Tracking the change in institutional genre: a diachronic corpus-based study of White House Press Briefings

Genre analysis mainly focuses on the description of language use in the different professional and institutional domains (Bhatia 2004). Due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation genre boundaries are becoming less clear-cut (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005), resulting in textual realization hybridity (Poppi 2007). Institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999). Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our aim is to uncover recurrent phrases in the White House Press Briefings to look at their diachronic variation and at the variables determining it. In other words, our main objective is to analyse how the discourse preferences constructing the podiums and the press in their way of projecting the referenced context and their subjectivity vary across 18 years. The data come from a corpus including all the Press briefings from January 1993 to May 2011. The addition of XML mark-up, including information about individual speakers and their role, allows us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation. The analysis of keywords and key-clusters helps to identify the “aboutness” and the style in each presidency (Scott & Tribble 2006), and allows the access to the identification of “pointers to the typical structure of discourse” (Bondi 2010: 10) highlighting static strategic communicative clusters, organizational phrases dynamic markers of authorial stance and content clusters. The analysis relies on two pieces of software: Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2007) to retrieve key clusters and Xaira to study their distribution across the years. Our findings show a more prominent interactive presence of the podium as an individual in Clinton’s first term than in the following years. The dominant key clusters include mental and cognitive verb phrases (e.g. I don’t believe; I think) expressing a hedging function that is less prominent in Bush’s briefings, where the podium seems to perform only the ‘mediator’ role. In Obama a higher involvement of the speaker is confirmed by the key cluster I think the president not merely used to project an idea but rather to mitigate his assertions. The analysis further demonstrates that a speaker’s power of persuasion is greatly determined by an ability to shift in and out of various roles within and across ‘discourse spaces’. Thus, the exploitation of specific discourse strategies by political actors goes hand in hand with their political strategies. These are realized through the repetition of specific patterns and subtly conveyed meanings. Although the context plays its role (attenuation and boosting depend on the importance and delicacy of the topics at issue) the main strategy of communication has got pragmatic reasons. The different shades of the meanings of the mental verbs confirm that the genre of conversation is one of the main components of this institutional genre together with their hedging function typical of political discourse and in particular of political interview.