This research project is supported by a research grant from The German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF)

(Grant I-1475-104.4/2018)

The project examines the discursive value of the first-order concept of ordinary in the context of public talk media, as well as the discursive strategies and their intended perlocutionary effects for the discursive construction of ordinariness as an object of talk in mediated public talk, through the positioning of self and other speakers as ordinary and non-ordinary.

The focus is on the production format of those interactions in which ordinary speakers position themselves, their interlocutors or third parties as ordinary, and by doing so refer indexically to the interconnectedness between the private/public sphere and social, political and communicative accountability. The discursive strategies and strategy-specific linguistic constructions to be analysed include, among others, first-frame meta-pragmatic comments on ordinariness and non-ordinariness; semantic prosodies; self- and other-naming, address terms and deictic expressions used for self- and other-reference; quotations from ordinary people’s talk; ironic criticism of (non)ordinariness; small stories and self-disclosures; subjectification and conversationalisation.

Fetzer, Anita. 2022. Doing things with discourse in the mediated political arena: Participation and pluralism of discursive action. Pragmatics & Society 13(5): 769–792.

Fetzer, Anita. 2022. Small stories and accountability of discursive action in mediated political discourse: Contextualisation and recontextualisation of ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants. Frontiers in Communication. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.970215

Bull, Peter, Fetzer, Anita & Kádár, Daniel. 2020. Calling Mr Speaker ‘Mr Speaker’: The strategic use of ritual references to the Speaker of the UK House of Commons. Pragmatics 30(1): 64-87. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19020.bul

Fetzer, Anita & Bull, Peter. 2019. Quoting ordinary people in Prime Minister’s Questions. In Anita Fetzer and Elda Weizman (eds.).  The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 73-101.

Weizman, Elda and Fetzer, Anita. 2019. Introduction. In Anita Fetzer and Elda Weizman (eds.). The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-17.

Fetzer, Anita & Weizman, Elda. 2018. “What I would say to John and everyone like John is ...”: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse. Discourse & Society 29(5).

Weizman, Elda & Fetzer, Anita. 2018. Constructing ordinariness in online journals: a corpus-based study in the Israeli context. Israel Studies in Language and Society 11(1).

For Open Access links to these publications click here.