Chapter 9. Metacommunication and intertextuality in British and Russian parliamentary answers

The chapter proposes a typology of metacommunicative criticisms occurring in answers to oral questions in the British and Russian parliaments. A range of communicative behaviours are criticised by the respondents while answering parliamentary questions: posing the same question more than once, misinterpreting the opponent’s comments, making inexplicable statements, breaching parliamentary rules of question asking, among others. It is argued that metacommunicative criticisms ensure intertextual connections in various oral and written parliamentary sub-genres, thus enhancing continuity and accountability in parliamentary discourse.