«Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse»

Peter Furko
«Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse»
Palgrave Communications, volume 3, Article number: 17054 (2017)

Palgrave Communications (@PalCommsOA) | Palgrave Macmillan | Londres | REINO UNIDO


Extracto de apartados resumen y conclusiones en páginas 1 y 7 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«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.

»Conclusions, directions for further research

»Because of its inherently semasiological nature, pragmatic marker research has been characterised by microanalyses and bottom-up approaches to a variety of discourse-pragmatic phenomena. However, if PrM research is informed by CDA, an inherently top-down approach preoccupied with ethical and societal concerns (cf. Angermuller, 2014: 11), we can gain new insights into distributional patterns that were previously unnoticed. The genre-based 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.

»As we saw above, celebrity interviews are markedly different from spontaneous face-to-face conversations in that manipulative uses are as salient in celebrity interviews as in close-to-the-core political news interviews. These tendencies were revealed after we looked at co-occurrence patterns with pronominal choices and vocatives, both of which have been extensively studied as manipulative in the relevant CDA literature.

»Conversely, PrM research has much to offer in informing CDA analyses and can either reinforce observations made on the basis of other lexical and morpho-syntactic choices or reveal new discursive strategies of control and dominance through quantitative analyses of functional distributions, D-values and co-occurrence patterns. Wodak and Meyer (2009) observes that “CDA researchers very rarely work with interactional texts such as dialogues” (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 10), a tendency which seems to have changed in recent years (cf. e.g. Wodak, 2009; Mölder, 2010; Kantara, 2012). The analysis of interactional texts, therefore, requires a new toolbox, to which PrM research can provide a useful addition.

»A promising direction for further research is the analysis of PrMs’ use from a multimodal perspective. A pilot study (cf. Abuczki and Furkó, 2015) suggests that there are correlations between particular PrM functions and the non-verbal signs (facial expressions, eyebrow movement, hand gestures and so on) communicators make while, or immediately beforeuttering PrMs. Multimodality has long been a focus of CDA research, thus, a critically informed, multimodal analysis of PrM uses in political interviews might reveal even more “traces of the punctuation of the unconscious” (Angermuller, 2014: 158) as well as influencing or manipulative intent.»