Cover not available
Part of
The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, voices and functions
Edited by Zohar Livnat, Pnina Shukrun-Nagar and Galia Hirsch
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 316] 2020
► pp. 203–230

“The hon. Gentleman says this is rubbish; it is absolutely true”

The strategic use of references to truth in Prime Minister’s Questions

| University of Augsburg

This chapter reports on an analysis of references to truth and compares their discursive value with references to fact and to reality as argumentative and rhetorical resources in the context of Prime Minister’s Questions. Truth is assigned a dual status in the analysis: it is a fundamental premise and can thus be assigned the status of a presupposition to which participants are committed. The research is based on 240 question-response sequences between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The analysis shows that references to truth are utilised by both participants with the Prime Minister referring more frequently to truth and fact, and the leader of the opposition referring more frequently to reality. References to truth insinuate its gradient conceptualisation with higher and lower degrees of truthfulness. The conversational implicature allows the speaker to act at face level in accordance with the rules of conduct of the speech event.

Keywords: truth, implicature, interactional achievement, challenge, maxim of quality, Prime Minister’s Questions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Truth, reality and fact, and truths, realities and facts
  • 3.Methodology and data
    • 3.1Participants and procedure
    • 3.2Data and method
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Challenges
    • 4.1The discursive value of references to truth
    • 4.2The discursive value of references to fact
    • 4.3The discursive value of references to reality
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 29 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.316.09fet
References
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1983 “The Dynamics of Political Interviews.” Text 3(2): 131–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
1987 Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven
1992 “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality: The Case of News Interview Discourse.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 163–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
D’Ancona, Matthew
2017 Post Truth: The New War on Truth and how to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2000 “Negotiating Validity Claims in Political Interviews.” Text 20 (4): 1–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002a “Communicative Intentions in Context. In Rethinking Sequentiality: Linguistics Meets Conversational Interaction, ed. by Anita Fetzer, and Christiane Meierkord, 37–69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002b “ ‘Put Bluntly, You Have Something of a Credibility Problem’: Sincerity and Credibility in Political Interviews.” In Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse, ed. by Paul Chilton, and Christina Schäffner, 173–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “ ‘Well if That Had Been True that Would Have Been Perfectly Reasonable’: Appeals to Reasonableness in Political Interviews.” Journal of Pragmatics 39(8): 1342–1359. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009/2011 “Challenges in Contrast.” Languages in Contrast 9 (1): 73–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 “The Multilayered and Multifaceted Nature of Political Discourse.” In The Pragmatics of Political Discourse. Explorations across Cultures, ed. by Anita Fetzer, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “ ‘When You Came into Office You Said that Your Government Would Be Different’: Forms and Functions of Quotations in Mediated Political Discourse.” In The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-ups, ed. by Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizman, and Lawrence N. Berlin, 245–273. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold
1994 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Greatbatch, David
1988 “A Turn-Taking System for British News Interviews.” Language in Society 17: 401–430. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, Herbert Paul
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol. III, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J.
1992 “Contextualization and Understanding.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, and Charles Goodwin, 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1996 “The Linguistic and Cultural Relativity of Inference.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Stephen C. Levinson, 374–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen
1987 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Harris, Sandra
2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse and Society 12 (4): 451–472. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mey, Jacob
2001 Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sarangi, Srikant, and Slembrouck, Steef
1996 Language, Bureaucracy & Social Control. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Recanati, Francois
1989 “The Pragmatics of What is Said.” Mind and Language 4 (4): 295–329. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sbisà, Marina
2002 “Speech Acts in Context.” Language and Communication 22 (4): 421–436. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R.
1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
2010 Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weizman, Elda
2008 Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles in the News Interview. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar