ab.iii)Frequency of Boosters in the Corpus of Political Interviews

ab.iii)Frequency of Boosters in the Corpus of Political Interviews

Focusing on the difference between males and females, male politicians used 1,872 boosters and female politicians made use of 1,577 boosters. According to this result, these devices as means of strengthening the illocutionary force of speech acts and showing speaker’s involvement are utilized by both sexes in almost the same extent since the size of male and female interviews is identical.

In the following sections, the frequency of boosters classified by their contribution to discourse meaning and occurrence of the most frequent boosters in the corpus will be discussed.

ab.iii.1Frequency of Boosters Classified by their Contribution to Discourse Meaning

Figure : Boosters Classified by their Contribution to Discourse Meaning

These results indicate that politicians want to affect opinions and attitudes of the audience by attempting to show positive attitudes to the listeners, subjectivity of the opinion, understanding, and agreement. They aim at persuading the audience that they are the right persons for the function they exercise. Expressions such as I think, I mean, I know, and I’m sure indicate a high degree of involvement of the speaker in the interactional process. Moreover, the speakers show that they know what is important and that is why they emphasize this issue and thus may strengthen their position in front of the audience. The number of both discourse-organizing and hearer-oriented boosters is considerably lower than the group of speaker-oriented boosters. It can be explained by the fact that politicians concentrate predominantly on strengthening their position in front of their audience.

ab.iii.2Occurrence of the Most Frequent Boosters

As is obvious from the results, the first position is occupied by the speaker-oriented booster I think by both sexes. The present analysis reveals (see Chapter 6) that I think may function either as a booster or as a hedge in different utterances, depending on the context. Holmes confirms this observation: “The function of I think as a booster has rarely been discussed, yet there are instances where, from the point of view of a pragmatic analysis, it cannot be interpreted in any other way. Though, semantically, forms such as I think are regarded as weakening the propositions they modify, it is clear that in context they may function quite differently” (Holmes 1995:93).

It is important to take into account not only its function in context but also the discourse genre. Chafe (1986) and Aijmer (1997) consider I think a typical feature of informal conversation, while Jucker (1986) considers it a characteristic of political discourse but no agreement concerning this issue has been reached so far. Simon-Vandenbergen’s study has revealed that the frequent occurrence of I think in casual conversations and in political interviews “has to do with the nature of the discourse, in which participants are primarily engaged in the expression of opinions” (2000:46).

Lexical items very and you know also belong to the most frequent boosters in the corpus, although their frequency of occurrence is much lower compared to that of I think. The intensifying adverb very used as a speaker-oriented booster takes up the second position in my data as regards the frequency of distribution. It is an attitudinal booster with the function of “expressing the degree of a certain quality [...] reinforcing the positive or negative quality, thus reflecting the attitude of the speaker towards the message” (Urbanová 2003:69).

As with I think, you know may also function as a booster or a hedge, depending on the context. “Its primary function may be to signal that the speaker attributes understanding to the listener, it may appeal to the listener’s sympathy, or it may function as a booster to emphasize the mutual knowledge of the participants. [...] Alternatively, you know may be more referentially oriented: it may function primarily as a lexical hedge to signal linguistic imprecision or mark a qualification, or it may express uncertainty about the propositional content of an utterance” (Holmes 1995:87-88).

Although you know has been described as a lexical item appearing to a great extent in informal interaction rather than in formal contexts (Holmes 1995), my data have revealed that it is very frequent in the genre of political interview, which belongs to the public variety of spoken language. The reason is that you know is often used to express mutuality and solidarity among speakers, which is important in political interviews since politicians aim at influencing their audience. You know and other hearer-oriented boosters contribute to a better orientation of the listeners in interaction because these boosters lay emphasis on those parts of utterance which are significant and relevant for the hearer. This interactional function of you know has also been confirmed by Schiffrin (1987:295) because, according to her research, it helps the hearer filter the story and choose the most important facts.

Finally, I mean appears 134 times in the corpus. As Table 5 shows, it belongs to one of the most common intensifying devices used by male politicians (108 instances) whereas it is used only 26 times by female politicians in the whole corpus of interviews. According to these results, female politicians seem to prefer I think to I mean. Schiffrin (1987) mentions several discourse functions of I mean, in political interviews it functions as a “marker of salient information, i.e. as an indicator of information which is highly relevant for interpretation of the speaker’s overall message” (Schiffrin 1987:309). Thus again, it serves as a means of emphasizing the subjective nature of speaker’s attitudes and his/her involvement.

ab.iii.2.1Approaches to “Discourse Markers”

The term “discourse” is proposed to emphasize the fact that “these expressions must be described at a level of discourse rather than a sentence, while the term “marker” is intended to reflect the fact that their meanings must be analyzed in terms of what they indicate or mark rather than what they describe” (Blakemore 2004:221, emphasis added). What delimits discourse markers from other discourse indicators is their ability to mark relationships between the distinct parts of discourse. In other words, their function is to create connectivity in discourse (Blakemore 2004:221-222).

Stenström’s account of pragmatic markers attempts to examine different levels of interactional process and make a connection between grammar and discourse by determining when devices traditionally described in grammatical terms have a primarily interactive function and vice versa. Stenström (1989:561-562) suggests three types of pragmatic particles:

purely interactional - particles such as oh, mhm, yeah, etc. which do not function as clause elements

mainly interactional - items whose primary function is that of pragmatic devices but at the same time they may be used as clause elements in some contexts (I see, I mean, you know, well, OK, etc.)

also interactional - diverse classes of adverbials which are used as interactional or strategic devices (anyway, in fact, of course, maybe, really, certainly, etc.)

Stenström’s classification as an interesting attempt to link grammar with discourse, however, the categories she has proposed are too broad and vaguely delimited to be used in my research. The boundary between “mainly interactional” and “also interactional” types of pragmatic particles is vague as it is difficult to determine the reason why a particular particle was used - if it was a strategic device or if it was a clause element without a specific discourse function.

Another approach to discourse markers has been proposed by Fraser (1990, 1996) who has determined four subclasses of pragmatic markers. Fraser (1996) declares that sentence meaning may be divided into two separate parts. On the one hand, there is the propositional content of the sentence, which “represents a state of the world which the speaker wishes to bring to the addressee’s attention” (1996:167), on the other hand, there is the non-propositional part of the sentence, which can be analyzed into pragmatic markers. These are defined by Fraser as the “linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” (1996:168). Pragmatic markers may have the form of a single word, a phrase, a clause or a particle.

Fraser’s definition of a pragmatic marker is adequate for this research since it implies that the speaker may have various communicative aims which s/he demonstrates by the use of various linguistic means. Utilizing various pragmatic markers, the speaker may show his/her degree of involvement in interaction. As Fraser quite correctly emphasises, pragmatic markers are not restricted only to one-word expressions, but also whole clauses may function as pragmatic markers. This broader approach to pragmatic markers, which is missing from Stenström’s classification, is also taken in this thesis.

The four different subclasses of pragmatic markers defined by Fraser are as follows:

basic markers indicate the force of the basic message (forms such as I regret or admittedly belong to this group)

commentary markers “provide a comment on the basic message” (1996:168) (e.g. frankly, stupidly)

parallel markers “signal an entire message separate from the basic and any commentary messages” (1996:168) (e.g. damn)

discourse markers show the relationship of the basic message to the previous part of discourse (e.g. but, so, incidentally, etc.)

Each of these four subclasses may be further divided into more specific groups of markers (see Fraser 1996). These specific groups of markers do not have any relevance for my research because they do not appear in political interviews under investigation. These markers are restricted to different types of discourse, for example, performative expressions occur in institutional types of discourse, message idioms can be found in informal language, etc.

Blakemore (2004:223) correctly objects to this classification by pointing out that it is based on the “unexplained distinction between content or descriptive meaning and meaning which is signaled or indicated: an expression which functions as an indicator (or marker) or does so simply on the grounds that it does not contribute to ‘content’.” Further, she adds that a reference to Grice’s conventional implicature (1989) would be appropriate because it can be regarded as the first attempt to define non-truth-conditional meaning more precisely.

After a description of the frequency of occurrence of boosters in the corpus, pragmatic functions of boosters in the corpus will now be discussed in greater detail.