Daniel Z. Kadar successfully applied for Academia Europaea’s competitive “From Knowledge To Action” Scheme with his early-career colleague David Hazemali
Daniel Z. Kadar, Research Professor of the ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics, successfully applied for Academia Europaea’s competitive “From Knowledge To Action” Scheme with his early-career colleague Dr David Hazemali (University of Maribor, Faculty of Arts, Department of History) and his broader research team. Their project, “Closed-Door Interaction on Politically Sensitive Topics – A Pragmatic Approach” will explore how poli cians use language when discussing sensi ve topics behind closed doors, by analysing phone calls between President Nixon and members of his inner circle during the unfolding of the Watergate scandal.
The description of the project is the following:
“We will collect and annotate comparable corpora consisting of private videotaped phone calls and public speeches of Nixon, and analyse these corpora from the point of view of speech acts an interaction. We will use our replicable speech act typology and related interactional system (see Edmondson, House and Kádár, 2023). Once we transcribe our data by using system of speech acts and interactional moves, we attempt to interpret recurrent interactional patterns through which Nixon discussed matters relating to the scandal in an unmitigated way. Although due to the size of the project ours is clearly a case study, in interpreting the effect of the closed-door setting on the behaviour of the participants we are able to rely on our team’s previous research on the language of closed-door diplomacy. We will focus on the particular issue of how the sensitivity of a topic influences the language use of politicians, which is a fundamental knowledge-gap to fill. In analysing the effect of sensitivity for the language use of Nixon and his colleagues, we will also compare the outcomes of our case study with how Nixon reflected to the Watergate scandal in the media.”
The project:
- Provides rare insight into the private language use of politicians who normally communicate in public.
- Allows to consider how the sensitivity of a topic influences language use.
- Provides an interdisciplinary cross-over between language, politics and historical studies.
- Will likely to trigger the interest of the broader public.