Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates at the Question/Answer Interface

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Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates at the Question/Answer Interface SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS IN POLITICAL DEBATES AT THE QUESTION/ANSWER INTERFACE Item Type Electronic Thesis; text Authors Labus, Mary Citation Labus, Mary. (2020). SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS IN POLITICAL DEBATES AT THE QUESTION/ANSWER INTERFACE (Bachelor's thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA). Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 08:00:21 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/651373 SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS IN POLITICAL DEBATES AT THE QUESTION/ANSWER INTERFACE By Mary Grace Labus ____________________ A Thesis Submitted to The Honors College In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelors degree With Honors in Linguistics THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA M a y 2 0 2 0 Approved by: ____________________________ Dr. Robert Henderson Department of Linguistics Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates 2 Abstract The debates held during the Democratic Presidential Primary provided a rare opportunity to study the question/answer interface that arises in semi-adversarial discourse. These public events are held to help voters decide between similar candidates based on what are assumed to be accurate and representative answers to often confrontational questions posed by the moderators and the other candidates. However, this paper finds that the majority of responses by the three candidates studied were partial answers, with rare full answers in response to direct moderator questions, not questions posed by other candidates. This analysis is based on a database that codes Senator Sanders‘, Senator Warrens‘, and Mayor Buttigieg‘s responses over the June through February debates by the type of question and whether their responses was a non, partial, or full answer. Further study could enhance this analysis by considering the difficulty of the questions asked and the range of partiality in the answers. Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates 3 Introduction Crudely, semantics is the meaning behind spoken utterances. More specifically, semantics splits into two subsections, formal and informal. Formal semantics uses logic to describe meaning and breaks down all the utterances into the simplest combination of logical symbols. Informal semantics includes things like discourse analysis and does not break the utterances down into different logics like formal semantics. Pragmatics is the study of semantics in various contexts. Discourse analysis tends to focus more on pragmatics because of this, since utterances change meaning based on the situation. Think about someone asking, ―What are you doing?‖ This could take on many different meanings depending on the tone of the speaker and what the listener perceives the speaker‘s tone to be. This question could be innocent, if the speaker left a study partner to take a call and came back to see the partner working on something that they were not working on before. This question could also be used by a parent scolding on of their children for doing something they were not supposed to. Thus, when looking at adversarial contexts, the pragmatics must be considered because the semantics change is the speakers are pitted against each other. Debates on policy and laws happen every day, but this paper will focus on the debates that happened during the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries. The debates that were filmed by national news stations were taken into consideration. Here, the debates will be considered in both a pragmatic and informal semantic context, providing an analysis of the candidate‘s answers to questions asked by the moderators and other candidates. Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates 4 Literature Review Political debates constitute a unique situation that is not present in everyday speech. They create adversarial conditions between the candidates while also inducing sympathy among the general public. In addition to these conditions, debates are often timed for responses to make it ―fairer‖ for the candidates. In everyday speech, people are not given a minute to respond to answer questions, and only 30 seconds to respond and rebut. This time limit affects the ability of the candidates to give comprehensible answers that the general public understands. Discourse analysis provides a way to study the pragmatics of the debates, though the type of discourse analysis chosen would differ from everyday political speech. Understanding how other people have studied discourse analysis in politics is important for debates, even if the discourse itself is different. Being able to compare debate and non-debate discourse is provides a basis for the differences between debates and other discourse. Eemeren, Garssen, and Bart (2008) collected articles dealing with controversy, debate, consistency, and credibility. Controversy and argumentation are central to debate because many of the questions posed to candidates deal with controversial topics and often lead to argumentation. Argumentation can also lead to less credibility, especially when the candidates attack one another instead of answering the questions. Credibility is important in political debates and crucial in the presidential debates (Eemeren, Garssen, Bart, 2008), since the presidential debates exist to help voters get to know candidates. This is something that is considered in the analysis of the answers provided by the three candidates. The analysis of the semantics and pragmatics in this paper were initially invented by Craige Roberts in the questions under discussion (QUD) model. Roberts (2012) looked [last paragraph was past tense, this should be too] at discourse as though it is a game, with the scores organized Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates 5 around the questions under discussion. She described discourse as a series of goals and strategies. Furthermore, she assumed that the primary goal is communal inquiry, which she built off of another previous study regarding views on context. This ties into the idea of discourse as a game, because the elements could be said to be the goals, the rules that the speakers must abide by, the certain ―moves‖ that speakers make, and finally the strategies that speakers use to make their ―moves.‖ Roberts (2012) stated two sets of rules, one which pertains specifically to conventions, and another which refers to different maxims. Moves are separated into questions and answers and strategies are the way in which these types of speech are ordered. She further discussed the semantics of questions and built up to a theory of Information Structure (Roberts, 2012). Debates are even more focused on questions and answers than everyday speech, making this theory more applicable in political debates than in everyday speech. Furthermore, there are other constraints that are active during debates that are not present in everyday discourse. Some of these constraints are time allotments, the actual set-up of answering a question (such as having another candidate offer a counter argument and then allowing the initial speaker a timed rebuttal). Yet, all of the rebuttals and counter arguments address the same question first posed by the moderator. However, her model also had some issues when applied to the debates, specifically in the difference between the idea of communal inquiry and the argumentative nature of the debates. Riester, Brunetti, and De Kuthy (2018) created guidelines for the QUD that Roberts first proposed. They discussed their methodology for creating questions under discussion and analyzing information structure. Information is divided into two parts, background information which is in context and focus information which is to do with answers to questions. The authors tried to clarify the way a listener or reader understood the information structure in received Semantics and Pragmatics in Political Debates 6 linguistics output, e.g. writing or speaking. Their main assumption was that discourse is not linear, but instead hierarchically organized. Riester, Brunetti, and De Kuthy (2018) also tried to establish a universality of information structure categories. They focused on the possible semantic and pragmatic categories rather than on syntax or morphology. They included a number of examples both throughout the paper and in the appendices of how they analyzed the information structure (Riester, Brunetti, and De Kuthy, 2018). These guidelines make the use of QUD more accessible and are going to be followed throughout this analysis of the 2020 presidential debates. These annotations only apply in English, but as the presidential debates used are in English this has no effect on possible analyses. Microanalysis is yet another possible analyzation method, though it focuses more on speeches, not debates (Bull, 2003). This makes the focus more on ―ambiguity‖ and ―claptrap.‖ Claptrap has a variety of definitions, but for the purposes of Bull (2003) it refers to empty language. Bull (2003) focused on the politicians wanting to show themselves in the best possible light, but since speeches are not as structured or as adversarial as debates, there would need to be adjustments if this analysis was used to study debates. Fetzer, Weizman, and Berlin (2015) focused on political discourse in general, such as what affected
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