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Abstract

In this corpus-assisted discourse study, the linguistic environments of pronouns are analysed and compared in calls to the BBC Radio 5 Live football phone-in ‘606’. Phone-ins are ripe for research, as they allow laypeople to debate with professionals to a large audience. This paper examines a 75,000-word corpus of British English football phone-in data to compare pronoun use between callers whose teams won and lost and establishes the themes they construct. Collocation and concordance corpus tools are utilised, allowing for a comparative analysis of 112 transcribed calls, not only comparing usage between pronouns themselves, but also how they are used differently by supporters whose teams won and lost. The pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ were chosen to be input into the corpus software. Collocation results show that pronouns are used in constructions that fit into six linguistic and thematic categories: auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, address markers, communication markers, experience markers and opinion markers. The additional context provided by the concordance analysis shows that these can be simplified into just two purposes: constructing stance and building credibility. There is little difference in how credibility is invoked between the callers whose teams won or lost, but as expected, the losers employ a more negative stance towards their situation. The stance constructions incorporate a wide variety of pronouns, whilst credibility is primarily built through first person pronouns. The findings about stance were consistent with literature on the specific functions of pronouns and the theme of credibility is also corroborated in works concerning identity in radio phone-ins, tying together theoretical work on pronouns with a different genre of text. I argue that stance is a principal element of calls in programmes where views on a subject are given. Credibility is also paramount, because the callers’ stances can only be taken seriously when they state their credentials to prove they can comment on the topic as an expert.

Course: English Language and Linguistics - BA - C2742S

Date Deposited: 2024-10-23

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14473.html