Masarykova univerzita

i.v)Conversationalization of Media Discourse

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i.v)Conversationalization of Media Discourse

When describing political discourse, it should be focused on its strong inclination to generic hybridity. It may be observed in my corpus that politicians tend to use informal, conversational language in an effort to be closer to their listeners and to be able to influence them more easily. Politicians pretend to belong among “ordinary people”. This is connected with a change in political discourse which has been noticed by several researchers (Fetzer and Weizman 2006; Fairclough 1998; Clayman and Heritage 2002; among others).

Fetzer and Weizman (2006) claim that “politics has undergone dramatic changes and has become a media endeavor. [...] The primarily monologue-oriented mode of discourse, which prevailed in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, is no longer considered to be appropriate in the western and Anglo-American contexts” (Fetzer and Weizman 2006:146).

This aspect has been confirmed by Fairclough, who states that “the genres of broadcasting often have a complex hybrid or heterogeneous character” (Fairclough 1998:150). He also points out that “political interviews typically mix their genres and their discourses. In complex ways, politicians characteristically shift into conversational genre, and draw upon lifeworld discourses, in finding ways to address mass audiences who are listening or watching in mainly domestic environments” (Fairclough 1998:151). This generic hybridity results in “conversationalization” (Clayman and Heritage 2002:339) of political discourse, or of the mass media in general.

The term “conversationalization” suggests that lexical means which occur typically in informal discourse penetrate into institutional discourse and influence it. As a result, this institutional discourse becomes more informal. “The interaction no longer takes place between roles or statuses [...] but because of sharply divided conversation control and the reduction of asymmetries, it becomes more informal and democratic. According to Fairclough, ‘conversationalization’ is the discursive component of social and cultural change” (Titscher et al. 2000:154).

However, when describing these new tendencies in the development of institutional discourse, Fairclough sounds rather critical. He sees conversationalization as an “apparent democratisation of discourse which involves the reduction of overt markers of power asymmetry between people of unequal institutional power” (1995:79, my emphasis). Democratisation of discourse is connected with “synthetic personalisation”, which Fairclough describes as the “simulation of private, face-to-face, person-to-person discourse in public mass-audience discourse - print, radio, television” (1995:80).

By contrast, Scannell considers changes related to broadcasting as something positive and inevitable, which goes hand in hand with the development of broadcasting itself and which contributes positively to its communicative character. “The liveness of radio and television indicates in all its ways the phenomenal now of being in the world. It is this that shows in all its practices. Through its being-there (its da-sein), broadcasting creates new ways of being in the world – of being in two places at once, two times at once” (1998:264).

Conversationalization relates to the fact that media discourse and the manner of broadcasting have gradually conformed to the norms of ordinary, informal conversation because the voices of radio and television are heard in the context of household activities, where the communicative style of interaction between people prevails (Scannel 1991).

i.vi)Conclusion

To conclude, political discourse consists of many genres, one of them being political interview. Political interview may be regarded as a specific genre because it structures reality in a specific way, i.e. it takes place in an institutional setting, there is an interviewer, who directs the interview and asks the questions, and an interviewee, who is a politician and answers the questions of the interviewer. Since the politician is aware of his/her responsibility and status, his answers are sometimes evasive and vague. The reason for this is that s/he does not want to be accused of lying. The role of the interviewer is very important at this point because a good journalist should insist on the politician answering the questions and s/he should know how to force the politician to do so. At this moment, it is also more interesting for the viewers.

When analysing political interviews, it is important to apply pragmatic approach, which is also adopted in this thesis. Linguistic means employed by politicians have various pragmatic functions. These functions may be interpreted properly only when the context in which the utterances were expressed is taken into account.

After defining the genre of political interview and characterising its typical features, we can now proceed to the explanation of the concept of illocutionary force and its components, and the speech act theory.

j.Illocutionary Force and Speech Act Theory

j.i)Introduction

As already anticipated above, there are certain linguistic devices that may accentuate or attenuate the illocutionary force of the particular speech acts. This accentuation (or boosting) and attenuation (or hedging) are designated as “modification“ of the illocutionary force. This modification contributes to a higher degree of the speaker’s involvement in interaction. First, a brief introduction to the concept of illocutionary force and its components (Section 4.2) and the theory of speech acts (Section 4.3) will be given. Then, various means of accentuation and attenuation of the illocutionary force will be described.

j.ii)Illocutionary Force

Illocutionary force and its modification has been described in various studies, some of which have also been focused on the theory of speech acts (cf. Vanderveken 1985; Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Holmes 1984; Levinson 1983; Mey 2001; Urbanová 2003).

Vanderveken states that “in uttering sentences within a conversation or dialogue, speakers perform speech acts of a type called illocutionary acts” (1985:181). In Searle’s and Vanderveken’s recent accounts of speech act theory, illocutionary acts have been defined as “minimal units of human communication. Some examples of these are statements, questions, commands, promises, and apologies. Whenever a speaker utters a sentence in an appropriate context with certain intentions, he performs one or more illocutionary acts.” (1985:1). An illocutionary act can be analyzed in terms of its illocutionary force and its propositional content. As Levinson states (1983:245), “the illocutionary force and the propositional content of utterances are detachable elements of meaning. Thus the following sentences, when uttered felicitously, would all share the same propositional content, namely, the proposition that the addressee will go home:

k.I predict that you will go home.

l.Go home!

m.Are you going to go home?

n.I advise you to go home.

But they would normally be used with different illocutionary forces, i.e. perform different speech acts” (Levinson 1983:245).

Before explaining the term “propositional content”, Cruse (2004) makes a difference between the “truth value” and “truth conditions” of a sentence. If a sentence has a truth value, it can be assessed as true or false. In case it does not have a truth value, it “cannot be evaluated as true or false” (2004:20). Truth conditions of a sentence are conditions under which a sentence is true. Thus, Cruse explains the propositional content as follows: “Those aspects of the meaning of a sentence which determine its truth conditions are collectively known as the propositional content of the sentence” (2004:21). Two sentences with the same propositional content “will yield statements with the same truth values on all occasions of use” (2004:21). This has been confirmed by Lyons who states that if (and only if) the sentences have “the same truth-conditions, we will say that they have the same propositional content” (1995:147). Nevertheless, Lyons tries to prove that the situation is not always so clear-cut. He considers these examples:

John Smith is unmarried.

o.John Smith is not married.

p.John Smith is a bachelor.

It may seem that the truth-conditions of all these statements are identical but statement c differs. C is problematic because, according to Lyons, “not every unmarried individual is a bachelor” (1995:147). He points out that it is usually thought that “John Smith” is a man but it may also be a women, a child, a yacht, “or indeed any entity whatsoever that is not only not married, but also not marriageable, and can be appropriately referred to with the name ‘John Smith’” (1995:147), and for that reason, this entity will fulfil the truth-conditions of statement b but not of c.

Turning back to the illocutionary force, Huddleston and Pullum (2002) observe that “statement, directive, and question are very general categories of illocutionary force, but there are in addition innumerable more specific illocutionary categories. Some of these can be regarded as simply special cases of the more general categories” (2002:858). They illustrate this with the sentence Bring the water to the boil, which may be uttered as a command, a request, advice or an instruction. However, all of these categories can be included in the category of directive, “for they all count as attempts to get you to do something” (2002:859).

As Searle and Vanderveken state, the realization of illocutionary forces in the syntax of natural languages is very diverse, for example mood, punctuation, word order, intonation, and stress. They term any linguistic component that indicates or determines the illocutionary force an “illocutionary force indicating device”. Word order and mood may be regarded as examples of this device (1985:2).

The illocutionary force has been defined in terms of seven interrelated components in the illocutionary logic, the logical theory of illocutionary acts, whose aim is to “formalize the logical properties of illocutionary forces” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:1) (cf. Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Vanderveken 1985). These components, as Searle and Vanderveken state, are sufficient to delimit the set of all potential illocutionary forces and clarify the determination of conditions that are necessary for successful performance of illocutionary acts.

The seven constituents that define the illocutionary force are the following:

q.illocutionary point

r.degree of strength of the illocutionary point

s.mode of achievement

t.propositional content conditions

u.preparatory conditions

v.sincerity conditions

w.degree of strength of the sincerity conditions

(Searle and Vanderveken 1985:12-20)

Ad a) illocutionary point

The illocutionary point is the point or purpose internal to each type of illocutionary act. This means that the point of a statement is to convey the speaker’s belief about the truth of a proposition, or, the point of a promise is to commit the speaker by a promise to do something, Searle and Vanderveken point out. For a performance of a particular act to be successful, it must achieve its purpose. In other words, in making a command, the speaker attempts to get the other person to do something. In case this person fulfils the order, the performance of this act was successful. However, Searle and Vanderveken state that “in real life a person may have all sorts of other purposes and aims; e.g. in making a promise, he may want to reassure his hearer, keep the conversation going, or try to appear to be clever, and none of these is part of the essence of promising. But when he makes a promise he necessarily commits himself to doing something. Other aims are up to him [...]” (1985:14). The illocutionary force has more elements, not only the illocutionary point. It has “further specifications and modifications of the illocutionary point, but the basic component of illocutionary force is illocutionary point” (1985:14).

Ad b) degree of strength of the illocutionary point

Searle and Vanderveken explain that although different illocutions may reach the same illocutionary point, they may differ in their strength. For instance, if the speaker requests somebody to do something, it has the same illocutionary point as insisting that somebody do it, but with a different degree of strength - the first is less strong than the latter (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:15).

Ad c) mode of achievement

There are some illocutionary acts that demand special conditions “under which their illocutionary point has to be achieved in the performance of the speech act” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:15). A speaker who is in a position of authority and issues a command does more than a person who makes a request. The illocutionary point of both utterances is the same but the command reaches the point by using the authority of the speaker (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:15).

Ad d) propositional content conditions

Most illocutions “impose certain conditions on what can be in the propositional content” (1985:16). For instance, the speaker can only promise something that is possible to accomplish and set in the future. S/he cannot make promises to have achieved something in the past (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:16).

Ad e) preparatory conditions

These conditions are “necessary for the successful and nondefective performance of an illocutionary act [...]. In the performance of a speech act the speaker presupposes the satisfaction of all the preparatory conditions” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:17, italics in original). For example, if a promise is successfully made and thus its illocutionary point is achieved, it may be still defective because what the speaker promised was not in the interest of the hearer. In other words, “in making a promise the speaker presupposes that he can do the promised act and that it is in the hearer’s interest to do it” (1985:17).

Ad f) sincerity conditions

Searle and Vanderveken state that many illocutionary acts with a propositional content include the expression of a psychological state. For example, when making a statement one expresses a belief, when issuing a command one expresses a desire. When the propositional content of an illocution is the same as that of the expressed psychological state, one can say that the speech act is sincere (1985:18). Searle and Vanderveken explain that there are also insincere speech acts “in which the speaker performs a speech act and thereby expresses a psychological state even though he does not have that state” (1985:18).

Ad g) degree of strength of the sincerity conditions

As may be seen above, the same illocutionary point can have different degrees of strength. The same psychological state can also be achieved with different dimensions of strength. “The speaker who makes a request expresses the desire that the hearer do the act requested; but if he begs, beseeches, or implores, he expresses a stronger desire than if he merely requests” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985:18, italics in original).

Before the actual description of the ways of modification of the illocutionary force in political interviews, the theory of speech acts and its development will be described in a more detailed way. It is significant since the speech act theory has relevance to discourse analysis, as confirmed by Schiffrin (1994:49).

As regards the relationship between the illocutionary force and speech acts, Thomas (1995) explains that initially, Austin used the term “speech act” “to refer to an utterance and the total situation in which the utterance is issued” (Austin 1962:52). Today the term “speech act” is used to mean the same as “illocutionary act” (Thomas 1995:51). The following subchapter will focus on the speech act theory proposed by Austin and its further development by Searle.

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