Gonen Dori-Hacohen

From sequential to affective discourse marker: Hebrew nu on Israeli political phone-in radio programs

Previous studies of Hebrew nu investigate this discourse marker in casual conversation. The current study explores nu on Israeli political phone-in radio programs and broadens our knowledge both about the functions and grammaticization processes of discourse markers and about some particularities of Israeli political talk radio. The comparison to casual talk reveals both qualitative and quantitative differences. In casual talk, the main function of nu is a sequential one – urging further development of an ongoing topic (69%). In the radiophonic data, the most common role of nu is as a keying token (53%), functioning in the affective realm. Furthermore, the talk-radio data show a wider variety of keys constructed by nu – which range from joking to sheer contempt – clustering closer towards the latter, in contrast to the case of casual talk, manifesting mostly the joking key. Structurally, whereas sequential functions are generally accomplished by stand-alone nu, affective tokens are accompanied by same-speaker talk. The analysis sheds new light on how a sequential token might come to function in the affective realm.

The Commercial and the Public “Public Spheres”: Two Types of Political Talk-Radio and Their Constructed Publics

This article describes radio programs that include one-on-one interactions between a host and caller about current affairs. The description reveals 2 formats: talk-back and phone-in. Talk-backs are found in commercial stations; the host is the star of these long programs; and the interactions with the callers are used to establish the status of the host. Phone-ins are found in public stations; the callers are the center of these shorter programs. These formats create 2 publics, 1 of passion at the talk-backs and 1 of discussion at the phone-ins. Each public has its features and relations with the public sphere.

Formulations on Israeli political talk radio: From actions and sequences to stance via dialogic resonance

This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis (CA) and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection – a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of formulations account for many instances throughout the corpus, understanding this particular formulation in CA terms does not explain its drastic rejection by the caller. We therefore turn to an in-depth examination of strategies for lexical and syntactic resonance as a stance-taking device throughout the interaction. In so doing, we not only shed light on the anomalous interaction, but also offer an answer to a provocative question previously put forward by Haddington (2004) concerning which of the two – stances or actions – have more meaningful consequences for the description of the organization of interaction. In the particular interaction analyzed here, stances play the more significant role. We propose that the intersubjective stance-taking of participants may be viewed as a meta-action employed among participants as they move across actions, sequences, and activities in talk.