Abstract
Pragmatic markers comprise a functional class of linguistic items that do not typically change the propositional meaning of an utterance but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse, for marking the speaker’s attitudes to the proposition being expressed as well as for facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences. Pragmatic marker research has been characterised by descriptive approaches: even case studies that take their data from political discourse tend to focus on linguistic patterns of co-occurrence and sequentiality rather than social-institutional norms or broader societal concerns. The novelty of this article is, therefore, in linking pragmatic marker research, a primarily discourse analytical, language-oriented field to the broader field of Discourse Studies with a focus on manipulative social practices and their manifestations in discursive strategies. This article analyses evidential markers, general extenders, quotation markers and markers of (un)certainty1 in political interviews broadcasted by the BBC, CNN and Hungarian ATV. After a short overview of the formal and functional characteristics of pragmatic markers and their relevance to Discourse Studies in general and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) research in particular, characteristics of the political interview as political discourse, institutional discourse and media(tised) discourse are discussed. In the second part, the results of previous (primarily descriptive and genre analytical) research are reconsidered from the perspective of CDA and particular pragmatic markers are associated with manifestations of manipulative intent, such as suppression, polarization, recontextualising, conversationalisation and intended ambiguity. An important finding of this study is that a single pragmatic marker can serve several manipulative functions, while a given manipulative strategy is potentially realized by a variety of pragmatic items. Potential manipulative uses are exemplified with a view to applying the heuristic to the analysis of representations of particular political events and happenings, which is a direction for further research.
Highlights
Pragmatic markers comprise a functional class of linguistic items that do not typically change the propositional meaning of an utterance but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse, for marking the speaker’s attitudes to the proposition being expressed as well as for facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences
The present article is informed by research in a sub-field of linguistic pragmatics, pragmatic marker research, often considered a “growth industry” (Fraser, 1999: 931) and, at the same time, a “testing ground” (Bordería-Pons, 2008: 1354) for theories of discourse and pragmatics
The article’s aim is to, first of all, illustrate that the analysis of pragmatic markers can serve as a methodology for revealing manipulative discursive practices, and, secondly, to demonstrate the benefits of the cross-fertilization between Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatic marker research
Summary
The political interview is a genre that is best understood in terms of its formal-functional characteristics as institutional talk (cf. Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991), political discourse, media discourse and mediatised discourse. Because of the genre-specific conventions of political interviews as well as a set of expectations on the part of the audience, the content of the IE’s turns always have to, at least, appear relevant to the IR’s first-pair part, if, the IE’s second-pair part is irrelevant, it is duly noted and / or made explicit by the IR, which is markedly different from the exchange mechanics of other discourse genres such as those of naturally-occurring conversations
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