Polar Questions, Response Preference, and the Tasks of Political Positioning in Journalism

ABSTRACT

Polar questions encode grammatical and sometimes social preferences for a particular answer. This article examines the use of such preferences in journalism and in particular within political positioning questions aimed at revealing where politicians stand on salient issue and policy debates. Positioning questions are geared to three distinguishable tasks: (a) proffering the recipient’s position for confirmation, (b) eliciting comment on others’ positions, and (c) proposing a mainstream or trending position. Such tasks condition the selection of a position to be grammatically forwarded and whose viewpoint it is understood to represent. Grammatical preference may be laminated with lexical and discursive formulations that underscore social preferences and in other ways advance the task in progress. This may entail positioning recipients as out of sync with other political actors or with the societal mainstream. Data in American English.

Notes

¹ A fuller analysis of the exchange in Excerpt 4 may be found in Clayman (2017, pp. 47–48).

² For another instance of “overbuilt” resistance to a marginalizing question, see the first excerpt in Clayman (2016).