Masarykova univerzita
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w.ii)ConclusionChapter 4 gave an outline of the concept of the illocutionary force and its components defined by Vanderveken and Searle (1985) and the speech act theory as it was proposed by Austin (1962) and further developed by Searle (1969, 1976). Mey’s useful comparison (2001) of these two theories is made at the end of this section. As already anticipated, the illocutionary force of particular speech acts may be modified by various means. This modification of the illocutionary force is closely connected with the degree of speaker’s involvement in interaction, which is why a substantial part of this thesis is devoted to the concept of involvement and its expression in the genre of political interview. As already mentioned, the focus of the present analysis is on the following means of modification of the illocutionary force: boosting devices hedging devices lexical means of expressing modality An explication of what “boosting” and “hedging” actually are will be offered in Chapter 6. This description is accompanied by authentic examples from the corpus. Before this theoretical explication, the corpus of political interviews will be described in greater detail in Chapter 5. Further, Chapter 7 deals with a quantitative and qualitative analysis of lexical devices that boost the illocutionary force in political interviews. A similar type of analysis can be found in Chapter 8, where hedging devices will be examined. Modality as a further means of modifying the illocutionary force will be analyzed in Chapter 9. As already mentioned, Chapter 5 will deal with the description of the material under analysis since it is important for the discussion of practical research, which will follow afterwards. x.Corpus Descriptionx.i)IntroductionAs already mentioned, this thesis focuses on a pragma-semantic analysis of linguistic means of speaker’s involvement in a corpus of political interviews. In this chapter, the material under investigation will be described in a more detailed way. The subsections will focus on the extent of the corpus (5.2), sources of the analysed material (5.3), politicians and their positions (5.4), topics discussed (5.5), and the subject of the analysis (5.6). x.ii)Extent of the CorpusThe corpus consists of 40 political interviews with British and American politicians, which were released between 2003 and 2008. 20 interviews were carried out with male politicians, 20 interviews with female politicians. The extent of male and female interviews is identical. To better illustrate the extent of the whole corpus, all words and characters were counted. Their numbers are summarized in Table 1 below:
Table : The Extent of the Corpus x.iii)Sources of the Data for the AnalysisThe interviews were downloaded from the webpages of various American and British TV and radio stations. As already stated, I worked only with the transcripts of these interviews. Prosodic means and paralinguistic features are not the subject of this research because it is a very wide topic, which could be investigated in a different study. All transcripts were used as they were found on the Internet. For this reason they may contain grammatical mistakes. It is difficult to say whether these mistakes were made by editing the transcripts or whether they were made by the speakers and the editor did not correct them. What follows is the list of all sources of the material under investigation: CBS News (an American TV network) PBS (an American TV network) NPR (an American radio network) BBC News (a British TV news channel) CNN (an American TV network) NBC (an American TV network) ABC News (an American TV network) Al Jazeera English (English version of the Arabic network) MSNBC (an American cable news channel) FOX News (an American news channel) x.iv)Politicians Appearing in the Corpus and their PositionsA total of 19 politicians were chosen for this analysis, 13 politicians are British, six politicians are American. Since the subject of this research was not the examination of differences between British and American politicians, the difference in number of politicians does not play a significant role in this study. All names of politicians including their functions they held when the interviews were carried out are listed in the table below:
Table : Politicians and their Positions Download 1.35 Mb. Share with your friends:
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