20 March 2026 – 16:00 – 18:00 (Campus Schuman, Maison de la Recherche, Room 2.44 and Zoom)

Anna TERZI (Stockholm University) : “Hybrid Signals in Italian Political Communication. Discourse Markers and Pragmatic Variation in Broadcast Talk”

Abstract:

In contemporary political communication, meaning is not produced by arguments alone. It also emerges from how political interaction unfolds over time: how speakers enter the exchange, maintain control of the floor, and bring sequences to a close. These interactional processes are made visible through a range of subtle linguistic and multimodal cues. Discourse markers, in particular, are intrinsically hybrid elements, positioned at the intersection of semantics and pragmatics and of textual and interactional organization. Their hybrid nature makes them especially well suited to the analysis of political communication and broadcast talk, both of which combine institutional forms of speech with features of everyday interaction.

This seminar draws on my doctoral research on discourse markers in Italian televised political discourse, based on a qualitative analysis of debates and interviews broadcast between 2000 and 2020. The study adopts a functional approach grounded in Bazzanella’s compositional model (1995; 2006), which conceptualizes discourse markers as context-sensitive resources whose pragmatic value emerges from their sequential positioning and interactional use.

The analysis combines insights from Conversation Analysis (Heritage, 2006; Hutchby et al., 2006) and argumentation theory (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004) to examine discourse markers as resources through which politicians orient their talk toward multiple audiences. Discourse markers help organize interaction while simultaneously shaping argumentative moves addressed both to co-present interlocutors and to broader audiences, including the universal audience presupposed by persuasive discourse. In doing so, they activate shared presuppositions and calibrate alignment and disagreement across different levels of address.

Within this framework, the seminar focuses on ma (‘but’) and dopodiché (‘after which’) as markers of distinct pragmatic modes of negation. While ma typically signals direct opposition, dopodiché tends to realize a more indirect and strategic form of negation, momentarily accommodating the opponent’s position before redirecting the argumentative trajectory. These contrasting uses show how negation is interactionally accomplished through discourse markers, shaping the progression of political talk and the positioning of speakers within it.

References:

Bazzanella, C. (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In L. Renzi, G. Salvi, & A. Cardinaletti (ed.),             Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione (Vol. III, p. 225-257). Bologna: Il Mulino.
Bazzanella, C. (2006). Discourse markers in Italian: towards a “compositional” meaning. In K. Fischer (ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 449-464). Elsevier.
Heritage, J. (2005). Conversation analysis and institutional talk. In R. Sanders & K. Fitch (ed.), Handbook of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 103-146). Psychology Press.
Hutchby, I. (2006). Media talk: Conversation analysis and the study of broadcasting. Open University Press.
Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1958). Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle
rhétorique. Éditions de l’Université.
van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation. The
pragmadialectical approach. Cambridge University Press.