This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Jaworski, A. Articles by Fitzgerald, R. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

'This poll has not happened yet': temporal play in election predictions

CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, UK, jaworski{at}cardiff.ac.uk

Richard Fitzgerald

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA, r.fitzgerald{at}uq.edu.au

Although the past plays a large part in election campaigns, predictions and promises are its lifeblood, with the various parties promising great things if elected and predicting doom if not. Indeed the `manifestos' usually published at the beginning of an election campaign are a study in pledges, promises and wishes that parties use to entice the electorate to vote for them. Whilst talk of the future often dominates election discourse, one aspect of the future that is largely passed over without comment is the actual make up of the result, despite the relentless publication of opinion polls results. However, towards the end of the general election campaign in the UK in 2001, the Conservative Party began to warn of the dangers of the Labour Party winning the election by a large majority. The media gave wide prominence to this event, seen as tantamount to conceding defeat to the Labour Party, though the reaction of all the main political parties was to downplay its significance. In this article, we explore the discursive manipulation of temporal relations in the 2001 election campaign, and the politicians' work in gaining political capital out of the Conservative Party `breach' in the routine election prediction structure.

Key Words: broadcast talk • election campaigns • future • media discourse • news • political discourse

References

• Aristotle (1954) The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Modern Library.
• Austin, J.L. (1961) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bell, A. (1995) ` News Time ', Time & Society 4: 305—28.[Abstract]
• Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Blumler, J.G. and Gurevitch, M. (1995) The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language & Symbolic Power, ed. and introd. J.B. Thompson, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. (2002) The British General Election of 2001. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Cohen, J. (1964) Behaviour in Uncertainty. London: Allen Unwin.
• Doane, M.A. (1990) `Information, Crisis, Catastrophe', in P. Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, pp. 222—39. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Dunmire, P.L. (1997) `Naturalizing the Future in Factual Discourse: A Critical Linguistic Analysis of a Projected Event' , Written Communication 14: 221—63.[Abstract]
• Dunmire, P.L. (2005) `Preempting the Future: Rhetoric and Ideology of the Future in Political Discourse' , Discourse & Society 16: 481—513.[Abstract]
• Edelman, M. (1964) The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Edelman, M. (1971) Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence. Chicago, IL: Markham.
• Edelman, M. (1988) Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Ellis, J. (2002) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris.
• Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power. London: Longman.
• Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour New Language? London: Routledge.
• Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
• Fitzgerald, R., Jaworski, A. and Housely, W. (in press) `Generating News: Agenda Setting in Radio Broadcast News ', in M. Burger (ed.) L'analyse linguistique des discours des médias: théories, méthodes et perspectives. Québec: Nota Bene.
• Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972—1977. Harlow: Pearson Education.
• Fraser, J.T. (1975) Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence. New York: George Braziller.
• Galtung, J. and Holomboe Ruge, M. (1999) ` The Structure of Foreign News ', in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , pp. 21—31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Originally published in 1965 in Journal of International Peace Research 1: 64—90.]
• Garton, G., Montgomery, M. and Tolson, A. (1991) `Ideology, Scripts and Metaphors in the Public Sphere of a General Election', in P. Scannell (ed.) Broadcast Talk, pp. 100—18. London: Sage.
• Glasser, R. (1972) Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C.G. Pearson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Goffman, Erving (1981) `Footing', in E. Goffman Forms of Talk, pp.124—59. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Graham, P., Keenan, T. and Dowd, A.-M. (2004) `A Call to Arms at the End of History: A Discourse-historical Analysis of George W. Bush's Declaration of War on Terror' , Discourse & Society 15: 199—221.[Abstract]
• Grusin, R. (2004) `Premediation' (Critical Essay) , Criticism 46: 17—39.[CrossRef]
• Hebdige, D. (1993) `Training Some Thoughts on the Future', in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, pp. 270—9. London: Routledge.
• Hoskins, A. (2007) `Temporality, Proximity, and Security: Terror in a Media-drenched Age' , International Relations 20: 453—66.[CrossRef]
• Hoskins, A. and O'Loughlin, B. (2007) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jaworski, A., Fitzgerald, R. and Morris, D. (2003a) `Certainty and Speculation in News Reporting of the Future: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh' , Discourse Studies 5: 33—49.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
• Jaworski, A., Fitzgerald, R., Morris, D. and Galasiñski, D. (2003b) ` Beyond Recency: The Discourse of the Future in BBC Radio News ', Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures. New Series I. Thematic issue: `Beyond: New Perspectives in Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching' , eds J.-P. van Noppen, C. Den Tandt and I. Tudor, pp. 61—72.
• Jaworski, A., Coupland, N. and Galasiñski, D. (eds) ( 2004) Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Jaworski, A., Fitzgerald, R. and Morris, D. (2005) `Radio Leaks: Presenting and Contesting Leaks in Radio News Broadcasts' , Journalism 5: 202—23.
• Jucker, A.H. (1986) News Interviews: A Pragmalinguistic Analysis. Amsterdam /Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
• Koch, B.J. (1983) `Presentation as Proof: The Language of Arabic Rhetoric' , Anthropological Linguistics 25: 47—60.[Web of Science]
• Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.
• Lauerbach, G. (2000) `Negotiating Defeat in TV Election Night Coverage' , in M. Coulthard, J. Cotterill and F. Rock (eds) Dialogue Analysis VII: Working with Dialogue . Selected Papers from the 7th IADA Conference. Birmingham 1999, pp. 107—20. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
• Lauerbach, G. (2003) ` Voicing and Ventriloquizing — The Constructive Role of Discourse Representation in Political Interviews ', Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht, Festschrift für Juliane House zum 60 Geburstag 8: 176—86.
• Liebes, T. (1998) `Television's Disaster Marathons: A Danger for Democratic Processes?', in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds) Media, Ritual and Identity, pp. 71—84. London: Routledge.
• Macintyre, D. (2001) `The 2001 General Election: A Journalist's Diary' , Journalism Studies 2: 590—6.
• Montgomery, M. (2005) `The Discourse of War after 9/11' , Language and Literature 14: 149—80.[Abstract]
• Nowotny, H. (1994) Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Pinar Sanz, M.J. (2003) ` Political Advertising Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach to Election Campaign Advertisements ', paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise, 12—14 November, Vigo, Galicia, Spain.
• Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U.H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe. London: Routledge.
• Roshco, B. (1999) `Newsmaking', in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader, pp. 32—6. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Originally published as part of Roshco's Newsmaking. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975.]
• Scannell, P. (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Schlesinger, P. (1978) Putting `Reality' Together. New York: Methuen.
• Scollon, S. and Scollon, R. (2000) ` The Construction of Agency and Action in Anticipatory Discourse: Positioning Ourselves against Neo-liberalism ', paper presented at III Conference for Sociocultural Research UNICAMP, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, 16—20 July.
• Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Tuchman, G. (1973) `Making News by Doing Work: Routinizing the Unexpected' , American Journal of Sociology 79: 110—31.[CrossRef]
• Van Dijk, T.A. (1989) `Structures of Discourse and Structures of Power' , Communication Yearbook 12: 18—59.
• Van Dijk, T.A. (1992) `Discourse and the Denial of Racism' , Discourse & Society 3: 87—118.[Abstract]
• Van Dijk, T.A. (1997) `Political Discourses and Racism: Describing Others in Western Parliaments', in S.H. Riggins (ed.) The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse, pp. 31—64. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Van Dijk, T.A. (2001) `Multidisciplinary CDA: A Plea for Diversity', in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, pp. 95—120. London: Sage.
• Zelizer, B. and Allan, S. (2002) `Introduction: When Trauma Shapes the News', in B. Zelizer and S. Allan (eds) Journalism after September 11, pp. 1—24. London: Routledge.

Discourse & Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1, 5-27 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1750481307085574


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Jaworski, A. Articles by Fitzgerald, R. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?