Brexit has not only changed the political landscape but has also given rise to a number of new species in the Homo genus according to scientists. Here is a quick run through some of the newcomers.
Continue reading “New species observed since Brexit referendum”
Sometimes being impolite and creating conflict doesn’t take much effort. All you need to do is raise your voice!
“once again we’re living above the shop!”
Fight for control of the floor can sometimes produce odd utterances out of the mouths of the interlocutors. Here is Boris Johnson and Nick Robinson spluttering syllables like bird wings flapping in the air as they fight for the turn in an interview on Radio 4 Today programme.
The eyes play an important part in human communication. They can signal an intention to communicate and sometimes act to facilitate turn transition. In this example here, we see Tom Watson, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, using his eyes to hold the floor during an interview on Sunday.
Some slips of the tongue (speech errors) for analysis. Latest ones on top.
“She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”
“Mr Davey, you have to understand, that we’re all looking at you as hypocrites.”
John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, likes to pick up on members who ‘chunter from a sedentary position’ – a slightly politer, and perhaps archaic, way of saying ‘shut up and stop muttering’.
Certain words in the House of Commons are normally taboo but sometimes it is possible to get away with using them by quoting someone and asking for ‘leave’ from The Speaker.
Political commentators and journalists all have their own idiosyncratic styles when interviewing politicians. Emily Maitlis, the BBC Newsnight commentator, often shows exasperation and incredulity in her voice through sweeping intonation falls and facial expressions. Here is a brief analysis to show how she uses linguistic features to signal this attitude.
Michael Gove, Conservative MP, serves up some curious hand gestures while speaking including teacup gestures and steeple Vulcans. Here are some of the more interesting examples from his interview on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday.
“HS2, we’re probably too pregnant to pull out.”
Editor: The BBC’s Question Time programme on Thursday nights seems to court controversy these days as we hold it to ever more stringent impartiality standards. In this blog, Elena Ioannidou dissects the discourse that this programme produces from a CA perspective. The blog is split into two parts. Part two is here.
Continue reading “Conversation Analysis – BBC Question Time (part 1)”
Editor: This is part 2 of the blog on the BBC Question Time programme. Part 1 is here.
Continue reading “Conversation Analysis – BBC Question Time (part 2)”
Negotiating the floor can take on epic proportions at times with your interlocutor when you both want to get something out. In the following two examples, David Davis and John Humphrys almost end up rapping together as they fight for the floor with each other!
“If you now try to hold us in against our will you will be facing perfidious Albion on speed.”
Reporter: How long is a long extension, please?
Juncker: Until the very end.
The dreaded Brexit slip strikes again!
What is the best way to guarantee nobody ever interrupts you during a debate?
“If this doesn’t work out, I’ll probably will do it, maybe definitely.”
Theresa May seems to have developed many ways of saying ‘no’ without actually meaning it. In her interview with Andrew Marr at the weekend, she frequently used reduced articulations of the word (e.g. ‘n-’) to preface her responses to Marr’s questions.
Speech errors don’t get much better when they appear in front of a live audience of millions on the BBC for the final of Strictly Come Dancing. This Freudian slips will go down as one of the classics.
“I believe that all fish should be in the sea.”
Slips of the tongue (speech errors) nearly always include some repair whereby the speaker realises the mistake and then attempts to correct for their error.
Speech errors (slips of the tongue) often ‘borrow’ from language in the mind that is downstream of the target language. Here is a good example from Theresa May at PMQs.
Continue reading “Slip of the Tongue: Borrowing from downstream”
Prime Minister’s questions (PMQs) got a ‘whooo!’ of surprise today when Jeremy Corbyn was speaking at the dispatch box.
One way to put a politician on the spot is to ask them how many people have been affected by their policy. Three times seems to be the optimum number of times to ask according to the Andrew Marr’s rulebook as he interviewed Theresa May on Sunday.
Slips of the tongue can be annoying for interviewers when they happen once. But when one error leads into another and then another, all in the space of a few words, it can be triply frustrating.
Vince Cable should perhaps leave sexual innuendos to others after fluffing his lines at the Liberal Democrats’ conference on Tuesday. Cable had intended to say that the Tories were locked in an ‘erotic spasm’ over Brexit, but instead the words came out as ‘exotic spresm’ producing an interesting slip.
Phoneme insertion in line 01.
Slips of the tongue that involve word substitution always seem to get the biggest laughs. Here Jeremy Hunt, the new Foreign Secretary, mistakenly refers to his wife as Japanese when she is in fact Chinese. The humour in this slip was obvious to the audience of Chinese dignitaries during a visit by Hunt to Beijing to discuss post-Brexit trade talks.
Standing up and speaking in public is not just a one-way affair from speaker to audience. The reaction of the audience to what is said can be just as important and defining as the speaker’s words themselves.
“This is the most expensive round of golf in history.”
Conversation can sometimes be like a game of poker, raising and doubling stakes, as the Andrew Marr Show demonstrated on Sunday.
Sally Who? You don’t get a name like that unless you work for the BBC!
“You wait forever for a bus question at PMQs, and then seven come along at once.”
An interesting slip of the tongue by Theresa May at Prime Minister’s question time occurred on Wednesday and suggested that perhaps we had voted for rather more than we thought during the EU referendum in 2016!
It seems strange that two of the smallest and most commonest words in the English dictionary could cause confusion between interviewer and interviewee but that is what ‘a’ and ‘the’ seemed to do on Sunday when Andrew Marr interviewed James Brokenshire, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, on the BBC.
