Article published In:
Journal of Language and PoliticsVol. 15:2 (2016) ► pp.215–236
Towards a linguistic model of crisis response (CRModel)
A study of crisis communication in the phone hacking scandal
The paper handles public crisis communication (cc) done by top public figures involved in what has been dubbed the News International Phone Hacking Scandal of 2011 in the UK. It contributes to the field by proposing an approach which reflects a “linguistic leaning” in cc (response) research. Hence, by applying sociolinguistic (face) and linguistic (stance) concepts we examine the texts released, with a view to discovering how crisis communicators ‘negotiate’ language to persuade/ manipulate the stakeholders to alter their perceptions about the crisis and the people implicated. The examination focuses primarily on grammatical stance marking devices (Biber el al. 1999) yielding results in three dimensions: 1) structural, 2) semantic and 3) stance attribution, and shows that besides rhetorical goals, the underlying objectives the speakers pursue are face maintenance and, consequently, facework that must be done in the circumstances that have occurred.
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