Article published in:
Certainty and Uncertainty in Dialogue
Edited by Andrzej Zuczkowski
[Language and Dialogue 4:1] 2014
► pp. 58–75

I haven’t spoken to him about it

Evidentiality in White House press briefings

| University of Vechta
White House press briefings have the function of providing journalists with first-hand information on present activities of the US-American administration. The Press Secretary, currently Jay Carney, mainly draws on indirect reportative evidentialiy, referring to recent utterances by the President. However, owing to the often critical and persistent inquiries by investigative journalists based on counter-evidentiality, the Press Secretary frequently resorts to evasive manoeuvres. Moreover, he commonly refuses to use logical inferencing in his function as a mouthpiece of the government, since speculations might be potentially harmful when given to the press. Thus, the present paper investigates the possibilities and limitations of evidentiality in this interview genre from a discourse-analytical perspective on the basis of an online archive of transcripts.
Keywords: information source, evidentiality, press briefing, quotation, interview genre, political discourse, persuasion
Published online: 20 May 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.4.1.04sch
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y
2004 Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Lloyd B
1986 “Evidentials, Paths of Change, and Mental Maps: Typologically Regular Asymmetries.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. by Wallace Chafe, and Johanna Nichols, 273-312. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Bell, Philip, and Theo van Leeuwen
1994 The Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation. Kensington NSW: University of New South Wales Press.Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi
2006 “Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Press Conferences.” Discourse & Society 17 (2): 173-203. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, and Susan Conrad
2009 Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1986 “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. by Wallace Chafe, and Johanna Nichols, 261-272. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul
2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage
2002 The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cornillie, Bert
2009 “Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: On the Close Relationship between Two Different Categories.” Functions of Language 16 (1): 44-62. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Haan, Ferdinand
2005 “Encoding Speaker Perspective: Evidentials.” In Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories, ed. by Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges, and David S. Rood, 379-397. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dendale, Patrick, and Liliane Tasmowski
2001 “Introduction: Evidentiality and Related Notions.” Journal of Pragmatics 331: 339-348. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diewald, Gabriele, and Elena Smirnova
2010 “Evidentiality in European Languages: The Lexical-Grammatical Distinction.” In Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages, ed. by Gabriele Diewald, and Elena Smirnova, 1-14. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ekberg, Lena, and Carita Paradis
2009 “Editorial: Evidentiality in Language and Cognition.” Functions of Language 16 (1): 5-7. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2007 “Challenges in Political Interviews: An Intercultural Analysis.” In Political Discourse in the Media: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Anita Fetzer, and Gerda Lauerbach, 163-195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
2010 “Hedging in Political Discourse: The Bush 2007 Press Conferences.” In Perspectives in Politics and Discourse, ed. by Urszula Okulska, and Piotr Cap, 201-213. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John
1985 “Analyzing News Interviews: Aspects of the Production of Talk for an Overhearing Audience.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Dialogue, vol. 31, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 95-117. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hutchby, Ian
2006 Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Maidenhead: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Jiang, Xiangying
2006 “Cross-cultural Pragmatic Differences in US and Chinese Press Conferences: The Case of the North Korea Nuclear Crisis.” Discourse & Society 17 (2): 237-257. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Joseph, Brian D
2003 “Evidentials: Summation, Questions, Prospects.” InStudies in Evidentiality, ed. by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, and Robert M. W. Dixon, 307-327. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Partington, Alan
2003 The Linguistics of Political Argument: The Spin-doctor and the Wolf-pack at the White House. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Plungian, Vladimir A
2001 “The Place of Evidentiality within the Universal Grammatical Space.” Journal of Pragmatics 331: 349-357. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
“Press Briefings.”
http://​www​.whitehouse​.gov​/briefing​-room​/press​-briefings (last access 23 March 2012).
Schubert, Christoph
2012 “Follow-Up Questions in White House Press Briefings: Metacommunication in Cohesion and Framing.” Language and Dialogue 2 (3): 449-463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Summers, Della et al.
(eds) 2005 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 4th ed. München: Langenscheidt-Longman.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Myketiak, Chrystie, Shauna Concannon & Paul Curzon
2017. Narrative perspective, person references, and evidentiality in clinical incident reports. Journal of Pragmatics 117 ► pp. 139 ff. Crossref logo
Schubert, Christoph
2019. ‘OK, well, first of all, let me say …’: Discursive uses of response initiators in US presidential primary debates. Discourse Studies 21:4 ► pp. 438 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.