Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schubert, Christoph

Titel

Unidentified speakers in news discourse: A pragmatic approach to anonymity

Ist Teil von

• Journal of pragmatics, 2015-11, Vol.89, p.1-13

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •The focus is on unidentified speakers in 218 online transcripts of CNN Newsroom.•The transcripts show various techniques of contextual identity construction.•Anonymous speakers fulfill pragmatic functions in terms of cooperation and relevance.•Lack of identification may result in an appealing quality of secrecy and suspense.•Namelessness can imply that knowledge about the speaker's identity is unnecessary. Anonymous speakers pose a great pragmatic challenge to other communicative interactants, since their appearance implies a lack of contextual information. Nevertheless, news discourse makes frequent use of unidentified speakers, so that its cooperativeness might potentially be restricted by this practice. Hence, this paper investigates the occurrence of unnamed speakers in news discourse based on a corpus of 218 online transcripts of the TV program CNN Newsroom from the year 2014. The study shows that recipients may employ several strategies of constructing the identity of anonymous participants, relying on hints by news anchors, reporters, or the nameless interlocutors themselves. Moreover, with the help of the frameworks of the Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory, and evidentiality, the paper points out that the non-identification of speakers fulfills a number of pragmatic functions, such as creating suspense or suggesting that knowledge about the speaker's identity is unnecessary for comprehension.