Abstract
Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is a parliamentary session in the British House of Commons where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs). Taking an interactional linguistic perspective, this chapter examines how LOs and PMs engage in adversarial ‘enticing sequences’ (e.g. Reynolds 2013, 2015), negotiating power and authority on the micro-level of interaction. Based on authentic video recordings, the study describes aspects of embodied action design and turn construction in light of the complex, mediated participation framework at PMQs. A focus is on the ‘index-up gesture’ (Streeck 2008) which is deployed in a specific action slot to claim superior epistemic and evidential access as a resource for claims of power, dominance, and authority by LOs.
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Notes
- 1.
Consider for instance the headline of an article in a British broadsheet, “Cameron fails to end ‘Punch and Judy’ politics” (Kirkup 2008), or PM Gordon Brown’s attack on David Cameron at PMQs: “This is the man who makes speeches about the primacy of Parliament. This is the man who says that we should keep our promises, and also said that there would be an end to Punch and Judy politics — and what did he then do?” (Hansard 27 Feb. 2008).
- 2.
- 3.
I am grateful to Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Anita Fetzer for making the videos available to me. Thanks to Stephen Bates and Alison Sealey for the Hansard files.
- 4.
For an example of question -leaking, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-pmq-prime-ministers-questions-labour-attack-lines-leaked-david-cameron-a7058921.html, accessed June 2018.
- 5.
Schegloff’s (2007) account of sequence organisation is fundamental here:
The organization of sequences is one of the central forms of organization that gives shape and coherence to stretches of talk and the series of turns of which stretches of talk are composed. The focus of this organization is not, in general, convergence on some topic being talked about, but the contingent development of courses of actions . The coherence which is involved is that which relates the action or actions which get enacted in or by an utterance to the ones which have preceded and the ones which may follow. (Schegloff 2007: 251, italics in the original)
- 6.
- 7.
The online glossary by the British Parliament provides the following definition of Green Papers:
Green Papers are consultation documents produced by the Government. The aim of this document is to allow people both inside and outside Parliament to give the department feedback on its policy or legislative proposals. (http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/green-papers/, accessed Feb. 2017)
- 8.
- 9.
It constitutes a general pattern in the data that interrogative question components are accompanied by the LO’s full gaze toward the PM throughout the entire construction or starting at what is treated as the final syntactic unit (cf. similar findings on gaze in questions in everyday conversation, Rossano 2012, 2013; Rossano et al. 2009; Stivers and Rossano 2010).
- 10.
Exceptions to the rule are questions on national security where national interests are foregrounded or speeches where tributes are paid and unity across party lines is displayed.
- 11.
The concept of type conformity was introduced by Raymond (2000, 2003) in his work on yes/no interrogatives but can also be applied to wh-interrogatives: “‘when’-interrogatives make a time reference relevant ” (Schegloff 2007: 78). Preferred second pair parts come unmitigated, unelaborated, and on time (Schegloff 2007: 63–73).
- 12.
Edward Reynolds has commented that in this restricted institutional environment, the PM must reply to all questions, enticing or not, and asked how we can say that the PM needs to be ‘enticed’ when in fact he is required to reply. Note that it constitutes a deviation from normal answer patterns in the data that PMs respond with a type-conforming answer at PMQs. It is in this sense that enticing questions are functional here: They solicit a straight, unequivocal answer on the part of the PM, which otherwise seems to be strategically avoided.
- 13.
Headline-punchline structures are a common rhetorical device in political speech to generate applause. Heritage and Greatbatch observe:
Here the speaker proposes to make a declaration, pledge, or announcement and then proceeds to make it. The message (or punch line) is emphasized by the speaker’s calling attention in advance to what he or she is about to say. Similarly, the audience is given to understand that applause will properly be due at the completion of the punch line message, which, once again, is normally short and simple. (Heritage and Greatbatch 1986: 128–129)
Three-item lists along with contrasts have been described as ‘claptraps’ by Atkinson (1984; cf. also Heritage and Greatbatch 1986): “[…] messages packaged as contrasts and three-part lists […] are peculiarly susceptible to being noticed, reported and remembered” (Atkinson 1984: 131).
- 14.
There is further evidence for this interpretation from a metacomment by PM Tony Blair when he was using the pointing gesture in an answer turn during a friendly exchange with the LO David Cameron: “I am sorry — I was pointing my finger; I would not want that to break up the new consensus” (Hansard, 7 Dec. 2005).
- 15.
For the Labour party manifestos of the 1997 UK general election see http://labourmanifesto.com/1997/, accessed June 2018.
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Acknowledgement
This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented at the University of Birmingham, Department of Political Science and International Studies, 14 March 2017, and at the 15th International Pragmatics Conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 18 July 2017. Initial findings were delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Sociology, 13 April 2016, and at The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Communication Studies, 28 April 2016. I thank the audiences at these talks, especially Stephen Bates, Maria Charles, Xiaoting Li, Geoffrey Raymond, Edward Reynolds, and Jürgen Streeck, for their comments and discussion. Special thanks to Cornelia Gerhardt, Edward Reynolds, and Jürgen Streeck for reading earlier drafts of this chapter and their valuable feedback. I take full responsibility for all remaining problems.
The research for this paper was financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant nos 221933637 and 290707652.
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Reber, E. (2019). ‘Punch and Judy’ Politics? Embodying Challenging Courses of Action in Parliament. In: Reber, E., Gerhardt, C. (eds) Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97325-8_8
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