0000000000092383
AUTHOR
Marco Venuti
‘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…
A corpus-based discourse analysis of security in White House press briefings
White House press briefings are daily meetings between the White House press secretary and the press. As one of the main official channels of communication for the White House, they play a crucial role in the administration communication strategies (Kumar 2007). Security has always been a key concept in political debate (Buzan 2000), particularly after the events of 9/11 and the rising of a new regime of international security (Fairclough 2007). Our analysis of a corpus of press briefings ranging across five presidencies, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, will focus on the lexical item security from a modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies perspective (Partington 2010). The an…