What is it about?
This article explores, from a rhetorical perspective, the distinctions between the communicative mechanisms of parliamentary adversariality and those of parliamentary cooperativeness, by focusing on the use of rhetorical appeals in parliamentary parentheticals. The study of parentheticals (i.e. parenthetically made comments), provides insights into the interactive rhetorical strategies of both personal and institutional confrontation during parliamentary debates.
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Why is it important?
In the light of the findings reported in the present study, parentheticals may be defined as foregrounding and backgrounding rhetorical strategies that filter the speakers’ standpoints and arguments in their ongoing discourse. By means of parentheticals, speakers adjust their ongoing discourse to the situation, to their interlocutors and to their audiences, as well as to their own end-goals. In doing that, their discourse shifts from the role as speakers to the role as observers and commentators. Parentheticals represent sentential and intersentential strategies of planning, signalling, explicitating, justifying and/or evaluating the ongoing talk.
Perspectives
The study of parentheticals shows that a recurring rhetorical feature of the MPs’ (= members of Parliament) interventions in the UK Parliament consists of parentheticals, i.e. parenthetically made comments. While these comments often focus on the ongoing discourse and the current speaker, they may target simultaneously one or several specifically addressed MPs, and/or a wider audience (whether Hansard reporters, visitors in the Strangers’ Gallery or TV-viewers).
Professor Cornelia Ilie
Strömstad Academy, Sweden
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This page is a summary of: Parenthetically Speaking: Parliamentary Parentheticals as Rhetorical Strategies, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/9783110933253.253.
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