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Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-09-24, 10:52 authored by Saul AlbertSaul Albert, Chase Wesley Raymond
Politicians’ greetings are usually studied for their symbolic significance as media events rather than as interactional practices. This article uses conversation analysis to study the greetings that occur just before the start of a stage-managed White House media event. We first operationalize and illustrate the constellation of co-constructed practices that enable a ‘greeter’ to pivot between multiple ‘greeteds’, and we show how such an activity reconstitutes participants’ situated social identities. We then broaden the scope of our inquiry to consider how such interactional practices contribute to Trump’s political persona. We conclude by arguing that our approach can illuminate both the communication styles of specific individuals, as well as the generalized methods through which political personae are constructed in and through social interaction.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Language & Communication

Volume

69

Pages

67 - 83

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Elsevier

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Language & Communication and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.08.001

Publication date

2019-09-24

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.08.001

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Saul Albert

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    Loughborough Publications

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