Political Media Discourse as an Interactional Space: Presidential TV Addresses to the Nation from a Metadiscourse Perspective

The study of political media discourse as an interactional space requires an analysis of not only its linguistic characteristics and propositional content but also its metadiscourse component, strategies employed to express speaker’s attitudes and involve the addressee into a dialogue. This paper aims to identify tools exploited to realize the interactional metadiscourse strategies in the genre of Presidential New Year’s addresses to the nation. To achieve this goal, the study determines the types of metadiscourse used in the texts of New Year’s Addresses, their functions and frequencies. The texts of New Year’s addresses broadcast in 2001-2022 were used as the research material for the present study. The analysis of these texts identified five categories of metadiscourse used with different frequencies: intensifiers of the categorical of statments (boosters), mitigators of categorical of statments (hedges), explicators of affective state, self-mentions, and engagement markers. The study revealed that these metadiscourse devices predominantly serve the following communicative functions: explicate the speaker’s confidence in the truth of the propositional content, demonstrate solidarity with the addressee, explicate the speaker’s affective states, involve the addressee into a dialogue, indicate the speaker’s personal responsibility for the utterances. The analysis showed that the most frequent metadiscourse categories are boosters and explicators of affective states, the shares of which in the total number of metadiscourse categories were 53.7% and 28.3%, respectively. The findings allow for the conclusion that metadiscourse is a crucial strategy contributing to the interactive nature of political media discourse.