‘I don’t know the answer to that question’: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of White House Press Briefings

White House Press Briefings, daily meetings with the press held by the White House Press Secretary, are the main information conduit for the White House (Kumar 2007). They are considered a “political chess game” where the Press Secretary and the press face a “wrestling match” (Partington 2006: 16). Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in t…