Affiliation and disaffiliation markers in the Legislative Assembly

of New Brunswick

Madeleine Allard

Sat. 2:00-3:40 C

In the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick, verbal interactions entail the production of affiliation and disaffiliation markers such as desk-thumping, applause, laughter, interjections, and comments. The approach and findings of conversational analysis are being applied to the study of parliamentary debates which have not been the focus of much study compared to the work carried out on conversations described as small talk. To ensure the interest of a large number of interactants who have little opportunity to take the floor entails such consequences as those related to speech turns and attention. In fact, a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) does not have the possibility to take the floor or keep his speech turn as he wishes since the Speaker allocates speech turns. Through the production of approval or disapproval markers, MLAs demonstrate not only that they are paying attention to what is been said, but it also suggests a stand in relationship to the discourse of the MLA who has the floor. With the aid of an audiovisual recording and the Journal of debates (Hansard) transcription of proceedings of December 4th, 1992, we analyze the discourse production of MLAs who had the floor in order to shed light on the various strategies and the relationship between those strategies and the production of markers by the audience. Research by Atkinson (1984a; 1984b) who studied verbal interactions of supporters of one political party gathered together has shown that applause is the result of a collective display of affiliation and unequivocal as to its interpretation. One then has to wonder what type of behavior occurs in a setting where parliamentarians are members of four political parties and a lengthy debate revolving around a controversial issue related to language rights takes place. Our working hypothesis was that the number of disaffiliation markers would be significantly higher than affiliation markers. The purpose of our paper is to verify this hypothesis by analyzing approximately seven hundred markers produced during the day in question using the following criteria: a) affiliation and disaffiliation markers; b) source of marker production, whether the result of an individual or collective display and the political stripes of those involved; c) duration; d) utterance content preceding the production or one or several makers; e) marker distributions; f) frequency of markers according to the item on the agenda.

References

Atkinson, J. Maxwell, 1984a: Our masters' voices: The language and body language of politics, London and New York, Methuen.

Atkinson, J. Maxwell, 1984b: Public speaking and audience responses: Some techniques for inviting applause, J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversational analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press/ Paris, Maison des sciences de l'homme.