Pragmatic functions of evidentiality in the response judgments at a political interview

Abstract

The article is devoted to the establishment of expression forms and the description of the pragmatic functions of evidentiality in the interviewed politician’s response discourse in the context of the official discussion. The research is aimed at identifying and analyzing the pragmatic specifics of evidentiality as the politician’s strategic tool in the interview, assuming a special evidence base in order to manipulate and convince the target audience. Based on a solid sample of fragments of an English-language political interview in which respondents raise current socio-economic problems, an original classification of the expression means and pragmatic functions of evidentiality is proposed in accordance with such parameters as the source of relevant information and the way of the everyday reality cognition. Relying on critical discourse analysis, the method of extracting and annotating evidential markers of the response judgment effectiveness, their subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis, the description of various evidentiality types that underlie the interviewed politician’s ideological attitudes and the pragmatic functions of these types are given. It is established that in the format of reacting judgments, evidentiality functions as the consequence of the interviewed politician’s need in activating effective information sources that can be based on personal knowledge, well-known information about socio-economic reality and other sources. At the same time, the politician’s evidence base may be of direct, indirect and presumptive character. It is revealed that the interviewed politician to cover the ideological attitudes of his / her activities also uses evidentiality as it legitimizes one’s own judgments and delegitimizes alternative (opposite) opinions,. The interviewed politician’s evidence source base is characterized, which reflect ideological bias due to the coding of hypothetical assumptions about the authority of representatives of the political sphere, facts of reality, well-known information. The contexts are analyzed when the politician assumes responsibility for the publication of relevant information, resorting to the sources of information actually obtained and thereby strengthening the argumentation of the propositions put forward. The typology of the sources of the interviewed politician’s evidence base is proposed.