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Article published In: Dialogicity in Political Discourse
Edited by Elda Weizman and Zohar Livnat
[Pragmatics and Society 13:5] 2022
► pp. 769–792

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Doing things with discourse in the mediated political arena

Participation and pluralism of discursive action

 | University of Augsburg
Published online: 6 December 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21025.fet
Abstract
This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in question-answer-sequences based discourse genres (interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Questions) in mediated political discourse. It considers the multilayeredness of participation and pluralism of discursive action on the one hand, and the delimiting frame of the dialogic discourse genres on the other. It shows that both have a decisive impact on the participants’ meaning-making processes in context: the inherently unbounded participation framework contributes to pluralism of discursive action, while genre- and media constraints narrow down the scope of production and interpretation. This does not only hold for the stage at which a discursive action occurs in the discourse, but also for its degree of explicitness with regard to presuppositions and felicity conditions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discursive action in context
  • 3.Political discourse and participation
    • 3.1Participation in political interviews
    • 3.2Participation in Prime Minister’s Questions
    • 3.3Participation in people’s Prime Minister’s questions
  • 4.Participation and pluralism of discursive action
    • 4.1More prototypical question-and answer sequences
    • 4.2Less prototypical question-and answer sequences
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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