English discourse markers in mediatised political interviews

Abstract

The present case study takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in spoken English: I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know. The point of departure in this research is a set of discourse-pragmatic relations and functions, such as conversation management, thematic control, concession, elaboration, reformulation, ventriloquizing, and marking evidentiality. After looking at which DMs signal these relations and functions in our corpora, we identify a set of English DMs whose members display markedly different pragmatic behaviours across various subgenres of spoken English such as naturally-occurring conversations and mediatised political interviews. We examine their use in a corpus of political interviews broadcast in English by the BBC and CNN between 2003 and 2011, and compare our results with previous research, performed on the basis of spontaneous, everyday conversations. Our paper has a threefold goal: (1) to present examples of the various discourse-organizing roles and strategic uses of the DMs; (2) to discuss the differences between the selected English DMs' functions across different subgenres of spoken English discourse; and (3) to answer whether or not the uses of the selected discourse markers differ across the various discourse types/genres (spoken English vs. different types of political interviews).

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Discourse Markers in Curriculum-Based English Textbooks and the English Entrance Exam in Taiwan

“…The results were in line with Carter and McCarthy's (2006) claim that DMs occur more often in spoken than in written language. The findings also agreed with Furko and Abuczki (2014) that DMs are genre-dependent. DMs occur more frequently in spoken than in written language; that is, the more interactive the genre is, the more frequently DMs occur (Huang, 2011).…”

Presidential campaign talk: Question-answering in ‘Neutral Informational Interviews’

“…He notes that they can presage ‘transformative answers’ which reframe the question that was asked (see also Stivers and Hayashi, 2010, and Clayman’s 1993a study of evasive answers in televised news interviews). In the study of political interviews, Furkó and Abuczki (2014) argue that ‘well’ can be used to presage a topic shift.…”

Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse

“…Furkó, 2013;Furkó and Abuczki, 2014;Furkó et al, forthcoming), and reconsiders those findings from the perspective of influencing intentions in general and manipulative intent in particular. The aim is to associate different groups of PrMs (evidential markers, general extenders, quotation markers and so on) with particular manifestations of manipulative intent identified in the relevant CDA research, such as suppression, polarization, recontextualising and conversationalisation.…”

“…The genrebased analysis of political news interviews and celebrity interviews (cf. Furkó, 2013;Furkó and Abuczki, 2014) revealed that the functional spectrum of PrMs in celebrity interviews is in many ways similar to that in spontaneous informal conversations, while PrMs fulfil fewer interactional and more heteroglossic functions in more prototypical political news interviews. However, on the basis of the analysis of manipulative uses, we can make further refinements to the distributional patterns of PrMs.…”