Context and Contexts: Parts Meet Whole? (Pragmatics & Beyond)

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Author: Anita Fetzer | Etsuko Oishi (editors)

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Context and Contexts

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Würzburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey

Herman Parret

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Deborah Schiffrin

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

University of Trondheim

Aichi University

Paul Osamu Takahara

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

University College London

Japan Women’s University

University of California at Los Angeles

Universität Basel

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Georgetown University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

University of California at Santa Barbara

Srikant Sarangi

Teun A. van Dijk

Cardiff University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Volume 209 Context and Contexts. Parts meet whole? Edited by Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi

Context and Contexts Parts meet whole? Edited by

Anita Fetzer University of Würzburg

Etsuko Oishi Fuji Women’s University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Context and contexts : parts meet whole? / edited by Anita Fetzer, Etsuko Oishi. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 209) Based on papers from the IPrA Conference, which was held in Melbourne in 2009. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Context (Linguistics) 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Social interaction. I. Fetzer, Anita, 1958II. Oishi, Etsuko. P325.5.C65.C63â•…â•… 2011 401’.41--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 5613 3 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8663 5 (Eb)

2011012098

© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi

vii 1

Situated meaning in context Why a mother’s rule is not a law: The role of context in the interpretation ofÂ€GreekÂ€laws Amalia Moser and Eleni Panaretou

11

Fighting words: Hybrid discourse and discourse processes Lawrence N. Berlin

41

Context and talk inÂ€confrontationalÂ€discourses Luisa Granato and Alejandro Parini

67

Deixis in context This? No, that! Constructing shared contexts in the conversational dyad Konstanze Jungbluth “Here is the difference, here is the passion, hereÂ€is the chance to be part of great change”: Strategic context importation in political discourse Anita Fetzer Context, contrast, and the structure ofÂ€discourse in Turkish Ümit Deniz Turan and Deniz Zeyrek

93

115 147

Communicative action in context Speech acts in context Jacob L. Mey

171

vi

Context and Contexts: Parts Meet Whole?

How are speech acts situated in context? Etsuko Oishi

181

Context: An adaptive perspective Thanh Nyan

205

Subject index Author index

235 239

Acknowledgements

This edited volume developed from an international panel organized by the editors within the IPrA conference in Melbourne 2009. We are deeply grateful to the participants of the panel and to our discussants Keith Allen, Kerstin Fischer and Kasia Jaszczolt, and the audience for their critical and stimulating comments. Our appreciation also goes to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, as well as to Isja Conen.

Introduction Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi 1.

Pragmatics and context

Pragmatics is fundamentally concerned with communicative action and its felicity in context, investigating action with respect to the questions of what action is, what may count as action, what action is composed of, what conditions need to be satisfied for action to be felicitous, and how action is related to context. These research questions and the object of research require action in general and communicative action in particular to be conceived of as relational concepts, relating action and context, relating action and communicative action, relating communicative action and participants, and relating participants with the things they do with words in context. The heterogeneous nature of context and the context-dependence of the concept itself have made it almost impossible for the scientific community to agree upon a commonly shared definition or theoretical perspective, and frequently, only a minute aspect of context is described, modelled or formalized (cf. Akman et al. 2001, Blackburn et al. 2003, Bouquet et al. 1999). Because of its multifaceted nature and inherent complexity, context is no longer considered an analytic prime but rather seen from a parts-whole perspective as an entity containing subentitiesÂ� (or sub-contexts). Context is generally connected in more and less explicit ways with communication, and analogously to the theoretical construct of pragmatics, communication is seen as both context-dependent and context-creating (Bateson 1972). In ethnomethodological conversation analysis and in interactional sociolinguistics, context is considered both product and process (Duranti and Goodwin 1992, Gumperz 1992). Hence, context is connected intrinsically with contextualization, which is assigned the status of a universal in natural-language communication (Gumperz 1996), enriching inexplicit forms and contents by assigning values to indexical tokens. This is usually done through conversational inference (Grice 1975), which is further differentiated with respect to its domain of reference, viz., global inference anchored to discourse genre or activity type (Levinson 1979,

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Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi

Â� Prevignano and di Luzio 2003) and local inference as described by Gricean conversational implicature. Context and contextualization are a constitutive part of recontextualization and decontextualization (Linell 1998), and context, contextualization, re- and decontextualization are connected intrinsically with entextualization (Park and Bucholtz 2009). While contextualization, decontextualization and recontextualization focus very much on language and language use, contributing to the pragmatic enrichment of underspecified meaning, entextualization, as it is used in this volume, takes the speaker and her / his communicative intention as a starting point and examines how unbounded context is referred to in a particular communicative setting and how it is assigned the status of a bounded object. In other words, contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization take communicative action as their starting point and investigate how situated meaning is connected with context and thereby pragmatically enriched, and entextualization takes context as a point of departure and examines how context as an unbounded entity is lexicalized and thereby assigned the status of a bounded entity and thus of an object of talk. Naturally, the processes of contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization and entextualization are connected dialectically in communication. The theoretical construct of context has been described in different research paradigms, and depending on their goals, various aspects have been highlighted, such as the importation and invocation of context in pragmatics and in socialinteractionÂ�-based paradigms, as a psychological construct in relevance theory and in cognitive grammar, or as a set of antecedent premises which are required for a speech act or discourse act to be felicitous. The dynamics of context is implicit in the relevance-theoretic framework, and it is explicit in cognitive grammar, pragmatics and social interaction. Moreover, context is seen as both given and reconstructed in interactional sociolinguistics. Against this background, context is no longer seen as an analytic prime. Rather, it is dynamic, relational, and a parts-whole configuration. Context is subjective and individual (Penco 1999), and it is social and institutional (Duranti and Goodwin 1992).

2.

Context and contexts

The multilayered outlook on context contains a number of different perspectives. First, context is conceived as a frame whose job it is to frame content by delimiting that content. The former operation assigns content the status of figure, and the latter assigns the context surrounding the figure the status of ground. At the same time, the delimited context of the figure is being framed and delimited by

Introduction

less immediately adjacent contextual frames (or the ground). The nature of the connectedness between those frames is a structured whole which is composed of interconnected frames (Goffman 1986). The gestalt-psychological figure-ground scenario prevails in psychological and psycholinguistic perspectives on context. It has also been adapted to cognitive pragmatics, as is reflected in the relevancetheoretic conception of context as an onion, metaphorically speaking. Sperber and Wilson not only point out the interconnected nature of the layers but also stress the fact that their order of inclusion corresponds to their order of accessibility (Sperber and Wilson 1986). This is of particular importance to the cognitive operations of inferencing, pragmatic enrichment, and to the calculation of implicatures, which are key operations in natural-language communication. Second, context is seen as a dynamic construct which is interactionally organized in and through the process of communication. This view prevails in ethnomethodology and ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Garfinkel 1994, Goodwin and Duranti 1992, Heritage 1984, Schegloff 1992), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 2003) and sociopragmatics (Fetzer 2004, 2010), where context is assigned the dual status of process and product. The dynamic outlook is based on the premises of indexicality of social action and on (joint) construction of a common context. In that frame of reference, meaning is not conceived of as autonomous but rather as relational, considering the embeddedness and interdependence of linguistic expressions. To use Ochs’ words, “(1) language systematically varies across social contexts, and (2) such variation is part of the meaning indexed by linguistic structures. (…) The meanings so indexed are referred to as social meanings, in contrast to purely referential or logical meanings expressed by linguistic structures” (Ochs 1992:â•›337–338). Consequently, a thorough examination of context needs to go beyond the prevailing definition of context as a set of propositions (Stalnaker 1999). To capture the indexicality of social action and the relational nature of social meaning, context needs to be conceived of as a complex dynamic network, which undergoes a permanent process of structuring and re-structuring. In those qualitatively-oriented paradigms, context is intrinsically connected with the concepts of adjacency pair, conditional relevance, and turn-taking on the micro level, with activity type (Levinson 1979) or speech event (Hymes 1974) on the meso level, and with institutional talk on the macro level, whose order is captured through context-independent and context-sensitive constraints and requirements. In institutional interviews, for instance, there is a clear-cut division of labor anchored to the turn-taking system and to the adjacency pair question/ answer: the representative of the institution has the right to ask questions while the client has the obligation to answer those questions (Fetzer 2000). Third, context is seen as given, as is reflected in the presuppositional approach to context which is also referred to as common ground or background

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information. Here, context is seen as a set of propositions which participants take for granted in interaction. This allows for two different conceptions of context: a static conception in which context is external to the utterance, and an interactive one, in which context is imported into the utterance while at the same time invoking and reconstructing context (Fetzer and Fischer 2007). While the former has been refuted in pragmatics, which is concerned fundamentally with contextdependentÂ� meaning and thus with communicative action and its felicity in context, it still has a number of supporters in information science, as is put succinctly by Levinson (2003:â•›33): the idea that utterances might carry along with them their own contexts like a snail carries its home along with it is indeed a peculiar idea if one subscribes to a definition of context that excludes message content, as for example in information theory. Context is then construed as the antecedent set of assumptions against which a message is construed. But it has long been noted in the study of pragmatics that this dichotomy between the message and context cannot be the right picture.

The context-dependence of context is thus reflected in its statuses as (1) given and external to the utterance, (2) re-constructed and negotiated in and through the process of communication, (3) indexical, and (4) never saturated. The connectedness between context and discourse has become apparent throughout the analysis of context above. To shed more light on the connectedness, their shared domains of reference, that is society, culture, cognition, and language, are examined in context, and context as a whole is classified into social context, sociocultural context, cognitive context, and linguistic context (Fetzer 2004). The multilayered outlook on context requires an analytic frame of reference based on methodological compositionality. For this reason, the most appropriate delimitation seems to be a functional one: context is conceived of as a frame of reference whose job it is to frame content by delimiting the content while at the same time being framed and delimited by less immediate adjacent frames. This also holds for discourse whose job it is to frame content by delimiting the content while at the same time being framed and delimited by less immediate discourse. To capture the interactive and dynamic nature of context and communication, methodological compositionality informed by linguistics, psychology, sociology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural studies is required. Only then is it possible to cross and transcend disciplinary boundaries and account for inherently unbounded theoretical constructs, which may become bounded when instantiated.

3.

Introduction

The contributions

The volume falls in three parts, investigating situated meaning, deixis, and communicative action. All of the contributions subscribe to a research frame anchored to compositional methodology, and all of their context-based analyses account for the connectedness between parts and whole. The first part of the volume, Situated meaning in context, comprises four contributions. Why a mother’s rule is not a law: The role of context in the interpretation of Greek laws by Amalia Moser and Eleni Panaretou explores the role of mesoand macro context in the interpretation of text on the basis of Greek laws. They start with an analysis of the grammatical categories of tense, aspect, and modality in the frameworks of descriptive grammar and of the speech act of directive in speech act theory, and adapt the results obtained to two different social and sociocultural meso contexts (or genres): Greek family-life discourse and Greek legal discourse. The study is based on a comparison of native speakers’ judgements corroborating the research hypothesis that it is not the type of speech act which licenses deviant uses of linguistics constructions but rather the genre in which the constructions are used. Fighting words: Hybrid discourse and discourse processes by Lawrence N. Berlin is set in the framework of critical discourse analysis, which is an interdisciplinary paradigm par excellence, informed by pragmatics, cultural theory, and sociology. It demonstrates in a fine-grained analysis how in his weekly program, Aló, Presidente, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez not only creates a hybrid discourse but also integrates the processes of entextualization and contextualization in that hybrid. Through the blending of orders of discourse, words can become actions, and militarizing language can lead a nation to the brink of war, and manipulation of language begets manipulation of ideology. Context and talk in confrontational discourse by Luisa Granato and Alejandro Parini is set in Systemic Functional Grammar. In line with that particular framework, the authors differentiate between linguistic context on the one hand, and social and sociocultural contexts on the other, which are evoked by the former. The systemic-function methodology is supplemented by conversation-analyticÂ� principles and techniques, in particular turn-taking, adjacency, and interruption, by Goffman’s conception of participation and footing, and by politeness theory. The study identifies the factors that are responsible for disruptions in the flow of discourse and the different consequences that this may bring about. The second part of the volume, Deixis in context, contains three papers. This? No, that! Constructing shared contexts in the conversational dyad by KonstanzeÂ� Jungbluth employs a radical micro approach to the investigation of deixis in

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Â� languages. She examines various languages which have three different demonstratives in their linguistic repertoire, such as Spanish, and others which have only two, e.g., Standard English and Polish, presenting a fine-grained analysis of constellations where speaker and hearer are positioned face-to-face and where they are not looking at one another while turned face-to-back or side-by-side. The paper demonstrates that context is a relational concept where the crossing over of spatio-oriented and socio-oriented references takes place. It is in the use of deictic forms where the two are intertwined. ‘Here is the difference, here is the passion, here is the chance to be part of great change’: Strategic context importation in political discourse by Anita Fetzer examines the strategic importation of context through conventional means focussing on the communicative function of the indexical deictic form here and its counterpart there in the dialogic genre of political interview and in the monologic genre of political speech. As indexical deixis, here and there ground reference to origo, and as relational deixis, they sign relation to origo. In the two genres, the distribution and function of here and there differ: the local linguistic context of here and there contains more linguistic means of a determinate nature and thus imports a more determinate kind of context in the speeches than in the interviews. Context, contrast and the structure of discourse in Turkish by Ümit Deniz Turan and Deniz Zeyrek shows how discourse context, i.e. common ground shared by discourse participants, and information packaging interact with the use of the contrastive connective (tam) tersine (on the contrary). They show that the connective evokes a discourse structure which has at least three parts: the material in the prior linguistic context, its refutation, and then rectification in the clause where the connective is hosted. The adverbial is used strategically to bring the cognitive context of the intended audience closer to that of the writer while minimizing any potential discrepancies in their cognitive contexts. The third part of the volume, Communicative action in context, contains three contributions. Speech acts in context by Jacob L. Mey argues with Austin (1962) that speech acts, in themselves, are not ‘real’: they have to be situated in reality; that is, in the context in which they are produced. Not only are speech acts situated in a context; the context itself situates the speech acts, it creates them, as it were. A so-called indirect speech act is what the context makes it to be – not necessarily what the words spoken express by themselves; vice versa, a speech act (broadly: an utterance) may create the context for which it is appropriate. Speech acts are always ‘situated’, that is, they are basically pragmatic acts. How are speech acts situated in context? by Etsuko Oishi purports to develop an Austinian speech act theory, in which the illocutionary act is described as the communicative move to the hearer that the speaker evaluates her present utterance as. In making a performative or non-performative utterance, the speaker

Introduction

specifies or indicates the value of the communicative move in identifying her/ himself as a particular addresser, the present hearer as a particular addressee, and the circumstances as a particular context. On the basis of this understanding, the author examines different elements in terms of which the success or failure of performing an illocutionary act is determined, and which indicate how illocutionary acts are situated in context. Context and adaptive action by Thanh Nyan describes context as a non focal element which is, in some way, necessary to the occurrence of a focal event, drawing mainly from Damasio’s model of decision making and Edelman’s Theory of neuronal Group Selection. Taking this focal event to be adaptive action, the author seeks to further the understanding of the relationship between context and adaptive action. She examines the interaction between context and non-linguistic adaptive action, as part of the process whereby action selection is carried out, and considers to what extent the relationship between context (in various manifestations) and linguistic action can be analyzed by means of the same criteria.

References Akman, Varol, Bouquet, Paolo, Thomason, Richmond and Young, Robert A. (eds.). 2001. Modeling and Using Context. Third International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT 2001, Proceedings. Heidelberg: Springer. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler Publishing Company. Blackburn, Patrick, Ghidini, Chiara, Turner, Roy M. and Giunchiglia, Fausto (eds.). 2003. Modeling and Using Context. 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, Context 2003, Proceedings. Heidelberg: Springer. Bouquet, Paolo, Brezillon, Patrick, Benerecetti, Massimo, Castellani, Francesca and Serafini, Â�Luciano (eds.). 1999. Modeling and Using Context. Second International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, Context’99, Proceedings. Heidelberg: Springer. Duranti, Alessandro and Goodwin, Charles (eds.). 1992. Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fetzer, Anita. 2000. “Negotiating validity claims in political interviews.” Text 20 (4): 1–46. Fetzer, Anita. 2004. Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality meets Appropriateness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, Anita. 2010. “Contexts in context: micro meets macro.” In Discourses in Interaction, Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa et al. (eds), 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, Anita and Fischer, Kerstin. 2007. ”Introduction.“ In Lexical Markers of Common Grounds, Anita Fetzer and Kerstin Fischer (eds), 1–13. London: Elsevier. Garfinkel, Harold. 1994. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goodwin, Charles and Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. “Rethinking context: an introduction.” In Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds), 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. “Logic and conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol. III, Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds), 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Gumperz, John J. 1992. “Contextualization and understanding.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds), 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1996. “The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), 374–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 2003. “Response essay.” In Language and Interaction. Discussions with John J. Gumperz, Susan Eerdmans et al. (eds), 105–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Levinson, Stephen. 1979. “Activity types and language.” Linguistics 17: 365–399. Levinson, Stephen. 2003. “Contextualizing contextualization cues.” In Language and Interaction. Discussions with John J. Gumperz, Susan Eerdmans et al. (eds), 31–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Linell, Per. 1998. Approaching Dialogue. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ochs, Elenor. 1992. “Indexing gender”. In Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds), 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penco, Carlo. 1999. “Objective and cognitive context.” In 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, Context’99, Proceedings, Paolo Bouquet et al. (eds), 270–283. Heidelberg: Springer. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul and Bucholtz, Mary. 2009. “Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institutional contexts.” Text & Talk 5: 485–502. Prevignano, Carlo and di Luzio, Aldo. 2003. “A discussion with John J. Gumperz.” In Language and Interaction. Discussions with John J. Gumperz, Susan Eerdmans et al. (eds), 7–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992. “In another context.” In Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds), 191–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stalnaker, Robert. 1999. Context and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Situated meaning in context

Why a mother’s rule is not a law The role of context in the interpretation ofÂ€GreekÂ€laws* Amalia Moser and Eleni Panaretou This paper explores the role of meso- and macro-context in the interpretation of text, on the basis of our research on the text of Greek laws.The use of the grammatical categories of tense, aspect and modality in these texts deviates from everyday use (Panaretou 2005, Moser and Panaretou 2009). The study is based on a comparison of native speakers’ judgements (elicited through questionÂ�naires and interviews and subjected to qualitative analysis) on law texts and everyday contexts containing the performance of the same type of speech act as the law: a mother setting a rule for her children and delineating the consequences of breaking this rule. Uses judged unanimously as ungrammatical and unacceptable in the latter context, went unnoticed in law texts. Our conÂ�clusion is that what licenses deviant uses is not the type of speech act, but the genre of law texts; it is argued that, as a form of meso-context, the genre of law texts, by virtue of being highly institutionalized within the cognitive and socio-cultural context in which it is embedded (Fetzer 2004, 2007), creates a cognitive frame so powerful as to impose specific interÂ�pretations even to grammatical forms which would be unacÂ�ceptable in different (con)texts.

1.

Introduction

Laws, even decontextualized fragments of laws, are immediately recognizable as such to native speakers of Greek, who attribute this recognizability to the Â�complicated and formal “legal language”. Nevertheless, the linguistic form does * Thanks are due to the organizers and the participants of the panel “Context and Contexts” at the 11th IPRA conference in Melbourne, in particular Jacob Mey, Virginia Hussin and Luisa Granato for their insightful comments, to the anonymous reviewers for their interesting suggestions, to Eleni Antonopoulou, Spyridoula Bella and Costas Canakis for our fruitful discussions with them and to our lawyer friends and relatives.

12

Amalia Moser and Eleni Panaretou

not give rise to any suspicion of ungrammaticality. A systematic comparison with standard usage, howÂ�ever, reveals not only unusual choices, but also numerous deviations from the rules of grammar; these centre around the use of the categories of tense, aspect and modality. The extent of the deviation becomes apparent when the grammatical forms used in laws are transferred to the same type of speech act in a different activity type: a mother setting a rule for her children. At once, the tense and aspect of the corÂ�responding law text make the utterance not merely deviant, but ungramÂ� matical and unacceptable. This paper investigates the hypothesis that, assuming that a law and a mother’s rule constitute essentially the same type of speech act, namely commands, what makes deviant uses acceptable in law texts is the specific genre, as conventionalized by the members of the relevant discourse community within its socio-cultural and inÂ�stitutional context.

2.

Methodology

The hypothesis that it is genre that determines the interÂ�pretation of the grammatical categories under investigation and thus explains the acceptability of deviant uses led us to base our analysis on decontextualization and recontextualization. On the one hand we decontextualized specific provisions of laws and mothers’ rules and on the other hand we “decontextualized” the deviant grammatical constructions found in laws and “recontextualized” them in a variety of contexts, including mothers’ rules. The results of our analysis were tested through a questionnaire distributed to native speakers with the purpose of eliciting their intuitions and judgements on the acceptability of the use of the three grammatical categories in laws and nonlegal texts. The questionnaire was answered by 41 informants, their ages ranging from 20 to 80 years of age: 24 students, 12 university degree-holders and 5 lawyers. It consisted of three parts. In the first part the informants, who had not been alerted to the aim of the questionnaire, had to assess the degree of acceptability of 20 utterances, choosing among three characterizations (correct – incorrect – unsatisfactory) and to make whatever corrections or improvements they deemed necessary. In the second part they had to paraphrase the modal verbs in 10 utterances and . The terms ‘decontextualization’ and ‘recontextualization’ are used here in a broader sense, to include the extraction and use in a different context of grammatical constructions rather than texts.

The role of context in the interpretation of Greek laws

in the third part to fill in the gaps of 12 utterances using the appropriate form of a verb in brackets. Fourteen informants (34.1%) were interviewed after filling in the questionnaire; this interview revealed not only the rationale of their responses but also the fact that they immediately and infallibly recognized the law excerpts through what they called the ‘peculiarity’ of their linguistic expression. All results were subjected to qualitative analysis, taking into consideration, in the case of the first part, only corrections pertaining to tense, aspect and modality. The first and second parts were also subjected to statistical analysis with the aim of checking the test’s validity. We did not deem it necessary to do the same with the third part, given that all informants filled in the gaps according to the standard rules of language, without deviations. The results of the statistical analysis are presented in Section 5.4.

3.

Law, speech acts, context and genre

3.1

Law

Law is a set of rules created with the purpose of regulating human relations within a given society; more specifically, laws, which in western and other societies are established by the State, enforce obligations and assign rights. Through the law the state communicates its will to the citizens in the form of obligatory and non-negotiable rules. It has a privileged status assigned to it by two factors: the inequality of social power between addresser and adÂ�dressee and the power of the addresser to enforce its will. As a consequence, law is in itself a kind of power: it has absolute symbolic power supplemented by the power of the judiciary system and the coercive power of police (van Dijk 1997:â•›16–28). From the legal point of view (Morgan and Dwyer 19482, Troller 1969, Â�Georgiadis 1997, Engisch 2005) laws have the following properties: (a) they are commands, (b) they cover every aspect of social life and every individual case that falls under a specific law, a characteristic named by Bhatia (1994) “allinclusivenessÂ�”, (c) they affect every class of citizens, (d) they are impersonal in a double sense: they are issued by the impersonal state and they address the impersonal society, (e) they are non-negotiable in the sense that every citizen must comply with the law without the possibility to negotiate its application, e.g. to ask for an ad hoc exception from the law, and (f) they normally apply from the moment they are issued and remain valid forever unless retracted by another law.

. Even laws that assign rights are considered commands (see Engisch 2005).

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Rules of law are divided into two parts: the first contains the description of the set of circumstances under which the rule is applicable (henceforth: Facts), and the second sets out the legal consequences which arise when these presupÂ� positions are met (henceforth: Consequences). The law therefore has the logical form of a hypothesis, i.e. of a conditional, a fact acknowledged by lawyers (Georgiadis 1997) and linguists (Crystal and Davy 1969, Bhatia 2004) alike. This logical form is usually expressed through the syntactic structure of conditionals, the Facts protoÂ�typically expressed by the protasis and the Consequences by the apodosis. From the pragmatic point of view, the macro-speech act performed by law is a directive and more specifically a command (Kurzon 1986, Panaretou 2009); the view of speech acts adopted in this paper is outlined briefly in the following section.

3.2 Speech acts Our claim that laws and mothers’ rules are essentially the same type of speech act is based on Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts. In both cases, his three criteria are met in the same way: – The point of purpose; they both set a rule, often in a direct manner – The expressed psychological states; in both acts the addresser exerts authority on the addressee and poses a demand – The direction of fit; they both have a world-to-word direction in Searle’s (1976:â•›3–4) sense, in that their purpose is to adjust the real world to an ideal one, under threat of sanctions. The similarities extend to most speech act classifications in the literature, notably Croft’s (1994) taxonomy based on sentence types. One of the severest lines of criticism against the Searlean tradition is that it focuses on the linguistic aspect of utterances, leaving aside social variables such as the speaker’s authority (Mey 1993:â•›157, Canakis 2007:â•›123–135, Sbisà 2009:â•›240). Nevertheless, even if we take into account such social variables, we still find that the similarities between . This legal distinction differs considerably from the one adopted by discourse anaÂ�lysts like Bhatia (1994), who distinguish two moves in the discourse structure of rules of law, namely provisionary clause and qualifications. The proÂ�visionary clause comprises both Facts and Consequences, while qualifications are inserted into both. . On the direction of fit in laws see Panaretou (2009:â•›63–64).


the two commands overshadow their differences. The speaker’s authority, for instance, though clearly unequal in absolute terms, is analogous in relative terms: in a child’s world within most societies the authority of parents is immense and, from the child’s point of view, of much greater weight than that of the state. The power relationship between a mother and a child mirrors on a much smaller scale that of state and citizens. A mother, like the state, has the power of imposing rules as well as sanctions for disobedience. The analysis that follows takes into consideration precisely this type of socio-cultural parameter in connection with the notions of context and genre.

3.3 Context The view of context adopted in this paper takes into account different facets of this complicated notion as developed within various approaches in the literature. A basic question about context concerns the text’s autonomy or dependence on it. If the text is conceived as an autonomous unit, it follows that its structure and grammatical features are not influenced by contextual factors. Descriptions of textual properties common to all texts, such as cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976) and coherence (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, Mann and Thompson 1988) for instance, might lead to the conclusion that the text can be studied independently of its context. A closer investigation of texts on the other hand reveals a large array of phenomena such as deixis, honorifics, differences in register and word order and the organization of the text, which cannot be explained without reference to context, thus making text context-dependent. We adopt the latter view because, as we intend to show in this paper, even the use of grammatical categories is affected by context. Our view is concomitant with the cognitive perspective, according to which context forms the ground against which the text is profiled as figure (see e.g. Goodwin and Duranti 1992:â•›9). In the broadest possible sense the context of a text is everything that surrounds it, from the sociocultural environment to the particulars of each activity. This rather vague notion requires some delimitation and subcategorization, if it is to be a useful theoretical concept and tool of analysis. Several categorizations are available in the literature. The immediate circumstances of the verbal activity (the time and place of the interaction, the social roles of the participants, the purpose of the text and the genre to which it belongs) constitute the context of situation (see e.g. Hymes 1974, Ochs 1979 and Halliday 1985).

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The social context (Goffman 1979) comprises the setting and the interactional and social roles of the participants of a specific speech event as well as their communicative intentions and purposes; it includes a wide range of social settings and institutions along with the power relations associated with social settings and social classes. All these factors influence the linguistic expression of the text. A more refined distinction is drawn between social and sociocultural context. Culture determines to a high degree the norms and beliefs of a society and the attitudes of speakers or groups of speakers towards social phenomena such as ethnicity, racism, gender and so on (Verschueren 1999:â•›91–4). The interÂ�relationship of social and sociocultural context is conceived as the distinction between an unmarked and a marked type of context. Social context is an unmarked context subcategorized into different types of marked sociocultural contexts, which lead to particular interÂ�pretations of textual features (Fetzer 2007:â•›14). World-knowledge and social knowledge are stored in people’s minds as mental representations which form various kinds of cognitive schemata, such as frames, scripts, scenarios etc. These mental representations form part of the common background knowledge of the participants and constitute the cognitive context that frames the text (Fetzer 2007:â•›9–12) and delimits its content and its interpretation(s) (Goffman 1986). Finally, language itself, as used within a text, forms the linguistic context or co-text, in view of which other parts of the same text are interpreted. A more general distinction pertaining to the notion of context is the micromacro distinction, first introduced by van Dijk for the structure of discourse. The immediate circumstances of the verbal activity constitute the micro or local context; the broader social and cultural surroundings constitute the macro or global context. Local discourse and context are interpreted in the light of global contexts (van Dijk 1997:â•›15). Between the two extremes lies the intermediate level of mesocontext which links the specific (texts, participants and actions) to the general. In this sense, genre as understood here, following Fetzer (2007), is a type of mesocontext (see 3.4 below). An important issue relative to the text-context relationship concerns the static or dynamic character of context. If contexts are ready-made, formated and a priori given in a specific discourse event, then the text-context relationship must be uniÂ�dimensional. The context is “brought along” in the discourse event and as a consequence it is only the context which influences the text and its linguistic expression and not vice versa. If, on the other hand, context is conceived as a dynamic notion, as something not a priori given but flexible and consequently


created, negotiated or even canceled in the course of the interaction, then the context is “brought about”. It emerges during the discourse event and “language is not determined by the context, it is in itself responsible for the availability of the very context which is necessary in order to interpret the structures encoded in it” (Auer 1992:â•›22). As Auer (op. cit:â•›27) points out, context is usually “brought along” in inÂ�stitutionalized settings. In this paper we claim that, due to the institutional character of law, the genre “brings along” its context. Context emerges through conÂ�textualization (Gumperz 1982, 1992, Bauman and Briggs 1990, Auer 2009), i.e. through the activities of the participants. According to Gumperz (1982:â•›131–133, 1992) the context is made recognizable through contextualization cues, i.e. “constellations of surface features of message form […] by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows”. One of their characteristics is that “they are used and perceived but rarely consciously noted and almost never talked about directly” (Gumperz 1982:â•›131). Bauman and Briggs (1990) brought into the field of research on the text-context relationship a new line of investigation, that of entextualization in connection to deconÂ�textualization and recontextualization. What comes into focus through these processes is not discourse but the text itself. Entextualization is “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit –a text– that can be lifted out of its interactional settings” (op. cit.:â•›73). This allows the text unit in question to be decontextualized, i.e. detached from its situational context, and reconÂ�textualized in another. While law displays a high degree of entextualization, this aspect is not relevant to the topic of this paper. The two other strategies were used in the analysis of the data and the questionnaire as described in Section 2 above.

3.4 Genre The various definitions of genre in the literature share the premise that texts belonging to the same genre serve the comÂ�municative purposes of a discourse community. In this paper we adopt the definition of discourse community given by Swales (1990:â•›23–27), according to which it consists of speakers who use a specific register associated with their professional occupation and are able to produce and understand texts in this register, as a result of being trained in this task. The communicative purposes impose the discourse structure of the genre and lead to specific grammatical and lexical choices, which occur systematically in different texts of the same genre. Thus, genre is highly conventionalized and

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recognizable to the members of the discourse community. Law is one of the most recognizable genres due to its invariant text structure and characteristic linguistic expression. Varying opinions have been recorded in the literature as to the relation between genre and context. We adopt Fetzer’s (2007:â•›21) view, considering genre as a bridging notion connecting the macro- with the micro-context. Thus, we see the genre of law as a meso-context connecting the micro-context of individual laws to the socio-cultural macro-context. This leads us to the following conception of the relation between the three levels: the sociocultural and institutional macro-context associated with the legal and judiciary system gives birth to the very notion of law and assigns its properties and purposes. Thus, a specific cognitive frame LAW, embedded in the more general world-frame SOCIAL LIFE, is common to all members of society and includes knowledge about the nature of law. Both the institutional context and the cognitive frame are “brought along” in Auer’s sense by default in both the production and the interpretation of individual laws at the micro-level.

4.

Tense, aspect, modality and conditionals in Greek

4.1

Tense

Tense, the “grammaticalised expression of location in time” (Comrie 1985:â•›9) is the deictic category which places events on a time axis relative to the speaker’s present (the time of utterance). The position adopted here is that Greek displays a tripartite division of time into past, present and future, developing a system of three absolute and three absolute-relative tenses denoting anteriority, as displayed in Table 1.

. For the structure of English laws see Bhatia (1994, 2004) and Hoey (2001), for the language of English laws Maley (1994) and Tiersma (1999) and for the structure and language of Greek laws Panaretou (2009). . A different view is that the Greek system is based on the binary opposition [±PAST], the future being a modal category (for a discussion see Bella 2005) and that the perfect is either a third aspect or a tense combining the past and the present; the view that the present perfect denotes anteriority is particularly controversial (but see Moser 2003). None of this, however, is directly relevant to the discussion at hand.


AbsoluteAbsolute tense relative tense (anterior)

Table 1.â•‡ Absolute and absolute-relative tense in Greek Time

Tense

present7 past

Present Perfective Past (Aorist) Imperfective Past Perfective Future Imperfective Future Present Perfect Past Perfect Future Perfect

future present past future

tréxo étreksa étrexa tha trékso tha trexo éxo tréksi íxa tréksi tha éxo tréksi

It should be noted that, while tenses are prototypically associated with the time spans on the axis of time to which their labels refer, there is, as in many languages, considerable freedom in their use, as they can acquire different temporal meanings depending on the context, along with the variety of modal nuances that they can convey. On the other hand, certain structures, such as conditionals, impose certain constraints on their use (see 4.4).

4.2 Aspect Aspect, the grammatical category which expresses “different ways of viewing the internal temporal consistency of a situation” (Comrie 1976:â•›3), is based on the opposition [±IMPERFECTIVE]; the perfective views the situation as a whole, ignoring its internal temporal constituency, in other words adopting the point of view of someone watching the event from the outside, while the imperfective pays attention to this constituency, adopting the point of view of someone situated within the event and watching it unfold. Greek has one of the most highly grammaticalized aspectual systems cross-linguistically: all forms of the verb are marked for aspect, including non-indicative forms (which are not marked for tense). The aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective is expressed by the aorist and the present stem respectively and therefore functions for all but a negligible number of verbs. Table 1 shows the inflectional expression of aspect as well as of tense in the indicative of the absolute tenses, with the Â�Perfect system seen as . Following a common convention, cross-linguistic tense categories appear in lower case, while specific tenses of the Greek language appear with a capitalized initial. . The opposition [± PROGRESSIVE], a subdivision of the imperfective, has no morphological expression in Greek.

19

20 Amalia Moser and Eleni Panaretou

Â�perfective. Being highly grammaticalized, aspect in Greek is also highly subjective, allowing the speaker to adopt the point of view of his/her choice, so that the same event can be referred to through either aspect: (1) óli méra xtes éγrafa/éγrapsa éna gráma ‘All day yesterday I wrote(perf/imp) a letter’

The liberty that this system gives to speakers is restricted in certain contexts, including conditionals (see 4.4). A second and equally important function of the imperfective is the expression of habitÂ�uality, i.e. the regular repetition of an event: (2) káthe kalokéri piγéname diakopés sta nisiá ‘Every summer we went(imp.) (= used to go) to the islands for the holidays’

As opposed to the main aspectual opposition, the habitual is linked to the objective temporal constituency of a situation; consequently, habitual events demand the imperÂ�fective, with a few exceptions in certain syntactic environments.

4.3 Modality Modality, as the expression of the personal stance of the speaker with respect to the situation (Palmer 1986), can be epistemic, i.e. related to the degree of certainty of the speaker, or deontic, i.e. related to the expectations of the speaker (wishes, needs, obligations etc.). Modality is expressed in Greek10 through a. the moods, on whose number there is considerable controversy. Three (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) are universally accepted, being morphoÂ�logically distinct; several forms of the Subjunctive or the Past Indicative Â�preceded by various markers/particles are frequently considered moods, notably those with the future/modal marker tha, often characterised as ‘conÂ�ditionals’. The imperative, formed only in the second person, is protoÂ�typically used in commands, but also in requests, exhortations and conÂ�cessions. The mainly syntactic opposition of the Indicative and the Subjunctive has to do with the expression of factuality by the former and non-factuality by the latter.

. For a more detailed analysis of aspect cross-linguistically see Dahl (1985) and Comrie (1976) and for the Greek aspectual system, with a discussion of the nature of habituality, Moser (2008). 10. For a detailed analysis of modality in Greek see Iakovou (1999).


b. two modal verbs, prépi and borí, which, in the manner of modal verbs crosslinguistically, double as deontic and epistemic, depending on the context: (3) o Níkos (tha) prépi na γimnázete aliós tha paxíni / γiati íne se polí kalí katástasi ‘Nikos must exercise/be exercising, or he will get fat(must=deontic) / because he is very fit(must=epistemic)’.

The optional future/modal marker tha functions as a mitigator: when the modal verb is used epistemically it reduces the likelihood of the hypothesized situation; when the verb is used deontically, it reduces the imposition and therefore also functions as a politeness element.

4.4 Conditionals in Greek Conditionals in Greek are subject to syntactic restrictions which include the use of tenses, aspects and moods. Several categorizations are available in the literature.11 Most of them are based on the opposition [±FACTUALITY]; we opt here for one based on [±POSSIBILITY] (analysed in greater detail in Moser and PanaretouÂ� 2009) on the grounds that at least prototypical conditionals are by definition nonfactual. Possible hypotheses are further subcategorized on the basis of their degree of probability, i.e. likelihood of realization. conditionals possible

probable

impossible an íxe tréksi, tha íxe prolávi[past perfect] an étrexe, tha prolávene([imperfective past] ‘if she had run, she would have been in time’ improbable

an tréksi[perfective subjunctive], tha prolávi[future]

an étrexe, tha prolávene([imperfective past]

‘if she runs, she will be in time’

‘if she ran, she would be in time’

Figure 1.â•‡ Conditionals in Greek

11. For a comprehensive critical presentation of previous analyses see Dancygier (1998). The caÂ�teÂ�gorization adopted here has used ideas from this work as well as Athanassiadou and Dirven (1997) and grammars of Greek: Holton et al. (1997) and Clairis and Babiniotis (2005), although it differs from each of them on several points.

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There are two further, less prototypical types of conditionals, both expressing possible hypotheses: a. hypotheses about the past or the present, concerning the consequences of conditions which may or may not exist/ have existed. They are expressed through the Perfective Past or the Present respectively:

an étrekse, tha prólave[perfective past] an tréxei [present] , tha prolávi[future] if she ran, she will have been in time if she is running, she will be in time

b. pseudo-conditionals, i.e. timeless or ‘eternal’ truths, usually exÂ�pressed with the Present throughout and more rarely with the Future in the apodosis; in fact, the conditions are usually expressed with a temporal when-clause:

an/otan tréxeis, prolavénis[present] if you run, you are in time

The point of interest with respect to the matters at hand is that past tenses are restricted to hypotheses about the past, with the exception of the Imperfective Past, which, in addition to impossible conditionals, is used in hypotheses about unlikely future events.

5.

Modality, aspect and tense in Greek laws

The analysis of the concept of law in 3.1 and of the three grammatical categories in 4 leads to the logical conclusion that law is by nature linked to specific subcategories of modality, aspect and tense. These associations create a set of expectations concerning the expression and interpretation of modality, aspect and tense in law texts. Law is obviously associated with modality, in its nature both as a command and as a conditional; commands are prototypical instances of deontic modality, and more precisely of obligatoriness, while conditionals embody epistemic modality. What makes laws particularly interesting in this respect, however, is that deontic modality prevails, to the near exclusion of epistemic modality. Because laws are issued by the state, they do not express the personal opinions, much less the personal feelings of the legislator. Law is therefore related to epistemic modality only insofar as it hypothesizes possible circumÂ�stances, without, however, paying any attention to the likelihood of their occurrence, since it has to foresee all possible (even rare or exceptional) conditions. Consequently, epistemic modality only concerns the Facts and not the Consequences of the law. Its obligatory character, on the contrary, provides it with a particularly strong deontic component,


since obligatoriness is the extreme version of deontic modality, reinforced in the case of law by its non-negotiability. The prevalence of deontic modality leads to the expectation of the presence of both modal verbs and all moods, given their inherent ambiguity, with a strong presence in the Consequences of the most deontic of moods, the imperative. The inherent future orientation of deontic modality would preclude the appearance of past tenses. The attributes of obligatoriness and all-inclusiveness of law associate it with the habitual aspect, since the law applies to each and every occurrence of the type of situation it describes. Law is associated with time in two different ways: on the one hand it is futureoriented in that it is normally valid from the moment of its enactment onwards; from a different point of view it can also be seen as atemporal, in the sense that it is valid ad infinitum, unless revoked by another law. This suggests an association with the Future tenses as well as with the Present, both in its future and its ‘eternal truth’ functions, to the exclusion of all Past tenses. As a conditional, law falls clearly under the category of possible hypotheses, because by definition it does not refer to impossible, i.e. non-realizable situations, but exclusively to situations which could arise in the future, however unlikely. Its indifÂ�ference to the degree of likelihood disassociates it from the category of unlikely conditionals, while its potentially eternal validity creates a link with Â�pseudo-conditionals. In this respect again, past tenses are expected to be excluded from law. The absence of past tenses is therefore the strongest expectation stemming from the properties of law and the grammatical rules of Greek. In the following sections all expectations are checked against actual usage in laws.

5.1

Modality

The mood par excellence associated with commands is the imperative; it would therefore be expected to appear frequently in the Consequences. This expectation is not fulfilled: the imperative is completely absent from laws. Since conditionals do allow the imperative in the apodosis, we attribute its absence to the impersonality of Law. As a consequence of this attribute, the text of law is conducted in the third person; the imperative is morphologically limited to the second person, and is therefore excluded. This is not a mere technicality; it reflects the lack of interaction between the addresser and the addressee, i.e. the state and the citizens. This explanation is reinforced by the fact that the subjunctive, which forms all three persons, and often has the function of an imperative in standard usage, is also

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exÂ�cluded from the Consequences, though not from the apodoses of normal conditionals. What is usually found is the Present and Future indicative. The latter is frequently employed in an imperative function in standard usage, clearly by virtue of its factuality, which lends the command a greater degree of obligatoriness, presenting as it does the action as a future fact.12 Neither the Future nor of course the Present inÂ�dicative, whenever used in an apodosis in standard usage, are necesÂ� sarily commands; it is the genre of law which enforces this interÂ�pretation, as in the following: (4) An o δiaθétis […] aγnoí tin elinikí γlósa […] proslamvánetepresent δierminéas. O δierminéas prépi na orkistí óti θa δierminéfsi pistá ti θélisi tu δiaθéti ‘If the testator ignores the Greek language […] an interpreter is hired. The interpreter must take an oath that he/she will interpret faithfully the will of the testator’

The two modal verbs prepi and bori, as expected by the obligatory nature of the law, are interpreted in their deontic sense. The following passage, included in the questionnaire (QII.8)13, is a good example of the limitations on the interpretation of modal verbs in law: (5) Éna atíxima epikínδinon ilikón borí na íne epísis ke aeroporikó atíxima. Stin períptosi aftí θa prépi na akoluθiθí i siníthis diadikasía ‘A dangerous substances accident may also be an air accident. In this case the usual procedure must be followed’

The modal prépi in the Consequence is, as expected, interpreted as deontic by 100% of the informants, with only one out of forty one giving the option of an epistemic reading in addition to his original deontic reading. The modal borí in the first sentence is clearly epistemic and was paraphrased as such also by 100% of the informants; however, this particular provision does not have the standard form of a conditional. The first sentence constitutes merely the description of a possible world, without forming part of a conditional. The nature of this sentence entails the epistemic reading. The entire conditional is indirectly expressed by the second sentence, with the protasis conveyed by the expression in this case, which corresponds to the sentence ‘if the dangerous substances accident is an air accident’.

12. The factuality of the Future is, of course, entirely relative, given that there are no facts in the future, since it has not yet taken place, but mere conjectures, with varying degrees of plausibility. 13. The abbreviations QI and QII refer to Part I and Part II of the questionnaire and are followed by the number of the specific item (see Appendix).


The most interesting feature of this text, however, is the presence of the mitigator tha (tha prepi). The obligatoriness of law leaves, as has been pointed out, no room for mitigation. Therefore, no mitigation markers would be expected. Interestingly, tha, here as well as in other laws where it appears, does not have any effect whatsoever on the interpretation of the modal, which is still understood as conveying the meaning of absolute obligation. Characteristically, not one of the informants interpreted tha in laws as a mitigator; those interviewed merely remarked that it is odd in a law text and, when asked why, said that it is normally used to express hedging or politeness, which is out of place in the law. The single informant who offered an alternative epistemic reading explained that it was precisely the presence of tha that led him to add the epistemic paraphrase as an afterthought.

5.2 Aspect The aspectual category most obviously associated with the law is the habitual; the imperfective, therefore, should be the most frequent aspect. The only imperfective form that would not be expected to appear is the Imperfective Past, since in conditionals it either refers to the past (i.e. expresses a non-realizable hypothesis) or minimizes likelihood in the future (4.4), both properties alien to law. The absence of the Imperfective Past is the only expectation to have been fulfilled in the data. Non-past forms of the imperfective are much rarer than expected. The perfective in contexts where the imperÂ�fective would be compulsory in standard usage yields a habitual meaning, even when there are no contextual markers of habituality. The two aspects seem to alternate freely and sometimes they even co-exist. The following example (QI.2) is one of the two that contain a subjunctive: (6) An o ofilétis apoxorísi[perfective subjunctive] […] éna prágma me skopó tin katavolí, I enoxí singentrónete s’aftó […]. An o ofilétis apostéli[imperfective subjunctive] to prágma […] i singéntrosi epérxete […] ‘If the debtor detaches one object for payment, the obligation is concentrated on this […] If the debtor sends the object […] the concentration occurs […]’

The examples with the subjunctive (which expresses only aspect and not tense) are the only ones where a considerable percentage of our informants seem to notice the aspectual irregularity. 43.9% declared QI.2 either ‘wrong’ (11 infs.) or ‘unsatisfactory’ (7 infs.) and 34% did the same with QI.20. Interestingly, however, they corrected it by changing the imperfective into a perfective rather than viceversa, as they would in ordinary language. This suggests that what struck them as

25


odd was the coexistence of the two aspects, which they eliminated by adapting the second verb form to the first. 80.5% objected to the perfective when recontextualized in QI.11 (28 ‘wrong’ and 5 ‘unsatisfactory’ answers): (7) Dioni, an den teliósis[perfective subjunctive] to fagitó su den tha sikónese[imperfective future(habitual)] apo tin karékla su. ‘Dione, if you haven’t finished (lit.: didn’t finish) your dinner you will not leave your chair’.

5.3 Tense Law being by its nature at once future-oriented and atemporal, the tenses that would be expected to appear are the Futures and the Present, to the exclusion of Past tenses. The relevance of the Future is obvious; the appropriateness of the Present stems from two of its qualities: (a) from the fact that cross-linguistically as well as in Greek it is the tense used par excellence for atemporal statements, such as proverbs, and (b) from its flexibility, also not exclusive to Greek, which allows it to be used for past, present and future, provided there are sufficient temporal indications in the context to prevent ambiguity. Future and Present are indeed frequent in laws (the latter in particular) but, unexpectedly, past tenses, with the exception of the Imperfective Past, also abound: the Perfective Past (Aorist), the Past Perfect and the Present Perfect are plentiful in laws. If the past tenses are unexpected because of the nature of law, they are even more inapÂ�propriate in the micro-context of conditionals: as pointed out in 4.4, the past tenses in conditionals signal not simply non-realizable conditions, but hypotheses about the past. The future orientation of law excludes the presence of this type of hypothesis. Nevertheless, examples such as the following (QI.9) abound: (8) An kséfiγe[perfective past] kinitó prágma apo tin eksusía tu noméa ke periílthe[perfective past] se kséno akínito, o noméas tu akinítu éxi ipoxréosi na epitrépsi tin anazítisi ke tin análipsi ‘If an object [has] escaped the user’s authority and [has] moved into someone else’s property, the user of the property is obliged to allow search and repossession thereof ’

The only possible interpretation of this as of any other law is that it concerns any occurrence of the Facts in the future; indeed, none of the informants had any difficulty or any doubt about its temporal placement. Nevertheless, only three informants characterized it as mistaken and four as unsatisfactory (17% of the


total number); all seven corrected it by replacing the Perfective Past (Aorist) with a Perfective Subjunctive. Crucially, 100% considered the Perfective Past ungrammatical and corrected it with a Perfective Subjunctive in the recontextualized examples, such as QI.10 (the same is true about QI.18): (9) Ákuse, Leoníδa, ipárxun orisméni kanónes: to proí δen ksekinás γia to sxolío an δen ípies[perfective past] ólo to γála su ke an δen éstroses [perfective past] to kreváti su. ‘Listen, Leonidas, there are certain rules: in the morning you don’t start off for school unless you’ve drunk all your milk and made your bed’.

The Past Perfect is even more incompatible with the type of conditional expressed in laws, since it is reserved in standard usage for hypotheses considering situations that did not occur in the past and are consequently completely unrealizable. Nevertheless, it frequently appears in the text of laws, as in (10): (10) I prosvolí tis patrótitas apoklíete epísis metá to thánato tu téknu, ektós an íxe ídi askithí[past perfect] i sxetikí agogí ‘Challenge of paternity is not allowed after the death of the child, unless the relevant suit had already been filed’

The questionnaire included two excerpts of laws (QI.6 and QI.17) and two recontextualized uses of the Past Perfect (QI.5 and QI.8), one of which was the following rule set by a mother: (11) Ari, pézis[present] poδósfero ta apoγévmata móno an íxes teliósi[past perfect] ta maθímatá su ‘Ari, you may play (lit: you play) football in the afternoon only if you had finished your homework’

The results were impressive. Only 6 informants (14.6%) commented on the use of the Past Perfect in one of the law texts (QI.17), characterizing it as ‘wrong’ (3Â€infs.) or ‘unÂ�satisfactory’ (3 infs.) and changing it into a subjunctive. On the contrary, 100% of our informants unhesitatingly marked the use of the Past Perfect as ‘wrong’, replacing it with a subjunctive, when reconÂ�textualized into a mother’s rule in QI.5.

5.4 Statistical data The answers to the questionnaire were subjected to statistical analysis using PASW statistics (SPSS).

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Mean = –0.34 Std. Dev. = 3.253 N = 41

Frequency

6

4

2

0 –10

–5

0

10

5

Standard

Figure 2.â•‡ Tense-aspect in standard language texts

Mean = –9.27 Std. Dev. = 3.194 N = 41

20

15

Frequency

28

10

5

0

–12

–10

–8

–6

–4 Law

Figure 3.â•‡ Tense-aspect in law texts

–2

0

2


The results of the statistical analysis with respect to tense and aspect show that the measures of central tendency in standard language text tend towards 0 (see Figure 2), supporting the prediction that informants would notice deviations in standard language test. On the other hand in law texts they tend to −12 (Figure 3), supporting the prediction that informants would not notice deviations.14 We also checked our hypothesis for statistical significance, using One-sample t-test. a. H0: mean of Expected reply-Standard reply (standard language Texts) is 0 versus H1: mean of Expected reply-Standard reply (standard language Texts) is not 0 and b. H0: mean of Expected reply-Standard reply (law Texts) is 0 versus H1: mean of Expected reply-Standard reply (law Texts) is not 0. Table 2.â•‡ One sample t-test for tense and aspect Test Value = 0 t

Expected reply-Standard reply (standard language Texts) Expected reply-Standard reply (law Texts)

df

Sig. (2-tailed)

Mean 95% Confidence Difference Interval of the Difference Lower

Upper

â•⁄â•⁄ −,672 40

,505â•⁄

â•⁄ −,341

â•⁄ −1,37

â•⁄â•⁄ ,69

−18,581 40

,000

−9,268

−10,28

−8,26

Sig. > 0.05 » H0 (deviations are perceived in standard language texts). Sig. < 0.05 » H1 (deviations are not perceived in law texts). The results obtained with respect to the interpretation of modality in law texts in contrast to standard language texts also complied with our expectations. FiguresÂ€4 and 5 display the graphic representation of the tendency of informants to

14. Answers were assigned the values 1, 2 and 3 (for correct, unsatisfactory and incorrect respectively) and the following variables were created: Expected reply – standard reply (standard language texts): ‘correct’ evaluation (according to standard rules) – informant’s judgement (standard language texts). Expected reply – standard reply (law texts): ‘correct’ evaluation (according to standard rules)Â€– informant’s judgement (law texts).

29

30


interpret modal verbs as uniquely deontic in law texts, while taking into account their ambiguity in standard usage.15 We also checked our hypothesis for statistical significance, using One-sample t-test. a. H0: mean of reply-Expected reply (standard language Texts) is 0 versus H1: mean of reply-Expected reply (standard language Texts) is not 0 and b. H0: mean of reply-Expected reply (law Texts) is 0 versus H1: mean of replyExpected reply (law Texts) is not 0. Table 3.â•‡ One Sample t-test for modality Test Value = 0

Expected reply–reply (standard language Texts) Expected reply–reply (law Texts)

T

df

Sig. (2-tailed)

Mean 95% Confidence Difference Interval of the Difference Lower Upper

17,536

40

,000

3,00000

2,6542

3,3458

−3,955

40

,000

−,53659

−,8108

−,2623

Sig. < 0.05 indicates that both standard language texts and law texts elicited the expected replies.

6.

Discussion

The study of data from law texts corroborated by the questionnaire has revealed an interesting phenomenon: expressions which are ambiguous in normal usage and leave the choice of interpretation to the addressee (such as the deontic or epistemic content of modal verbs) prove to be unambiguous in law (in the case of modal verbs, leading to a deontic interpretation). Conversely, uses which are unacceptable or unÂ�grammatical in standard usage (such as the use of past tenses in conditionals 15. Answers were assigned the values 1, 2 and 3 (for deontic, epistemic and deontic/epistemic) respectively and the following variables were created: Expected reply – reply (standard language texts): ‘correct’ mark (according to our expectation)Â€– informant’s judgement. Expected reply – reply (law texts): ‘correct’ mark (according to our expectation) – informant’s judgement.


Mean = 3.00 Std. Dev. = 1.095 N = 41

20

Frequency

15

10

5

0

0.00

2.00 Standard

4.00

6.00

Figure 4.â•‡ Modality in standard language texts

Mean = –0.54 Std. Dev. = 0.869 N = 41

30

Frequency

20

10

0 –5.00

–4.00

–3.00

Figure 5: Modality in law texts

–2.00 Law

–1.00

0.00

1.00

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referring to the future) are available as options in law. It turns out, therefore, that the genre of law eliminates some choices which are available in standard usage, and at the same time offers as choices what in standard language constitute deviations. Moreover, these deviations are not even noticed by native speakers. An interesting outcome of the investigation was that our informants, as was reÂ� vealed by their interviews, immediately recognized the decontextualized passages as excerpts of laws. Asked how they reached this conclusion, they mentioned the voÂ�cabulary, the long and complex sentences and the repetition of words where a pronoun would normally be used. This suggests that these features function as contextualization cues by which readers recognize the genre of law. The deviations under investigation were not mentioned at all, which was to be expected, since they passed unnoticed in the questionnaire. According to Gumperz’s definition discussed in 3.3, they would still qualify as contextualization cues. In our view the existence of other, more salient cues, which are readily and consciously accessible to readers, means that if the grammatical deviations play a role at all in the process of contextualization, it must be of secondary importance. Turning to the deviations, we will start by discussing the most blatant one, i.e. the use in laws of the Past Perfect, which is ungrammatical in the corresponding mothers’ rules. This ungrammaticality is due to the fact that mothers’ rules, as all directives, are future-oriented, and hence, like all conditionals concerning the future, do not allow past tenses (see 4.4 above). What needs to be explained is why law, which is future-oriented as well, does not impose the same restrictions. The first step towards this explanation is to find out which part of the meaning of the past tenses could possibly license their use in the type of conditional found in law. We believe that the answer lies in the property of anteriority. Past tenses are intrinsically connected to anteriority on two levels. On the one hand as deictic elements they are defined by their relationship to the speaker’s present, to which they are anterior. More importantly for this discussion, they can also express anteriority within the past domain. This feature forms an integral part of the meaning of the Past Perfect. The Perfective Past (Aorist), being one of the most versatile forms of the Greek verb, is also often used to indicate anteriority in the past. The only past tense that cannot be used for this purpose (and is, on the contrary, used to express simultaneity in the past) is the Imperfective Past. Anteriority is also inherent in the meaning of every conditional, because the proposition of the protasis precedes that of the apodosis both logically and temporally. Since laws refer to the future, they express anteriority in the future. In the conditionals found in laws the past forms of the verb, including the Past Perfect, are only encountered in the protasis, i.e. in the part of the conditional which is by definition anterior to the apodosis. It would seem that this inherent


anteriority of the protasis forces the interpretation of the past forms as anterior, foregrounding their own inherent anteriority at the expense of their counterfactuality, which, it should be noted, is a secondary layer of meaning, appearing only in certain contexts. It is also worth pointing out that the Imperfective Past (the only past tense incapable of expressing anteriority) is, crucially, the only past tense absent from laws. Anteriority is therefore the property of the Past Perfect and the Aorist which licenses their use in the protasis of laws. One further question that arises is why anteriority assumes such importance in laws. The answer, we believe, lies in the necessity for precision in the temporal sequence of the events that lead to the legal consequences. Example (10), analyzed in 5.3, is a case in point: (10) I prosvolí tis patrótitas apoklíete epísis metá to thánato tu téknu, ektós an íxe ídi askithí[past perfect] i sxetikí agogí ‘Challenge of paternity is not allowed after the death of the child, unless the relevant suit had already been filed’

The temporal sequence of events is crucial for the implementation of this law: challenge of paternity is allowed iff the suit is filed before the death of the child. The anteriority therefore has to be emphasized. In the verbal system it is the Past Perfect that is most strongly marked for anteriority. It is therefore the cognitive salience of anteriority that makes the Past Perfect acceptable. The preceding paragraphs have pinpointed anteriority as the feature of past tenses which licenses their deviant use in laws. It remains to be explained why this feature does not allow past tenses in mothers’ rules. The similarities of the two kinds of rules, which are due to the fact that they belong to the same type of speech act, obscure two crucial differences between them: (a) the fact that laws constitute a genre while mothers’ rules do not and (b)Â€that they are produced in and evoke different contexts. According to the definition adopted in this paper (3.4) mothers’ rules do not constitute a genre for the following reasons: mothers cannot be said to form a discourse community because they are not a professional group and they do not use a specific common register to accomplish a specific communicative purpose. Issuing rules is not the sole communicative purpose of the multi-faceted motherchild relationship. Laws, on the other hand, are issued by a highly trained, clearly identifiable professional community, in a particularly idiosyncratic register, often referred to as legal jargon or legalese. Moreover, not only do they have a very specific comÂ� municative purpose as described in 3.1, but they are the sole regulators of the relation between state and citizens.

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34


Table 4 compares laws and mothers’ rules with respect to the concept of genre: Table 4.â•‡ Laws, mothers’ rules and genre Constitutive elements

Law

Mother’s rule

discourse community communicative purpose discourse structure linguistic expression

+ CONSTANT CONSTANT CONSTANT

− VARIABLE VARIABLE VARIABLE

The only common characteristic of legislators and citizens on the one hand and mothers and children on the other is the authority and power relationship as described in 3.2. Even so, the degree of mothers’ power and its management vary considerably within the same society on an individual basis. Moreover, mothers’ rules are negotiable, while laws are not. These differences are closely linked to the context in which these rules are issued. Mothers’ rules are formulated in the context of everyday conversation between a mother and her child. This communication is carried out in standard everyday language and mothers’ rules are formulated according to its grammatical rules. Laws on the contrary are produced in a highly institutionalized context, in the frame of which there is no direct, face to face communication between the participants. Table 5 compares laws and mothers’ rules with respect to the factors discussed so far: Table 5.â•‡ Laws vs. mothers’ rules Features

Law

Mother’s rule

Command Future-orientation Power Genre Context evoked

+ + ++ + institutional

+ + + − everyday conversation

We believe that the differences in context explain why the deviant uses pass unnoticed in law while they are deemed unacceptable in mothers’ rules. When our informants were faced with a mother’s rule in the questionnaire they evoked the relevant context, i.e. everyday conversation, which is associated with the standard language and therefore noticed every deviation from its grammatical rules.


It is crucial for our argument that when they were faced with laws, the informants did not merely realize that they were not parts of everyday conversation, but they recognized the specific genre. Their response to the texts can be satisfactorily explained only by the type of context it evokes. Due to the institutional nature of the genre of law the sociocultural context associated with it is brought along and established as default assignment (Auer and di Luzio 1992:â•›26–7). The recognition of the genre, therefore, evokes the relative cognitive frame, which includes the knowledge common to all members of society about a. the properties of law (future orientation, obligatoriness, all-inclusiveness, eternal validity) and b. the idiosyncratic linguistic expression of laws, which leads readers to expect a complicated, confusing and incomprehensible text, with “peculiarities” which they attribute to the genre. Hence, when they are dealing with law texts they try to make sense of them bearing in mind their knowledge of the nature of laws. As a consequence, a. they usually interpret modal verbs as deontic because of the obligatory nature of the law, b. they accept the perfective aspect in laws and interpret it as habitual even when there are no contextual markers of habituality, because they are aware of the potential eternal validity of the law, c. they accept tenses which in conditional sentences express counterfactuality and interpret them as expressing only anteriority because they know that laws are not dealing with non-realizable cases.

7.

Conclusions

The analysis presented in this paper revealed that the genre of law eliminates some of the choices available in standard usage, such as the epistemic interpretation of modal verbs, and offers choices that do not exist in standard usage by allowing deviant uses of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect. The fact that these “irregularities” remain unnoticed by native speakers, who immediately point them out in the case of mothers’ rules, was attributed to the genre of law and the relevant context.

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Genre, seen as a type of meso-context, connects the micro-context of each particular law to the socio-cultural macro-context. It ‘brings along’ information about the nature of law, its institutional character and the language of law which differs from everyday language in many respects. The context evoked in this way determines the interpretation of tense, aspect and modality. A different kind of context, that of everyday conversation, is evoked in the case of mothers’ rules which are therefore judged by the rules of standard usage. In both cases context affects the use of language: directly in the case of mothers’ rules and in the case of laws through the mediation of genre as meso-context.

References Athanasiadou, Angeliki and Dirven, René (eds.). 1997. On Conditionals Again. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Auer, Peter. 1992. “Introduction: John Gumperz’ approach to contextualization.” In The Contextualization of Language, Peter Auer and Aldo di Luzio (eds), 1–37. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 2009. “Context and Contextualization.” In Jef Verschueren and Jan-Ola Östman (eds), 86–101. Auer, Peter and di Luzio, Aldo. 1992. The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L. 1990. “Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Bella, Spyridoula. 2005. “Cognitive motivation and pragmatic functions of the Greek deictics.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 6: 39–60. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1994. “Cognitive structuring in legislative provisions.” In Language and the Law, John Gibbons (ed), 136–155. London: Longman. ———. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse: a genre-based view. London/New York: Continuum. Canakis, Costas. 2007. Isagogi stin Pragmatologia: Gnostikes ke kinonikes opsis tis glosikis xrisis [Introduction to Pragmatics: Cognitive and social aspects of language use]. Athens: Ekdosis tou Ikostou Protou. Clairis, Christos and George Babiniotis, in collaboration with Αmalia Moser, Ekaterini Â�Bakakou-Orfanou, Stavros Skopeteas. 2005. Grammatiki tis Neas Ellinikis: DomolitourgikiÂ�Epikinoniaki [Grammar of Modern Greek: Structural-Functional-Communicative]. Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. 1994. “Sentence typology and the taxonomy of speech acts.” In Foundations of Speech Act Theory, Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed), 460–477. London: Routledge. Crystal, David and Davy, Derek. 1969. Investigating English Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.


Dancygier, Barbara. 1998. Conditionals and Prediction: Time, Knowledge and Causation in Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Beaugrande, Robert and Dressler, Wolfgang. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman. Engisch, Karl. 200510. Einführung in das juristische Denken [bearbeitet von T. Würtenberger u. D. Otto]. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Fetzer, Anita. 2007. “Context, contexts and appropriateness.” In Context and Appropriateness: Micro Meets Macro, Anita Fetzer (ed), 3–26. Amsterdam / PhilaÂ�delÂ�phia: John Benjamins. Georgiadis, Αpostolos S. 19972. Genikes arxes astikou dikaiou [General Principles of Civil Law]. Athens/Komotini: Sakkoulas. Goffman, Ervin. 1979. “Footing.” Semiotica 25: 1–29. ———. 1986. Frame Analysis: an Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goodwin, Charles and Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. “Rethinking context: An introduction.” In Rethinking Context, Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds), 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. “Contextualization revisited.” In Peter Auer and Aldo di Luzio (eds), 39–53. Halliday, Michael A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. ———. 1985. Language, Context and Text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Victoria: Deakin University Press. Holton, David, Mackridge, Peter and Philippaki-Warburton, Irene. 1997. Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London: Routledge. Hoey, Michael. 2001. Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: an Ethnographic Approach. London: Routledge. Iakovou, Μaria. 1999. Tropikes Katigories sto rimatiko sistima tis Neas Ellinikis [Modal Categories in the Greek verbal system]. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Athens. Κurzon, Dennis. 1986. It is Hereby Performed: Explorations in Legal Speech Acts. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Maley, Yon. 1994. “The language of the law.” In Language and the Law. John Gibbons (ed.), 11–50. Harlow: Longman. Mann, William C. and Thompson, Sandra A. 1988. “Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional analysis of text organization.” Text 8: 243–281. Mey, Jacob. 1993. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Morgan, Edmund M. and Dwyer, Francis X. 19482. Introduction to the Study of Law. Chicago: Callaghan. Moser, Amalia. 2003. “Tense, aspect and the Greek perfect.” In Perfect Explorations, Artemis Alexiadou, Monika Rathert and Arnim von Stechow (eds), 235–252. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 2008. “The changing relationship of tense and aspect in Greek.” Typology and Universals (STUF) 61: 5–18. Moser, Amalia and Panaretou, Eleni. 2009. “Tense, aspect and modality in legal texts.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, Ioannina 2007 (online e-book: http://www.linguist-uoi.gr/cd_web/).

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Ochs, Eleanor. 1979. “Planned and unplanned discourse.” In Discourse and Syntax [Syntax and Semantics 12], Talmy Givón (ed), 51–80. New York: Academic Press. Palmer, F. R. 1986. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panaretou, Eleni. 2005. Nomi ke kanones dikeu: glossika ke kimenika xaraktiristika [Laws and Legal Rules: Linguistic and Textual Features]. Athens, Parousia. Panaretou, Eleni. 2009. Nomikos logos: glossa ke domi ton nomon [Legal Discourse: Language and Structure of Laws]. Athens: Papazisis. Searle, John R. 1976. “A classification of illocutionary acts.” Language in Society 5: 1–24. Sbisà, Marina. 2001. “Illocutionary force and degrees of strength in language use.” Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1791–1814. ———. 2009. “Speech act theory.” In Jef Verschueren and Jan-Ola Östman (eds), 229–244. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, Peter. 1999. Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Troller, Alois. 1969. The Law and Order: An Introduction to thinking about the Nature of Law. Leyden: Sithoff. van Dijk, Teun A. (ed.). 1997. Discourse as Social Interaction. London: SAGE. Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London/New York: Arnold. Verschueren, Jef and Östman, Jan-Ola (eds.). 2009. Key Notions for Pragmatics. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Appendix Questionnaire* Questionnaire I (QI) In the following texts a. If an element seems wrong or unsatisfactory, please underline and correct/improve it b. Mark the box that corresponds to your evaluation (correct, incorrect, unsatisfactory) (1) Vassili, you will play[imperfective] football in the afternoon only if you finish[perfective] your homework. (2) If the debtor detaches[perfective] […] one object for payment, the obligation is concentrated on this […] If the debtor sends[imperfective] the object […] the concentration occurs […] after the object is delivered. (3) If you choose[imperfective] the more expensive tiles, you will save[perfective] money in the long run, because they last longer. (4) From now on, if you decide to make a withdrawal[perfective subj.] you will need your passport. If you deposit[imperfective subj.] money you don’t need to bring along any document. (5) Ari, you play[present] football in the afternoon only if you had finished[past perfect] your homework.

* Translation of law excerpts was limited to the parts containing the grammatical category under investigation. In the original questionnaire they were quoted in full.


(6) If a contract […] was signed[past perfect] […] under duress and […] was declared void[perfective past] […] the decision is effective[present] only after it is copied[perfective past] […] (7) If payment […] is arranged[perfective subj.] for a set date, it is considered overdue[present] after the end of this day. If a deadline is set[present perfect] […], payment is considered overdue after the expiry of the deadline. (8) If you had cooked[past perfect], let’s go to a movie. (9) If an object [has] escaped[present perfect] the user’s authority and [has] moved[present perfect] into someone else’s property, the user of the property is obliged to allow search and repossession thereof. (10) Listen, Leonidas, there are rules: in the morning you don’t set out for school unless you’ve drunk[perfective past] all your milk and made up[perfective past] your bed. (11) Dione, I’ll say this for last time: if you don’t finish eating[perfective subj.] you won’t leave[imperfective future] your chair. (12) – Mum, can I play with George Tuesdays? – Only if you’ve finished[perfective past] your English homework. (13) Every time I want[present] to make a withdrawal I show[present] my passport, because my identity card is too old to be acceptable[present]. (14) If the testator has named[perfective past] as his heir a person who had not been born[past perfect] at the time of his death, the bequest is treated as a trust fund (15) Mum, can I go[perfective] to the cinema with my friends? If George’s father drives[imperfective] you back, O.K. (16) Vassili, you will play football[perfective] in the afternoon only if you’ve finished[imperfective] your homework. (17) A merger is proposed [present] […] if at the time when the demands coexisted the deadline […] had not expired [past perfect] (18) Anna, if you haven’t finished [perfective past] your food, you will not leave [imperfective subjunctive] the table. (19) Niko, you will play [imperfective subj.] football in the afternoon only if you’ve finished [present perfect] your homework. (20) The owner […] has the right to prohibit [perfective] building on the neighbouring plot. If building is attempted [imperfective] after a building permit has been obtained […] prohibition can be demanded only if damages […] have already occurred [perfective past]. Questionnaire II (Q2) Please replace every bori and prepi with an equivalent expression (e.g. maybe, it is compulsory etc.) (1) Anyone with a degree in Classics may teach Ancient Greek in Secondary Education. (2) I am very sorry to have to interrupt you, but I’m afraid you will have to move. (3) The testator may oblige the legatee […] (4) I haven’t seen him, but he must have arrived. (5) Each of you has different skills. I’m sure you’ll all get a job eventually. Yannis could teach music. (6) I don’t know how many books will sell at the Easter bazaar. People don’t buy too many books lately. Some have no money, others don’t read – Ellie must buy some, though. (7) If you intend to travel to certain countries, you will have to be inoculated in advance.

39


(8) A dangerous substances accident may also be an air accident. In this case the usual procedure must be followed’. (9) If the person who has suffered the damage has contributed to the damage […] the court may not award damages or may reduce the amount. (10) I haven’t seen him, but he must have arrived. Questionnaire III (QIII) Please fill in the gaps with the appropriate form of the verb in brackets. (1) Each morning before ________ (LEAVE) for work my brother has to _______ (SEE) the kids onto the school bus. (2) Subjects taught during the previous academic year will be examined according to last year’s regulations if students ______________ (SIGN UP) for them before June. (3) Objects which ________ (CONNECT) to the ground non-permanently are not considered parts of the property. The same regulation pertains to buildings which ________ (ERECT) on land belonging to a different owner by one who ________ (HAVE) the authority to do so. (4) The person who has care of the object is held responsible as long as different provisions ________ (NOT BE MADE). (5) Objects are deprived of this property from the moment that they ________ (STOP) being used for a […] municipal or religious reason. (6) Students lose their student rights if they ____ not __________ (RE-REGISTER). (7) The lawsuit is unacceptable if the person damaged ________ (OBTAIN) the freehold by improper means. (8) ___________ (MAKE) moussaka. Will you come to dinner? (9) You can only take your dog with you when you go abroad if it ____________ (INNOCCULATE) recently. (10) The owner […] is obliged to ________ (ACCEPT) smoke emission, noise and similar side-effects. He has however the right to ________ (PROHIBIT) the installation of machinery which is certain to produce such effects. (11) Every child has to _________ (STUDY) for at least two hours, but has the right to _________ (WATCH) television for one hour. (12) Tomorrow ___________ (COOK) spaghetti. Yannis and Iphigeneia ________ (COME) over.

Fighting words Hybrid discourse and discourse processes Lawrence N. Berlin The purpose of this research is to investigate how, through the blending of orders of discourse, words can become actions and militarizing language can lead a nation to the brink of war. By exerting political power while broadcasting his weekly program, Aló, Presidente, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez not only creates a hybrid discourse, but also integrates the processes of entextualization and contextualization in that hybrid. Using a critical discourse analysis, a pragmatic model of multilayered context unveils elements in those processes whereby the talk and interaction render an external reality. Ultimately, it is the careful and systematic choice and inclusion of synchronic and diachronic elements that will resonate with the target audience, even when introduced over a relatively short period of time, which ostensibly manages to create a plausible enemy in order to support military aggression. Thus, manipulation of language begets manipulation of ideology.

1.

Introduction

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

The above idiom has long been taught to and used by small children on playgrounds as a retort to name-calling. It suggests that words do not have the force to wound in the sense that concrete objects used as weapons do. While everyone knows this to be true, it cannot be denied that words can and often do have an effect on the recipient. The question is whether their effect can be so pervasive that it foments a common belief, one that might even lead to aggression; and the answer is “yes”. In fact, it happens all the time. And the more effective the wordsmith, the better the chance that people will believe. Take, for example, the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003). On the New York Times best-seller list for 136 weeks, it has sold over 80 million copies

42

Lawrence N. Berlin

and has been translated into more than 40 languages to date (Sage 2009). While this feat is remarkable in itself, what is even more remarkable is the degree of controversy since its publication. Cleverly weaving together a hodgepodge of actors, activities, and places from throughout history, many of which would be relatively familiar to a large swath of the general public, Brown created a story that was plausible enough to have millions of ordinary people believing that the work of fiction is, at least in part, factual (Gessell 2005; Stetzer 2006). Believers even went so far as to use more than sticks and stones – hammers and chisels – causing damage to a church in the United Kingdom which had been identified in the book (BBC 2006; Wilkes 2006). As an isolated incident, the event would appear “relatively” harmless, but the extent of belief in the text has actually produced large scale response from myriad sources, including many religious, to rebut the inaccuracies found therein (Catholic News Service 2006). In terms of what is being called “fighting words”, or militarizing language, heads of state have often been the figureheads who are required to make a case for going to war (cf. Fairclough 2005; Graham and Luke 2005; Rudd 2004; van Dijk 2005). And the grounds don’t necessarily need to be factual, just believable. In a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes after the United States invaded Iraq, while only 50% of those polled believed that the government’s justification for going to war was “not being misleading”, a full 57% continued to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, 41% believed that the weapons had actually been found, and an overwhelming 68% approved of the decision to go to war (PIPA 2003). Thus, in the advancement of “soft power” defined as “getting others to want what you want” (Nye 2004:â•›5), Chouliaraki (2005) implies that the case for legitimacy can be achieved through consensus-building. In the current chapter, I explore the possibility that this consensus-building can occur by (1) merging two orders of discourse – political and media – both of which serve as “instruments of soft power” (Chouliaraki 2005:â•›3); (2) contextualizing the new hybrid through the exploitation of components from both; and (3)Â€entextualizing familiar historical referents that will resonate with the target audience, a politician can attempt to make a case for military aggression where any option appears untenable. To explore the scenario, the chapter utilizes the Multilayered Model of Context (MMC) intended for the examination of discourse from a critical perspective (Berlin 2007). Within this model, the stratification of “context” can be said to coincide at each respective level with the speaker’s ability to entextualize language (i.e., delimit its use as recognizable within a given discourse or genre) and/or to contextualize its discourse space (i.e., create a context associated with a discourse or genre wherein the language is used). Moreover, it allows for a fine-grained analysis in the realization of a critical discourse analysis by separating out the

Fighting words: Hybrid discourse and discourse processes

linguistic, interactional, situational, and extrasituational levels of context without suggesting that they are mutually exclusive. Rather, the ability to consider the various levels and how they influence one another leads to a deeper understanding of their interplay in the analysis of the discourse, the practice, and the conjuncture (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). The MMC is applied to data obtained from the weekly broadcast of Aló, Presidente (n.d.), a Venezuelan television show consisting of “interviews” with Hugo Chávez, the President of the Bolivarian Republic. Focusing on broadcasts from the latter part of 2007 into and culminating with the early part of 2008 when Chávez calls for the mobilization of Venezuelan troops to go to the border with Colombia, the excerpts from the transcripts exemplify how specific elements identified in the analysis of the practice and the conjuncture function to contextualize the discourse as a hybrid of political and media discourse, while speakers’ use of specific utterances demonstrating familiarity with the power of entextualized forms to invoke certain expectations and interpretations emerges in the analysis of the discourse. In particular, the progression of Chávez’ particularized use of militarizing language is traced over time in order to determine if the hybrid is “of a particular speech event or […] a more global institutional context” (Fetzer 2004:â•›8–9).

2.

Multilayered model of context Extrasituational context Analysis of the Conjuncture

Analysis of the Practice

Situational context Interactional context Linguistic context Analysis of the Discourse

Analysis of the Conjuncture

Figure 1.â•‡ Multilayered Model of Context (Berlin 2007)

In the original iteration of the Multilayered Model of Context (Berlin 2007), the concept of context was broken down into four distinct levels following a theoretical perspective informed by critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki and

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Â�Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 1989, 1995), systemic functional linguistics (HallidayÂ� 1978, 1984, 2002a, 2002b; Widdowson 2004), speech act theory (AustinÂ� 1962; Levinson 1983; Sbisà 2002; Searle 1969), and linguistic anthropology (Goodwin and Duranti 1992; Urban 1991). These levels were identified as the linguistic context (or co-text), the interactional context, the situational context, and the extrasituational context (see Figure 1). The linguistic context is represented by the units of analysis which are delimited and identified in the text together with their immediate environments in the sense of a more traditional linguistic analysis (e.g., words, phrases, clauses, wordclasses, speech acts). From a linguistic perspective, these are the most objective and incontrovertible elements within discourse. For example, in (1) (Aló, Presidente program no. 297:â•›20), President Chávez uses the inclusive we-forms with “we evaluated” (‘evaluamos’) and “we will continue” (‘seguiremos’) to position himself as a partner of the French government in negotiating on behalf of the Colombian government with FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). (1) a. Chávez: […] Yo recibí esta semana a un emisario del president Sarkozy, el director para América Latina, Daniel Parfait, de una gran experiencia, un conocedor, fue embajador en Colombia, y un grupo de asesores del Gobierno francés muy interesados en esto, y evaluamos opciones y seguiremos trabajando pues. b. Chávez: […] This week, I received an emissary from President Sarkozy, the Director for Latin America, Daniel Parfait, an experience man, a connoisseur, and a former Colombian ambassador, and a group of consultants from the French government are very interested in this, and we evaluated the options and we will continue working.

Another example can be seen in the use of speech acts. In (2) (Aló, Presidente program no. 297:â•›46–47), Chávez issues the command in line 10 whereby he orders the elimination of the tolls he asks about in line 2. In so doing, he fulfills the necessary requirements of the illocutionary requirements in that there is a future act being requested of the hearer, Diosdado, who as the governor of the state (1) is able to perform the action and (2) might not have obviously performed the action without the express request of Chávez (i.e., he had not previously closed those two tolls). (2) 1 Chávez: Where do the people pass if not there? Well, my friend eliminated 2 â•‡ those tolls in a very orderly manner. Are there any tolls left in Miranda? 3 Diosdado: Two tolls. 4 Chávez: And why do you have tolls, Diosdado? Which are the tolls that you 5 â•‡ have there? 6 Diosdado: No, I’m letting you know, Mr. President, that we have already 7 â•‡ discussed eliminating the tolls in Tazón and Playa Pintada, the two that are


8 â•‡ left, with the Minister of the Infrastructure. 9 Audience: [applause] 10 Chávez: Eliminate them! Now, what is being done to give concessions to the 11 â•‡ private sectors? They covered the toll supposedly to maintain the highways, 12 â•‡ and they haven’t done maintenance or anything.

The interactional context incorporates the scope of language use. It includes Hymes’ (1972) notion of knowing how to use language and Austin’s (1962) knowing how to do things with words; it is Wittgenstein’s (1958) “language games” and Halliday’s (1984) “language as behavior”. Following Halliday, the interactional context is further divided into two sublevels: the ideational and the interpersonal. The ideational represents what is going on behind the language, internal to the mind of the speaker, but indexed in the language used, such as speaker intent, presupposition, entailment, and implicature. It may not be evident in the text, and usually requires an interpretation of the pragmatic situation in order for it to be revealed. The interpersonal represents what is accomplished by and through the language, what the interaction itself accomplishes. It is external and heareroriented and can result in uptake on the part of the hearer to the extent that it produces a reaction, demonstrating the power of language to have actual force in the world, where more evident references intended for the hearer are perceived and acted upon. Once again referring to (2), the order to eliminate the two tolls entails that they are still open and active; it also subsumes the preparatory rule in the speech act that Chávez must be in a position to order their immediate closure, a fact taken for granted since he is the president of the republic. It can also be inferred in the ideational sublevel that he is further attempting to maintain or deepen the rift that exists between the private sector – not typically his supporters – and the public by referring to the former’s mismanagement of the tolls and alluding to a misappropriation of the people’s money (i.e., it hasn’t been used for maintenance of the highways as it was intended). It is also clear on the interpersonal sublevel that Chávez is using the particular occasion of the presence of an audience to issue the command as Diosdado has just assured him (lines 6–8) that there has already been a discussion of eliminating the two tolls in question and, most likely, this would have happened eventually even without the president’s intervention. The uptake on the part of the governor, however, will be to move swiftly to comply with the ordered closures. The situational context relates to Malinowski’s (1923) “context of situation” where the physical environment becomes a co-participant in the ability to carry out certain interactions. Identified on the level of domain from an anthropological perspective (cf. Spradley 1980), the situational context’s components – actors, activities, and places – represent a delimited social situation which is immediate and recognizable. Chávez appears to be keenly aware of how important the

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situationalÂ� context can be; he opens each show “on location” in different parts of the country, presenting everything from farms to national parks to monuments. Despite his position as president, he is depicted as one of the common people; he has even opened the show on horseback, rivaling his former arch-nemesis, George W. Bush, who also took every opportunity to portray himself as a “regular guy” to the viewing public. The extrasituational context is more elusive, existing on a subconscious level for the participants and overhearers who share common cultural norms. Further subdividing this level of context for a finer-grained explication, there are (1) the sociolinguistic or considerations and recognition of the discourse as a particular type or order; (2) the sociocultural or the synchronic, local influences that position a discourse in relation to other simultaneous events; and (3) the sociopolitical or the diachronic; global influences that give historicity to an event by positioning it in time and as being related to other events in the common knowledge of participants. The sociolinguistic is discussed at length in Section 4.1 where the opening of Aló, Presidente is shown to include all the elements of a news interview (Clayman 1991). Examples of the synchronic and diachronic are replete with references to current events (e.g., the Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip) and popular culture (e.g., Vitto Corleone, a character from the movie The Godfather), and cultural and historical knowledge that the Venezuelan viewing audience – and possibly anyone else viewing in Latin America – is likely to be familiar with (e.g., Simon Bolívar, Gran Colombia, the Battle of Ayacucho; cf. Bushnell 2007). The MMC shares qualities with other models of context. Fetzer’s (2004) social action model (SAM) and the interplay of contexts (cf. Fetzer and Akman 2002) breaks down context into three levels: the linguistic context, the social context, and the sociocultural context (see Table 1). The linguistic context in Fetzer’s model roughly corresponds with that of the MMC, but also includes elements of the MMC’s interactional context; Fetzer explains that in a conversation-analytic framework, the “language produced (formulated) and interpreted (decoded) by co-participants is assigned a dual function” (2004:â•›5); specifically, “it invokes linguistic context by constructing it” (2004:â•›5) while it simultaneously manages to “provide the context for subsequent talk and recovery of intended meaning” (2004:â•›6). The combined process is the essence of entextualization where, paraphrasing Fetzer, the language in the linguistic context is decontextualized in a local negotiation of meaning, then recontextualized at a global level for clarification. The unique feature of the MMC here, then, is that it separates the talk from its use, the linguistic from the pragmatic, giving the actors’ intentions, strategies, etc. a different status than the texts that they produce; thus, following systemic functional linguistics, language as code and language as behavior are represented as two different levels in the MMC.


Table 1.â•‡ Comparison between the Multilayered Model of Context and the Social Action Model Berlin (2007)

Fetzer (2004)

LINGUISTIC CONTEXT “language as code” –â•‡units (e.g., word, phrase, clause, sentence, …); classes (e.g., verbal, nominal, adverbial) –â•‡initiative-response, adjacency pair, move, turn, transaction, exchange, sequence –â•‡ speech act*

LINGUISTIC CONTEXT –â•‡ communicative contribution –â•‡ speech act –â•‡ utterance –â•‡ turn –â•‡ discourse –â•‡“language produced (formulated) and interpreted (decoded) by co-participants” (2004:â•›5) –â•‡ [time, location, speaker, hearer]

INTERACTIONAL CONTEXT “language as behavior” internal/speakeroriented –â•‡intent, presupposition, entailment, implicature, etc. â•‡â•‡“not readily apparent in the text, but interpreted through the pragmatic situation” (2007:â•›170) –â•‡illocutionary force â•‡â•‡“mental phenomena, beliefs, values, desires” (ChouliarakiÂ�Â€& Fairclough 1999:â•›61)

external/heareroriented –â•‡ strategies, tactics –â•‡perlocutionary effect â•‡â•‡“social relations and processes (social relations, power, institutions)” (ChouliarakiÂ� & FaircloughÂ� 1999:â•›61)

SOCIAL CONTEXT –â•‡ status –â•‡ roles –â•‡ footings “co-participants, immediate concrete, physical surroundings including time and location, and the macro contextual institutional and non-institutional domains” (2004:â•›7)

SITUATIONAL CONTEXT –â•‡ actors, activity, space –â•‡ “material activity” EXTRASITUATIONAL CONTEXT –â•‡ synchronic and local/sociocultural –â•‡ diachronic and global/sociopolitical –â•‡ cultural domain

SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT (EXTRALINGUISTIC) “co-participants, their physical and psychological dispositions and the specific knowledge or assumptions about the persons involved, the knowledge of the language, the knowledge of routines and activity types, their communicative intentions and communicative goals, and general background knowledge. […] organizational contexts and other socio-historically constituted contexts of institutions and (sub)cultures” (2004:â•›9)

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Fetzer’s (2004) model incorporates some of these behavioral features in its social context, such as speaker status, roles, and footings. Contrastively, the MMC keeps these distinct from this level, focusing only on those concrete elements also included in the social context of the SAM: the actors, their activities, and the physical space itself. Perhaps the area of the greatest convergence can be found between the extralinguistic context of the MMC and the sociocultural context of the SAM. Fetzer defines this level as including the “physical and psychological dispositions and the specific knowledge or assumptions about the persons involved, the knowledge of the language, the knowledge of routines and activity types, their communicative intentions and communicative goals, and general background knowledge [as well as] organizational contexts and other socio-historically constituted contexts of institutions and (sub)cultures” (2004:â•›9). I would add that these forms of knowledge are especially and uniquely informed by the culture within which the participants exist, their dispositions being influenced by the current (synchronic) local events and the formative forces that create distinct cultures over time.

3.

Contextualization and entextualization

Following the postpositivist shift which has gradually become more accepted in academia over the past few decades, there has been a concomitant shift in the analysis of discourse away from a more traditional focus on products to a focus on processes (Bauman and Briggs 1990). For example, in the MMC, which was designed to apply within a critical discourse analytic framework, distinct elements (i.e., products) are identified within each of the various levels of context (e.g., a speech act), but the realization of processes occurs in the interplay between the layers (see Figure 2). Thus, the analysis of the discourse which emerges as the interplay between the language (linguistic context) and how it is used (interactional context), the analysis of the practice by which certain interactions occur within certain situations, and the analysis of the conjuncture where situations are defined and positioned within and informed by the larger society and its culture (i.e., extrasituational context) occur within and between the multiple layers. Among the processes which are particularly relevant and which this volume highlights are the complementary processes of contextualization and entextualization. Contextualization has been defined as “an active process of negotiation in which participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessments of its structure and significance in the speech itself ” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:â•›69). As such, it can be viewed as either context-producing (i.e., the context is created, ostensibly through voicing and the recognition of the text as


Extrasituational context

Analysis of the practice

Linguistic context

Analysis of the discourse

Interactional context

Analysis of the conjuncture

Situational context Contextualizing processes

Entextualizing processes

Figure 2.â•‡ Multilayered Model of Context (revised 2011)

being part of a particular discourse) or, reciprocally, meaning defining and delimiting (i.e., a process by which context delimits what can be said in an interaction and how the talk which occurs therein is to be interpreted). An example of the former can be seen in (3) (Aló, Presidente program no. 299:â•›1) where the format of the exchange indicates that an interview is about to commence (see Section 4.1 for a more thorough analysis of the components of an opening sequence for an interview). An example of the latter can be seen in (2) where the respective roles and statuses of the interactants (i.e., the actors in the situational context, the president is speaking to one of his governors) renders the issuing of a command feasible. (3) 1 President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías: 2 â•‡ Sunday, January 6. Happy New Year and Happy Three Kings’ Day; today 3 â•‡ is the day of the kings. Diosdado, what did the three kings bring? 4 Governor of Miranda, Diosdado: I’m waiting, my commander, for tonight. 5 Chávez: You’re still waiting. Happy New Year then, and Happy Three Kings’

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6 â•‡ Day to Venezuela and all Miranda. We’re making the program Hello, Mr. 7 â•‡ President number 299. The battle has begun, Pedro Morejón Carillo, isn’t 8 â•‡ that right? 9 Minister of the Power of the People’s Economy, Pedro Morejón Carrillo: 10 â•‡ Yes. 11 Chávez: Do you know the family of Eneas Perdomo Carrillo? 12 Carrillo: Sort of. 13 Chávez: Eneas Perdomo Carrillo. Well, we love to come here and visit 14 â•‡ Charallave, Miranda, starting in 2008. The battle has begun, this is going to 15 â•‡ be a good year, and, well, the year of the three R’s, we’ve said: revision, 16 â•‡ rectification, and a new revolutionary boost. And we love to start the year 17 â•‡ with program 299 of Hello, Mr. President, here, inaugurating this 18 â•‡ tremendous center of socialism – because that is the rumbo: socialismÂ€– 19 â•‡ that carries the name of Ezequiel Zamora, born very close to here in Cúa. 20 â•‡ Here we are in Charallave. Well, Diosdado and Morejón, let’s go in then. 21 â•‡ What an amazing dining hall! This is the dining hall?

The advocates of the centrality of context have often assumed the position that text cannot or should not be viewed outside of its context; such a stance, then, tends to view work focusing on isolated text skeptically and questions the degree to which a purely linguistic analysis can inform a full understanding of discourse. Entextualization, on the other hand, is a process which embodies two aspects: decontextualization and recontextualization. The first part, decontextualization, has been suggested as primary by Bauman and Briggs when they define the concept as “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (1990:â•›73). While this aspect of entextualization suggests that texts can not only be taken out of context for the purpose of analysis, but are, in fact, extracted by speakers all the time, the latter aspect of recontextualization implies that the extracted texts can be repositioned into other contexts – potentially other discourses – and that they are, consequently, context-recreating. Park and Â�Bucholtz, in an attempt at simplification, have forwarded a definition wherein both aspects are addressed, identifying entextualization as “the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object” (2009:â•›485). Excerpt (4) (Aló, Presidente 302:â•›68) presents a simplified example where Chávez incorporates the reading of a headline (lines 1–2) and part of a news Â�article (lines 4–7) into his broadcast. The piece has been removed from its original context (decontextualized) and inserted into Chávez’ address to the audience (recontextualized) to underscore his claim that the United States and Colombia are conspiring against Venezuela and him.


(4) 1 Chávez: Now here is Díaz Rangel’s column: “The increasing [threat] against 2 â•‡ Venezuela.” Eleazar Díaz Rangel. Listen, you should give Díaz Rangel a 3 â•‡ good interview one of these days, a good journalist. 4 â•‡â•‡ Let’s read a piece, no more: “It appears evident” – I’m quoting – “that we 5 â•‡ are being confronted with an increasing [threat] against Venezuela, with the 6 â•‡ bases in Washington and Bogotá, the [Commander] of the US Armed Forces 7 â•‡ in Colombia claims that the Venezuelan threat…” Here we have the 8 â•‡ commander of the Bolivarian Army, General Mata Figueroa. 9 Audience: [applause]

Other examples can be seen when specific signifiers appear in the linguistic context, such as references to historical figures or events, that carry a particular meaning for the hearers; the integration of these signifiers is revealed in the analysis of the conjuncture and indicates a form of entextualization whereby the user can be said to manipulate language by their insertion in order to invoke a response in the hearers (see Section 4.2 for examples). The representation of distinct definitions and levels of context, however, should not undermine the need to comprehend the multiple levels as interrelated. For instance, even though the nature of entextualization suggests that texts can be extracted from their original context, the second aspect of the process – recontextualization – requires that the text be linked to a new context in order to be understood. Furthermore, to see the processes of contextualization and entextualization as separate or oppositional runs the risk of missing a vital understanding of the discourse under examination.

4.

Analyses

The data chosen for analysis are a series of broadcasts from the program Aló, Presidente (see Table 2) which emanates from Venezuela, specifically numbers 296–313 which represent the period from September 2007 through June 2008. To provide some background information, the time represents a period when the Colombian military had been conducting incursions across their borders into the jungles of Ecuador and Venezuela to fight FARC; some notable leaders of FARC had been assassinated by the army. It was clear that the US had been involved – as it has been in Colombia for a long time. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had been functioning in some capacity as an intermediary between the government of Colombia and FARC. Having railed against US imperialism on numerous occasions, the Colombian incursions across the border into sovereign Ecuadorian territory to rout FARC members (Ecuadorian President Correa being a close ally

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Table 2.â•‡ Source material for study from Aló, Presidente, episodes 296–313 No.

Date

Location

296 297 298 299 300 301 302 304 306 307 308 309 311 312 313

9/30/2007 10/7/2007 10/14/2007 1/7/2008 1/13/2008 1/20/2008 1/27/2008 2/17/2008 3/2/2008 3/16/2008 3/30/2008 4/27/2008 5/11/2008 6/8/2008 6/15/2008

Sector Tierra Blanca, Mun: Barinas, State: Barinas Cerro Guaraira Repano (Parque Nacional “El Ávila”) Santa Clara, Provincia de Villa Clara, CUBA Charallave, State: Miranda San Francisco de Tiznados, Mun: Ortiz, State: Guárico Mun: Machiques de Perijá, State: Zulia Caicara de Maturín, Mun: Cedeño, State: Monagas Morichal Largo, Mun: Independencia, State: Anzoátegui Plaza Caracas, Caracas Barquisimeto, State: Lara Nuestra Señora de Coromoto, Mun: Guacara, State: Carabobo Mun: Santiago Mariño, State: Aragua Maracaibo, State: Zulia Santa Ana de Coro, State: Falcón Sector La Encantada, El Junquito, State: Vargas

of Chávez) was seen as further evidence of US interference in South American affairs which Chávez has long been trying to dominate. The Colombian military attacks coinciding with an increasing number of visits by high ranking officials in the Bush Administration to Colombia at the time, presumably for talks about a free trade agreement between the two countries, Chávez grew increasingly paranoid about the possibility that plots were afoot to assassinate him. Previous work looking at Aló, Presidente has focused on the trustworthiness and credibility of the presidential discourse (cf. Shiro and Nuñez 2007) and conflict and attenuation in political dialogue (cf. Bolívar, Chumaceiro, and Erlich 2007). In this particular presentation, however, I focus on the discourse of the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez Frías, as it is replete with entextualization and contextualization, the former seen in examples of historicity and the latter evident in Chávez manipulation of conventions of use to create a hybrid discourse. While the two processes could be handled separately, the dynamic interplay of the two over the course of the period examined underscores the benefit of Â�conducting an extended critical discourse analysis rather than limiting the exploration to a single iteration of talk. However, in an effort to simplify the discussion, Chouliaraki and Fairclough have identified the “particular contribution” of critical discourse analysis in terms of the interdiscursive analysis, where the relevant analyses are of (1) the “choice” or the extent to which “a particular type of communicative interaction draws upon a mixed resource of discursive practices (genres and discourses) with low maintenance of boundaries within and across orders of discourse”


(1999:â•›116) and (2) the “chain” or the charting of “channels between discursive practices within and across orders of discourse which systematically connect one discursive practice with another” (1999:â•›116). In Section 4.1, I will demonstrate how the program takes on aspects of media discourse, wherein information presented serves to transmit a perspective to the public. Next, and embedded within this order of discourse, the chosen references to the political as discussed by Chilton (2004) and Fairclough (1995) are revealed as the hegemonic power of the President’s personal “talk show” reveals a strong case for the argument of a hybrid. In Section 4.2, I will focus my attention on the chain of the framing of “Colombia” over time, first represented as a single entity, unified and positively viewed within Chávez’ language use, and later signified as divided between the government (referred to negatively by Chávez as “la oligarquía colombiana” – ‘the Colombian oligarchy’) and the people (referred to positively as “el pueblo colombiano”), a situation which builds toward several political incidents, not least of which is the call for militarizing the border between Venezuela and Colombia, further support of the claim by Bolívar (2001) that the program has been used as an instrument to incite “violent attacks” against those whom Chávez opposes (Bolívar, Chumaceiro, and Erlich 2007). Excerpts from several of the broadcasts are presented.

4.1 Choice analysis: Structure of the media interview Clayman (1991) breaks down the sequential organization of a news interview opening which pertains to the general structure being discussed here. In the opening sequence, the interviewer speaks to the camera – allegedly addressing the extant audience – and delivers the “headline”, providing a welcome, identifying the program, and sharing information about the interviewee. The headline is followed by the “story” wherein relevant background information is provided. Next comes the “lead-in” which generally includes a “pre-introduction” and an “introduction”; the two combined provide an orientation for the audience toward the interviewee by situating him or her within the story and presenting an immediate context for the program’s topic. Clayman goes on to differentiate this sequenceÂ� from a more casual conversation by means of highlighting the staged nature of the interaction. He explains that (1) the interviewees are already primed to talk, having been invited and made aware of the interview; (2) they dispense with the social niceties embedded in greetings as they have already been introduced and, in cases where there are several interviewees, are expected to be prepared to address one another; and (3) they are already aware of the topic of conversation, it having been introduced previously.

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In (3), presented in Section 3, the opening of Aló, Presidente exhibits all the characteristics of Clayman’s (1991) opening sequence. Taking each component in turn, the very beginning of the episode incorporates the “headline” (lines 2–7), including information about the date, a welcome, and identification of the program and episode; the “story” (lines 7–16), giving some background information which will orient the audience including the topic of the program and introducing some of the guests; and the “lead-in” (lines 16–21), sharing information to situate the audience. In many cases, portions of these elements can overlap, but the main idea in Clayman’s work is that they are all present and indicative of a type of media discourse (i.e., the news interview). In (2), presented in Section 3, it is also obvious that the turn-taking which occurs between Chávez as interviewer and Diosdado as interviewee follows patterning identified for news interviews by Heritage and Greatbatch (1991), as well as Clayman (1991), where the interviewer generates questions and the interviewee(s) respond; more specifically, the framing of the question by the interviewer determines the direction of talk by the interviewee. One of the elements that underscores how these interviews deviate from the norm, however, is the fact that rather than being the one interviewed as the head of state, Chávez is the one conducting the interview, extending his power from a CDA perspective in the sense that he embodies both the power of the state as president and the power of the interviewer – following Heritage and Greatbatch – as the one who directs the talk. At this point, however, the political referents are increasingly obvious – as are the signifiers of power – beginning in line 2 where Chávez refers to “tolls” (‘los peajes’), asking the Governor of the State of Miranda how many are still functioning and then giving authorization for their closure in line 10. Thus, while the structure supports an interpretation of the discourse as “media”, the content indicates the political – in fact, it can be argued that the discourse of enactment and transaction merge in Aló, Presidente every time Chávez issues a dictate and uses the medium of television through which to carry it out. To further underline the hybrid nature of this show in particular, Fairclough (1995) traces an analysis of identity change in political television where not only the elements of a political interview and simulated conversation are apparent, but also multiple aspects that could be classified as “entertainment” are found, Â�making Aló, Presidente appear more like a variety show at times with Chávez opening each episode “on location” (see Table 2). Additionally, the show may include the reading of poems and the singing of songs – performed by the President himselfÂ€– adding to the variety show feel indexed in the various shows arranged in montage in the opening banner. In all cases, the content, whether taking the form of an interview or one of his many soliloquies, is overtly dominated by Chávez in terms of the amount of talk, the direction of talk, and the messages being transmitted to the viewing audience.


4.2 Chain analysis: Increasing the rhetoric against Colombia Starting with the analysis of the practice, the situational context in (5) contains Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with one of his guests, (Colombian) Senator Piedad Córdoba on a hilltop in a national park north of Venezuela. The day is Sunday, October 7, 2007 and it is the 297th episode of Aló, Presidente. Chávez is speaking about his plans to mediate in the conflict between the Colombian government and FARC (Aló, Presidente 297:â•›20). In the analysis of the discourse, Chávez takes full advantage of the conventions of the media broadcast. In a personal appeal to Uribe to ensure the safety of the emissary from FARC, Marulanda, in meeting with the Venezuelan President, he interacts directly with the camera (lines 1–8) as if Uribe were sure to be listening. Thus, the concrete elements in the situational context (e.g., the camera) enable the contextualization of a personal conversation before Chávez shifts back to his live wider audience (line 9) and guest (lines 12–13). In the linguistic context, Chávez indicates a mutual respect for Uribe as a fellow statesman by greeting him (‘Saludamos a Presidente Uribe’) and even referring to him as compadre. In line 5, he mentions Uribe’s introspection, maturity, and intelligence. He also quotes Simón Bolívar in a form of entextualization (lines 14–15) which he goes on to recontextualize (lines 15–16) by relating it to the upcoming negotiation. (5) 1 Chávez: So, it is necessary, Uribe, I’m telling you, we both need to agree. If 2 â•‡ Marulanda wants to come to Caracas, Uribe, you put him on a plane, my 3 â•‡ friend, and send him to me. Put him in a plane, send him to the border 4 â•‡ with everything, with a little coffee and everything. You have to help us; 5 â•‡ otherwise, I won’t be able to [negotiate] with FARC. Uribe, [I’m 6 â•‡ appealing] to your introspection, your maturity, and your intelligence. 7 â•‡ However, I know there are some factions [sic], over there in Colombia, 8 â•‡ that want to dismantle these negotiations, but we can’t allow it. 9 â•‡â•‡ I know that Uribe wants a humanitarian accord. He wants it; he told me 10 â•‡ and I believe him. I know that FARC wants it, too; Marulanda has told me 11 â•‡ the same [thing] in the letters that I’ve received. Well, I want to help and 12 â•‡ now we have to help each other, isn’t that right Piedad, that we are finally 13 â•‡ able to help the process to move forward? 14 â•‡â•‡ Bolivar said: “Patience and more patience, constancy and more 15 â•‡ constancy, work and more work.” In this case, to reach an agreement and 16 â•‡ then peace, why not? […]

On Sunday, January 6, 2008, the situational context in (6) finds Chávez in a school dining hall where he is surrounded by two of his ministers, the Governor of the State of Miranda, the director of the school and some of the children. It is the

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299th episode of Aló, Presidente (Aló, Presidente 299:â•›15) and Chávez is recounting his New Year’s Eve in the presidential palace, Miraflores (lines 1–2). In the analysis of the discourse, Chávez presents a flashback (lines 2–4), ultimately using a previous situation to contextualize his talk. While it appears that he is still working as a mediator between Uribe’s government and FARC – he identifies statements issued by his own government (line 5), Uribe (lines 6–7), and FARC (lines 7–8) – the stance represented in the linguistic context is somewhat ambiguous as he suggests doubt toward Uribe in line 5 (“we hope what President Uribe said is true”) and FARC in line 7 (“its version of the facts”). Nonetheless, he emphasizes the most relevant piece of news, that a boy who had been held in captivity by FARC, Emmanuel, is now free (lines 9–11), regardless of the uncertainty of the circumstances. The entextualized signifier of his name emerges as particularly meaningful in the analysis of the conjuncture as the case of Emmanuel had become part of the public consciousness through media coverage, especially in Colombia. (6) 1 Chávez: […] For example, for the first time since I’m President, I received 2 â•‡ the New Year in the Palace of Miraflores. We were paying close attention 3 â•‡ at that moment to the frustrating [situation] of the liberation of Clara, 4 â•‡ Consuelo, and Emmanuel, who was already freed. Our government has 5 â•‡ broadcast a communiqué and that is our position, we’ve stated our 6 â•‡ position, but like I said on the 31st, we hope what President Uribe said is 7 â•‡ true and that Emmanuel isn’t in the jungle [any longer]. FARC has 8 â•‡ broadcast a communiqué giving its version of the facts; beyond any 9 â•‡ version, focus, or political diatribe; the most beautiful and important thing 10 â•‡ is that Emmanuel is free; that’s the most important thing: Emmanuel is 11 â•‡ free. […]

On the occasion of Sunday, January 13, 2008, and the broadcast of the 300th episode of Aló, Presidente, Chávez is joined by several guests. The situational context includes a farmer, the granddaughter of Emiliano Zapata (Mexican freedom fighter), and a former kidnap victim from Colombia. Prior to the segment in (7) (Aló, Presidente 300:â•›27), Chávez has been speaking of the negative influence of the United States and its president at the time, George W. Bush, on Colombia. It seems apparent that he is again assuming his role as mediator, and he positions himself as a peaceful participant by referring to the Geneva Conventions and protocols. The analysis of the discourse once again shows him utilizing the broadcast medium to create a private conversation space in the interactional context with Colombia’s president. He gives advice to Uribe (lines 1–3), allegedly entextualizingÂ�


his own previous discourse with the former (Pastrana) and the then current (Uribe) Colombian heads of state by affirming that a military solution is not the answer to resolving the conflict with FARC (lines 3–5). The analysis of the conjuncture reveals references to the common history of Venezuela and Colombia (lines 8–10). Thus, the current history in the extrasituational context is juxtaposed with Spanish origins of New Granada (Nueva Granada) and Great Colombia (Gran Colombia) which emerged after Bolívar led the fight for liberation from the Spanish crown (Bushnell 2007), and are alluded to and contextualize an affinity (that should exist) between the two in the interactional context. (7) 1 Chávez: […] President Uribe, think like the statesman you are, like I told 2 â•‡ Pastrana, it’s not a blackmail; no, Pastrana. I told Pastrana 100 times, 3 â•‡ “Pastrana, there is no military solution.” I’ve told Uribe 100 times, too, 4 â•‡ there is no military solution to that problem and if there is no military 5 â•‡ solution, what other solution is left: the political way. That’s a political 6 â•‡ problem; we’re going to [work together] and [negotiate] a way out of this 7 â•‡ war, and for that, in a few years, hopefully, the drama that a large part of 8 â•‡ Colombians and we, too, live will end. Because when we speak of 9 â•‡ Colombia, we are speaking of a great country, a sister country, daughters 10 â•‡ of the same father, the same mother. 11 â•‡â•‡ My greetings to Colombia and I repeat from here, we love Colombia and 12 â•‡ the Colombian people; it’s a love. […]

In the following episode (program number 301), the analysis of the practice locates Chávez in a factory on a dairy farm in the state of Zulia; he is together with some plant workers and the Minister of the Economy. It is January 20, 2008 and he has just finished reading a letter of thanks from December 21, 2007 for his Â�efforts at mediation; he claims that it is signed by various Colombian army officers and politicians who are still being held captive by FARC in the jungles of Colombia. Chávez entextualizes this text in his broadcast in order to position himself through the interactional context as being united with the Colombian people; in the discourse that follows in (8), he counters that alignment with his discussion of Uribe (Aló, Presidente 301:â•›72). Beginning in line 1, while Chávez has already identified himself as a respected negotiator, he suggests that Uribe ruined the rescue of two kidnap victims (line 2). He continues to shift the direction of his talk between the audience (e.g., lines 2–5) and Uribe himself (e.g., lines 5–6). He accuses Uribe of being a peon of George W. Bush (lines 5, 8, and 11) and engages in even more specific name-calling, starting in line 13 and culminating in the entextualized references to the cinematic mafia

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godfather, Don Vitto Corleone (line 15). Despite the negative diatribe, however, he reaffirms his love of Colombia (line 16) and recontextualizes his own unified position while lauding the union of Colombia and Venezuela (line 18). In the analysis of the conjuncture, it seems plausible that the juxtaposing of various elements can function in the extrasituational context to manipulate public opinion. For example, he posits his own “victory” represented by the praise in the letter from important and well-recognized figures in Colombia with Uribe’s apparent failure at a rescue attempt; he also continues making present references to uniting Colombia and Venezuela while glorifying the past when the two countries were indeed one. In the social struggle that exists between the two politicians for ideological dominance – Uribe representing conservatism and capitalism, Chávez representing revolution and socialism – if Chávez can depict Uribe as being weak, a follower, then he positions himself as being more powerful. “Language manipulates us into doing whatever the powerful in society tell us to do” (Mey 2001:â•›309); consequently, Chávez’ ability to garner more support depends on his appearance of power. (8) 1 Chávez: […] Well, Uribe… Do you see what he did on the 31st? Uribe 2 â•‡ undermined the rescue of Clara and Consuelo. They didn’t want all those 3 â•‡ people to be freed, and that’s what Uribe said to several presidents at the 4 â•‡ time. […] Uribe dropped everything because Bush [forced] him to; Uribe 5 â•‡ is Bush’s peon. Uribe, I think Bush will leave very soon. Who you are you 6 â•‡ going to [turn to] then? 7 Audience: [laughs] 8 Chávez: Why do you continue working as a little imperial peon? What a sad 9 â•‡ [excuse] for a Colombian president! […] 10 Audience: [laughs] 11 Chávez: Sad peon! Sad peon; a man like that doesn’t deserve to be president 12 â•‡ at all, even less of a country. You don’t deserve a president of a country; 13 â•‡ you don’t deserve it, you coward, liar, hypocrite, conniver. 14 â•‡â•‡ Uribe is good to be a mafia boss, that’s what’s he’s good for. He would 15 â•‡ be perfect for that. Vitto Corleone, Don Vitto Corleone […] 16 â•‡â•‡ Greetings to Colombia! I love Colombia! Long live Colombia! 17 â•‡â•‡ […] 18 Chávez: Long live Venezuela and the union of Colombia and Venezuela!

By episode 306 (9), the alignment of elements is just right for the Venezuelan leader to use his militarizing language to ignite the sparks of war. The situational context finds him with his Minister of Security, the governor of Miranda, and reporters from the state-run television station, VTV, in Plaza Caracas. It is MarchÂ€2,


2008, a day after the Colombian army had entered into its southern jungle and crossed the border of neighboring Ecuador to assassinate Raúl Reyes, the second in command of FARC. The analysis of the practice shows that Chávez has given a list of events which depict revolutionary efforts to gain independence, referencing everything from the decisive Battle of Ayacucho where Peruvian independence was won to Venezuela’s own independence from Gran Colombia (cf. Bushnell 2007) before making the plea “We have to liberate Colombia.” In the analysis of the discourse, Chávez starts making his case at the beginning of (9) (Aló, Presidente 306:â•›33–34) by referring to the Colombian incursion into Ecuador (lines 1–2). In the linguistic context, he makes a point of separating the government which he calls “the Colombian oligarchy” (la oligarquía colombiana) from “the people of Colombia” (el pueblo colombiano) (line 4–5) while negatively depicting the former (“impudence” in line 2; “mafiosa” in line 7; “treacherous, beastly” in line 9). He entextualizes a communiqué by inserting a portion of it into his discourse (lines 9–12 and 14–16) and comments on it by mocking the use of “sister” – an appellation that he has used himself in earlier programs when speaking of Colombia – and repeating the same idea to characterize the event (i.e., in Spanish, the word violar can mean ‘violate’ as in line 1 or ‘rape’ as in line 12). Next, as had been evidenced in earlier interactional contexts, he again shifts his focus to a directed, personal address, threatening to send fighter jets to attack Uribe and his government (lines 19 and 21). The analysis of the practice also reveals him echoing the entextualized use of “self-defense” (lines 16 and 23–24) with a reference to Israel’s similar claim for taking military action (lines 27–28). Taking events that are relatively recent and likely to be familiar to his audienceÂ€– Â�Israel had fought a war with neighboring Lebanon in 2006 and had again closed all access to Gaza in 2007 – the analysis of the conjuncture shows how Chávez can manipulate language and, in turn, ideology, by paralleling its incursions and Â�isolated position in the Middle East (lines 23–30) to the status of Colombia and its neighbors in Latin America (lines 30–32). Shifting his position in the interactional context once more, Chávez actively takes on his role of president in the hybrid discourse to perform a series of functions as commander-in-chief. Following the actions of his Ecuadorian counterpart (lines 34–35 and 37–38), he orders troops to the border (lines 41 and 44) and recalls his ambassador and staff from Colombia (lines 49 and 52–54) before the adulating crowd who, like a Greek chorus – again mixing the theatrical in this hybrid discourse – chants a slogan that has become the cry of Chávez’ followers (‘Alerta, alerta, alerta que camina; la espada de Bolívar por América Latina!’) (lines 58–59).

59


(9) 1 Chávez: […] They invaded Ecuador. They flagrantly violated the holy 2 â•‡ sovereignty of Ecuador. And even more they have the… the impudence. 3 â•‡ Here I’ve been reading a communiqué from the Colombians, from the 4 â•‡ Colombian oligarchy. I won’t say “the Colombians”, let’s be careful. Long 5 â•‡ live the people of Colombia! Long live the people of Colombia! 6 Audience: [applause] Long live [Colombia]! 7 â•‡ Chávez: Take a look at this communiqué sent by the mafiosa Colombian 8 â•‡ oligarchy. They don’t show their face, no; they send papers and they strike 9 â•‡ in a treacherous, beastly way. Take a look at what they say here: “The 10 â•‡ Ministry of External Relations and the Ministry of National Defense will 11 â•‡ respond today to a note of protest from the government of their sister 12 â•‡ republic of Ecuador.” They call her “sister”; they are raping her and call 13 â•‡ her “sister”. What [irony]; what [irony] from that oligarchy! I’ll keep 14 â•‡ reading. Take a look at what comes [next]: “In the meantime, we 15 â•‡ anticipate that Colombia didn’t violate sovereignty, but acted in accord 16 â•‡ with the principle of legitimate [self-]defense.” This is something very 17 â•‡ serious; this can be the beginning of a war in South America, because you 18 â•‡ should know that if, for example, it occurs to you to do that in Venezuela, 19 â•‡ I will send you some Sukhoi (jet fighters), my friend. 20 Audience: [applause] 21 Chávez: I will send you some Sukhoi [jet fighters], my friend. We are 22 â•‡ absolutely not going to accept that Colombia converts these lands into 23 â•‡ another Israel. Israel invades Lebanon, bombs it, kills “in legitimate [self]24 â•‡ defense”, they say. Israel invades the Gaza strip – I’ve been seeing on the 25 â•‡ news – every day. They bomb to assassinate a Palestinian leader, they 26 â•‡ bomb a whole neighborhood and kill a hundred people, they don’t care 27 â•‡ where [the bomb] falls, and Israel says that it is “in legitimate [self]28 â•‡ defense”. It is the [raised] fist of the empire against the Arab world, to 29 â•‡ impede the unity of the Arab world, to fragment that world, to fill it with 30 â•‡ war, with misery. Uribe, we are not going to allow you to recreate another 31 â•‡ Israel here in South America, you know? No matter what, Uribe, we’re not 32 â•‡ going to allow it! 33 Audience: [applause] 34 Chávez: We are not going to allow it. President Correa informed me a few 35 â•‡ minutes ago that he is recalling his ambassador from Bogotá today. 36 Audience: [applause] 37 Chávez: He is recalling his ambassador from Bogotá today, and he is moving 38 â•‡ troops toward the north. I told him, “Correa, you can count on Venezuela 39 â•‡ for whatever, under any circumstance.” 40 Audience: [applause]


41 Chávez: Mr. Defense Minister, move ten batallions to the border with 42 â•‡ Colombia, immediately. 43 Audience: [applause] 44 â•‡ Chávez: Tank batallions. Deploy the airforce. We don’t want war, but we are 45 â•‡ not going to allow the North American empire, who is the master, and its 46 â•‡ [lapdog] President Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy, to come divide us, 47 â•‡ to come weaken us. We are not going to allow it. 48 Audience: [applause] 49 Chávez: I order the immediate return of all our personnel at the embassy in 50 â•‡ Bogotá. 51 Audience: [applause] 52 Chávez: Close our embassy in Bogotá. Mr. Chancelor, Nicolás Maduro, 53 â•‡ close the embassy in Bogotá for me and recall all our officials who are 54 â•‡ there. 55 Audience: [applause] 56 Chávez: And we are on alert, on alert. I am putting Venezuela on alert and 57 â•‡ we support Ecuador under any circumstance. 58 Audience: Be alert! Be alert! Be alert! The sword of Bolivar marches through 59 â•‡ Latin America!

Chávez uses the mixed discourse format of his weekly broadcast to produce militarizing language through the employment of certain elements to contextualize a scenario where there is a perceived threat and the juxtaposition of entextualized language to create a pretext for going to war. For the moment, he can use the power derived from his manipulation of language processes to wield more influence with his listening public and, possibly, public opinion in general. In fact, however, while media sources around the world reported on the “crisis” in Latin America (BBC 2008; Carroll and Brodzinsky 2008), Uribe never bothered to send troops to the Colombian side of the border nor recall any of the Colombian staff from the embassies in Venezuela or Ecuador and the whole “misunderstanding” appeared to be resolved less than a week later when Uribe embraced Chávez at a previously planned meeting of several Latin American leaders in the Dominican Republic on March 7. The Multilayered Model of Context, however, reveals that militarizing language is not necessarily a singular event, but one that is built up over time. Therefore, while an episodic analysis may have sufficient power to index the use of Â�entextualized language and the manner in which it is recontextualized, the strength of a progressive analysis demonstrates how the language and context merge over time to contextualize the call for war.

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5.

Conclusion

Chávez’ use of what has been termed a hybrid discourse indicates what may be a global institutional context. Given the power of the interviewer to control the direction of the talk and the tendency of politicos in an interview situation to co-opt the direction of talk (Berlin 2007, 2008; Harris 1991), the hybrid may well be a fertile ground for the engagement of militarizing language. The nature of this particular type of discourse and the resultant language under examination requires that analysts consider that they are not looking at a straightforward order of discourse, but do, in fact, need to consider the processes of entextualization and contextualization working in tandem with multiple levels of context and across several iterations (i.e., within a contained time period, but not necessarily identifiable when reduced to a single iteration) to justify and thereby produce a call to action. Replete with entextualized historical references – diachronic and synchronicÂ€– that resonate with interdiscursivity and intertextuality in the levels of the linguistic and interactional contexts, Chávez’ “militarizing language” represents a “structured sequence of actions of which it is composed” (Fairclough 1992:â•›126). That is, the entextualized bits of language have become decontextualized from their original formulations and recontextualized into a new and unique use. That use, in turn, serves to contextualize and position the participants involved in the activity. As such, militarizing language, enacted within the interactional context, creates a situational context – in this case, the sending of troops to the border for “protection” and possible invasion – which can extend into the extrasituational context as it becomes part of the sociocultural reality and sociopolitical history of the involved. Within a critical discourse analysis, hybrid discourses can be seen to operate as a form of language manipulation attempting to manipulate ideology where language can have the power to create external reality. Use of the MMC enables a fuller analysis of the various dimensions, one that also situates it in time and place, both synchronically and diachronically, in order to render a description and a possible explanation which reveal the nature of the manipulation employed.

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Stetzer, Ed. 1 May 2006. Americans’ Polled on Their Views about The Davinci Code. North American Mission Board-NAMB.net. North American Mission Board, SBC. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. . Urban, Greg. 1991. A Discourse-centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals. Austin: University of Texas Press. van Dijk, Teun. 2005. War Rhetoric of a Little Ally: Political Implicatures and Aznar’s Legitimatization of the War in Iraq. Journal of Language and Politics 4 (1): 65–91. Widdowson, Henry G. 2004. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Wilkes, David. 24 Aug. 2006. Da Vinci code fans wreck church window in Holy Grail hunt. Home | Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. . Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical investigations, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Context and talk inÂ€confrontationalÂ€discourses Luisa Granato and Alejandro Parini This paper presents a study of the way in which context and language in an institutional setting are mutually affected in the development of confrontational interaction. We hypothesise that when the canonical institutional context in terms of tenor and mode is altered, the encounter may depart from its prototypical form and even become unsustainable in the environment in which it is taking place. Our analysis identifies the factors that are responsible for disruptions in the flow of discourse and the different consequences that these may bring about in two media interviews. It shows that the smooth development of this type of discourse depends on three factors: (a) how well the participants comply with the roles dictated by the institution, (b) how they exercise power in relation to their roles, and (c) whether they observe the expected interactional behavior and content in a discourse of this kind.

1.

Introduction

The news interview has come to play a prominent role in contemporary broadcast journalism and political communication and, as Clayman and Heritage (2002:â•›1) claim, “it seems to have replaced the news story and has become a frequently used genre in its own right”. This prominence has made the news interview the object of many social scientific studies. Socially ratified media interviews are expected to develop in a smooth and orderly fashion in which interviewers are supposed to elicit information from the interviewee for the benefit of an audience. In this process the question-answer format and the institutionalised roles of the participants are usually respected throughout the unfolding of the encounter. This standard practice may contrast with interactions which breach the pre-established norm as regards the functional activities performed and the identities projected by the interactants, and this breach of the norm may give rise to aggressive and conflictual discourses.

68 Luisa Granato and Alejandro Parini

This paper deals with the relationship between language and context in confrontational discourses and the aim is to identify some of the contextual features that characterise this type of encounter. We examine some aspects of the interactional behaviour and the roles enacted by the participants in confrontational political media interviews broadcast on television and radio programmes, with a view to showing how a deviation from prototypical aspects of the mode and tenor, as variables of the situational context of the media interviews, may lead to the distortion of the genre.

2.

Perspectives on context

The study of context has been approached from different theoretical perspectives. Hanks (1994) looks at the interpretation of a communicative event as being dependent on two elements: focal event and context, and the relation between them as being one of figure and ground. The complex phenomenon of focal event, which includes verbal and non-verbal behaviour, can provide enough ground for the creation of context, and context offers resources that are crucial for the interpretation of the focal event (Duranti and Goodwin 1994).The production of talk as a focal event is regarded as doubly contextual since an utterance is based on the context of the previous utterance and at the same time it provides context for the next utterance (Heritage 1984). Fetzer (2007) refers to the complexity of the notion of context and to some of the different perspectives from which it has been analysed. First, within a psychological and psycholinguistic perspective and in cognitive pragmatics as well, context is thought of as a frame that delimits content and is itself constrained by major frames. The author mentions studies from the fields of ethnomethodolgy, interactional sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics which consider context as dynamic and not static, and goes on to suggest that “context is seen as a dynamic construct that is interactionally organised in and through the process of communication” (Fetzer 2007:â•›4). In this view, context is regarded as both process and product, and as “a relational construct” which establishes complex relations between communicative actions, individual participants and individual surroundings. Finally, from a pressupositional approach, Fetzer draws on Stalnaker’s work (Stalnaker 1999) in which context is equated to common ground or background information, and as such, is given or taken for granted in interaction. Fetzer describes context as external to the utterance – a static conception – and as internal to the utterance – interactive conception – in which it is “invoked and reconstructed” (Fetzer 2007:â•›5).

Context and talk in confrontational discourses

Within the research paradigm of sociopragmatics, Fetzer (2007) conceptualises context in terms of a parts-whole relation and, therefore, acknowledges the existence, within context, of linguistic context – immediate and remote – (linguistic material or co-text), social context (the parts that constitute a speech event), sociocultural context (culture-specific interpretations of the social context) and cognitive context (mental representations or assumptions stored in the minds of speakers). These sub-categorisations of context are considered at both a micro/ local level and a macro/global level, and are also regarded as being of either the generalised type or the particularised type. Another contribution to the study of context comes from the field of ethnographic inquiry in close relation to performance-oriented analysis. In this domain, the notions of contextualisation, decontextualisation and entextualisation become crucial tenets of the theoretical approaches to the work on context and social interaction. In their work on Poetics and Performance as Perspectives on Language and Social Life Bauman and Briggs (1990) look at the shift in focus from context to contextualisation, that is, from the analysis of text to the analysis of texts as they emerge in context. They argue that text and context and the distinction between them are being drastically redefined showing a change of focus from product to process and from conventional structure to agency. This move bears relation to the processes of entextualisation and contextualization. In this perspective context is not predetermined and independent of performance but is rather shaped in the constant negotiation between participants in situated interactions. It is in these negotiations that the relevant features of context emerge. As Bauman and Briggs posit this shift….represents a major step towards achieving an agent-centred view of performance. Contextualisation involves an active process of negotiation in which participants reflexibly examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessment of its structure and significance in speech itself. Performers extend such assessment to include predictions about how the communicative competence, personal histories and social identities of their interlocutors will shape the reception of what is said. (Bauman and Briggs 1990:â•›69)

This perspective centres the attention not only on the performer but also on the active role of the hearer. Following this line of reasoning, Fetzer (2007) brings into the discussion on context the notion of contextualisation cues (Gumperz 2003) as expressions without lexical meaning and whose interpretations depend on the context and emerge in the negotiation of meaning in interaction. We regard this notion of contextualisation as a tool that helps realise the significance of interactive discourse.

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Bearing in mind the distinction between discourse and context, Bauman and Briggs (1990) discuss entextualisation as a process through which discourse can be decontextualised from the interactional setting in which it is produced and transformed into a text. Further work on context has been carried out taking into account a sociocognitive theoretical framework (van Dijk 2009). Before developing his theory of context, van Dijk delimits the idea of context by considering it in terms of those social properties of the communicative situation that are relevant to discourse production and comprehension. He states that these properties do not exert direct influence on discourse because they “are not directly involved in the cognitive processes of discourse production and understanding” (van Dijk 2009:â•›4). For van Dijk social influence of the context is always filtered through personal or individual cognitive features of participants in interaction. Hence, in his view, contexts are subjective, that is that individuals subjectively define a situation. His contention is that “a context is what is defined to be relevant in the social situation by the participants themselves” (van Dijk 2009:â•›4). In this model, situations are defined as mental representations that constitute the link between the social situation and the production and comprehension of discourse. Contexts can thus be conceptualised as mental models in the sense that they subjectively represent personal experience and embody sociocultural knowledge about the participants and their social world. So for Van Dijk contexts are mental models since they represent the experience of communicative episodes and also embody sociocultural knowledge. These mental models are referred to as context models or contexts and include schemas which are flexible and simple enough so as to respond to the needs of every communicative situation in our daily life. These representations of communicative experiences are dynamic since they are sensitive to the previous linguistic environment as well as to the changes experienced in all social situations. In sum, context models are the channels through which the situation influences talk and text, and talk and text influence the situation. Contrary to this view of context, which puts a premium on cognition and the mental representations of context, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approaches this notion from a social perspective. Based on the Hallidayian ideas on language in relation to the social world, this model establishes a relationship of realisation between the three strata of context of culture, context of situation and text in context. Here, the context of culture is treated as being separate from the context of situation. Genres represent the context of culture which bears on the language used by means of the structures that the culture institutionalises as a way to fulfil social aims. Register, on the other hand, refers to the context of situation and constitutes a theory with its three variables of field, tenor and mode, as shown in Figure 1.


Context

Language

Genre

Text

Theory of register Field Tenor Mode

Metafunctions Ideational Interpersonal Textual

Figure 1.â•‡ Context in the SFL model

In Halliday’s terms these variables are defined as follows Field refers to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place, what it is that participants are engaged in, in which language figures as some essential component. (Halliday and Hassan 1985:â•›12, in Martin and Rose 2003:â•›297)

According to Martin and Rose, field encompasses sequences of activities that pursue a social or institutional goal and that include “people, things, processes, places and qualities” (Martin and Rose 2008:â•›14), giving rise to different and varying patterns of texts. Tenor refers to who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what kinds of role relationships they obtain, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech roles they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved. (Halliday and Hassan 1985:â•›12, in Martin and Rose 2003:â•›297)

And these role relationships can be seen as a complex of the four simultaneous dimensions of power, contact, affective involvement and orientation to affiliation (Eggins and Slade 1997). Mode refers to what part language is playing, what it is that the participants are expecting language to do for them in the situation: the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has and its function in the context. (Halliday and Hassan 1985:â•›12 in Martin and Rose 2003:â•›297)

These dimensions of register are closely linked to the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language, which are in turn realized through the lexico-grammatical system of the language and which construe experience, enact relationships and organise discourse respectively. Despite the fact that the model has received substantial criticism from scholars like Widdowson (2004) and van Dijk (2009), we find the Systemic Functional theoretical construct a useful organising principle to be used as a first approach to

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Luisa Granato and Alejandro Parini

the study of context since it treats interactional behaviour – mode – and the roles taken and the identities projected by the interactants – tenor- as two separate theoretical dimensions. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the cognitive and sociopragmatic approaches and so believe that for a complete account of the complexities of context, elements from these two theoretical domains should be taken into account to complement the analysis. For reasons of space this work is limited to the analysis of the dimensions of tenor and mode within the theory of Register as described in the SFL paradigm.

3.

The media interview

In this section our attention centres on the media interview as a type of face-toface communicative event. We take up issues specific to its prototypical features and development, attending to the structuring of live and mediated talk in political interviews. Charaudeau describes the interview as: one of the dialogic situations which constitutes a form of linguistic interaction in which participants are physically present or partially present as is the case of telephone interviews, and they alternate their contributions. (Charaudeau 1997:â•›228)

Within this structure participants have roles that form part of the media interview: the role of the interviewer legitimated as the questioner and the role of the interviewee as the participant with reasons to be interviewed. This interaction is motivated by and addressed to an audience in absentia who may hear or listen to what is going on in the television or radio studio. This gives rise to a form of mediated communication with spatial and often temporal disjunctions that creates a distance between addresser (active participants) and addressee (audience). The matter of distance between addresser and addressee determines the relationship between the two as participation in the communication does not take place on an equal basis. Talbot, Atkinson and Atkinson (2003) explain that in terms of consumption or reception, participation takes place on the audience’s terms and so the audience is in control. But as regards output, the media are in the hands of professional journalists who represent institutional control and who are expected to be objective and disinterested and to challenge their sources at the same time. Notwithstanding this asymmetrical relationship between addresser and addressee, the news interview is a kind of institutional talk and so cannot be regarded as a mere vehicle of communication but rather as a form of interpersonal communication (Greatbatch 1988; Heritage and Greatbatch 1991).


So unlike in other types of media communication, in the media interview the addresser is composed of an interviewer and a guest who engage in interaction without having scripted or pre-planned their discourses before the encounter. Clayman and Heritage (2002) express that although interviewers and interviewees may each have their own preconceived agenda in mind at the starting point of the interview, each participant’s capacity to realise his or her agenda is greatly determined by the conduct of the other participant. This argument in favour of the news interview as a jointly-constructed enterprise is what partly makes the news interview a type of speech exchange that differs from others with a more or less predetermined format (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). As Clayman and Heritage (2002:â•›22) argue, this type of exchange is distinctly straightforward in how interactants organise their participation with the interviewer asking questions and the interviewee answering them. However, the authors admit that this question-answer format is far from simple or straightforward when one considers what participants to an interview actually do. Because news interviews do not happen in a vacuum, they are better understood as embedded in society and so constitute an organised social institution that stands in relation to other societal organisations such as journalism and politics. The political media interview is an instantiation of the link between journalism and politics and provides a stage on which political discourses can be articulated. Since journalists and their political guests come to the interview to engage in debate rather than to disclose personal problems, political interviews often lead to confrontational exchanges. In typical interviews, both parties contribute to the smooth development of the discourse. Argumentative fragments or whole encounters of this type are handled with consideration and respect for the other’s opinion so that a good atmosphere is created and the principles of reasonable and civilised talk are respected throughout. Interactants keep the roles and the line they adopt at the beginning of the encounter, since breaking this norm or falling out of line may put the face of the interactants at risk, render the discourse inappropriate and cause the loss of control of the interview, especially on the part of the interviewer. When this undesired behaviour occurs, participants usually make efforts to dissipate or downplay conflict and to signal that the institutional lines adopted at the beginning are still in play. However, dispute sequences may stretch over longer periods of time or even used to construct a whole interview, in which case, disagreements can be presented in “aggravated” (Goodwin 1983 in Hutchby 1996:â•›24) opposition terms. This is observed mostly when an opinionated journalist with a very direct personal style conducts the interview. Building this type of interactions seems to depend on a very delicate balance of the power brought into play by the interactants in the turn by turn development of the discourse, and also of the power institutional or

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political positions endow people with. In the texts under analysis assumed to represent asymmetrical forms of interaction, the two participants, conscious of their institutional identities, may produce rather symmetrical encounters in which it is difficult to decide which of the two exercises more power. There seems to be agreement across languages on the salient characteristics of confrontational talk in the media which show several differences with nonconfrontational discourse. These differences are related to the use of grammar and discourse resources which help produce the desired effects in each particular case. It is worth noticing that one cannot deny the difficulty of drawing clear lines between the two types of discourse. Placing the two extremes at the end of a continuum would offer better possibilities for a more accurate analysis.

4.

Overview and data

The focus of attention of this analysis will be placed on some aspects of mode and tenor as the variables of register (context of situation) which can be associated with the production of confrontational discourse. The interactions under analysis can be seen to depart from prototypical media interviews since one of the outstanding features is the general confrontational overtones which can be perceived throughout the development of the encounters. So the question we asked ourselves was how these deviations are related to the three dimensions of registerÂ€– field, tenor and mode – and the corresponding metafunctions of languageÂ€– ideational, interpersonal and textual. Two corpora of media interviews broadcast live on different radio and TV programmes in Argentina were used as the source for this empirical work. One is made up of seventy telephone radio interviews (Granato 1999) and the other was collected from several TV political talk-shows comprising twenty-five face-toface interviews (Andreau 2008; Móccero 2005). One text from each of these two corpora was chosen for the purpose of illustrating the characteristics found in the confrontational fragments. The first one is a telephone radio interview between Miguel Clariá, a journalist, and Vani, the leader of a non-legitimised political group of his own making. The interview revolves round a situation whereby the Town Hall staff went on strike and this group self-called “The Vani Brigades” decided to storm the building. The second is a television interview conducted in a TV studio between former president of Argentina, Antonio De La Rúa, and two interviewers, Marcelo Bonelli and Gustavo Silvestre. Mr De la Rúa’s period in office was characterised by his abrupt downfall due to accusations of corruption that included the bribing of senators to pass a labour law in Congress. The three participating interviewers


are considered to be opinionated journalists who are well known for their direct and combative questioning style. We are going to refer to certain characteristics which were found to be salient in the verbal encounters analysed, and which can be linked to the relationship between language and context. Since this type of discourse is organised by means of the participants’ alternating contributions to the interactions, the analysis will look at context at a micro level and will pay attention to the consequences of the participants’ successive conversational actions in the unfolding of the talk. The study of the confrontational fragments was carried out by means of a qualitative analysis and through the use of observation, description and interpretation techniques. We first identified the features which departed from those found in non-confrontational interviews and then analysed the way in which they affected register.

5.

Interactional behaviour of the participants

The interview is a type of discourse that is organised interactionally rather than thematically, that is to say, that themes are expressed, but the turn-by-turn construction also impinges on the unfolding of the interactional game being played by both interviewer and interviewee by means of a rather predictable question-answer format (Clayman and Heritage 2002). This format consists of a turn-taking system in which contributions from the interviewee come in when a question seems to complete a unit, that is, at a transition relevance place (TRP), (Levinson 2008). This interactional aspect constitutes a part of the metafunction of mode as described by Systemic Functional linguists (Halliday 1985; Eggins and Slade 1997). In the process of negotiating their ideational world and the place they occupy in it, participants also negotiate ways of entextualising their discourse to represent their social reality (Eggins and Slade 1997). The entextualisation of confrontational talk often results from disregard for the canonical format as noted by several conversation analysts (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1988/89, 1992; Clayman and Heritage 2002; Boden and Zimmerman 1993), and as can be seen in the following extract: 29 30 31 32 33

(1) D: B: D: B: D:

(Bonelli y Silvestre – De la Rúa) … la prueba, no resultó [ xxxx nada y ] [Pero la sensación, la sensación fue que] y esto se fue. Déjeme, déjeme terminar] [xxxx cerrar la causa y pasar a otro tema] Déjeme terminar

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34 B: No para investigar. 35 D: Déjeme terminar y déjese de suspicacias porque xxx 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

D: B: D: B: D: B: D:

… the evidence, didn’t work out [xxx well and ] [But the feeling, the feeling was that] [and this blew over. Let me, Let me finish] [close the case and move on to something else] Let me finish. so as not to investigate. Let me finish and stop making unpleasant insinuations.

Here the guest tries to complete his answer to the last question posed by saying …the evidence didn’t work out well…and and this blew over… Let me finish. Let me finish. Let me finish and stop making unpleasant insinuations (lines 29, 31, 33 and 35) without succeeding in drawing his interlocutor’s attention who simultaneously (in lines 30, 32 and 34) develops the idea that the judicial case the interviewee was referring to was manipulated to avoid an investigation. His contribution to that effect being but the feeling, the feeling was that…close the case and move on to something else so as not to investigate. This interactional behaviour gives rise to two either overlapping or alternating parallel monologic discourses in which each participant follows his own line of thought ignoring the speech of his interlocutor. The question-answer structure is thus ignored and what might have been an exchange of opinions turned out to be a succession of contributions of a non-reciprocal nature. These monologic fragments are often caused by the build-up of tension and personal involvement in the interaction where disregard for the interactional conventions of this type of communicative event added to other characteristics like the production of challenges, ill-founded insinuations and accusations and animosity, give rise to confrontation. As Schegloff (1988/89) observes in his analysis of the often cited Bush-Rather encounter, the departure from the prototypical turn-taking system of media interviews and the occurrence of constant competitive overlaps contribute to the transformation of the interview into a confrontation. The following extract further illustrates this phenomenon. (2) 68 B: 69 70 D: 71 B: 72 D: 73 B: 74 D:

(Bonelli y Silvestre – De la Rúa) Se cae el país institucionalmente y ¿qué? ¿Es mentira? ¿Cómo puede ser? Por el fuerte estado de sospecha creado y a partir de [la sospecha] [Momento, momento] [la sospecha] que está creada por, por indicios por todo lo que se publica…

68 B: 69 70 D: 71 B: 72 D: 73 B: 74 D:


The country collapses institutionaly and what? Is this a lie? How can this be? due to the strong suspicion that has been aroused and coming from [the suspicion] [Just a moment, just a moment] [the suspicion] that is created by, by hints. By all that is published

Again, in this short fragment, the interviewer seems to ignore the expected questioning stance by imposing himself (line 71) and finally completing his interlocutor’s contribution with calculated insinuation manifested in the use of the expression by hints (line 73) which, in relation to the previous discourse, clearly refers to hints arising from the behaviour of the president and of his own political entourage. Finally, the interviewee manages to recover the floor and to finish his utterance counter-attacking the journalist by attributing the suspicion to what is published by the media. This clearly shows how personal agency and involvement can often interfere with the smooth running of the interview thus creating confrontation. Furthermore, aggressiveness and hostility break the norm and clearly damage the interviewee’s face who is accused of suspicious political behaviour and of interfering with the course of justice. Watts makes a point of this in his work on politeness, when he argues that …both parties (to an interview) are expected to contribute to the smooth development of the discourse, that is not to break what is understood as politic behavior in a particular verbal encounter. Breaking the norm may damage the face of the interactant. (Watts 2003:â•›131)

The author (2003:â•›19) defines politic behaviour as “that linguistic behaviour which is perceived to be appropriate to the social constraints of the ongoing interaction, i.e. non-salient….”. The smooth development of the interaction in the examples above can be seen to have been altered not only by the strong accusations against the interviewee but also by a clear disrespect for the canonical turn-taking structure of the media interview. Here the use of language has influenced the register of the interactions, affecting the dimension of mode in the texts. The Claria–Vani interview is an extreme case of deviation from the basic turntaking format of this genre. Of the forty-one contributions by the interviewer only two at the very beginning of the encounter fulfil an elicitation function. Since the first question in line 3, What are the Vani brigades? is not followed by a satisfactory answer, the interviewer feels the need to be more explicit by producing a second elicitation erm..as an organisation, what are you? Are you a political group…of…of political action? A clash political group? What kind of political group? (lines 8–9).

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The other three turns in which the interviewer makes use of interrogative structures cannot be interpreted as elicitations of information in the context. When he says at different moments in the interview: What’s your connection with the Town Hall? (line 18), …you decide that you occupy that space. On whose behalf?, What’s your authority? (lines 60–61), Who chose you to go to the Town Hall to tell the staff whether they should go on strike or not? (lines 98–99), he, as well as the audience, knows that Vani has no connection with the Town Hall whatsoever, that his actions are not backed up by any legitimate authority and that he has no right to exercise power over the Town Hall staff. These are discourse acts which fulfil the function of condemning illegitimate and outrageous behaviour despite their typical question structure. The use of hostile prefaces to questions loaded against the position of the interviewee is also regarded as a sanctionable course of action, as Extract (3) below shows. (3) (Clariá–Vani)

60 V: … nacional y provincial 61 MC: O sea. Usted decide. Usted decide que los diputados, los concejales no funcionan y Usted decide que Usted ocupa ese lugar ¿En nombre de … 62 63 V: [No, no, no] 64 MC: … ¿Quién y con qué derecho? 65 V: No, no, no. El derecho que le otorga el espacio vacío otorgado por otro. 60 V: … national and provincial. 61 MC: That is, YOU decide, YOU decide that the deputies, council members don’t do 62 their job properly and You decide that You occupy that space. On behalf …? 63 V: [No, no, no] 64 MC: [of whom and what right have you got to do that? 65 V: [No, no, no] The right that the empty space others leave gives you.

The preface in lines 61 and 62 to the question asked in lines 63 and 65 constitutes a very hostile statement emphasised by the repetition of the phrase YOU decide and by the strong prominence placed on all the occurrences of the second-person pronoun you. A prefatory statement of this kind can also be seen in the following extract from the interview with former President De la Rúa. (428–430, 432–433) (4) (Bonelli y Silvestre – De la Rúa) 428 B: o sea, tuvo un gran consenso…eh por lo que ustedes decían en la campaña electoral 429 apuntaban a un cambio, sobre todo en la política socioeconómica. 430 D: Sí. 431 B: Sin embargo, usted profundizó la política…o sea ustedes decían “recibimos un


432 desastre” pero profundizó esa política; no hizo ningún cambio ¿no cree que ese fue su 433 principal error? 428 B: so, you had great support. erm according to what you said in your election campaign you 429 were aiming at a change especially in matters of socioeconomic policy. 430 D: Yes. 431 B: However, you made this policy more extreme…I mean, you said “we inherited a 432 disastrous situation” but you made that policy more extreme, you didn’t make any changes. 433 Don’t you think that was your most serious mistake?

The question in line 433 is preceded by strong criticism to De la Rúa’s administration which represents a vicious attack on his image. This criticism is conveyed by means of a preliminary aimed at pillorying the President’s lack of action to fulfill his election pledge. In both extracts above, these instantiations of confrontational prefaces contribute to the reification of an encounter which departs from its canonical format and they have, as Schegloff (1992), and Clayman and Heritage (2002) sustain, significant consequences for the interview’s trajectory and context. Another resource observed throughout the interviews is the use of interruptions with the aim of exercising self-defence when participants feel they are being attacked. This becomes an outstanding feature of the encounters in the sample of texts analysed. In the interview with former President De la Rúa, both the preliminaries to the questions posed and the questions themselves picture the President’s actions in power as inadecuate, wrong and unlawful. This triggers constant interruptions on the part of De la Rúa who tries either to justify his actions or deny the interviewers’ statements and insinuations. Similarly, in the extract below from the Clariá–Vani interview, interruptions also emerge as self-defence strategies. (5) (Clariá–Vani) 100 MC: …han sido..elegidos para cumplir ese rol ¿quién lo eligió a usted para ir a la 101 municipalidad a decirle a los empleados si deben o no [hacer paro?] 102 V: [bueno yo] le preguntaría a usted quién es el que le ha elegido como comunicador 103 social. 104 MC: [A mi me ha] 105 V: [los espa] los espacios vacíos se cubren… 106 MC: no, no. [pero yo no] 107 V: [por los] espacios [vacíos] 108 MC: [Oiga] perdóneme. Yo no yo no vine con una brigada a LV3 para instalarme acá.

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109 V: No. Usted vino con Mario Pereyra y [xxx] 110 MC: Claro.[yo he sido contratado] 111 V: [xxx] producto de un… ¿quiere que le cuente como llegaron a LV3? 100 MC: have been elected to play that role. Who chose you to go to the Town Hall and tell 101 the staff whether they should or should not [go on strike] 102 V: [well I] would ask you who has chosen you as a social communicator. 103 MC: [I have been] 104 V: [sp] spaces are filled. 105 MC: No, no [but I didn’t] 106 V: [but the] empty [spaces] 107 MC: [Listen] Excuse me. I didn’t come to LV3 with a brigade to settle down here. 108 V: No. You came with Mario Pereyra, [xxx] 109 MC: Sure. [I have been hired] 110 V: …[xxx] as a result of a… do you want me to tell you how you joined LV3 TV station?

However, in this case these interruptions are not only produced by the interviewee but also by the interviewer who fights for the floor and needs to defend himself from offensive and out-of-place remarks made by his interlocutor (line 107). In fact, after the journalist overtly expresses his disapproval of Vani’s actions at the Town Hall, Vani, as a form of retaliation in line 102, makes an attempt to accuse the journalist of also holding an illegitimate position at the radio station for which he works. This leads to reiterated interruptions on the part of Clariá who tries to mark the difference between his professional activities in the radio and Vani’s storming of the Town Hall. These fragments illustrate how participants in media interviews can depart from the dimension of mode typical of this type of encounter and how this distortion contributes to the construction of confrontational sequences which may even produce a change of genre. Nevertheless, the most significant contextual alterations in the interviews are found at the level of tenor and this will be dealt with in the next section.

6.

Socially significant relationships in the interviews

As in any instance of institutional talk, there are certain expectations in relation to the activities and roles of the interactants. In media interviews information and opinions are exchanged through the questions and answers of the participants who interact for an audience. This interaction involves cooperative behaviour between interviewer and interviewee that would allow the former to elicit the


information that is required, and the latter to be able to express his or her ideas as fully as he or she believes it necessary in order not to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. If there is disagreement, both parties to the talk expect their self-public image not to be damaged. Departures from the stereotyped expectations regarding roles and identities projected in the interviews are manifested in different ways and affect the relationship between interviewer, interviewee and audience. First, in confrontational encounters participants frequently act for their own benefit or engage in discussions of private affairs that may lead them to ignore the pre-allocated structure of questioning and answering roles. As a result, talk fails to be addressed to the audience as it is expected in prototypical media interviews. Thus the balance between the three parties to the conversation is broken and the change of tenor may result in a change of genre. This is visible in the extract below: (6) (Clariá–Vani) 18 MC: Desde ya, señor Vani. ¿Qué tiene que ver usted con la municipalidad? 19 V: Nada: Absolutamente nada que no sea la misma que usted como vecino de Córdoba. 20 MC: Si. [La diferencia] 21 V: [Usted, usted] vive en Barrio Jardín 22 MC: Sí, señor. 23 V: Buenos. Yo vivo en Bajo Palermo. 24 MC: Sí. Pero yo no estuve ayer en la municipalidad [ni a favor ni en contra de la] del 25 paro. Quiero preguntarle .. 26 V: [xxx] Debiera estarlo porque usted es tan propietario como yo como vecino de 27 Córdoba. 28 MC: Pero me permite… [A ver si logramos]… 29 V: [Le permito] 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

MC: Of course, Mr. Vani. ¿What is your connection with the Town Hall? V: Absolutely none that is not the same as yours as an inhabitant of Córdoba. MC: Yes [The difference] V: [You, you] live in Barrio Jardín. MC: Yes, Sir. V: Right. I live in Bajo Palermo. MC: Yes. But I wasn’t at the Town Hall yesterday [in favour of or against] the strike. I’d 25 like to ask you .. 26 V: [XXX] You should be because you are as much of a proprietor as I am as an 27 inhabitant of Córdoba. 28 MC: But let me… [Let’s see if we can]… 29 V: Sure. Go on.

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The Clariá–Vani interview shows unfriendly overtones from the very beginning signalled by an enhanced prosody that projects a sense of censorship towards the interviewee’s doings. In Extract (6), in line 18, the interviewer produces his third elicitation – What is your connection with the Town Hall? – which again functions as a challenge to which the interviewee cannot respond satisfactorily (since everybody knows he has no connection with the Town Hall). This veers the discussion into a more private sphere, which produces a change of tenor as Vani adopts a questioning role with the intention of casting doubts on Clariá’s action or, rather, lack of action as regards the Town Hall affair. This stance taken by Vani is meant to shift the focus of the conversation away from the responsibilities attributed to his own personal behaviour. In all the texts chosen for analysis, the interactants’ moral values are at stake. In the interview Clariá–Vani both the interviewer and interviewee negatively judge each other’s character, either explicitly or implicitly, by means of criticizing – personal judgement – or condemning – moral judgement (Martin and Rose 2003). For example, in the fragment that follows, the interviewee is implicitly accused by the journalist of whimsically trespassing on a public institution without having the right to do so. (7) (Clariá–Vani) 60 V: … nacional y provincial 61 MC: O sea. Usted decide. Usted decide que los diputados, los concejales no funcionan y 62 usted decide que usted ocupa ese lugar ¿En nombre de … 63 V: [No, no, no] 64 MC: [… ¿Quién y con] qué derecho? 65 V: [No, no, no] El derecho que le otorga el espacio vacío otorgado por otro. 60 V: … national and provincial. 61 MC: That is, YOU decide, YOU decide that the deputies, council members don’t do their 62 job properly and you decide that you occupy that space. On behalf …? 63 V: [No, no, no] 64 MC: [… of whom and what] right have you got to do that? 65 V: [No, no, no] The right that the empty space others leave gives you.

Here again the interviewer poses a rhetorical question which, far from eliciting information, is meant to voice disagreement: On behalf…of whom and what right have you got to do that? (lines 63 and 65). This moves away from the line expected to be taken by journalists who are supposed to keep attitudes to themselves and manifest criticism in an objective manner so that role relationships are respected and the communicative links


Â�between interviewer and interviewee maintained throughout the development of the encounter. We use Goffman’s definition of line (Goffman 1959:â•›5) as “a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which the participant expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluations of the participants, especially himself ”. The supposedly unbiased line adopted by interviewers or journalists in media interviews is, in our texts, violated by high affective involvement. In fact, the use of evaluative vocabulary to express judgement appears to be a regular feature. In both interviews, the interviewers overtly and strongly criticise their guests’ actions and condemn their public behaviour. Falling out of line may also lead the participants to fail to meet the expectations of the audience and to move away from politic behaviour, with the inevitable loss of face (Watts 2003). In the Clariá–Vani interview, the participants’ roles are reversed: the interviewee interrogates the interviewer and then questions his activities in the radio station for which he works, thus assuming a dominant role and gaining control of the discourse. The interviewer, far from condemning this deviation, contributes to it by engaging in the discussion and by accepting the role imposed by his interlocutor. This alteration of roles also affects the role of the audience who seems to be turned into an unaddressed hearer. This interactional behaviour of the interactants can also be explained in the light of the footings they take up in relation to their remarks. For Goffman (1974) footing is the stance or posture taken by the participant in interaction. The author claims that “a change of footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance” (Goffman 1974:â•›128). Goffman (1981) distinguishes between different “production formats” employed by speakers in interaction, these formats being: (a) animator, the person who actually utters a sequence of words, (b) author, the person who is the source of the beliefs and of the words through which they are expressed and (c) the principal, the person whose opinion or point of view is depicted in the utterance produced. The journalists conducting the interview with De la Rúa act as animators attributing their accusations to external voices and thus avoiding responsibility for their assertions. In the Clariá–Vani interview, Clariá, on the other hand, presents himself as both animator and author, that is, as the source of the accusations thus contributing even more to the building-up of a tense atmosphere. Clayman and Heritage argue that a primary requirement of media interviews is the maintenance of interviewers’ impartiality so that they “should (i) avoid the assertion of opinions on their own behalf and (ii) refrain from direct or overt affiliation with (or disaffiliation from) the expressed statements of the interviewees” (Clayman and Heritage 2002:â•›126).

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The belligerence shown by the participants in the interviews often disrupts the neutralistic style that interviewers are expected to employ and thus jeopardise the whole enterprise by turning the discussion into a rather conflictual encounter with the loss of most of its informative value. This is observed in the use of utterances with an interrogative structure which are clearly not meant to elicit information from the interviewee. For example, as noted before, in Extract (6), the interviewer asks What is your connection with the Town Hall? (line 18) when he knows that Vanis has no association with the institution and therefore acted illegitimately. Also, in line 100, Extract (5), the utterance Who chose you to go to the Town Hall and tell the staff whether they should or should not go on strike constitutes a rhetorical question used with the purpose of conveying disapproval and showing defiance. The accusation implicit in the first utterance and the disapproval and defiance in the second are not typical means to achieve the on-going action of eliciting information for the sake of the audience. We observe that the expressions quoted here originate in the taking up of a role which is not that of a media interviewer who may be expected to challenge the views of his interlocutor, but not to be aggressive towards him. This seems to show a departure from the expected tenor of a media interview. The unexpected behaviour on the part of the interviewer, which is observed throughout the encounter, seems to generate some kind of retaliation from the guest who uses expressions loaded with the same degree of aggressiveness. In the following sequence from the interview with former president De La Rúa, the host announces that he is going to ask a question but instead, he refers to the investigation that is being carried out in court about a $1m going missing, and states that there is some evidence which seems to suggest that the money went into the hands of government officials or family members of government officials during his period in office. (8) (Bonelli y Silvestre – De la Rúa) 160 D: ¿Pero qué va a decir, que fue a funcionarios de la Casa Rosada? Es mentira. 161 B: Bueno 162 D: Una mentira suya en ese caso 163 B: No, no es una mentira. Es una pregunta lo que le estoy haciendo. Ahora usted sí me 164 respondió. 160 D: But what do you mean? That it (the money) went to government officials? It’s a lie. 161 B: Well. 162 D: A lie of yours in this case. 163 B: No, it’s not a lie. It’s a question that I’m asking you. Now you have answered it.


Although here the host does not present the issue as a hard fact and himself as the author of this statement in Goffman’s terms, the interviewee takes this rather personally and replies It is a lie (line 160) and then repeats A lie of yours in this case (line 162). In our view, this again represents a departure from the canonical tenor of an interview as participants are not supposed to throw accusations at each other that would result in the taking up of roles which are atypical in media interviews. Aggressiveness also emerges in the Clariá–Vani interview. (9) (Clariá–Vani) 112 V: …[xx] producto de un.. ¿Quiere que le cuente cómo (Clariá y Pereyra llegaron a 113 LV3? 114 MC: No no. Yo le voy a le voy a pedir primero que no.. eh que no me obligue a 115 interrumpir la comunicación si si [va a..] 116 V: [Igualmente] yo estoy reprimido, así que que si corta esta comunicación a nadie 117 le va a [asustar] 112 V: … [xxx] it is the result of. Do you want me to tell you how you (Clariá and 113 Pereyra) joined LV3 TV station? 114 MC: No, no. I’m going to, I’m going to ask you first not to force me to interrupt this 115 conversation if if [you are going to …] 116 V: [Anyway] I’m already censored, so that if you cut off this communication nobody 117 is going to be [shocked]

In this extract, the utterance Do you want me to tell you how you joined LV3 TV station? (line 112) produced by the guest constitutes a sly insinuation that the host has made a professional career by the use of unethical means. Conflict builds up and in lines 114 and 115, I’m going to ask you first not to force me to cut off this communication if…if…you are… the host answers back, threatening the guest that he will hang up. This threat becomes a fact in the following extract. (10) (Clariá–Vani) 129 MC: [Bueno, evidentemente] no hay ninguna posibilidad de dialogar razonablemente con 130 usted]. 131 V: [Bueno, dialoguemos] Dialoguemos. 132 MC: [Bueno] Vamos a… vamos a seguir nosotros con nuestro programa. A las siete y 133 dieciocho minutos eh…. vamos a continuar con nuestro programa nosotros porque no hay posibilidades de mantener diálogo 134

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129 MC: [Well, obviously] there is no possibility of establishing a [reasonable] dialogue 130 with you. 131 V: [Well. Let’s talk.] Let’s talk 132 MC: [Well] Let’s, let’s go on with our programme. At 7:18 ehm …we’ll carry on with our 133 programme, as there are no possibilities of carrying on with the conversation

In line 129, after unsuccessfully trying to get the conversation back on course, the journalist says Well, obviously there is no possibility of establishing a reasonable dialogue with you… When the guest replies Well. Let’s talk, let’s talk (line 131), the host hangs up on the guest thus cutting off the communication and, addressing the audience, he says Well, let’s go on with our programme (line 132). Here we can clearly see how the host exploits his very powerful position for having the last word or say in his dispute with the guest. This not only alters the role of the interviewer who exercises more power than he is expected to, but it also affects the closing of the interview which is supposed to be negotiated and not imposed unilaterally against the will of the guest. Against this background, expressions of politeness and manifestations of politic behaviour are scarce. So is the use of modulation and modalisation that would normally soften the impact of what is expressed. As expected, when there is aggressive confrontation, there is little room for these features.

7.

Conclusions

The analysis of the confrontational fragaments presented in this work shows the way in which these fragments differ from prototypical, non-confrontational sequences of media talk. The emphasis was placed on the deviations at the levels of tenor and mode. Although for the sake of analysis in the theory as well as in this paper the two aspects have been singled out, it is important to point out that both co-occur whenever an utterance is produced. The results of our study are summarised in Figures 2 and 3. As shown in Figure 2, the mode is seen to contrast drastically in terms of some aspects of the interactional behaviour of the participants when the two types of sequences are compared. Confrontational talk shows a frequent alteration of the turn- taking system mechanism considered suitable in media interviews. Constant interruptions and reluctance to pass the floor, even when it is insistently claimed by the interlocutor, contribute to the emergence of controversial overtones in the encounters.


Mode: (Interactional behaviour) Prototypical sequences

Confrontational sequences

Respect for turns

Disrespect for turns

Overlaps and interruptions quickly repaired

Overlaps and interruptions, recurrent and sustained

Language as only component

Language as only component

Spontaneous production

Spontaneous production

Figure 2.â•‡ Contextual dimension of mode Tenor Prototypical sequences

Confrontational sequences

Contact

Infrequent

Infrequent

Power

Used as expected

Not used as expected (variable)

Affective involvement

Very low

Very high

Orientation to affliation

Frequent

Rare

Figure 3.â•‡ Contextual dimension of tenor

At the level of tenor there is no variation in the type of contact established, but power, affective involvement and engagement operate differently as shown in Figure 3. The power exercised by the interactants seems to respond more to the needs of the moment by moment unfolding of the discourse than to the prerogatives pre-allocated to their identities. Hierarchies of roles are often forgotten or ignored and the actions taken by the participants cease to be predictable. As mentioned before, one can frequently observe a symmetrical positioning of participants in spite of the fact that, due to their high positions in the social organisations to which they belong, one of them could often be expected to exhibit his power and superiority over his interlocutors and obtain recognition from them. Polite and politic behaviour as well as kind address are practically absent form confrontational encounters while they are common features in the discourse of agreement.

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Finally, a thorough analysis of the contextual characteristics of confrontational interviews is to be completed with a detailed study of other aspects not examined in this paper.

References Andreau, Laura. 2008. Des/cortesía en los medios: El caso de la entrevista televisiva. Unpublished MA dissertation. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Argentina. Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L. 1990. “Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life”. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Boden, Deirdre and Zimmerman, Don H. (eds.). 1993. Talk and Social Structure. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charaudeau, Patrick. 1997. El Discurso de la Información. La construcción del discurso social. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa. Clayman, Steven and J. Heritage, John. 2002. The News Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drew, Paul and J. Heritage, John (eds.). 1992. Talk at work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro and Goodwin, Charles (eds.). [1992] 1994. Rethinking Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eggins, Suzanne and Slade, Diana. 1997. Analysing Casual Conversation. Cambridge: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Fetzer, Anita (ed.). 2007. Context and Appropriateness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fetzer, Anita. 2007. “Context, contexts and appropriateness”. In Context and Appropriateness, Fetzer, Anita (ed), 3–27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goffman, Erving. 1959. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin Harness, Marjorie H. 1983. “Aggravated correction and disagreement in children’s disputes”. Journal of Pragmatics 7: 657–677. Granato, Luisa. 1999. La estructura sociolingüística de la entrevista radial: un estudio de pragmática discursiva. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Greatbatch, David. 1988. “A turn-taking system for British news interviews”. Language in Society 17: 401–430. Gumperz, John J. 2003. “Response essay”. In Language and Interaction. Discussions with John Gumperz, Eerdmans, Susan L., Prevignano, Carlo L. and Thibault, Paul J. (eds), 105–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1985. An Introduction to functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Halliday, Michael A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaia. 1985. Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Hanks, William F. 1994. “The indexical ground of deictic reference”. In Rethinking Context, Â�Duranti, Alessandro and Goodwin, Charles (eds), 43–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.


Heritage, John and Greatbatch, David. 1991. “On the institutional character of institutional talk: the case of news interviews”. In Talk and Social Structure, Boden, Deirdre and Zimmerman, Don H. (eds), 93–137. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hutchby, Ian. 1996. Confrontational Talk. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Levinson, Stephen C. [1983] 2008. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, James R. and Rose, David. [2003] 2008. Working with Discourse. London: Continuum. Martin, James R. and Rose, David. 2008. Genre Relations. Mapping Culture. Milton Keynes, UK: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Móccero, María Leticia. 2005. Tensión y distensión en la entrevista periodística televisiva: Un estudio pragmático-discursivo. Unpublished MA dissertation. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Argentina. Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel and Jefferson Gail. 1974. “A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking in conversation”. Language 50. 4: 696–735. Schegloff, Emanuel. 1988/89. “From interview to confrontation: observations on the Bush/ Rather encounter”. Research on Language and Social Interaction 22: 215–240. Schegloff, Emanuel. 1992. “On talk and its institutional occasions”. In Talk at Work, Drew, Paul and Heritage, John (eds), 101–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1999. Context and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talbot, Mary, Atkinson, Karen and Atkinson, David. 2003. Language and Power in the Modern World. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2009. Society and Discourse. How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, Henry G. 2004. Text, Context, Pretext. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Deixis in context

This? No, that! Constructing shared contexts in the conversational dyad Konstanze Jungbluth The article focuses on the role of the hearer in the process of constructing context. Her position towards the speaker determines the choices which may be used to structure the dyad of conversation into several sub-spaces. The research on spoken language use is based on Spanish and Polish data (Jungbluth 2005, 2009). Three parts build the ‘whole’ of the conversation: the acoustically perceivable utterances, the parts not uttered but meant by the speaker and the parts not uttered but interpreted by the hearer (Coseriu 1980). The whole is never the same for everyone involved in conversation, as subjects are different from one another (Humboldt 1836, Wittgenstein 1914). The anchoring of context to the uttered and interactively perceived parts of dialogue does compulsorily show up these differences.

1.

Introduction

My research sheds light on the hearer in the process of constructing context. Her position towards the speaker – face-to-face, face-to-back and side-by-sideÂ€– determines the choices which may be used in order to structure the dyad of conversation into several sub-spaces. A primary source of my data is natural language use, performed to coordinate manual activities. The situations observed remind one either of the language

. My contribution was first presented at the IPrA conference on diversity, context and structure, Melbourne 2009, forming part of the panel organized by Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi in an outstanding professional manner. Critical comments of the researchers listening and coreading by Kasia Jaszczolt gave good advices to improve the paper. Subsequently, I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and Rita Vallentin for their critical reading of the manuscript; special thanks to Amy Swanson for improving the English. All remaining faults and infelicities are my own responsibility.

94 Konstanze Jungbluth

plays described by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, or of the language use observed in the capital of Austria by Karl Bühler, who contextualized the short utterances, often consisting of just a single word, to build upon his theory of context. When pairs engaged in manual interaction aim to achieve a shared goal, orientation in space is fundamental. Deictic features, for example demonstratives, are prominent in their dialogue. Building the conversational dyad, do the speaker and her hearer always share the same space, called ‘inside’, which is conceptualized as inclusive? Under which circumstance is there a hearer side space constructed, drawing a borderline between the speaker and the hearer, with the aim to exclude the latter from the sphere of the former? Users of language systems which feature paradigms of three demonstratives, for example Spanish este – ese – aquel (see 2.2; Jungbluth 2005, 2010, in press), Japanese kono – sono – ano (Diessel 1999), Finnish tämä – se – tuo (Laury 1997), Serbian ovaj – taj – onaj (Fulir and Raecke 2002), and English diaÂ� lects this – that – yonder (Cheshire 1997), are forced to select the adequate term, in order to make explicit differentiations, which may be left implicit in other languages with a smaller paradigm of demonstratives, for example Polish (see 2.1) and many other languages. The use of demonstrative pronouns, and the choice of one of them out of their language specific closed paradigms in a cross linguistic perspective is the subject of this paper. Entextualizing this paper and as an eye catcher, the header starts with a scrap of a dialogue: “This? No, that!”. A larger part of the conversation taped will be shown, and further discussed in Section 4.1. The data emerge from the corpus of European Spanish. It will be important to observe, how tight the ongoing action, the questions uttered and the answers are intertwined and how quickly contexts may change. A father and his son were observed when making a choice out of several juice packages at a supermarket. The son was squatting at some distance in front of the products stored. As he was about to take out of the shelves one of the juice packages, he asked: “Este ‘This’?” While first looking down at the leaflet of offers in his hands his father answered: “No este ‘No not this [one]’.” Looking up he continued “Ese ‘This/that in front of you’!”. The translation into five words in English paraphrases the Spanish just one word long utterance ese. Due to changing contexts, note that the reference of the term this is not the same in the question and in the answer. While the former refers to the package on the shelf, the latter refers to a picture in a leaflet. This difference points towards the importance of the situational context, which in the case of origo related deictic terms is basic. . Wittgenstein (1914–1945/1984). . Bühler (1934/1965/1982, translated into English by Donald Fraser Goodwin 1990).

Constructing shared contexts in the conversational dyad

The term ese, the middle term in the three term system of demonstratives used in European Spanish, refers to the juice package in front of the hearer, a space to which German and English speakers may only refer by adding further prepositional phrases or locatives to their terms. The data belong to a qualitative research design. It was collected in Spain and in a community of Polish immigrants in Germany and represents action embracing language use. English glosses are added, as are descriptions of the ongoing action with special attention to the positions of the interacting persons and their perspectives. The latter has been proven to be of special importance. The situational context is fore grounded in the interpretation of these data. Processes of changing contextualization are observed. In Section 5, the step from spatial to temporal reference will be discussed, as an example of recontextualization. Time is not directly perceivable. Cultures have developed forms of mental representations of time, based primarily on space. These transfers are the result of processes of recontextualization, where terms used for reference in space are decontextualized from space and recontextualized in time. Traces of entextualization may be observed too. While the former may consist of small items and transferences of single terms, the latter is only perceivable, when phrases, whole utterances or parts of dialogue are cut off, transferred and integrated, i.e. entextualized in a new textual environment of spoken language use (Urban 1996). Entextualization may be observed in the paper itself (see above), where parts of the data are used to exemplify a certain hypothesis, or simply to draw attention on the research question itself. Coming back to spatial reference, sometimes turning one’s body is enough to change the spatial context. My conception of context is therefore dynamic. Context is interactively done by the participants engaged in conversation. They not only open and close spaces by turning their bodies, but they arrange the space itself. In order to accommodate the reciprocal understanding, they determine the order and direction of the relevant sub-spaces. They may draw the attention of their listeners towards co-occurring perceptual features of the local context, for example touching objects, while talking about them, thus making this anchoring relevant. By doing so the choice of certain linguistic terms out of the respective grammatical paradigm is no longer arbitrary but fixed. Secondary, embedding in an institutional context may determine the choice, while expressing the inclusion or exclusion of the addressee herself, or of her as a member of a certain Â�social

. Under the term text as used in this paper written and spoken manifestations of language use are subsumed (see Jungbluth and Schlieben-Lange 2004). . See “doing gender”; “constructing shared contexts by (non)verbal communication”.

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group, for example of a political party she belongs to (see Czyzewski, Gülich, Hausendorf and Kastner 1995). The extent to which the correspondence of different aspects of context has to be negotiated depends on the finalization of the acting parties involved. Every utterance has to be enriched on both sides, by the speaker and by her hearer/s. What is said is always less than what is understood and less than what is meant (Coseriu 1980). The gap between the meaning which the speaker had in mind, and the understanding of the utterance by the hearer may be narrowed by continuing the dialogue. It will never be closed (see Humboldt 1836–39). “Listening to a word nobody imagines exactly the same as someone else and the tiny difference has wide repercussions and spreads similar to a water ring in the language as a whole. Every understanding is therefore at the same time a not-understanding, every tally of thoughts and feelings is at the same time a gaping.” Meaning and understanding depend on the anchoring of the utterances in contexts at hand for the participants, the add-ons are at the same time necessarily different for everyone and basic in order to make sense of the giving and receiving in the ongoing conversation. Three parts build the ‘whole’ of the conversation: the acoustically perceivable utterances, the parts not uttered but meant by the speaker and the parts not uttered but interpreted by the hearer, consciently and unconsciently. Therefore context is a first order notion and the ‘whole’ will never be the same for each of the participants involved in conversation. The paper is organized in 6 parts. After having familiarized the reader with the differences between two and three term paradigms of demonstrative pronouns in Section 2, I will give an introduction to the conceptualization of the conversational dyad formed by the speaker and her hearer/s in Section 3. I will show the insights of this conceptualization by focusing on action embracing language use in Polish and Spanish in Section 4. The following section on context and contexts consists of two parts. Section 5.1 concerns the recontextualization of spatial terms in time while Section 5.2 concentrates on the dynamics of shared and unshared contexts in situational settings. Finally I take up the title of this volume and will discuss how these data and their interpretation, which reflect language use at the micro context, have to be taken as examples for the use of certain discourse traditions at the meso level. They have to be embedded in language use not at the universal level but at the level of a certain language, of

. „Keiner denkt bei dem Wort gerade und genau das, was der andre, und die noch so kleine Verschiedenheit zittert, wie ein Kreis im Wasser, durch die ganze Sprache fort. Alles Verstehen ist daher immer zugleich ein Nicht-Verstehen, alle Übereinstimmung in Gedanken und Gefühlen zugleich ein Auseinandergehen.“ (Humboldt 1836–39/2003).


a language as a historic phenomenon, a traditional way of talking (and writing), which in the case of Spanish differs between its European and its Latin American varieties.

2.

Two and three term systems of demonstrative pronouns

In the following section the reader will be introduced to the differences between languages, which systematically show an opposition between two demonstratives in their paradigm contrasting between a near and a not near, i.e. distant space, and paradigms of those languages consisting of three demonstratives. The speakers of the latter are forced to make explicit distinctions between three spaces: a near one space, a space at a middle distance and a distant space, consistently performed when staying or sitting side-by-side (see Figure 1 and Section 3.3).

2.1 Two term systems: Polish Looking at the demonstrative pronouns (further on ‘DEMs’) out of 234 languages shown on the map of the World Atlas of Language Structures Online, more than half of them, 127 languages to be exact, are characterized by establishing an opposition between two spaces (Diessel 2005). Polish is one of them. This Slavic language distinguishes between ten ‘this’ and tamten ‘that’. As was said above users of the languages which show up a paradigm of only two terms usually leave contrasts implicit which have to be expressed in languages with three term systems (see Section 2.2 below and discussion in Section 2.3).

face-to-face

Inside ten ‘this’

Outside tamten ‘that’

side-by-side

Near ten ‘this’

Distant tamten ‘that’ (Jungbluth 2009:â•›141–145)

Graph 1.â•‡ Spatial oppositions expressed by the two term paradigm of DEMs in Polish . For theoretical back ground (Coseriu 1975 and Section 3.1): The French terms – langage, langue, parole – refer to the universal, the historical and the actual levels of linguistic abstractions of ‘language’. The middle one, the historical level may be subdivided into a language and a cultural specific level. Discourse traditions (Jungbluth and Schlieben-Lange 2004), i.e. patterns of dialogues, of discourses or of texts are used to verbally act in settings. They may be shared by closely related cultures and may be performed in several languages (writing post cards; literary forms as novels; discourse of the New Year performed by presidents etc.).

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Using demonstrative pronouns only, speakers of Polish may regularly distinguish an inside and an outside space. This is prominent in face-to-face conversations (see the following Section 3). When a shared perspective between speaker and hearer staying side-by-side is on stage, a near space may be opposed against a distant one.

2.2 Three term systems: Spanish Differently from Polish, speakers of Spanish always have to distinguish between three spaces. In the shared perspective they cannot leave it to the situational context whether the space talked about is closer or farther away. Imagine a situation at a vantage point. When talking about landmarks speakers of languages of three term paradigms always have in mind a three part spatial opposition. For example, sights which they may talk about they have to anchor in a space at a middle distance or in a space far away. Similarly to speakers of Polish, speakers of Spanish usually differentiate in face-to-face conversations just between an inside and an outside space. This basic distinction seems to be universal. But when necessary, for example in situations of trouble it goes without extra effort to make further distinctions when talking Spanish. It is familiar to hear speakers of Spanish who just use their “middle” term ese to oppose a speaker side space against a hearer side one. face-to-face

Inside este ‘this’ speaker-side

hearer-side

face-to-back

este (aquí) ‘this (here)’

ese ‘this (there)’

side-by-side

Near este ‘this here’

Middle ese ‘this (there)’

Outside aquel ‘that’

Far away aquel ‘that’ (Jungbluth 2005:â•›45–126)

Graph 2.â•‡ Spatial oppositions expressed by the three term system of Demonstrative Pronouns in Spanish . Researchers who aim to collect data on the use of the term ‘ese’ which expresses the reference to a hearer-side space may look for situations where a speaker is positioned behind her hearer, called face-to-back (see Section 3.2). These arrangements have turned out to be especially productive. Imagine a teacher looking over the shoulders of his student sitting in front of her. Blocked by the back of the hearer the two spaces, the speaker side one in front of the teacher and the hearer side one in front of the student are clearly separated. The separation is mirrored by the use of ‘este’ for the fomer and ‘ese’ for the latter.


2.3 How to express spaces at a middle distance in Polish? To summarize the different ways in which basic oppositions in language use are spelled out in Polish and Spanish, compare Graphs 1 and 2. Of course one may express in every language of the world everything one wants to, but speakers of languages which show up smaller paradigms have to build longer utterances, the load of ‘substance’ increases. In contrast to a simple demonstrative pronoun, for example Spanish ese, Polish speaker may utter ten przed tobą ‘this in front of you’ to refer to a hearer-side space (see Data 9 and Section 4.3). Due to the weaker paradigm they have to add to the DEM a prepositional phrase (DEM + PP). To refer to the space at a middle distance structurally distinguished from a near and a far away space will urge a similar effort for supplementary linguistic substance, i.e. locative adverbs in addition to the demonstrative pronouns (DEM + ADVloc). face-to-face

Inside ten ‘this’

face-to-back

speaker-side ten (tutaj) ‘this here’

hearer-side ten przed tobą DEM + PP ‘this before you’

side-by-side

Near ten ‘this’

Middle ten [+N+] tam DEM + ADVloc ‘this there’

Outside tamten ‘that’

Far away tamten ‘that’

(Jungbluth 2009:â•›141–145)

Graph 3.â•‡ Adding prepositional phrases and/or locatives to the two term-paradigm of DEMs in Polish

Finer differences are especially prominent in contexts where the two or more people involved do not only “perform […] together a joint action” (Vanderveken and Kubo 2002:â•›16) while talking to one another but when their intention is to coordinate manual activities.

3.

Constructing spatial context in the conversational dyad

When starting to talk to one another, speaker and hearer build the conversational dyad. As underlined by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1827), language use

99


starts with the pair, with two persons. Every utterance belongs to a reciprocal talk, a dialogue where the speaker imagines herself as opposed to another. Besides of finalization (see above) alterization as the direction of language towards the hearer, the alter, is the other basic activity of language use itself (SchliebenLange 1983). All possible constellations of the position of the speaker towards her hearer(s) will be conceptualized as one of the following situations regardless of the language used: Speaker and her hearer(s) stay or sit behind each other looking at each other face-to-back face-to-face S< H< <S H>

beside each other side-by-side S< H

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