Psychics and the ‘other side’: A discourse analysis of televised psychic readings

Marianne Mason

Abstract

This article provides a discourse analysis of a large corpus of televised psychic readings. The goal of this study is to uncover the relationship between the linguistic structure of psychic readings and the psychics’ linguistic agenda. The findings of this study suggest that the psychics’ engage in linguistic tactics that allow them to negotiate and extract specific information from their subjects. The discourse structure of psychic readings facilitates deception, since the subjects, rather than the psychics, are the actual source of subject-specific information in a reading.

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