Verbal rituals, power and discursive identities: discursive strategies of consolidation of the interlocutive relationship in radio broadcasts

Abstract

Taking as reference a corpus of verbal interactions available in five Portuguese radio broadcasts constituted by phone calls from listeners that, during the night period, go daily on air in order to dialogue with the radio host, we will analyse the verbal rituals that contribute to the maintenance of the relation of institutional power established between the interactants. The paper considers the sequential and interactive dimensions of speech acts, analysing the discourse strategies accomplished by the radio hosts and by the listeners that participate in the radio broadcast in order to achieve a balanced interactional relation that involves saving face, as well as persuasion. Regularly, in these institutional settings, listeners use conversational de-vices that are specific of oral interaction, along with linguistic phenomena that reveal the conversational involvement of the participants in interaction: hesitations, speech overlap, repetitions, diminutives, discourse intensifiers and narratives of life experience. Radio hosts manage the flux of thematic progression, establishing and looking after coherence with the realisation of interventions of continuity and the production of answer-question sequences. These are all aspects that contribute to the maintenance of the interactional order on the radio broadcasts under analysis and that help consolidating interactional relations.