A Functional Discourse Analysis of Two Candidates’ Interviews in 2017 British Parliamentary Election

Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse has been used in a large number of discourse studies around the world. Nevertheless, it has been commonly applied to the study of debates (e.g., Glantz, Benoit, & Airne, 2013; Loughery & Ewald, 2013; Benoit, Hansen, & Verser, 2003; Choi & Benoit, 2009). This paper attempts to expand the applicability of functional analyses to interviews. Therefore, interviews with two candidates for 2017 British Parliamentary Election, namely Theresa May, the Conservative Party nominee and Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party nominee, were content analyzed using the framework of the Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse. Thefindings indicated that differences between debates and interviews emerged out of the differences in the nature of these two kinds of advertising methods for elections. The results were not consistent with the findings from prior analyses of political campaign debates in various areas. For instance, the analyses of the interviews showed that the candidates did not use similar patterns of acclaims, attacks and defenses to build preferability. Additionally, the role of the interviewer as an attacker was manifested throughout the interview in that most of the questions or comments presented by the interviewer were challenging for the candidates, hence they dramatically increased the number of defenses. In addition, the interviewer played a key role in deciding on what subjects to be discussed. Another difference was that, as the candidates do not confront each other in the interviews, the attacks were fewer in number and less direct. This research confirms the value of categories suggested by functional theory to study political discourse. Moreover, it demonstrates that the theory can be developed further to take into account more forms of political campaigns and other aspects oflinguistic theory to include nonfunctional or overlapping function utterances as well

کلیدواژه ها:

British parliamentary election ، acclaim ، attack ، defense ، political discourse