UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA LA EVASIÓN EN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS Y EL CONGRESO DE LOS DIPUTADOS: UN ESTUDIO INTERCULTURAL TESIS DOCTORAL DIRECTORA: DRA. ISABEL MARÍA ÍÑIGO MORA AUTOR: DERYCK JOHN BARKER FRASER Fdo. Dra. Isabel María Íñigo Mora Fdo. Deryck John Barker Fraser SEVILLA 2015 To my very dear son, Juan José. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt gratitude, first and foremost, to the director of this doctoral thesis, my tutor and very close friend, Dr. Isabel María Íñigo Mora, who must receive all of the credit for proposing the title of this dissertation, and for suggesting the corpus upon which it is based. She generously spent a great deal of her precious time giving me assistance, advice and encouragement, without which this piece of work would not have been produced. In addition to devoting a great number of hours providing me with suggestions on how to plan this essay, she unselfishly took the trouble to read and correct the entire thesis, and even to advise me on how to rewrite several paragraphs. Her patience with me knew no bounds, despite my ignorance of administrative matters, absent-mindedness, and numerous foibles and mistakes. She lent, and more often than not, gave me a great amount of bibliographical material, including numerous articles and books, and even had the kindness to provide me with copies of any important material available on the internet. She was, in fact, a library on wheels. Most importantly, she has always kept me informed about developments in the English Language Department of the University of Seville. As a result of this, I managed to obtain a grant which enabled me to spend a very productive and profitable period of study in England in 2008. Needless to say, it was she who organized all of the necessary paperwork for the application to procure the grant, and the preparation of my visit to the House of Commons in London, and to the University of York. Also of vital importance, she gave me specific instructions on how to get into contact with El Congreso de los Diputados (the Spanish House of Parliament), in order to obtain information related to the Spanish section of the corpus. My wholehearted thanks also go out to Dr Peter Bull for his unlimited generosity during my stay at the University of York in the summer of 2008. He went to great lengths to ensure that I was suitably equipped to carry out my studies at the University of York by providing me with an office, and library and computer facilities. In addition to this, he has also unstintingly devoted much of his time to answer several of my queries related to this essay, and has always been kind enough to give me excellent advice on how to structure the analysis of the corpus on which this thesis is based. I am also extremely grateful to my neighbour and good friend, Mr José Antonio Mora Martín, who, at short notice, very willingly took the trouble to design each and every one of the graphs which appear in the dissertation, and who did all of the necessary computer work on the document. In addition, I would also like to thank the personnel in the House of Commons, London, for providing me with leaflets and factfiles of the British Parliament, and other useful information, both in person and by telephone. Also, I am extremely grateful to the clerks of El Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid, for taking the trouble to send me very important information about the Spanish Parliament in a personal email message, and for answering my countless queries by telephone. CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. 1 CHAPTER 2: THE PRAGMATICAL ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE. 5 2.1: Political discourse. 5 2.1.1: What is political discourse? 5 2.1.2: Types of political discourse. 7 2.2: Politics and language. 9 2.2.1: Language as a means of persuasion. 9 2.2.2: Implicature in politics. 10 2.2.3: The use of metaphor as a political strategy. 14 2.2.4: Deixis, presupposition and entailment in political discourse.16 2.3: Speech acts and political interaction. 19 2.4: Impersonalization and ambiguity in politics. 22 2.4.1: Pronoun ambiguity in political discourse. 22 2.4.2: The passive voice: a strategy used to decline responsibility. 26 CHAPTER 3: EQUIVOCAL COMMUNICATION, THE CONCEPT OF FACE, AND FACE MANAGEMENT 28 3.1 Equivocal communication. 28 3.1.1 What is equivocation? 28 3.1.2 Why does equivocation occur? 30 3.1.3 Equivocation in the political context. 32 3.1.3.1 How politicians equivocate. 32 3.1.3.2 Agenda-shifting procedures. (Greatbatch 1986). 34 3.1.3.3 Reformulations in news interviews (Clayman 1993, 2001). 38 3.2 The concept of face and face management. 41 3.2.1 Face: basic notions. 41 3.2.2 Face in the political arena. 42 3.2.2.1 Face threat in news interviews. 42 3.2.2.2 Three aspects of political face. 45 CHAPTER 4: QUESTONS, REPLIES AND NON-REPLIES. EQUIVOCATION TYPOLOGY (BULL AND MAYER 1993, AND BULL 2003). 59 4.1 Questions, replies and non-replies. 59 4.1.1 How to define a question. 59 4.1.2 What constitutes a reply. 63 4.1.3 Intermediate replies. 69 4.2 Equivocation typology (Bull and Mayer 1993; Bull 2003). 73 CHAPTER 5: TWO PARLIAMENTS IN CONTRAST. 89 5.1 How Parliament works: The House of Commons and El Congreso de los Diputados. 89 5.2 The Treasury Committee and La Comisión de Economía y Hacienda.95 CHAPTER 6: ANALYSIS OF CORPUS. 96 6.1 Analysis of the transcripts of the parliamentary sessions held in The Treasury Committee of The House of Commons. 96 6.1.1 Table Eng1: Financial Stability. 96 6.1.2 Table Eng2: Inflation. 133 6.1.3 Table Eng3: expenditure and administration. 163 6.1.4: Total statistics of the British Parliamentary sessions. 190 6.2 Analysis of the transcripts of parliamentary sessions in La Comisión de Economía y Hacienda of El Congreso de los Diputados. 192 6.2.1 Table Esp 1: Responsibilities of the Bank of Spain. 192 6.2.2 Table Esp 2: The Spanish financial system in the international context. 217 6.2.3 Table Esp 3: Future plans and priorities of the National Competition Commission. 240 6.2.4 Total statistics of the Spanish Parliamentary sessions. 262 CHAPTER 7: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF EQUIVOCATION PARLIAMENTARY SESSIONS IN THE BRITISH AND SPANISH PARLIAMENTS. 264 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION. 273 REFERENCES. 275 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The purpose of this dissertation is to carry out an analysis of political discourse used by politicians in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom and El Congreso de los Diputados in Spain. This analysis will consist of a comparative study of question and answer sessions in the British and Spanish Parliaments, with the idea of comparing and contrasting linguistic and cultural differences between the two nations mentioned, the United Kingdom and Spain. We find this initiative to be very interesting, since we expect that it will shed a great deal of light on what could still probably be considered a fairly unexplored field: an analysis of the differences in attitudes in the political arenas of two countries or nations. For example, it could help us to ascertain whether Spanish politicians are more evasive than their British counterparts, or whether the reverse is the case. The corpus on which our doctoral thesis is based consists of question and answer sessions of the Treasury Select Committee in the House of Commons, and La Comisión de Economía y Hacienda in El Congreso de los Diputados. I have chosen two Committees which deal with economics because of the knowledge obtained on this matter in the preparation of my investigation project. The main idea of the dissertation is, to some extent, based on the concept of “face”, an idea proposed by Goffman (1955, 1967), and subsequently developed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), and other authors such as R. Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983), and Fraser (1990). This notion of face will be applied to political discourse. It will be seen how, according to Bull, Elliott, Palmer and Walker (1996), politicians need to safeguard three types of face: their own self-image, that of their political party, and that of significant others (smaller groups within the party, people, institutions, or even countries with whom they maintain important links.) In the political world, politicians are, more often than not, confronted with face- threatening questions, and find themselves with the necessity to defend or safeguard the types of image mentioned previously. One of the strategies employed to this effect is equivocation, which is the focal point of this dissertation. Various books and articles have been written on the concept of equivocation, the most important of which is Equivocal Communication, the work of Bavelas, Black, Chovill and Mullett (1990). In this book, the authors explain the basic principles of equivocation theory, and make references to its use in political discourse. A detailed examination of these principles will be made in our thesis, after which, they will be applied to our corpus. The phenomenon of equivocation is present in a number of everyday situations, when people find themselves in a position where telling the truth could be hurtful and unnecessary, and telling a blatant lie could also be inappropriate. Bavelas et al. (1990) provide us with a few examples of this, such as thanking someone for a useless present, writing a letter of recommendation for a person with questionable skills, or even making a promise which would be difficult to fulfill.