1.1PMQs: A ritual practice

In the House of Commons, the presiding officer is known as the Speaker, who chairs the debates, maintains order, and determines which members may speak. The continuous history of the office is held to date back to 1376, to the reign of the medieval English king Edward III (Roskell, Clark, and Rawcliffe 1993Roskell, John S., Linda Clark, and Carole Rawcliffe (eds.) 1993 The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1386–1421. Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing.). At that time, the Speaker was the MP chosen by the other MPs to quite literally speak on their behalf, in particular, to communicate their decisions to the reigning monarch. This was a dangerous business. Between 1399 and 1535 no less than seven Speakers had their heads chopped off. In modern times, this grisly history is reflected in a ritual whereby the MP newly elected to the office shows reluctance to accept it and is forcibly dragged to the chair by other MPs. Thus, the role of the Speaker is not only institutionalised, but may also be seen in a Durkheimian sense as sacred (Durkheim 1912 [1954]Durkheim, Émile 1912 [1954] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. by Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) – as a semi-religious figure initiated into the role through a distinctive rite of passage (Johnson 2011Johnson, Jay 2011 “Through the Liminal: A Comparative Analysis of Communitas and Rites of Passage in Sports Hazing and Initiations.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 36 (3): 199–227. ), thereby endowed with particular rights and privileges, as well as with particular obligations. In the context of PMQs, the Speaker has in certain respects powers even greater than that of the PM, for example, rebuking noisy MPs from either government or opposition benches for excessive interruptions, barracking, and general rambunctiousness. Importantly, it is the Speaker who decides who gets to question the PM, and how long the session lasts (recent controversies concerning Speaker Bercow indicate how important is this power). While the PM has the ability to rebuke MPs who are being disorderly, it is only the speaker who is empowered to actually ‘do’ anything about this.

One of the Speaker’s tasks is to preside over PMQs, the central British parliamentary institution and its highest profile parliamentary event. PMQs always begin with the same tabled question to the PM, asking if s/he will list his/her official engagements for the day; thus, like any institutionalised ritual, PMQs are to a certain degree ‘scripted’ or ‘demarcated’ (Staal 1979Staal, Fritz 1979 The Meaninglessness of Ritual. Numen 26 (1): 2–22. ).22.The second author would like to express her gratitude to Verena Weber, BA (University of Augsburg, Germany) for having re-edited the Hansard files. The Speaker’s response to this question is also scripted, i.e. PMQs depart with a ritual sequential chain (Collins 2004Collins, Randall 2004 Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ). This initial ritual continues, as the called Member can then pose a supplementary question (termed a ‘supplementary’) on almost anything that relates to the PM’s general responsibilities or to some aspect of government policy. The MP is limited to this one supplementary and cannot follow up the PM’s response with any further utterance (Harris 2001Harris, Sandra 2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12: 451–472. ). However, this is permissible for the Leader of the Opposition, who is allowed up to six questions. Often, only the initial question regarding the PM’s engagements is tabled, although MPs can table ‘Questions for oral answer on a future day’ which the PM would have notice of.

Because MPs have the advantage of putting supplementaries to the PM without notice, PMQs have the important elements of unpredictability and surprise, and thereby, like any public ritual, also have a sense of drama (Turner 1967Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.; 1992Turner, Victor 1992 Morality and Liminality. In Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols, ed. by V. Turner, 132–161. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press.). Of course, this unpredictability only holds for the questions made by the Leader of the Opposition and other MPs who are supposed to oppose the PM – many of the PM’s own MPs provide notice (off the record) of what they are going to ask. This dramatic character is liminal and a manifestation of what Turner (1967)Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. calls “anti-structure”, i.e. it represents a situation in which what people perceive as ‘ordinary’ parts of social order are turned upside down. Thus, in many social situations, we are expected to avoid conflict, strive for harmonious relationships with others, and keep verbal conflict to the minimum possible. These social norms do not apply to PMQs, in which the exact opposite of these norms of social order is expected from the participants. Yet, whilst the social order gets jeopardised in PMQs, this jeopardy is intentional and normative – provided that it is kept within ritual boundaries – and it is exactly this paradox that makes PMQs a prime example of liminal anti-structural ritual phenomena in modern societies (along with other liminal events, e.g. martial arts matches, see Kádár and House forthcomingKádár, Dániel Z., and Juliane House Forthcoming. “Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions across Cultures.”). In the liminal setting of PMQs, the PM is not necessarily the most powerful party (despite being the head of the government), in that the PM may be subjected to an unpredictable series of attacks, and is expected to ‘hold ground’, in a similar fashion to public speakers who get heckled (Kádár 2014Kádár, Dániel Z. 2014 “Heckling: A Mimetic-Interpersonal Perspective.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (1): 1–35. ). Although PMQs has been widely and extensively criticised (e.g., Thomas 2006Thomas, Graham P. 2006 United Kingdom: The Prime Minister and Parliament. In Executive Leadership and Legislative Assemblies, ed. by N. D. J. Baldwin, 4–37. London: Routledge.; Blair 2010Blair, Tony 2010 A Journey. London: Hutchinson.), it is arguably a remarkable institution, providing a notable degree of political accountability, whereby ordinary MPs have the opportunity to put questions directly to the head of the government.

In PMQs, there is an expectation that the dialogue should follow a question-response pattern, just as in political interviews (Fetzer 2000Fetzer, Anita 2000 “Negotiating Validity Claims in Political Interviews.” Text 20 (4): 1–46. ). But unlike a broadcast interview, questions in PMQs are posed by other politicians, not by interviewers. This has important implications for the discourse which takes place. As journalists, political interviewers are expected to be more or less ‘impartial’, and they formulate their conversational contributions accordingly, mitigating the face-threatening potential of their challenges with an appropriate degree of redressive action (Fetzer 2009Fetzer, Anita 2009 “Challenges in Contrast.” Languages in Contrast 9 (1): 73–97. ). Politicians, however, are restricted in their communicative actions by no such constraints. In the British political arena, it is certainly not a moral value to be ‘impartial’, but rather the other way around, it is part of the moral order (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016Spencer-Oatey, Helen, and Dániel Z. Kádár 2016 The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate. East Asian Pragmatics 1 (1): 73–106. ): MPs in PMQs can be as partial and as unashamedly partisan as they choose. Having argued thus, as Murphy (2014)Murphy, James 2014 (Im)politeness during Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK Parliament. Pragmatics and Society 5: 76–104. notes, backbench MPs still want to get work done on behalf of their constituents, and so this can lead to partisanship being set to one side. Yet, it is safe to argue that MPs can behave in rather arbitrary ways in the PMQs, and they are protected by parliamentary privilege, which allows them to speak freely in the House without fear of legal action on grounds of slander. Thus, a second reason why PMQs may be seen as ritual is because it embodies, in a sense, a distinctive moral order (Kádár 2017Kádár, Dániel Z. 2017 Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ); what would normally be regarded as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unacceptable’ in other settings seems to be integral and self-evidently justified by the conduct and procedures of PMQs.

At the same time, MPs cannot simply say what they like. They are expected to observe certain traditions and conventions regarding what is termed ‘unparliamentary language’ (House of Commons Information Office Factsheet G7, 2004). Specifically, they should not be abusive or insulting, call another member a liar, suggest another MP has false motives, or misrepresent another MP. These ethical conventions are enforced by the Speaker, who may ask a Member to withdraw an objectionable utterance, and only the ritually sacred person of the Speaker can make such an order. Over the years, Speakers have objected to the use of abusive epithets such as ‘blackguard’, ‘coward’, ‘git’, ‘guttersnipe’, ‘hooligan’, ‘rat’, ‘swine’, ‘traitor’, and ‘stoolpigeon’ (House of Commons Information Office Factsheet G7, 2004).

1.2Mediated address in PMQs

As argued so far, in PMQs, MPs must orient both to the expectation that the dialogue should follow a question-response pattern and refrain from unacceptable ‘unparliamentary’ language. However, within these constraints, they are still allowed a great deal of scope to attack and criticise their fellow MPs. In doing so, they may employ considerable ingenuity to remain within the conventions of acceptable parliamentary language. For example, the former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill once famously substituted the phrase “terminological inexactitude” for the unacceptable term “lie” (House of Commons Information Office Factsheet G7, 2004).

Given that the ritual conventions of PMQs lead MPs to engage in language use that might be described as ‘gamelike’ (see Turner 1967Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. on the close relationship between ritual and game), it also provides notorious interactional resources for political point-scoring. Indeed, PMQs resemble a game because its participants are allowed to experiment with verbal techniques of aggression to win an upper hand (just as participants of group games such as British Bulldog, a football match, or a judo competition are allowed to physically do what is at their disposal), but only within boundaries that ensure that no harm is caused beyond what is institutionally allowed. This resemblance to competitive sports (which are always ritual by nature) was noted by the late Simon Hoggart (2011)Hoggart, Simon 2011 “Prime Minister’s Questions – or an Unpleasant Football Match.” The Guardian 14 December. Retrieved from http://​www​.theguardian​.com​/politics​/2011​/dec​/14​/prime​-ministers​-questions​-football​-match, the distinguished political columnist of The Guardian newspaper:

Prime Minister’s Questions is increasingly like an unpleasant football match, in which the game played publicly is accompanied by all sorts of secret grudge matches, settlement of scores and covert fouls committed when the players hope the ref is not looking.

Political point-scoring in PMQs has been analysed through qualitative analyses conducted by both Harris (2001)Harris, Sandra 2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12: 451–472. and by Bull and Wells (2012)Bull, Peter, and Pam Wells 2012 “Adversarial Discourse in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (1): 30–48. . Harris argued, based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987)Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. theory of politeness, that much PMQs discourse is composed of intentional and explicitly face-threatening acts (FTAs). In the context of broadcast political interviews, three distinctive forms of FTA have been identified (Bull, Elliott, Palmer, and Walker 1996Bull, Peter, Judy Elliott, Derrol Palmer, and Libby Walker 1996 “Why Politicians Are Three-Faced: The Face Model of Political Interviews.” British Journal of Social Psychology 35 (2): 267–284. ): threats to the party the politician represents, threats to individual face, and threats to what were termed significant others. The latter might be political allies (whose face the politician would wish to uphold) or political opponents (whose face the politician might wish to attack). In PMQs, threats to individual face (in the form of personal attacks) have been shown to occur with great frequency (Waddle, Bull, and Böhnke 2019Waddle, Maurice, Peter Bull, and Jan R. Böhnke 2019 “ ‘He is just the nowhere man of British politics’: Personal Attacks in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 38 (1): 61–85. ), based on the analysis of interactions between Leaders of Opposition and past five PMs (Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron). Similarly, Cameron’s successor as PM, Theresa May, was shown to to make regular personal attacks on the current Leader of Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn (Bull and Strawson 2019Bull, Peter, and Will Strawson 2019 “Can’t Answer? Won’t Answer? An Analysis of Equivocal Responses by Theresa May in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Parliamentary Affairs 6 February. ).

Illustrative techniques for performing FTAs in PMQs were identified by Harris (2001)Harris, Sandra 2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12: 451–472.  – for example, asking disingenuous questions to which the questioner already knows the answer. The intended perlocutionary effect of these disingenuous questions was not to obtain an answer, but rather to reframe the question in another context, thereby deconstructing the opponent’s argumentation. A more systematic investigation of such techniques was conducted by Bull and Wells (2012)Bull, Peter, and Pam Wells 2012 “Adversarial Discourse in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (1): 30–48. , who identified six distinctive ways in which FTAs are performed in questions to the PM, and five ways in which the PM may counter FTAs in replies. The term face aggravation (based on Goffman 1967Goffman, Erving 1967 “Where the Action Is.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behaviour by Erving Goffman, 149–270. Chicago: Aldine.) was utilised to refer to the aggressive use of facework, in which antagonists seek to score points at the other’s expense. Overall, Bull and Wells proposed that face aggravation between the PM and Leader of Opposition is not just an acceptable form of parliamentary discourse, but it is both sanctioned and rewarded, a means whereby the Leader of Opposition may enhance their own status. They further argued that PMQs should be regarded as another of the situations identified by Culpeper (1996)Culpeper, Jonathan 1996 “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367. , where impoliteness is not a marginal activity, but central to the interaction that takes place. In this respect, it shows similarity with other – highly ritual – settings such as army training. Army training involves respect (towards officers) and rudeness (towards ‘rookies’), i.e. it provides a ritual scene in which aggression and related face aggravation is a central part of the interactional dynamics.

The prevalence of impoliteness and covert aggression (Archer 2008Archer, Dawn 2008 “Verbal Aggression and Impoliteness: Related Or Synonymous?” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, ed. by D. Bousfield and M. A. Locher, 181–207. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.) operates in noteworthy contradiction to a number of ritualistic conventions governing the discourse of PMQs. In particular, MPs must address their remarks to one another only indirectly through the medium of the Speaker. MPs must also refer to other MPs in the third person (rather than as ‘you’), and use formal and honorific titles, such as the ‘Right Honourable Gentleman’ or the ‘Foreign Secretary’. If breached, these conventions are enforced by the Speaker, who may suspend an MP from sitting in the House. So, for example, a left wing Labour MP (Dennis Skinner) was suspended from the House for a day (11 April 2016) because he persistently referred to former Conservative PM David Cameron not as Prime Minister but as “Dodgy Dave”, in relation to a controversy over Cameron’s personal tax affairs. This act of suspension is referred to in parliamentary procedure as ‘naming’, once again an example par excellence of the ritualistic character of PMQs. As Kádár (2017)Kádár, Dániel Z. 2017 Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. argues, institutionalised ritual practices tend to trigger meta-definitions, i.e. in many lingua-cultures detailed regulations define how language users should behave in institutional settings where rituals prevail. British parliamentary rituals are prime examples of this phenomenon, as illustrated above by our discussion on the nature of rights and obligations at PMQs.

In the present paper, we define the question-response dynamic of PMQs and the role of the Speaker as the simultaneous recipient/moderator of questions and responses as ‘mediated address’. This term refers to the fact that, whereas in other situational contexts the involvement of a mediator and the ritual interactional format might suggest a high degree of formality and deference, in PMQs discourse they are often combined with the strategic use of FTAs. Whereas MPs may be seen to observe their duty of being civilly ‘indirect’ by addressing one another through the Speaker, this practice may not be indirect in terms of situated pragmatic operation. While Harris (2001)Harris, Sandra 2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12: 451–472. argues that these procedures serve to mitigate FTAs, thereby keeping the discourse within the bounds of acceptable parliamentary language, an alternative view is that in PMQs discourse they may actually work as boosters for FTAs.

What makes this form of interaction so powerful is that it can cast a veil over brutal attacks. Thus, in the following example, David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, launched a wholesale assault on former Labour PM Gordon Brown (Bull and Wells 2012Bull, Peter, and Pam Wells 2012 “Adversarial Discourse in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (1): 30–48. , 37):

Mr Speaker, for 10 years the PM plotted and schemed to have this job – and for what? No conviction, just calculation; no vision, just a vacuum. Last week he lost his political authority, and this week he is losing his moral authority. How long are we going to have to wait before the past makes way for the future?

If Cameron’s comments had been addressed directly to the PM, it would make this assault much more personal. Such a ‘personalised’ version of the above attack might look as follows:

For 10 years you have plotted and schemed to have this job – and for what? No conviction, just calculation; no vision, just a vacuum. Last week you lost your political authority, and this week you are losing your moral authority. How long are we going to have to wait before the past makes way for the future?

This latter attack would be regarded as beyond the bounds of acceptable parliamentary language, and certainly, Cameron would have been corrected for not addressing his remarks to the Speaker. Nevertheless, through the use of third-person language Cameron was arguably able to make a more damning indictment of the PM, whereby Gordon Brown is not addressed personally, but as object of talk.

So far, we have overviewed the ritual characteristics of PMQs. We have argued that, along with the sacred status of the Speaker and the dramatic/liminal and anti-structural nature of these clashes, the pragmatically most significant ritual characteristic of PMQs interaction is that it operates through mediated address, i.e., there is no way for participants to directly interact without the involvement of the Speaker who moderates the interaction in an ‘in-between’ role. Thus, the Speaker holds ‘procedural power’ in this ritual game and is empowered to enforce participants to obey its rules.

In this context, the main theme of this paper is specifically on the ritualistic convention whereby politicians in parliamentary debate may only refer to one another in the third person through the channel of the Speaker. Notably, on some occasions, politicians will actually refer to the Speaker as ‘Mr Speaker’; the particular focus of this paper is on what communicative functions are served by this explicit reference. In the following section, we discuss the research methodology on which our paper is based.

4.1Discourse organisation

Due to the ritual nature of PMQs, there are recurrent moments in the sessions when the Speaker is referred to as ‘Mr Speaker’. This is highly conventionalised and not in any sense conflictual. In the following example, the Speaker calls Jeremy Corbyn to speak in the House (“I call Jeremy Corbyn” [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]). Corbyn acknowledges the allocation of turn with this formulation:

In early January, such felicitations are conventional and customary, and as such may be seen as conventional in nature. Note that in giving the Leader of Opposition an opportunity conventionally to greet others also facilitates the organisation of the discourse, as the Speaker ratifies the first politician to make a question to the PM.

The acknowledgement of an allocated turn supplemented with an explicit reference to the Speaker may also be utilised to support the formation of alignment between a politician and his electors (cf. Kadar and Zhang 2019Kádár, Dániel Z., and Sen Zhang 2019 Intersubjectivity and implicitness in Chinese political discourses: A Case-Study of the 2018 Vaccine Scandal. Journal of Language and Politics 18 (5). ). This is the case in Extract (2), in which Jeremy Corbyn first acknowledges the allocation of turn and thus the right to speak with the ritual expression of gratitude towards the Speaker. This former acknowledgement is recurrent and ceremonial, so it is part of the ritual dynamics of the PMQs. However, in this turn Corbyn performs another act of thanking realised with the performative verb ‘to thank’ and expands the more strategic expression of gratitude to his electors in the Labour Party:

Explicit references to the Speaker may also serve simply to clarify as to who the intended addressee is. In the following example, Jeremy Corbyn pays tribute to the late Gerald Kaufman, a former Labour MP whose funeral Corbyn had just attended. He refers to a message from the Speaker which was conveyed by the rabbi at the ceremony.

In this case, the explicit reference to Mr Speaker disambiguates the referential domain of the second person pronoun of “your message”. It is notable that this is one of the few occasions that Hansard actually records the reference to Mr Speaker (usually they are omitted), presumably to ensure that the text is intelligible to the reader.

Explicit references to the Speaker of the House of Commons with a discourse-organising function have the function of accepting the macro-presuppositions of the discourse of PMQs and thereby recognise the ritual character of the event.

4.2Conflictual situations

However, as the data analysis above shows (see Table 1), explicit references to the Speaker were significantly utilised in those contexts in which the Leader of the Opposition challenged the PM’s policies and deconstructed their argumentation. The following two extracts are from PMQs (15 November 2015). Extract (4) is from the fifth question asked by the Leader of the Opposition, while Extract (5) is a follow-up question, realised as his sixth and final question in this particular question-and-response sequence. Unlike their discourse-organising functions, which usually occur turn-initially, if acknowledging turn allocation, or turn-medially, if disambiguating referential domains, the conflictual-situation signalling function of explicit reference to the Speaker is also anchored in the turn-medial position. However, it additionally requires a negatively loaded context, imbued by syntactic, morphological, and semantic negation, which is frequently intensified with adverbials or, in the context of PMQs, interruptions and other kinds of disruptive behaviour (printed below in italics). Frequently, the loaded context also contains quotations with a challenging force (cf. Fetzer and Bull 2019Fetzer, Anita, and Peter Bull 2019 “Quoting Ordinary People in Prime Minister’s Questions.” In The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres, ed. by A. Fetzer and E. Weizman, 73–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ).

In Extract (4), Jeremy Corbyn challenges PM David Cameron’s previous response to his request for information as not appropriate, using slightly attenuated syntactic negation (“not absolutely sure”) boosted with an afterthought (“no doubt”). The explicit reference to the Speaker occurs in this negatively loaded context and indicates a transmission from the Leader of the Opposition’s comment on the inappropriateness of the PM’s answer while at the same time introducing a chain of counter-arguments which deconstruct the PM’s argument regarding cuts to police numbers. In (5) the PM’s response is challenged, this time not by the Leader of the Opposition himself, but rather indirectly through a quotation from an ordinary citizen (cf. Fetzer and Weizman 2018Fetzer, Anita, and Elda Weizman 2018 “ ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: The Construction of Ordinariness through Quotations in Mediated Political Discourse. Discourse & Society 29 (5): 1–19. ) directed towards the PM. This conflictual situation is signalled by interruptions from other MPs, which are followed up by the Leader of the Opposition with an explicit reference to the Speaker and the ultimate challenge formulated as a yes/no-question (“Will the Prime Minister be able to tell us” with the implication “or will he not?”). Both references to the Speaker index the macro-presuppositions of the discourse of PMQs, signalling that challenges with a strong pragmatic force may be forthcoming while at the same time appealing to the Speaker as a mediator that their formulation is in accordance with the constraints of the ritual exchange:

According to the official Treasury data, the Home Office’s overall budget fell from £12.6bn in 2011–12 to £10.9bn in 2015–16 (a real terms cut of 18 per cent). According to a House of Commons Library briefing, if one excludes staff on a career break or maternity/paternity leave, the true strength of the UK’s 43 police forces in March 2016 was just 118,779, the weakest since March 1985 ( The Independent, 5 June 2017The Independent 2017 “Did the Conservatives Really Cut the Police and Make Us Less Safe from Terror Attacks?” 5 June.). Given that following the general election of 2010, David Cameron formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, both the above questions can be regarded as attacks on government policy, specifically with regard to cuts in police budgets and in levels of staffing. In both instances, Corbyn prefaces the attacks by referring explicitly to the Speaker.

A further example can be seen in the following interchange between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, in which he made an extensive attack on the government’s mismanagement of the NHS [National Health Service]. As has been the case with Excerpts (4) and (5), explicit references to the Speaker are embedded in a context imbued by syntactic negation (“cannot provide”, “not concerned”, “not getting”), morphological negation (“unsafe”) and semantic negation (“so overstretched”, “lack of care”, “prevent”, “shortage”, “state of emergency”, “blighting”, “fewer”), and multiple interruptions. It is after these interruptions that the Leader of the Opposition refers explicitly to the Speaker, drawing his attention to this inappropriate form of interaction, thereby acting in discordance with the constraints of the interaction ritual:

Corbyn’s attack on the government record took place in the context of a report from the British Medical Association, according to which the NHS is “at ‘breaking point’ with a decline in the number of hospital beds leading to delays and cancelled operations” ( The Guardian, 20 February 2017The Guardian 2017 “NHS at Breaking Point, According to British Medical Association” 20 February.). Notably, Corbyn’s attack includes three references to Mr Speaker, and a further indication of its conflictual nature is reflected in interruptions from Conservative MPs.

Extracts (7), (8), and (9) are from PMQs, 4 November 2015. They illustrate the orchestrated interplay between the discursive functions of explicit references to the Speaker and their contextual embeddedness. The first explicit reference to the Speaker supplemented with an expression of gratitude has a discourse-organisational function, acknowledging turn allocation. This is followed up with an on-record challenge by the Leader of the Opposition, making explicit with a performative (“I note”) embedded in a highly negative context (“not offered whatsoever”, “crisis”) the PM’s lack of responsiveness in his prior turn, which is acting in discordance with the discourse’s macro presuppositions of providing appropriate responses to questions. The challenge is ratified by disruptive behaviour, commented on by the Speaker, calling for order in (8) and thereby making explicit the code of conduct in the House. The Leader of the Opposition continues with his turn in (9), again with an explicit reference to the Speaker embedded in a highly loaded context imbued with syntactic negation (“will not answer the question”), signifying a potential conflict, in that the PM is acting in discordance with the macro-presupposition that he should provide appropriate answers to questions. The reference to a negated hypothetical future action by the PM may count as the communicative action of a threat, in particular against the background that the Leader of the Opposition provides an answer to this hypothetical question with a quotation from an expert source; this leads to another on-record challenge formulated as an either-or question:

Explicit references to the Speaker are not only produced by the Leader of the Opposition, but the PM also makes use of them, albeit less frequently. The following Excerpts ((10), (11), (12) and (13)) are from PMQs, 13 January 2016. In (11), The PM is responding to a question from the Leader of the Opposition (10). In that question, the Leader of the Opposition’s explicit reference to the Speaker is realised in the initial position of his turn, which makes it a prime candidate for a discourse-organising function. However, in this instance, the turn-allocation is not supplemented with an expression of gratitude, as would have been the case if the turn had been allocated by the Speaker. Furthermore, Corbyn’s explicit reference to the Speaker is embedded in a negative context and a quotation from an ordinary citizen. For these reasons, it is assigned the function of signalling a conflictual situation.

The same function is utilised by the PM in (11). Again, the explicit reference to the Speaker occurs in a negatively loaded context with syntactic negation (“not going to be able to deal with”, “is it not interesting”), morphological negation (“nothing”) a question (“isn’t it interesting, Mr Speaker”), which is repeated, and dialogically formulated challenges as conversational quotations along the lines of “I say – you say” which assign Labour the role of being “conservative” and thus the party which is against changes and wants people to remain poor (“stay stuck in poverty”).

In (13), the PM responds to the Leader of the Opposition’s fifth (penultimate) question of their question-and-response sequence (12). His explicit reference to the Speaker is realised turn-medially, and as has been the case with all of the turn-medial references to the Speaker, their function is that of signalling a conflictual situation. In (13), it is not a direct challenge about Labour’s policies but rather the claim that Jeremy Corbyn owns a home. [Corbyn is referred to as the Right Honourable Gentleman, in line with the House’s code of conduct]. This claim could be interpreted as a reference to the politician’s private sphere of life and thus as not in full agreement with the macro presuppositions of the discourse of PMQs, thereby as not fully appropriate. Here, the explicit reference to the Speaker in combination with the redressive action “let us put it like this” mitigates the force of claim and the forthcoming challenge formatted as a question (a format which is the privilege of the Leader of the Opposition only) – “what is the Right Honourable Gentleman frightened of?”:

Explicit references to the Speaker are generally edited out in the official transcript of parliamentary debates (Hansard), as they do not seem to contribute to the information content of the conversational contributions. This quantitative and qualitative analysis of explicit references to the Speaker has shown that they index the macro presuppositions of the discourse of PMQs, targeting the participants rights and obligations as regards (1) turn allocation and turn-taking, (2) participant-exclusive rights and obligations to ask questions for the Leader of the Opposition and provide responses to the questions for the PM, (3) appropriateness of their conversational contributions as regards content and formulation, and (4) possible infringements on the interaction-ritual constraints. It has been shown that the discursive function of explicit references to the Speaker depends on their positioning in the turn and on their local contexts. If they are positioned initially and supplemented by expressions of gratitude, they fulfil a discourse-organisational function, acknowledging turn allocation. If they are realised medially and their embedding context is imbued with negativity, quotations, interruptions and other forms of disruption, they signal a conflictual situation.