Narrativity discovered and narrativity uncovered: Narration and narrativisation in related political discourse
Abstract
This paper provides fresh insights about media representations of political debates as highly agonistic environments, and in addition about narratively related (reported) speech as a transformative technique favoured by journalists to report on televised political debates in the next day's newspaper. In doing so it also demonstrates a method (using the discourse analysis software Prospero) for detecting and analysing formulaic semantico-discursive phrases that recur in large textual corpuses.
Following a theoretical approach rooted in the ideas of polyphony and narrativisation as an act of translation, it describes two formulas with a strong narrative and argumentative dimension, X udelal B, kdyz rekl A (In saying A, X did B) and Jak X rekl, ... (As X said, ...). I show how both are deployed to support the reporter's rendition of the debates as ongoing argumentative contests, the first to "uncover" the drama behind what was said, the second to project a mission or scenario "discovered" in the words of an authority.
A reporter who uses the phrase In saying A, X did B is performing narrativisation, whereas one who uses the phrase As X said, ... is performing critical or apologetic co-narration.