Causing, staging, and negotiating disruption

Language thematisations in political debates on immigration

Abstract

Immigration discourses are controversial and disruptive discourses within which ideological questions around the protection or destruction of existing social and political orders are discussed. These debates are increasingly revolving around political language use itself. Disruptions are identified in the debates not only on the level of sociopolitical implications of immigration, but also on the communicative level. A relevant communicative means hereby is public-political language criticism voiced in language (use) thematisations. Methodologically, the analysis of communicative disruptions (i.e. a word choice or formulation is not recognized as usable without disruption or is highlighted as worthy of criticism or problematic through metacommunicative marking) or stagings of disruptions (i.e. strategies of staging political competition and assigning and denying authority on the basis of notable linguistic evidence to decouple and delegitimize opposing ideologies) and interruptions of ongoing interaction to negotiate language use is carried out on the basis of an interactional-pragmatic discourse analysis. Thus, the instances are conceptualised as strategically employed language thematisation practices and attempts at (dis)clarification within mediatised public-political communication contexts.