toward, the information, the speaker (or writer) secures a communicative act to the hearer (or reader), or promotes or shares the understanding of a state of affairs. In these pragmatic functions, evidentiality may intersect with epistemic modality and with the marking of tense and aspect. The present issue of Evidentiality in discourse provides functional analyses of the form and function of evidentiality as grammaticalized and optional marking across different discourse domains (political discourse, media discourse and non-institutional conversation) and different discourse genres (research articles, media reports, Prime Minister’s Questions, election campaigns and mundane everyday talk). The following section examines the theory and practice of evidentiality, discussing the grammar and pragmatics of evidentiality. The third section examines evidentiality as a discursive construct and the fourth section introduces the contributions.

Foregrounding evidentiality in (English) academic discourse: Patterned co-occurrences of the sensory perception verbs seem and appear

Abstract This paper examines the distribution, patterned co-occurrences and function of the sensory perception verbs appear and seem and the three English modal auxiliaries can, may and must in the context of written academic discourse, concentrating on their contribution to the expression of evidentiality and epistemic modality. It is based on the premise that epistemic modality and evidentiality are different: the former refers to a category in which some hypothetical state of affairs is indexed and evaluated; the latter refers to a visual, sensorial, hearsay or inferential mode of knowing. The methodological framework is an integrated one, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies to filter out discourse patterns which may contribute to the fore- and backgrounding of evidential meaning. Patterned co-occurrences of nevertheless and thus with appear and seem and can, may and must are assigned the status of a salient discourse pattern in and through which evidential meaning is foregrounded.

Sort of and kind of in political discourse: Hedge, head of NP or contextualization cue?

This contribution argues for an integrated approach to the analysis of sort of / kind of, assigning them the status of contextualization cues. It combines quantitative with qualitative, context-sensitive methodologies accounting for distribution, function and co-occurrence. The spoken data comprise ten political speeches (35,844 words) and 22 political interviews (150,044 words), displaying the constructions [DET ADJ sort of / kind of NP], [DET sort of NP], [QUANTIFIER sort of / kind of NP], [sort of / kind of VP]. The local linguistic context of sort of / kind of contains discourse markers, other hedges, interpersonal markers, question tags and relative clauses. Sort of / kind of also co-occur with expressions of epistemic modality realized through modal verbs and modal adverbs, and with cognitive verbs and verbs of communication used as parentheticals. Their most frequent and thus unmarked variant is the more-fuzzy function which co-occurs with other devices expressing indeterminacy. Their marked variant is the less-fuzzy function, which is fronted or co-occurs with relative clauses.