Soundbiters bit

Living in a contracted dialogistic space

The uncomfortable life at Number 10

Or appraisal meets CADS over Hutton

Appraisal system descriptive framework

CADS methodology

Hutton inquiry data

And social change…

Soundbites, spin and other practices Technologisation of discourse Records of discourse are more available and

access to what was said is easier. This has made the moves more evident And people less trusting Cultural products created round this theme

CADS methodology

Corpus linguistics Discourse analysis Quantitative and qualitative methods Pork butcher approach

The data

Hutton Inquiry transcripts Blair, Campbell and Powell: their

testimony at the Inquiry (Parts 1 and 2)

the context… Legal setting: Q and R. A number of dialogues going on Constrained by: A serious occasion Need to remain coherent with witness

statements and documents taken from office computers. (retrospective)

All was being recorded, transcribed and put on the web site (prospective)

Corpus All Hutton: 1,002,836 st. sentence length

18.31 Number 10: 39,304 St. sentence length:

26,07 Blair: 13,534 sentences 348 st length

28.60 Campbell: 17,705 sentences 646 26.05 Powell: 8,431 sentences 176 st length

17.21

Sentence length and ideolect

A pattern of accumulating discourse markers:Turn initiatiors well. Utterance launchers Look, I mean, you know. Overtures as I said, I must say, can I just say. Epistemic stance markers I think, in a sense, as it were. Stance adverbials obviously , really , actually

A thin trickle of proposition in a sea of discourse markers: more spin than substance?

Keywords 1 N WORD Number 10 % Hutton % KEYNESS

1 hmm 0.58 0.05 826.2 2 I 4.34 2.35 696.5 6 think 0.98 0.39 312.0 7 was 3.00 1.96 244.1 9 this 1.31 0.69 223.2 10 that 3.97 2.88 196.4 11 the 6.56 5.15 192.9 12 point 0.41 0.14 170.6

Keywords 2

N WORD Number 10 % Hutton % KEYNESS

16 thing 0.14 0.03 97.5 18 going 0.29 0.12 85.6 19 not 1.55 1.10 84.1 20 thought 0.20 0.07 83.5 24 were 0.82 0.52 73.1 25 say 0.43 0.23 72.5 26 making 0.12 0.03 71.3 27 issue 0.17 0.06 70.7 28 saying 0.18 0.06 70.4

Keywords 3

N WORD Number 10 % Hutton % KEYNESS

15 it 2.01 1.44 29 felt 0.13 0.04 66.6 31 way 0.22 0.09 62.6 35 discussion 0.13 0.05 53.8 39 story 0.17 0.07 50.9 44 people 0.17 0.08 42.3 47 cannot 0.13 0.05 41.1 48 false 0.04 - 40.6 49 frankly 0.03 - 40.5 50 terribly 0.02 - 40.3

KEYWORDS 4

N WORD Number 10 % Hutton % KEYNESS

53 important 0.11 0.04 37.9 55 clear 0.14 0.06 37.5 57 person 0.11 0.04 36.9 61 centrally 0.02 - 34.0 62 difficult 0.07 0.02 32.5 65 recall 0.12 0.05 29.2 66 should 0.22 0.13 29.1 67 obviously 0.11 0.05 28.8 71 emphasise 0.03 - 26.7 73 no 0.48 0.34 26.4 76 best 0.06 0.02 26.1

Keywords

Indicate salience Show differences compared with all

Hutton corpus Indicate what the core of a particular

pattern might be At first sight appear normal and

innocuous, noise rather than signal

Constructing an identity

Individuals and team spirit – who does what to whom with whom?Pronouns

What do people do all day? Kinds of activity–Verbs/Nouns

Engagement and detachment – evaluating, taking responsibility, Modality

Pronouns

Mostly to do with discourse management and an interpersonal dialogue but also it, this and that

Oscillation: vague reference and group identity

Lawyers accepted the alternations without comment, encouraging the construction of a joint identity for the team

Key verbs from the keywords

Word all Hutton Men at work Keyness

think 0.39% 0.92% 191.2 thought 0.07& 0.22% 78.4 say 0.23% 0.48% 77.2 mean 0.07% 0.21% 57.6 felt 0.04% 0.13% 45.7 emphasise - 0.03% 26.5

More verb forms All Hutton Men at Work

Keyness was 1.96% was 3.06%

Keyness:199.6 were 0.52 were 0.83 Keyness:

57.9 do 0.36% do 0.61% Keyness:

51.1 cannot 0.05% cannot 0.15% Keyness:

47.4

Existential constructions

Cluster All Hutton Men at work this was 0.07% 0.19 % that was 0.15 % 0.27 % it was 0.07 % 0.63 % there were 0.15 % 0.27 % there is 0.09 % 0.21 % Tot: 0.53 % 1.57 %

Talking about work Mental and communication verbs: discourse and

stance markers – privileged access Transitivity: impersonal constructions no-one gets

singled out or named. Locative/ Existential constructions : stuff happens In the thick of things: indefinite noun phrases often

marked for size and number and negative evaluation Perceivers of a situation; reactors rather than

initiators

The real protagonists

Word All Hutton Men at Work Keyness

thing 0.03% 0.15% 90.1 sense 0.03% 0.12% 66.3 issue 0.06% 0.19% 63.9 people 0.08% 0.21% 58.6 point 0.14% 0.29% 45.4 story 0.07% 0.19% 52.9 discussion 0.05% 0.12% 28.0

Nouns

Text autonomisation or illocutionary text nouns

The vagueness of thing, way, sense Fuzzy reference referential indistinctness Patterns in their use: the first, the best, the

only, the important (thing, way) and issue agentless passives and

metaphorical usage

People

Decisions and choice (the best the only the right the senior)

Part of the dialogistic second guessing about perceptions: people would say

The key point

Dialogistic positioning with respect of interlocutors (the BBC’s point of view)

Limiting the range of choice dialogistically (there is no point, little point, a key point, )

Emphasis: structural foregrounding, lexical focussing around the field of difficulty

A kind of spin

Foregrounding : Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions

Focussing: what the point is emphasise/important/key/salient/vital/. Stance adverbials in the keywords:

obviously/terribly/absolutely/frankly Evaluation: best/only way/only thing

Hard times and having to The quality of life Modality: deontic and epistemic, perceived

needs and duties, perceptions of reality HUTTON MEN AT WORK

should 0.13 should 0.24% Having to: 0.07% 0.20% Difficulty: 0.02% 0.09% Semantic field: difficult/complicated etc.

Metaphors they live by

Firefighting and weathering the storm Space and positions Under fire and at war Stronger and bigger than us Uncontrollable and messy

In control or at bay?

The data, wordlists, keywords, concordances, point to a different picture from that of the outsider perceptions.

Men at work construct their identity and working reality through their use of particular linguistic features in a build up of patterns

What the data shows

On returning to the data (via concordance lines)

We see the keywords correspond to resources linked to a number of dialogistic patterns:

Appraisal – dialogistic positioning

particular patterns of dialogistic positioning:the arguability of any utterance can be varied by adjusting the dialogistic status of the utterance to engage with past, present or future communicative exchanges.

Constant interaction

taking up, acknowledging, responding to, challenging or rejecting actual or imagined prior and future utterances.

Disclaim

Dialogic opposition resources by which some prior

utterance or some alternative position is invoked so as to be rejected, replaced or dismissed as irrelevant

Proclaim Concur - aligns with interlocutor Pronounce - intrudes self Endorse - brings in other texts for

support Typically against some opposed

alternative increases the interpersonal cost of any ejection /doubting / challenging of the author's dialogic position

Expanding and contracting

whether the resources employed present the speaker as opening up the dialogue to more or less divergent positions or as closing it down so as to suppress or at least limit such divergence.

Contraction

the space for dialogistic diversity is contracted by what amounts to a pre-emptive rhetorical action - the writer/speaker is presented as seeking to constrain possible dialogistic divergence by overtly and strongly indicating their personal investment in the current proposition/proposal.

‘obviously’

Any challenge necessitates a direct confrontation with the speaker writer or a confrontation with what is represented as `common-knowledge' or `public opinion'.

“the only way”

alternative positions are closed down by being directly rejected or by being replaced.

Assertion

Those utterances which employ the form of the bare assertion ignore or deny the dialogic imperative and thereby suppress the basic heteroglossic nature of social reality.

Key patterns in the data

Proclaiming and Assertion – Denial – Probabilising via privileged access Relativising or spin –– backgrounding by

foregrounding Justification closing down options

Making assertions

Existential and locative expressions Cluster number 10 All Hutton this was 0.19 % 0.07% that was 0.27 % 0.15 % it was 0.63 % 0.07 % there were 0.27 % 0.15 % there is 0.21 % 0.09 %

Tot: 0.53 % 1.57 %

denying

No Not Cannot False

Probabilising

When epistemic markers are used it is usually with privileged access:

We felt/We thought/I think

Not open to contradiction

contracting the space

Illocutionary text nouns thing, way. Fuzzy reference, referential indistinctness but with distinct patterns in their use

the first, the best, the only, the important (thing, way)

All of which close down the options

People

Same patterns found with the key word people. Decisions and choice evaluation (the best /the only /the right /the senior)

Part of the dialogistic second guessing about perceptions and pre-empting of reactions: people would say

“Look this way”

Point as a keyword Dialogistic positioning with respect of

interlocutors (the BBC’s point of view) Limiting the range of choice dialogistically

(there is no point, little point, a key point, ) Emphasise: angling the argument to

exclude other aspects

Spin – angling the position

Foregrounding : Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions

Focussing: what the point is emphasise/important/key/salient/vital/. Stance adverbials in the keywords:

obviously/terribly/absolutely/frankly

Noblesse oblige

Modality: deontic and epistemic, perceived needs and duties, perceptions of reality

Number 10 HUTTON

Having to: 0.22% 0.04% No options but one…….

Painted into a corner or shutting the door

The data, wordlists, keywords, concordances, point to a habit of dialogistic second guessing and pre-empting.

Chronic anticipation

Living in an open dialogue

An uncomfortable contracted space

limited in scope, trapped by its own logic, created by its encoding in language which

closes off areas of possible choice Immobile but twitching Cripplingly heightened intertextual awareness

of others’ reactions Technologisation strings visible Short term benefits soon give way to longer

term drawbacks

Painted into a corner