Critical Discoursal Analysis of Synchronic Context

Discourse & Society
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Time for a change: a critical discoursal analysis of synchronic context

with diachronic relevance
David Hyatt
Discourse Society 2005; 16; 515
DOI: 10.1177/0957926505053054
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Time for a change: a critical discoursal
analysis of synchronic context with
diachronic relevance
Discourse & Society
Copyright © 2005
SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 16(4): 515–534
10.1177/
DAV I D H YA T T 0957926505053054
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
A B S T R A C T . This article offers a framework for the analysis of temporal

context, an analysis of synchronic context with diachronic relevance. It seeks
to look at the way in which temporal context operates on a number of levels to
help construct the ways in which individuals and groups understand their
social worlds. Aspects considered include the immediate and medium-term
sociopolitical contexts, the contemporary sociopolitical individuals,
organizations and structures and the more long-term temporal context which
includes the various assumptions of order, structures of inclusion and
exclusion and generally how a society legitimates itself and achieves its social
identity. In addition to the analytical tool considered, the article also posits
some methodological implications for research in this area.
KEY WORDS: critical discourse studies, interdiscursivity, synchronic and diachronic

temporal context, time
Bourdieu (1991) contends that it would be meaningless to try to analyse political

discourse by concentrating on the utterances alone without considering the
sociopolitical conditions under which the discourse is produced and received. A
clear example of this in the UK political context would be the Jeremy Paxman
interview with then MP Neil Hamilton (BBC2 October 1996) in which Hamilton
was aggressively defensive, going so far as to accuse Paxman of hypocrisy in that
his lifestyle was at least as lavish as that of Hamilton, who had been accused of
corruptly accepting money from a businessman for tabling questions in
the House of Commons. The extremity of Hamilton’s reaction was atypical of the
genre of adversarial political interviewing. However, taking into account the
contemporary political situation, in which Hamilton was being fiercely attacked
as an individual and his career was in jeopardy, the reaction was understandable

516 Discourse & Society 16(4)
and the language choices explicable. An analysis at the textual level alone would
not reveal this, as the lexico-grammatical features might illustrate Hamilton was
being aggressive and defensive, but not why. Neither would a wider register analy-
sis explain this particular situation, as the nature of the relationship might not be
clear without a contextualization, first, of the immediate temporal context in
which an individual is fighting for their career, and second, the wider contem-
porary context of a concern in the media and among the public relating to the
notion of political ‘sleaze’, or corrupt/amoral practices by public servants. Even
at the level of genre, there could be analytical problems as the actual instance
here displays atypical features for the genre of the adversarial political interview,
according to my analyses (Hyatt, 2003) and those of other researchers (Harris,
1991; Heritage, 1985; Simon-Vandenbergen, 1996). An additional analytical
category would appear to be required.
The intention of this article then is to posit such an analytical tool for describ-
ing the temporal context in which text/discourse is situated. The article draws on
a corpus of 60 adversarial political interviews, broadcast on UK terrestrial
television between 1995 and 2001 and on a series of questionnaires and per-
sonal interviews with TV interviewers, originally collected as part of an extended
research project investigating the genre of adversarial political interviewing and
its implications for critical literacy (Hyatt, 2003). However, before discussing the
analytical tool, it will be valuable to consider the way in which some of the key
literature relating to temporal context has influenced the development of the tool
discussed in this article.
From context to temporal context

For Halliday, following the theorizing on context of Malinowski (1946) and Firth
(1957), the centrality of context is exemplified in the success of mutual compre-
hension between interlocutors. This is achieved through predictions made and
expectations of what one’s interlocutor will say in any given situation (Halliday,
1985/1989). The experience of a range of social situations and encounters leads
to individuals building up a store of knowledge as to what language is likely to
be appropriate in what situations. Halliday divided his analysis of context of
situation into three features, or ‘motivational relevancies’ Field, Mode and Tenor.
Field refers to what is happening in the discourse and the purpose for its inclu-
sion; Tenor refers to the participants in the discourse and their roles and relation-
ships; and Mode refers to the way in which the text is organized and the part that
the language is playing.
Such static models are, however, potentially open to criticism of producing
only a two-dimensional picture, a snapshot frozen in its own time-scale and so
not reflecting the dynamic nature of context and text. In the same way as
language change is inevitable, so is contextual change. Systemicists have
attempted to address the issue of a dynamic notion of context and the way in
which context changes throughout an interaction, and how certain contexts are

Hyatt: Time for a change 517
open to negotiation by the participants and are therefore evolving contexts

(Hasan, 1980/1996; O’Donnell, 1999). Such analysis has even been taken to
consider dynamic modelling within the sentence and even within the speech act
(Ravelli, 1993). However, such analyses have tended to concentrate on modelling
at a micro lexico-grammatical level and in this article I would like to suggest a
tool for analysis at a more macro-level which attempts to capture the diachronic
influences on the text while also examining the way in which synchronic factors
impact.
In considering temporal context, it is crucial to understand that the notion of
time is a cultural formation, and that temporal/historical perspectives are con-
structed through culture and not simply inevitably fused to a linear progression
of events or an objective clock-based time – both cultural constructs enshrined in
modernity. Temporal experiences are variable, and this can be represented
metaphorically – time ‘flies’ and ‘drags’ in different contexts – expressions and
construals of the social cognition that is part of understanding the shaping power
of context.
The centrality of temporal context is illustrated in the fact that differing senses
of time are sources of cultural conflict and that making others conform to your
concept of time is a significant form of social control – consider again the hegem-
onic rule of the clock in western industrial society through its metaphors and
epithets – 24/7, 9 to 5, time waits for no-one, free time, quality time – all notions
that limit and control periods of production (and consumption). Indeed, E.P.
Thompson (1991) has expanded on this noting its cultural situatedness in that
many cultures conceptualize time as task oriented (divided into variable intervals
relating how long it takes to complete certain significant tasks). In contrast he
notes that capitalist, modernist societies have divided it into systematic units, and
through a rejection of a notion that a task can take a certain time this implies a
task as to be done within a certain time and so facilitates a push to greater and
faster production. E.P. Thompson notes the symbolic culture of the watch, a
symbol of its possessors disciplined attitude to work and as a retirement gift.
Other examples of the conditioning toward this conception of time are school
timetables, work shifts, bus and train timetables (rush hour), etc. Even the use of
timelines in teaching tenses in the language classroom, serves to emphasize the
time aspect of tense and aspect as opposed to acknowledging their functional,
ideological and manipulatory roles – tense and aspect are used to construct
‘understanding’ about events. For example, the use of the present simple tense
constructs an event as reality or fact and the past simple tense can represent a
past event as no longer being important or relevant.
In the longer-term context, one might conceptualize history as narrative
rather than a linear sequence of facts that are to be positivistically and unequivo-
cally accepted as the ‘truth’. Such a position has a well-established literature
which represents the interdisciplinary nature of research into the past. For
example, Ensink and Sauer (2003) offer a complex discursal analysis of the ways in
which a range of speakers/writers on the 1994 commemoration of the Warsaw

Uprising, 50 years previously, construct past events from their own perspectives,
as well as others’ perspectives, to represent a picture of the past and the present.
Martin and Wodak (2003) offer a cogent analysis of the discursive construction
of the past, emphasizing the ways in which competing social narratives vie for
official acknowledgement and validation, while engaging with the strategies and
processes for the construction of collective, cultural and individual memory.
In contrast, an ‘objective’ view of history is contingent on the facts selected,
the criteria for this, and the degree to which these facts signify something within
the specific cultural context of their interpretation. Historical narratives are an
important way in which societies construct and represent themselves, be these
the emphasis on development during imperial periods typical of post-colonial
European historical narratives or the resistance to American imperialism that
characterizes Cuban historical narratives. Any attempt at understanding the
impact of temporal context, then, needs to include a diachronic perspective.
A key contribution in relation to this article is Foucault’s notion of ‘epistemes’
or the ways of ‘knowing’ into which discourses have been ordered (Foucault,
1972). His discussion of the archaeology of knowledge considers how this frame-
work for understanding the world is expressed through language, what is
possible/acceptable and what is not. Epistemes refer to the systems of knowledge,
understanding and thought which are in operation below the consciousness of a
subject and that define the limits and boundaries of thought in a given domain
and period, by setting conceptual possibilities. In effect, the episteme encompasses
all the paradigms of a society at a particular time and governs the way that a
society or era approaches and understands the world. As time moves on, one
episteme replaces another and a new epoch is said to be born. However, it is the
episteme that determines how people within that epoch think, act and under-
stand their identity and the world around them.
An episteme needs to be understood in an interdisciplinary sense, and as such
can illuminate the rules and conventions, official and tacit, by which a society is
ordered and understands itself, which in turn sheds light on the values, ideo-
logies, conflicts, evaluations and attempts at resolution that take place. It is these
understandings that create the context through which a text can be analysed and
interpretation attempted.
More recently, social theorists concerned with critical discourse studies (van
Dijk, 2004) have attempted to theorize context, in their concern to examine the
discursive reproduction of domination and its opposition and resistance. In such
examinations the notions of ethics and of legitimacy are central though these
concepts are highly context dependent. Van Dijk (2004) draws attention to
agency by noting that context is ‘in here’ as well as ‘out there’ and so arguing for
theorization to draw on an analysis of both social structures and structures of
social cognition, while remaining aware of the limitations of sociological and
social psychological perspectives. Context, from this perspective then is not social
structure but the personal constructs of social structures. As such it is a mental
model that is personal, subjective and prone to change. Context can be seen as an

interpretation not of the text, but of the social situations in which the text is
produced and received.
Van Dijk (2004) notes that one of the structuring aspects of context is time,
offering the example of time control and management in parliamentary debates
to illustrate the impact and relationship to power of temporal context. This
contribution is crucial but is rooted in synchronic analysis of temporal context –
this article hopes to offer parallel avenues of analysis in the ways in which the
synchronic and diachronic elements of temporal context both contribute to
elucidate discourse as a form of social practice, and indeed as an expression and
construal of social cognition.
A final yet crucial insight comes with the Discourse–Historical Approach to
the modelling of context (Weiss and Wodak, 2003; Wodak, 2001). This triangu-
latory approach views both spoken and written language as social practice
(Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) and emphasizes the centrality of interdisciplinar-
ity as well as stressing the need to consider diachronic sociopolitical dimensions
when theorizing context. It persuasively argues that interdisciplinarity is a
necessary and logical corollary if context is to be considered as more than merely
situation in a spatial or temporal sense but a concept that requires much deeper
theoretical description and justification. As Weiss and Wodak (2003: 23) argue,
the Discourse–Historical Approach ‘attempts to transcend the pure linguistic
dimension and to include more or less systematically the historical, political,
sociological and/or psychological dimensions in the analysis and interpretation of
a specific discursive occasion’.
The approach considers context on four levels:
1. Linguistic Analysis – the immediate level in which language and co-textual
aspects, including pragmatic strategies, are analysed.
2. Discourse Theory – the intertextual and interdiscursive relationships among
utterances, texts, genres and discourse are considered.
3. Middle-Range or Mezo-Theories – here extra-linguistic social and sociological
variables, including institutional frames of specific contexts are analysed.
4. Grand Theory – this encompasses the wider historical and sociopolitical
contexts which influence the discursive practices within which they are
embedded.
The model proposed in this article has a number of similarities in terms of its
four-part structure and its interdisciplinary nature, and can be seen as a related
model, yet with some differing though complementary emphases, such as a more
specific focus on individuals and the epistemic nature of medium- and longer-
term temporal contexts.
It is also salient to note that although a broader review of the literature on
media and political discourses (Fairclough, 1995; Hyatt, 2003) is beyond the
scope of this article a number of key authors have dealt with this from a histori-
cal perspective. Meinhof and Richardson (1998) consider the transition of
European television and the way in which the new temporal and special relations

constructed demand the viewers’ engagement in construction of textual mean-

ings. Pollak (2003) analysed Austrian newspaper articles since 1945 to examine
the strategies used in the construction of a minimization of responsibility of
Austrian participation in Nazi war crimes. Also in the Austrian context, van
Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) used a discourse–historical approach to analyse the
official letters that notified immigrant workers of the rejection of their family
reunion applications, a method which allowed this analysis to be linked intertex-
tually and interdiscursively to the historical context of immigration in Austria.
Each of these articles illustrates the value of a historical approach to media
discourse analysis.
A critical note on context and interpretation

There is a danger within the act of interpretation of texts and discourses of equat-
ing particular linguistic encapsulations with rigid interpretations of the world-
view these encapsulations are interpreted as representing. Fish (1981) has
warned of the dangers of such ‘interpretive positivism’, whereby linguistic data
are used as a way of confirming decisions and interpretation already arrived at
concerning the meaning of a text. To ensure that an act of textual analysis is
valuable as a disclosing device rather than itself an act of ideological cloaking
and masquerade, it is necessary for the analyst to be open about his/her position-
ality, to attempt to offer a reflexive account of the interpretation, to be aware that
textual encodings are polysemic, and to emphasize the centrality of the context of
the production and reception of texts.
Any analysis of text is prone to the potential distortion of historical and/or
cultural relativism – is it possible for the analyst to know precisely what happened
in the past and is it inevitable that the lens of our own culture will distort the
image when looking at people from another culture? Such aspects of ‘perceptual
relativism’ (Hollis and Lukes, 1982) remind us that in this area a reflexive under-
standing of personal positionality is a prerequisite for the analyst.
Finally, in the application of a categorical model of the type I am attempting
to posit there is the danger of over-systematizing the units of analysis into rigid
units, as the warning of the dangers of ‘perceptual relativism’ require an inher-
ent flexibility, tentativeness, and reflexive commitment to provisionality within
the organization and analysis of data.
A framework for analysis

By emphasizing the analysis of synchronic context, I attempt to consider the
ways in which the prevailing ideology influences the generic features of the type
of text under consideration and provides insights into influences on the actual
context of situation in which the text under consideration is produced. In the
context of political interviewing, my previous research (Hyatt, 2003) has argued
that there is an antagonistic relationship between interviewer and interviewee.

This, in part, reflects the nature of conflict inherent in western liberal democracy,
with its aim of continual expansion and domination of the forces of production.
In turn, this helps to determine the generic structure of the interview in which
antagonistic propositions are advanced and on the basis of a judgement of their
success or not, are either followed up or replaced by new antagonistic proposi-
tions. In its turn this will realize, at the register level, the linguistic acts in which
the participants might engage, such as attempts on the interviewers’ part to elicit
revealing answers, follow up and exploit unsatisfactory answers and present new
propositions to maintain pressure, and on the interviewees’ part to hedge to avoid
answering, to deny propositions, to question the interviewers’ fairness or bias, or
to move topic to a preferred subject matter. These aspects of register are, in turn,
realized at the lexico-grammatical level by such devices as the uncontracted ques-
tion tag, with its formulaic presupposition, and the use of negative interrogatives.
I would like to suggest a four-category model. In each category there is a
consideration of the sociopolitical context in itself, and then how this impacts on
the institutional, discoursal and generic features of the text under consideration,
as illustrated when the model is related to the data.
1. IMMEDIATE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

This refers to the state of contemporary actuality, what is in the news at the
moment. In relation to the political news interview, the reason why the interview
is taking place at this moment and the social events or activities that are rep-
resented, and how these are projected through the text, as well as the current
generic composition under consideration, in recognition that any genre is a dynamic
construction and is constantly undergoing transformation and reconstruction.
2. MEDIUM - TERM SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

This covers influential contexts that survive for a longer period than the individ-
ual news story but still are too temporary to be considered aspects of the wider
context of culture. These represent the wider sociohistoric mores prevalent at a
particular time. These might be represented by particular political eras, in the UK
political context, such as Thatcherism, Majorism and New Labour, or by sub-
divisions or amalgamations of these eras. Such eras, however, need not be politi-
cal but could be social (e.g. advent of welfare state in the late 1940s), economic
(periods of boom or recession), cultural (mods and rockers, punk, dance music,
etc.) or any other category that impacts on sociohistoric mores of a given period.
They also do not necessarily map onto one another in a linear fashion but may
well overlap.
It also aims to consider the impact of these sociohistoric mores on the
conventions of the genre under consideration – in this case political discourse, or
to be more accurate in the case of my research, western neo-liberal political
discourse. The naming of these categories is a political act – I could have defined
these categories as capitalist political discourse, or democratic political discourse,
or even left the ‘neo’ off neo-liberal, converting it from a pejorative to a

commendatory term. An example of this would be the diversity in deference of

political interviews at various times. Key indicators of the impact can be seen par-
ticularly through intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The way that discourses
pervade each other has become the subject for much discussion including the
impact of advertising and economic discourses on academic discourses
(Fairclough, 1993) not only to promote their institutions, but also to position the
university as a commodity within a consumer society, and the interdiscursivity
between news discourse and entertainment discourses (Scollon, 1998). Each of
these practices of interdiscursivity is inherently linked to the time and socio-
historic context of their emergence.
3. CONTEMPORARY SOCIOPOLITICAL INDIVIDUALS , ORGANIZATIONS AND

STRUCTURES
These may or may not be participants in the discourse but without an implicit
awareness of the nature of these individuals/organizations the discourse would
lack full meaning. They provide contextualizing detail on the influence of actors
and agents on the representation of the text, and the impact of these individuals
on the discourse. In UK media discourse, individuals with specific styles and
approaches in terms of aggressiveness, familiarity, and persistence, such as politi-
cal interviewers Robin Day, Jeremy Paxman, John Humphreys, and indeed
programmes with which they are associated, have spawned followers and the
nature of the genre has changed, arguably the nature of the discourse has
changed. As well as journalists, there are other individuals impacting on media
discourses such as the UK Prime Minister’s former press secretary, Alistair
Campbell, identified by TV interviewers (Hyatt, 2003) as a key influence on
the permissibility of various aspects of the genre of news interviewing. Similar
influential individuals can be found in other international contexts. As well as
individuals, various political and media organizations and their conventions may
impact upon the discourse, such as the BBC Charter’s stated requirement of
neutrality, and the individual agendas and contemporary policy orientations of
various political parties.
The groups with potential to influence the discourse in this section can range
from small discourse communities to larger macro-societies and cultures as a
whole. Also this section can help to look at the relationship between individuals
and institutions in order to address the dilemma of the interrelationship between
agency and structure, by acknowledging the dialectical nature of the relationship
between the individual and society and how structural and institutional proper-
ties of society play a part in the constantly dynamic transformation of the (self )
construction of individuals.
4. EPOCH
This draws closely on Foucault’s notion of the episteme (Foucault, 1972), or what
counts as knowledge or truth in a particular era. This might include the various
assumptions of order, structures of inclusion and exclusion and generally how a

society legitimates itself and achieves its social identity. In this section, the
consideration is of how epistemes are constructed and reinforced through the
discourse. For Foucault (1977) this included notions of ‘deviancy’ and ‘normal-
ity’, whereas for others (Fairclough, 1989) the discourse of an epoch is deter-
mined by its powerful voices and given consensual power rather than coerced
power through the notion of hegemony, through discourses of appropriacy and
common sense in which the ideology of dominant groupings is ‘naturalized’ into
acceptance as ‘the way things are’. For example, one might consider the way in
which the dominant technologized discourse of medicine has displaced other
discourses related to social or ‘alternative’ forms of medicine.
The diachronic relevance can be illustrated by engaging in a comparative
observation of these levels, in respect to the changes in generic features evident
between the instantiation of the texts in differing temporal contexts, e.g. a com-
parison of the generic features of the news interview in the early 1950s, 1997
and the present would reveal a variety of generic changes. Criticality in this
analysis can be injected through consideration of the determining factors acting
as catalysts for these changes to occur and the attendant implications of these
changes.
Critiques of this analytical tool

Context needs to be understood as a dynamic construct. First, it changes, and it is
the product of the mutual interaction and inter-relationship between our con-
struction of the situation and the situational impact on our thought processes,
and so is linked with the social constructionist notion of language as social
action. Therefore, it needs to be considered in terms of its diachronic relevance.
Second, the categories are not mutually exclusive. They are necessarily overlap-
ping. In hindsight, and for analytical and descriptive clarity, it is the nature of
theorists to assign separate categories to phenomena. In reality, the boundaries
between these categories are less well defined. So I employ categories for analyti-
cal clarity, yet in the belief that the frontiers of these categories are fuzzy and
overlapping. The fuzziness of the boundaries is a problem only if one is fixed into
the epistemology and ontology of positivism with its concern for exactness and
precision.
The strongest of potential critiques lies with the fact that any attempt to look
at the sociohistoric context of a text involves a process of social construction of
that context. Past events are transformed or reinterpreted in line with the epis-
temological mores of the present in order to be viewed as narratively coherent. As
Scott (1999: 98) puts it ‘We . . . literally reconstruct the past with reference to
how we understand the present.’ However, the concern needs to be with how
people construct these realities through text and how others understand these.
Thus, my approach which advocates an emphasis on temporal context needs also
to seek insights from specialist informants in terms of the production/construc-
tion of the text and also seek insights from a reception perspective to look at the

potential for differential readings of texts (Hall, 1980). From a textual point of
view, the ways in which the epistemological frameworks of the present impinge
upon the rhetorical and textual conventions of how a discourse operates to
organize meaning can be elucidated through an analysis of the impact of inter-
discursivity, as Fairclough (1995) has done in looking at the discourse of the
mass media.
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE CORPUS

In order to illustrate this analytical model I consider examples from two inter-
views from the corpus specifically, as well as drawing insights more widely from
the corpus as a whole. The two interviews are ‘Interview 20’ with John Prescott,
the new Deputy Prime Minister, interviewed by Kirsty Wark (Newsnight BBC2, 2
May 1997) and ‘Interview 37’ with Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, inter-
viewed by Jeremy Vine (Newsnight BBC2, 9 April 2001), from Hyatt (2003).
1a. Immediate synchronic context – State of contemporary actuality

The first interview takes place the day after a general election in which the Labour
Party has been elected with a large majority after a period of 18 years of con-
tinuous Conservative rule. The second interview takes place almost 4 years later
at a time when the country is suffering from a nationwide outbreak of foot and
mouth disease, for which the government’s policy had come under wide media
and public scrutiny and criticism.
1b. Immediate synchronic context – Current generic conventions

In both main examples, there is evidence of the interviews following the
previously identified (Hyatt, 1999) patterns of the adversarial interview, with the
geometric discourse patterning of Antagonistic Proposition followed by Response
followed by either Reiteration or New Antagonistic Proposition and subsequent
Response. Examples of the ways in which these are construed through lexico-
grammatical choices are:
● Direct questioning
Have you got a big office?
This isn’t about specific cases, it’s about the broader picture isn’t it?
● presuppositional interrogatives/declaratives
Cecil Parkinson, you’re now the chairman of a fertilizer company. How deep is the
mess you’re now in?
Cecil Parkinson, when do you think that the party started to fall apart?
You were one of the numerous people from your party who were setting out to under-
mine the Prime Minister.
● Use of negative interrogatives
Isn’t it fair to say that . . .
. . . but isn’t the reality that . . .

● Question tags
. . . that isn’t something you can legislate for is it?
● Uncontracted negative tags
The Prime Minister did say . . . did he not?
. . . you do have a reputation, do you not, of . . .
● Presuppositional tags
. . . you accept that?
● Evaluative dismissals
Well you can’t do both.
2a. Medium-term synchronic context – Wider synchronic sociohistoric mores

The first interview (Interview 20) takes place in a ‘honeymoon’ period for the
new administration. In this case, it is taking place against a temporal backdrop of
the end of Majorism. It was a political period most notably associated with
‘sleaze’, a catch-all term for corruption and other forms of ‘amoral’ behaviour
engaged in by those who purportedly serve the public interest. The media con-
struction is one of an unpopular government, worthy of attack. In my individual
interviews with television political interviewers (Hyatt, 2003), referred to here as
respondent interviews, a senior BBC political commentator noted that this period
was one in which the antagonism of adversarial interviewing was particularly
high.
I think there was a particular time at the end of the Conservative government, that
the overwhelming feeling in the country, and certainly, if we had read it correctly, and
the election suggested we had, people were pretty fed up with the government, and
were annoyed with them over various things, and I think from the demeanour of the
politicians they knew that, and moreover, the civil war within the Tory Party was an
open secret . . . I wouldn’t publicly use the word ‘hostile’ but whatever one says
‘aggressive’ . . .
(Respondent Interview 8)
Interestingly, there seems to be a clear correlation between this level of antago-

nism and the medium-term temporal context, as evidenced by the research of
Harris (1991), whose corpus-based study showed that between 1984 and 1987
the leader of the opposition Neil Kinnock was subject to far more hostile inter-
viewing than Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Harris notes that ‘. . . the inter-
actional differences which appear quite clear-cut may contain a high degree of
contextual motivation’ (p. 93) and that these findings need to be ‘interpreted in
the light of a particular set of historical and political circumstances during the
period of the recorded political interviews which form the database’ (p. 94).
The interviews took place against a backdrop of perceived economic prosperity,
the aftermath of Falklands War and a period in which Kinnock was in conflict, in
terms of policy, personality and power, with a significant section of his own party,
thus opening up a clear angle of attack for journalists. Harris (1991) notes that
by 1990, a time of difficulty for Mrs Thatcher and her government with the

context of considerable change in British politics, economic downturn and

unpopular policies that eventually forced Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, afforded
the opportunity for interviewers to use a more hostile line of questioning, in line
with the temporal context. My corpus and interviews also suggest that the early
‘honeymoon’ period of the new Labour government was marked with a period of
less hostile questioning as they provided a contrast to the previous discredited
government and at this time hostile questioning was not what the audience
‘wanted’.
. . . the mood was, after a general election with a huge majority, obviously different to
that government and, you know, to ask the question ‘Right Blair why have you let the
country down’ just wouldn’t feel right, it might feel right now, but it wouldn’t then . . .
Interview 20 was recorded on 2 May 1997, the day after the UK general election,
and the BBC interviewer Kirsty Wark conducted a very non-antagonistic inter-
view with John Prescott, the Deputy Leader of the victorious Labour Party. Given
this context immediately following an election, the public desire at this time is
deemed to be interest rather than antagonism.
Yet by 2001, in a context marked by the notion of political ‘spin’ or the
perceived deliberate manipulation of news and media for propaganda purposes
by the Labour government, again the corpus, and the previous Respondent
Interview quotations, would suggest that the degree of antagonism seems to be
rising. The medium-term analysis of context would suggest a changing situation,
where 4 years on, after election promises not to be ‘sleazy’ but following a number
of scandals on financial probity and personal morality grounds, the construction
in the later interview is then one of greater antagonism.
Contrast the degrees of antagonism in these two propositions:
KW: Now when John Major demitted today, he said that he was handing over the most
benevolent economy ever handed over by a Prime Minister. The books are opened
now. Is he right?
(Interview 20)
JV: From our knowledge of it, and we’ve seen it, there are 309 reported cases of
illegal sheep movements which have been reported by trading standards officers but
only by 58 of the 150 trading standards officers that were surveyed. So it suggests
that there are a lot of illegal sheep movements going on.
(Interview 37)
The first is constructed and represented as a question for information with the
emphasis on the behaviour of the previous administration, for which Mr Prescott
cannot be held responsible. In the second there is a suggestion of illegality, and an
implied failure on the government’s part to prevent this, for which as a minister
for some time, Mr Brown, it is implied, can be held responsible.

2b. Medium-term synchronic context – Impact of sociohistoric mores on generic

conventions
Linguistically, the differential in degrees of deference and hostility can be illus-
trated throughout the corpus in the approach to interrogatives and through a
brief transitivity analysis. There is evidence from the corpus that the choice of an
existential or relational process using the verb ‘to be’ in order to reify an utterance
that may be contested or contestable, e.g.
● existential and relational processes evaluating negatively the state of the
government ‘you’re in a mess, aren’t you’.
● material processes evaluating negatively the actions of the government
Clearly these tough new proposals are going to please many of the Unions, but isn’t
the reality that they are going to do little to solve situations like the Manton School
example.
● verbal process evaluating negatively comments made
. . . and yet only the other day, you described his (Major’s) public image as unmemo-
rable.
● use of verbal and mental processes to describe a party’s action in contrast to
material processes to describe opposition (you say and think whilst they do)
you are saying that even if this peace process breaks down as far as you understand
it, the IRA will continue to observe the cease-fire.
● direct attitudinally evaluative interpersonal epithets
this question of Europe in your Party which is brewing up into a potentially damag-
ing issue.
● indirect (ironic) interpersonal epithets
how helpful do you think it was to . . .
In terms of the use of interrogatives it is revealing to note the way in which

alternatives are offered as a means of addressing the proposition depending on
the degree of hostility displayed. An example addressed to a government minister
is clearly presuppositional and both of the alternatives are negative:
Sir Norman, were these results as bad as you expected or were they worse?
Now, the winner at Eastleigh sent a message to the Prime Minister. He said ‘change
your policies or change your job’. Which will he do?
In contrast, the question addressed to an opposition shadow minister offers one

negative alternative plus one ‘escape route’:
Let’s take the pensions issue, because that is one issue which is quite fundamental to
the party and what the party actually believes in now . . . you have got a fight on your
hands tomorrow, or will a deal be struck?
So the medium-term sociopolitical context does seem to have a strong bearing on

the linguistic choices made by interviewers.
The notion of intertextuality was one raised by interview respondents as a
way of checking that politicians do what they say they do:

the purpose is I guess is political consistency . . . I mean if you prove somebody has
said something absolutely opposite to what they said today clearly you’ve got some
armoury there.
It is also a mechanism by which interviewers maintain a neutral stance:

. . . one of the ways of challenging a minister, one of the ways of exploring and
explaining a subject is through bringing in relevant testimony . . . I mean it is actually
a way of avoiding appearing partisan.
Interdiscursivity is central to discursal construction, and so to a location of dis-

course within a temporal context. The following is an extract from an interview
with the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (TES, 2000: 4).
‘If we don’t have a first class well-educated workforce, then we can’t compete’ he says.
‘It is the single biggest driver of increased productivity. There is no way we can
compete with low wage economies in the developing world. But we can compete on
the basis of skill and aptitude and knowledge. I don’t personally believe we’ve yet
understood the importance of education. We’re at the beginning of understanding it.’
This offers a clear example of the interdiscursivity of the discourses of economics

and education. It represents a GNP philosophy of education (Bottery, 1990).
Education is viewed as one part of a machine furthering the economic prosperity
of the country. The teacher is constructed as a trainer of practical skills, the needs
for which are defined by government policy. The educational task is viewed as
raising standards of literacy and numeracy to support the economy. It implies
teachers/schools are accountable to society in meeting these economic aims and
so can be judged by government-sponsored bodies. This implies policy interfer-
ence in curriculum, pedagogy, inspection, teacher education and management.
The problem with this mixing of discourses is that in its push for ‘professionalism’
it ignores the diversity of ‘professions’. It ignores the complexity and richness of
the different routes of professional thought and values, and cannot have the
depth of insight and understanding into the context of these. In calls for ‘best
practice’ one implicitly denies the diversity that is characteristic of education as a
human activity, and diverse approaches to pedagogy in differing contexts.
It suggests a performative view in which human beings are judged solely in
terms of their productivity, itself typical of the dominant discourses in this
temporal context. The discourse further serves to ‘normalize’ those who adhere to
its philosophy. Therefore, the literate, the numerate and employed are ‘normal’
and the unemployed, the illiterate, and innumerate, by these value-laden terms
are reified as negative, deviant, problems for society to solve. The common sense
here is one of conformity to a regulatory norm rather than a celebration of
consensual diversity.
The following are some examples of the instantiation of this interdiscursivity:
● first class well-educated workforce – the interweaving of educational and
economic policy;

● the single biggest driver of increased productivity;

● compete (three instances);
● skill, aptitude and knowledge (key elements of education?);
● present tense locating the debate in the ‘here and now’;
● repeated use of inclusive pronominal ‘we’ (six times) to position participants
as in-group members with the speaker, and thus assuming shared beliefs and
values in this philosophy of education.
This notion of interdiscursivity is also linked to the category of epoch, as it is
a key mechanism through which the assumptions of what is viewed as knowl-
edge and truth are constructed and reinforced, through a process of ‘naturaliza-
tion’ (Fairclough, 1989).
3a. Individuals, organizations and structures – Influence of actors/agents on

representation
In my example interviews, the key figures and organizations are TV interviewers
Kirsty Wark and Jeremy Vine, politicians John Prescott and Nick Brown,
Conservative and Labour Parties, BBC, and the farming community, although
more generally, key figures are represented by the political and media organiz-
ations and their conventions. The political control of press officers such as Alistair
Campbell, the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former press secretary, and his
office at Millbank, who are widely cited by my interview respondents as a key
influence on the availability and content of interviews:
. . . we wanted to talk to Nicky Gavron, because we knew she was going to be up for
Deputy Mayor, but they wouldn’t give us her, they gave us Trevor Phillips instead, and
that was, you know, entirely Millbank, but then we went directly to her and she says
‘Well, you know, I mustn’t cross Millbank’ and that’s what you get a heck of a lot of
the time . . . it’s got a bit better but I mean (laughs) once I was doing an interview with
some MP and his bleeper went off, and it actually said ‘Do not agree to do Newsnight
interview’ and it was sent to all backbenchers . . .
The institutional constraints on broadcasters and journalists need also to be con-

sidered. Only 2 of the 22 broadcast interviewers surveyed in the questionnaire
felt their institution did not require a stance of ‘neutrality’ in interviews.
Interview Respondent 8 noted that it is watched quite hard, both by editors and
programme colleagues whilst Interview Respondent 9 stated that neutrality was
laid down by BBC Charter – it’s an absolute requirement.
3b. Individuals, organizations and structures – Influence of actors/agents on discourse

Here Jeremy Vine’s direct style has, according to my respondents, continued the
tone set by fellow BBC interviewers Jeremy Paxman and John Humphries for a
general adversarial approach to interviewing. Indeed also the individual reputa-
tions, responsibilities and ambitions of the interviewees will also affect their
choices of how they will encode their responses. Indeed the BBC’s Charter legal

requirement, that a broadcast journalist maintains a stance of formal neutrality

has had a major impact on the way in which journalists structure their questions
in order to meet this criterion and advance challenging propositions. The complex
interrelationship among institutions, structures and the individual all play a part
in the construction of the interview, and more generally in all institutional
discourses (Davies et al., 1999).
4a. Epoch – The synchronic context

The temporal context in which the interviews take place, one of late 20th
century/early 21st century parliamentary government in the UK, is character-
ized by an increasing potential for the media reportage of political issues and
events. It is characterized by a conflict between the institutional requirements of
neutrality imposed on broadcast institutions and the institutional requirements
of those institutions in a competitive environment to increase their share of the
audience. This needs to be weighed against the suggestion from interview respon-
dents that despite the existence of the adversarial broadcast interview, the media
do play a role in sustaining the status quo. In turn, this needs to be weighed
against the self-regulation of the media in that the competitive environment
demands that each broadcast institution will be seeking out shortcomings in the
others.
4b. Epoch – The discoursal construction

As stated, the BBC Charter requires that a broadcast journalist maintain a stance
of formal neutrality. However, the inception of ITV in the 1950s caused a radical
change in political interviewing from being a neutral vehicle for information
transmission to a challenge on policy and practice. Robin Day (1975) suggests
this is because it makes for more interesting, challenging and controversial
television that has a positive affect on the audience ratings. My respondent inter-
views pointed to many journalists’ concerns with the late 1990’s phenomenon of
‘dumbing down’, particularly in ITV’s coverage of political affairs.
The change in the future is dumbing down, that is very obvious, there isn’t a news
executive in this county who will admit this but there is enormous pressure to dumb
down and it is happening everywhere, you know, it seems to be self-evidently obvious
in terms of ITV . . . There is no news on ITV.
Interviewers accept they play a role in maintaining status quo, they offer a
professional facade of a questioning of policy, etc., but where institutions and
ideologies are under threat, with reporting on events and personalities such as
the Gulf War, Ireland, Kosovo, Joerg Haider, this facade disappears.
there’s no such thing as neutrality . . . I just don’t think the interviewer can ever
detach themselves from who they are . . . I feel no requirement to be particularly
neutral about that (Joerg Haider in Austria) . . . I know lots of people, the really

professional thing is essentially neutrality, but I don’t think it’s a realistic human
condition, indeed I think it’s a dishonest human condition.
I am not neutral for example where anti-semitism or racism is concerned. I’m against
it and will robustly question from that perspective. If you want an interviewer who
thinks such positions are defensible quarters from which to question then find
another interviewer.
Again this section raises the issue of interdiscursivity. The construction of a

particular episteme can be reinforced and naturalized through the mixing of dis-
course. In the Blair interview (TES, 2000), assumptions of order and exclusion
are activated through the privileging of the literate and numerate and the mar-
ginalization of those not included within these groupings. The interdiscursivity
constructs and reinforces a ‘common sense’ that legitimates the policies, values
and ethics of this particular philosophy.
Harris notes (1991: 93) that how we interpret the strategies politicians use in
responding to questions ‘may be affected by a particular set of historical circum-
stances and ideological norms which tend to elude definition in empirical terms.’
I would agree with this position, though dispense with her modality and assert
that it is fundamentally affected by the synchronic relevance. It is this contention
that my framework hopes to elucidate.
Implications
The implications are:
1. The necessity for a methodological interdisciplinarity, as advocated by Weiss
and Wodak (2003) previously discussed, where a more comprehensive theoreti-
cal treatment of context requires insights from other disciplines in theoretical,
methodological and research terms. The corpus is the bedrock of the study of
how texts operate. However, the textual analysis can only be helped by:
● a systematic understanding of the sociohistoric context of the production
and reception of the text;
● qualitative interviewing with specialist informants where possible – those
engaged in the creation of the text, if one is concerned with contextualiz-
ing the discourse. This does not deny the researcher’s role in analysis, or
in view of social constructionist and phenomenological perspectives,
should it be taken at face value. However, these informants have some-
thing to add, and some aspects of the discourse may be obscured without
these insights. This could be seen as pre-empting Geoff Thompson’s
(2000) question in the title to his article, ‘Is it enough to trust the text?’;
● the value of considering how texts are received offers the potential to
challenge critiques of SFL that it only views text from the perspective of
the producer. Reception theories, such a Stuart Hall’s (1980) ‘encoding/

decoding theory’, suggest that while text producers make language

choices to imbue texts with a preferred reading, readings may be either
dominant in accepting this preferred reading, resistant by rejecting it, or
negotiated when a group accept much of the previous position but may
dissent in certain aspects, on the basis of culture, context and experience.
2. The value of an interdisciplinary study of texts. By accepting Hallidayan and
critical discourse perspectives, we reject the view of language as an entity to
be studied in experimental isolation. Other disciplines come to bear – social
theory and sociology, semiotics, philosophy, political theory, media studies,
multi-modality studies, cognitive processing studies amongst many others.
The notion of a temporal context is for me fundamentally bound up with
notions of interdisciplinarity.
Conclusion
This synchronic/diachronic model is an attempt to look at the contextual impact
of time, while being aware of the distorting lenses of a modernist notion of linear
time and of the impact of the cultural construction of historical perceptions.
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DAV I D H YAT T works at the School of Education, University of Sheffield as Director of the
MA Education Policy and Practice, Director of the MEd English Language Teaching and
Director of the Singapore Distance Learning Programme. He also contributes to the MA
and EdD programmes in Literacy and Language in Education. David has worked in the UK,
Spain, Hungary, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong, and has worked at the universities of
Bristol and Bath. His research interests include critical discourse studies, political/media
discourse analysis and academic literacy, and he holds a PhD in the area of critical literacy
in education. A D D R E S S : School of Education, University of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road,
Sheffield S10 2JA, UK. [email: d.hyatt@sheffield.ac.uk]

Critical Discoursal Analysis of Synchronic Context

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Discourse & Society

Time for a change: a critical discoursal analysis of synchronic context

The online version of this article can be found at:

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A B S T R A C T . This article offers a framework for the analysis of temporal

KEY WORDS: critical discourse studies, interdiscursivity, synchronic and diachronic

Bourdieu (1991) contends that it would be meaningless to try to analyse political

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From context to temporal context

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open to negotiation by the participants and are therefore evolving contexts

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constructed demand the viewers’ engagement in construction of textual mean-

A critical note on context and interpretation

A framework for analysis

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1. IMMEDIATE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

2. MEDIUM - TERM SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

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commendatory term. An example of this would be the diversity in deference of

3. CONTEMPORARY SOCIOPOLITICAL INDIVIDUALS , ORGANIZATIONS AND

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Critiques of this analytical tool

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ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE CORPUS

1a. Immediate synchronic context – State of contemporary actuality

1b. Immediate synchronic context – Current generic conventions

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2a. Medium-term synchronic context – Wider synchronic sociohistoric mores

Interestingly, there seems to be a clear correlation between this level of antago-

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context of considerable change in British politics, economic downturn and

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2b. Medium-term synchronic context – Impact of sociohistoric mores on generic

In terms of the use of interrogatives it is revealing to note the way in which

In contrast, the question addressed to an opposition shadow minister offers one

So the medium-term sociopolitical context does seem to have a strong bearing on

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It is also a mechanism by which interviewers maintain a neutral stance:

Interdiscursivity is central to discursal construction, and so to a location of dis-

This offers a clear example of the interdiscursivity of the discourses of economics

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● the single biggest driver of increased productivity;

3a. Individuals, organizations and structures – Influence of actors/agents on

The institutional constraints on broadcasters and journalists need also to be con-

3b. Individuals, organizations and structures – Influence of actors/agents on discourse

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requirement, that a broadcast journalist maintains a stance of formal neutrality

4a. Epoch – The synchronic context

4b. Epoch – The discoursal construction

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Again this section raises the issue of interdiscursivity. The construction of a

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decoding theory’, suggest that while text producers make language

Bottery, M. (1990) The Morality of the School. London: Cassell.

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Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com by mai falalky on October 24, 2009

Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com by mai falalky on October 24, 2009

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