Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. Anita Fetzer (University of Augsburg): “It’s a very good thing to bring democracy erm directly to everybody at home”: The strategic use of ‘doing ordinariness’ in mediated political discourse

This paper examines the discursive construction of ordinariness by elite politicians in the context of mediated British political discourse (parliamentary debates, political speeches, articles in online newspapers). The analysis focuses on how politicians assign ordinary-life experience the status of an object of discourse, and on how they ‘do ordinariness’ in the mediated political arena. To bring ordinary-life experience into the discourse, they may use quotations or narrate small stories, and to ‘do ordinariness’ they may opt for the local frame breaks and the use of colloquial language.
The paper shows that the discursive construction of moments of ordinary-life experience in a non-ordinary-life context is done strategically to align with the audience as a whole or with particular sub-groups: the electorate and their followers.

(presented as part of Linguistisches Kolloquium)

Poster