Parliamentary Discourse

Parliamentary discourse is both a category of institutionalized multiparty confrontational political discourses and an expanding field of study. The aim of this article is to identify and outline the discourse‐shaped and discourse‐shaping mechanisms of deliberation, adversariality and polarization that underpin the political negotiation and power struggle carried out in parliament. Highlighting the linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of parliamentary discourse, the focus is on micro‐ and macrolevel investigations of parliamentary debating procedures, parliamentary question–answer patterns, and politeness principles and argumentation strategies across parliaments. The article concludes with final remarks on recent trends and future directions for this field

Discourses of leadership changeorchanges of leadership discourse?

 The present study focuses on the discursively performed leadership during periods of transition and change in the context of competition-driven organizations. It explores discourses of leadership in a diachronic perspective, scrutinising the ways in which they construct and re-construct corporate and culture-related identities. Drawing on interviews and press conferences with several CEOs of two multinational companies, Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), an investigation of the challenges of leadership branding was carried out in a discourse-analytical and pragma-rhetorical perspective. Particular emphasis has been placed on systematically comparing the presentations in letters to employees by the CEOs of Nokia and Ericsson. This comparative study provides evidence for the internal and external challenges underlying leadership discursive construction and re-construction aimed at ensuring a consistent interconnectedness between a company’s values and its competitive qualities. 

Metadiscursive strategies in dialogue: Legitimising confrontational rhetoric

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. The metadiscourse used in institutional dialogue is envisaged in this investigation as a set of discursively and rhetorically structured utterances meant to contextualise, as well as overstate or understate the interlocutors’ statements with respect to the degree of involvement, topical explicitness, positioning, interpersonal rapport and audience appeal. The main goal is to analyse the interplay between shifting metadiscursive strategies and ritualised discursive practices by examining instances of parliamentary interaction that shape participant role shifts, private-public communicative interfaces, and multiple audience targeting strategies. A rhetorically significant category of metadiscursive strategies used to surreptitiously introduce controversial comments are the rhetorical parentheticals. In terms of their position and role in the discourse, two main types of metadiscursive parentheticals have been identified in institutional dialogic interaction: parentheticals that function as inserted metadiscourse (occurring either by juxtaposition, before, after or between whole discursive units) and parentheticals that function as embedded metadiscourse (occurring between two constituents of one specific discursive unit). A pragma-rhetorical approach has been adopted for the analysis of various types of metadiscursively functioning parentheticals in order to identify shifts and overlaps between the personal and interpersonal levels and to examine multi-level correlations between the interlocutors’ articulations of complementary or competing representations and interpretations. Context-specific examples illustrate how interlocutors use parentheticals to adjust their discourse to shifting rhetorical situations, vary the effects of their rhetorical appeals by addressing interchangeably or simultaneously several audiences and choose to reinforce/cancel previous assumptions referentially, relationally and/or evaluatively

Follow-ups as multifunctional questioning and answering strategies in Prime Minister\u27s Questions

In parliamentary interaction, more than in other types of institutional dialogue, follow-ups indicate how UK Members of Parliament (MPs) negotiate not only the pros and cons of topic-related issues, but also their status, roles and power positions. While a follow-up is normally conditioned by preceding turns in a dialogue, and, in its turn, it helps to shape the scope, focus and/or content of subsequent uptakes and follow-ups, interactively co-constructed follow-ups during Prime Minister\u27s Questions (PMQs) display recurrent argumentative or counter-argumentative strategies since they not only highlight controversial aspects of the debated issues, but they also serve (explicitly or implicitly) to successively and repeatedly call into question the position of a political adversary, thereby undermining the latter\u27s authority and credibility. The aim of the present investigation is to identify and examine the discursive and argumentative functions of follow-ups occurring in PMQs of the House of Commons. The main research questions to be pursued are the following: What recurrent follow-up patterns can be found in PMQs? How are follow-ups initiated and responded to in the ongoing parliamentary interaction? What impact do follow-ups have on subsequent uptakes, and on the power balance between questioning MP and responding Prime Minister

Questions and Questioning

The importance of questions in all kinds of private and public communication can hardly be overestimated. Having long been a central investigation topic in classical rhetoric and philosophy, and later in grammar and linguistics, the study of questions and questioning has gradually developed into a multidisciplinary field of inquiry, integrating pragmatics, rhetoric, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and anthropology (and this is not an exhaustive list). Starting with some of the most significant definitions and classifications of questions within several theoretical approaches or schools of thought based on formal, functional, sequential, and/or contextual dimensions of use, this article provides an overview of the most influential research on the roles, functions, and goals of questions and answers in specific social contexts and institutional environments

Gendering confrontational rhetoric: Discursive disorder in the British and Swedish parliaments

Parliaments are basically adversarial settings that instantiate the polarization of political power. In debating the pros and cons of available alternatives, parliamentarians are supposed to observe convention-based institutional norms and regulations. However, in critical moments these rules are strategically violated to achieve political goals. Gender-related asymmetries in parliamentary power balance tend to emerge in disorderly parliamentary behaviour and/or disruptive discourse practices. This article focuses on the way in which the rules, procedures and practices of parliamentary interaction are being transgressed in mixed-gender encounters. The results indicate that a range of five context-specific master suppression techniques1 are used by both female and male MPs to enact and reinforce their own power position and, at the same time, to challenge and undermine the opponent\u27s authority and credibility. A micro-level analysis of gender-related disruptive discourse practices in the UK Parliament and the Swedish Riksdag shows how different parliaments, with different rhetorical styles and traditions, often exhibit different forms and manifestations of rule violation, on the one hand, and different reactions to disorderly discursive behaviour, on the other. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

-Discourses of leadership change or changes of leadership discourse?

The present study focuses on the discursively performed leadership during periods of transition and change in the context of competition-driven organizations. It explores discourses of leadership in a diachronic perspective, scrutinising the ways in which they construct and re-construct corporate and culture-related identities. Drawing on interviews and press conferences with several CEOs of two multinational companies, Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), an investigation of the challenges of leadership branding was carried out in a discourse-analytical and pragma-rhetorical perspective. Particular emphasis has been placed on systematically comparing the presentations in letters to employees by the CEOs of Nokia and Ericsson. This comparative study provides evidence for the internal and external challenges underlying leadership discursive construction and re-construction aimed at ensuring a consistent interconnectedness between a company’s values and its competitive qualities