Appreciations and Audience Response in 4 Mexican Political Speeches

Abstract

Using the fine-grained methodology of Conversation Analysis, the video recordings of four political speeches delivered by a Mexican Governor were examined. Since previous studies have found that speakers design sequences of talk to elicit the audience’s applause (Atkinson, 1984a, 1984b; Bull, 2003; Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986), the departure point for this thesis was to find where applause occurred in order to examine what sequences of talk elicited it. A preliminary observation was that every time the Governor expressed appreciation to a person or group of people, the audience applauded and the recipients non-verbally responded to the Governor for the appreciation. A detailed examination of the structure, the sequence organisation and the delivery of ‘appreciations’ was carried out. At a structural level it was found that by changing footing, thus affecting the audience and the recipient’s participation framework, the Governor was able to move from addressing the audience to addressing the recipient of his appreciation and back to the audience to re-commence his monologic talk. At the sequence organisation level, it was found that the actions performed by the Governor and by the addressed-recipient of his appreciation constitute an adjacency pair (AP): not until the Governor finishes doing appreciation do the recipients respond to the Governor for the appreciation. The audience’s applause, on the other hand, can neither be said to be part of the main AP nor be said to perform a straightforward action. Instead, the audience’s applause is a continuous action, enveloping, through clapping, the whole appreciation. At the delivery level, it was examined and explained how the Governor combines intonation, gaze and body movements with his words to elicit the audience and the recipients’ responses. Though a detailed examination and explication of the actions performed by the Governor, the audience, and the recipients of appreciations, this thesis is able to show how a particular moment of interaction within the monologic format of four Mexican political speeches is created, sustained and brought to a closure. This thesis is also able to demonstrate that the speeches under examination differ in their organisation from other political speeches, and consequently, from prior findings (e.g. Atkinson 1984a, 1984b; Bull, 2003; Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986).