Political Media Discourses

In this Chapter, we give an outline of Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CaDS) and explain the rationale and the advantages of employing such an approach to political media discourses. We look at the history of using corpora to study the interaction of political actors, the media as mediators, and the general public, as well as how the advent of new media is altering the nature of this interaction. In an illustrative case-study, we analyse two corpora of transcripts of press briefings on international affairs, both from 2018, namely, US State Departments press briefings (USSD-18) and the English-language versions of the China Foreign Affairs Ministry press briefings (CFA-18). We intend to compare and contrast these datasets from the perspectives both of the political issues discussed and, also, linguistically as two variations of a discourse type intended and perceived as a complex communicative event by all ‘sides’, that is, the podiums (acting variously as principles, authors and vehicles) and the journalists (addressees but also co-principles) and the real beneficiaries (other ‘over-hearing’ powers, the media and the public). We will also discuss the negotiation of meanings, including the pervasive phenomenon of forced lexical priming (flooding the discourse with strategic messaging; Duguid 2009) performed by the podiums.