Papers by Martin Montgomery
Journal of Language and Politics, Aug 25, 2020
Much commentary on the discourse of Donald Trump's populist appeal has tended to focus on his soc... more Much commentary on the discourse of Donald Trump's populist appeal has tended to focus on his social media presence, in particular on his use of Twitter, to the relative neglect of his campaign rallies. Yet his campaign rallies during the 2016 presidential election were arguably the critical vehicle for delivering the crucial votes which secured his victory. Members of his own team, and Trump himself, certainly thought so. Since the election Trump has continued to campaign in rallies in key states with increasing vigour, attracting large and enthusiastic audiences as the second term elections in 2020 approach. These large-scale public events dramatically enact the bond between Trump and his base. But they also provide an opportunity for research to re-focus attention beyond Trump as controversial populist political figure to the process of mutual engagement between Trump the speaker and his highly active and vocal audience. This article, partly through discourse analysis of Trump's speeches but also through close examination of the verbal, vocal and gestural behaviour of participants at his rallies poses the question: "Is the audience Trump's creation or is Trump the audience's creation?"
An Introduction to Language and Society, 2008
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Oct 21, 2011
This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popu... more This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popular ‘trouble-shooting’ business television programme Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA. Belligerent broadcasting is a broadcast style that offers as spectacle expressions of anger or impatience, or the exercise of intimidation, against an on-screen interlocutor. Focusing on the performances of Gordon Ramsay, the article analyses the management of on-screen confrontation between participants occupying asymmetrical positions of power and perceived expertise. The article looks at how the face-threatening component of belligerent talk is ameliorated by strategies of authenticity and its representation as a productive force within the narrative of the programme. Finally, we assess the relevance of arguments that this broadcasting style might be seen as part of a ‘new incivility’ across media discourses.
Journalism Studies, Apr 1, 2008
In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an... more In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstrøm (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit. KEYWORDS broadcast news; communicative entitlement; discourse analysis; discourse genre; news interview; quotation The Media Interview and the News Interview Since the 19th century, and particularly over the last half of the 20th century, interviews have featured as a salient genre across the range of print and broadcast media output, frequently being used in entertainment and confessional formats (see Bell and Van Leeuwen, 1994). The chat show interview, as one salient type, has been subject to much study (Bell and van Leeuwen, 1994; Tolson, 1991) and is pervasive enough as a form to be the subject of parody (see Montgomery, 1999; Tolson, 1991). One significant characteristic of media interviews as a generic form lies in the way that they work as talk for an overhearing audience. Interviewers and interviewees know that what they say will be appraised not just by their immediate interlocutor but by who-knows-how-many beyond. This is not merely a matter of pressure towards increased circumspection in one's choice of words, though that must undoubtedly exist. It is also a matter of the public performance of talk*of talking adequately for the public purposes of the encounter and of acquitting oneself well in public. A second significant aspect of the media interview as a genre is the way in which they are characterised by clear differentiation or pre-allocation of roles: one speaker asks questions and the other answers them. The speaker who asks questions does so from an institutionally defined position*one in which they hold some responsibility for setting the agenda, the terms or the topic of the discourse. Nor is it a case of simply asking questions; the media interviewer also controls the length, shape and even the style of the encounter. Conversely, interviewees have in some way or other earned their role, their ''communicative entitlement'' (Myers, 2000), by virtue of a distinctive attribute*as material for a documentary case study, as witness, as celebrity. And the nature of this entitlement is
Routledge eBooks, Nov 29, 2021
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2009
Discourse & Society, Jul 1, 1999
Discourse & Communication, Aug 19, 2016
Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in ... more Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in the different media are not the same. Print headlines are mostly contiguous with the story to which they refer. Broadcast headlines, however, are often at some temporal distance from their associated news item. In the print medium every story carries a headline. In broadcast news only some items are headlined. And yet, whereas the linguistic properties of print headlines have been much studied, almost no attention has been given to broadcast headlines. This article uses a corpus of headlines from BBC television news to explore their discursive form and function. It isolates a basic structure of {heading (+supplement)} for television news headlines and delineates a repertoire of patterns through which the structure is realised. In doing so, it suggests that the core function of television news headlines is to engage with the audience by projecting aspects of their news values forward through the programme.
Language and Literature, 2005
The article traces the emergence of war as the dominant term for responding to the events of 9/11... more The article traces the emergence of war as the dominant term for responding to the events of 9/11. It does so by focusing on speeches, interviews and newspaper headlines in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in their discursive-pragmatic contexts. In order to account for the salience and circulation of an expression such as war, it proposes for the public sphere a principle of discursive amplification. The article also highlights, however, the unevenness of the adoption of the term war by showing how differently it was inflected at different moments and in different sections of the public sphere. In addition, other modes of expression could have been adopted. The article provides some discursive reasons why war prevailed.
Springer eBooks, 2019
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Social Epistemology
The experimental method is designed to secure the reliable attribution of causal relationships by... more The experimental method is designed to secure the reliable attribution of causal relationships by means of controlled comparison across conditions. Doing so, however, depends upon the reduction of uncertainties and inconsistencies in the process of comparison; and this poses particularly significant challenges for the behavioral and social sciences because they work with human subjects, whose malleability and complexity often interact in unexpected ways with experimental manipulations, thus resulting in unpredictable behavior. Drawing on the Science and Technology Studies perspective and one of our author&#39;s experiences in experimental work, this paper examines how experimental social scientists manage to establish objectivity and standardization in the face of vagaries arising from working with human subjects. In identifying experimental researchers&#39; solutions to this challenge, we draw on methodological discussions among applied social scientists as naturally occurring data, through which we show how some seemingly mundane practices play essential roles in extracting patterns out of otherwise unpredictable behaviors in the lab. Closely examining such strategies, we reveal the inherent instabilities in the experimental method when adopted in the social sciences and discuss their methodological implications. In conclusion, we make tentative suggestions for escaping the kinds of methodological impasse which we have identified.
The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, 2009
The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism presents an authoritative, comprehensive assessmen... more The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism presents an authoritative, comprehensive assessment of diverse forms of news media reporting – past, present and future. It provides an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates, whilst also stressing the value of reinvigorating scholarship with a critical eye to developments in the professional realm.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media, 2017
... Introduction Debates about the nature and purpose of English Studies have been common-place s... more ... Introduction Debates about the nature and purpose of English Studies have been common-place since ... perspective in Ways of Reading is one that places less emphasis on Literature as such ... Examples in this book will be taken from the fields of journalism and advertising, film ...
An Introduction to Language and Society, 2008
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Papers by Martin Montgomery