The purpose of this paper is to show the existing relationships between the concept of community and the linguistic forms used to convey or even to manipulate it. First of all, the limits and restrictions of any form of community will be defined. Second, one specific form of community will be selected for analysis. The community chosen will be the Parliamentary community, and the linguistic form singled out for study will be the first person plural pronoun “we”. We will try to discover any type of relationship between (a) the scope of reference of this personal pronoun and (b) the intentions of the person who uttered it. In this way, we can see whether there is any connection between personal identity (in terms of inclusion/exclusion from a group) and pronominal choice. This could also lead us to the discovery of any possible strategic use of this personal pronoun.

This article is concerned with Extreme Case Formulations (ECFs) (Edwards, 2000; Pomerantz, 1986) in multiple-party TV programmes in two different languages: Spanish and English. I examine the role of ECFs in Spanish pre-electoral debates and in English panel interviews. English data is 77 minutes and 58 seconds long and comprises nine different panel interviews of political, socio-political and social issues and Spanish data is 78 minutes long and includes four political pre-electoral debates. The results will disclose that the number of ECFs found in the Spanish and in the English corpora differs considerably (48 versus 81). And in relation to the type of recording, the data will reveal that (a) interviewers and interviewees deployed many more ECFs in political recordings (2.8 percent) than in socio-political (1.2 percent) or social recordings (1.3 percent); and (b) politicians used more ECFs (4.8 percent) than any other type of interviewees (1.5 percent).

No abstract

Nuestro objetivo consiste en analizar el uso de los mecanismos verbales y no verbales como estrategias comunicativas en las entrevistas políticas, y más concretamente en una entrevista televisada con el ex-Presidente de los Estados Unidos, Bill Clinton. Pretendemos descubrir cómo los politicos intentan sacar ventaja de los mecanismos verbales y no verbales en las entrevistas televisadas.

This paper analyses politicians’ selection of adverbs of certainty and extreme case formulations (ECFs) in both the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit (2016). This analysis helped discover if politicians in the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit: (a) framed a similar or different reality through their discourse choices and (b) used the same types of adverbs of certainty and ECFs and with the same frequency. For this purpose, we contrasted both the time (the 1975 Referendum vs. the Brexit) and the position (Anti-Europe vs. Pro-Europe). The corpus was made up of eight different recordings. Four of them were about the Brexit and four about the 1975 Referendum. In the case of the Brexit corpus, two recordings were Pro-Europe, two were Anti-Europe, and the same was in the case of the 1975 Referendum corpus.