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Conversationalization and Democratization in a Radio Chat Show: a Grammar-Led Investigation

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Conversationalization and Democratization in a Radio Chat Show: a Grammar-Led Investigation Conversationalization and democratization in a radio chat show: A grammar-led investigation Nicholas Smith University of Leicester, UK This paper investigates the closely-related concepts of conversationalization and democratization in a specialized register, the biographical radio chat show, represented by BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (DID). To explore these concepts in the show we first undertake a data-driven stylistic analysis of ‘key’ parts-of-speech (POS) tags, i.e. statistically significant grammatical categories that distinguish a corpus of DID talk from a corpus of conversation. We then track these grammatical features over four sampling periods to see what changes occur, and the extent to which they evidence conversationalization and democratization. This process is done separately for guests and hosts, since they each have a different role in the participation framework of the show. Results suggest a clear overall movement across time towards conversational norms and levelling of the differences between guests and hosts. The features that evidence conversationalization are usually but not necessarily evidence of democratization, and vice versa. We relate the findings to the changing contextual environment of the show. Keywords: conversationalization; democratization; Desert Island Discs; participation framework; key POS-tags 1. Introduction The terms democratization and conversationalization have been used in previous research to refer to broad processes of change in public forms of discourse, particularly those used in contemporary western societies (Fairclough, 1995, 2014; Steen, 2003; Leech et al., 2009). It is clear from the way these terms have been applied that they are assumed to share a lot of common ground. However, it is less clear in what ways (if at all) they differ: Can a field of discourse become progressively more conversational without becoming more democratic? Or more democratic but not more conversational? Such issues have been partially touched on before, but not apparently explored in systematically sampled data across time. 1 This paper seeks to address this research gap. The data we use for the investigation are from broadcast talk, specifically interview transcriptions from the popular British radio show Desert Island Discs (DID), which has been running almost continuously on BBC since 1942. The basic format of DID has changed remarkably little over the years: essentially a host invites a guest, a prominent public figure, to imagine being marooned on a desert island, to choose eight pieces of music to accompany them, and to talk about their lives in relation to the music. In previous research DID has sometimes been classed generically as a chat show (Castell, 1999; Smith and Waters, 2018), although music also plays an important role (Brown et al., 2017). The programme is interesting from the perspective of style change because a) the turnover of hosts has been very low, and b) during the 1970s and 1980s its hosting station, BBC Radio 4, was the site of conflicting pressures over issues such as emotional disclosure on programmes, and popularization (‘dumbing down’, in some cases) vs. seriousness (Hendy, 2007, 2017). The corpus data used here come from a crucial period in these struggles, and this may have influenced the course of democratization/ conversationalization.1 We will explore conversationalization and democratization in DID by drawing on a corpus – or representative sample – of transcriptions from the show in four periods. We will compare this corpus with a corpus of conversation to determine how far the frequencies of grammatical word classes used by hosts and guests on DID across time differ from conversation, and what evidence the comparative data provide for changes of style. 2. Overlapping notions of change, and the context of Desert Island Discs 2.1. Democratization, conversationalization and sociability Norman Fairclough, perhaps the person most strongly associated with democratization and conversationalization of discourse, defines the first of these terms as “the removal of inequalities and asymmetries in the discursive and linguistic rights, obligations and prestige of groups of people” (Fairclough, 1992: 201). Fairclough (p.201-207) identifies a number of ways in which linguistic democratization can be realized, including: • democratization of access, e.g. accepting people with regional accents for public speaking roles in the media;2 1 As Doctor (2017) notes, the very introduction of programmes like DID during the 1940s was itself a step towards ‘democracy’ in British broadcasting. Up to that point music selections on the radio were controlled by the broadcasters themselves. 2 This aspect is similar to Coupland’ (2014) vernacularization: “shifts towards a more positive valorization of vernacularity” (p.85). Although diversification of accents is a salient area of the democratization of the BBC, it is beyond the (grammatical and stylistic) scope of the present paper. 2 • the removal of ‘markers of hierarchy and power asymmetry’ (1992: 203), e.g. terms of address such as Mr and Sir; • removal of sexist language, e.g. he as a generic third person; • conversationalization (see below). Fairclough argues that democratization is often a convenient pretence, a tool for social control. For example, when a government switches to using non-hierarchical address terms in letters to its citizens, it can be more about making people think that society has become more egalitarian and democratic than actually making it so. For this reason it might be more appropriate to rename Fairclough’s concept pseudo-democratization, as Clayman and Heritage (2002: 339) do. Media researchers sometimes regard Fairclough’s interpretations of discourse change as unnecessarily ‘suspicious’. Scannell (1989), Tolson (2006) and Coupland (2014), for instance, treat the expansion of more personable, informal communicative styles in broadcasting not in terms of ideological agendas so much as responding to a genuine need for sociability, i.e. to attract audiences by coming across as not too distant from them. Scannell (1989) characterizes the evolution of public service broadcasting in the UK as a genuinely democratizing social practice, citing as an example the introduction of interviews that bring public figures to account. Audience participation programmes arguably represent a more recent development in media democratization (see Livingstone and Lunt, 1994). Fairclough defines conversationalization as a “tendency towards a simulation of conversation in public interactions and texts” (Fairclough, 2003: 224), that is, for linguistic features associated with informal, private conversation to permeate public forms of talk, e.g., news broadcasts and print advertisements. Such features include colloquial vocabulary and generic use of you. Conceptually, an important aspect of conversationalization is the ways in which the discourse of ordinary people’s experience, or ‘lifeworld’ discourse as Habermas (1984) calls it, spread into institutional domains such as television, radio and the print media (Fairclough, 1992, 1995). A typical case might be a news interviewer aligning her/himself with the audience by simulating words from an imaginary ‘man in the street’, e.g. “an awful lot of people when you ask them say…” (Fairclough, 1995: 145).3 There are occasional suggestions in the literature that conversationalization and democratization are not necessarily aligned. Garrett and Bell, for example, alluding to Fairclough’s work, remark that “conversationalization may or may not serve the democratization of discourse” (Garrett and Bell, 3 Fairclough (1992) sometimes uses synthetic personalization, in ways that are very similar to conversationalization. Unsurprisingly there is also overlap between conversationalization and informalization, as used by other reasearchers, e.g. Pearce (2005) on discourse, Wouters (2007) on social mores. Similarly, in corpus studies of recent language change, colloquialization (Leech et al., 2009) refers to the adoption of conversational usage in public forms of discourse, cf. Hiltunen et al. (this issue). 3 1998: 12). While the expression ‘level playing field’ is frequently used in relation to the conditions of conversation, Fairclough provides a useful reminder that informal conversation, too, can play out unequally when participants have differential power (2003: 78). And in a discussion of developments in broadcast news programmes around the turn of the 21st century, Montgomery (2007) notes that the introduction of dual news presenters can have very non-conversationlike effects. These are particularly noticeable on television news: while each presenter in turn talks directly to the camera (i.e. the viewing audience), there are times when neither presenter appears to pay attention to the other, either visually or verbally (e.g. because of the need to follow an autocue). This development clearly contrasts with ordinary conversation, where it is normal practice to monitor one’s interlocutor while speaking or listening to them. The following observations can be made about research in this field: 1. Democratization seems more open to subjective interpretation, and therefore more difficult to firmly establish, than conversationalization. For example, how can we tell if a putative case of democratization is a pretence or real? For which parties do we consider it to apply? With broadcast interview programmes, for instance (the subject of the present study), it is unclear whether democratization
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