Small stories and accountability of discursive action in mediated political discourse: Contextualisation and recontextualisation of ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants

This paper examines how participants in mediated political discourse use short narratives strategically to account for discursive action by contextualising and re-contextualising their selves, particular acts intended unintended perlocutionary effects. The data analysed are pre-election (2017) non-election (2018), comprising online news reports from British broadsheets, parliamentary debates, speeches leading politicians, web-based comments' sections. research is based on the differentiation between generalised pragmatic premise second-order theoretical construct of accountability 2 communicative its discourse-community-based particularisation, first-order participant 1 . value latter negotiated context political-discourse further distinguished as regards acts. analysis focuses ordinary not-so-ordinary contextualise recontextualise interfacing ordinary-life experience anchored private domains public institutional domains. It considers (1) production format comparing story tellers; (2) stories with (a) not-so-ordinary, (b) ordinary, (c) characters; (3) settings settings; (4) explicit implicit evaluations characters tellers. shows that there not only variation formatting more-prototypical small monolithic characters, plot, less-prototypical more dimensional fuzzy evaluations. There also function stories: tellers through life-world-experience-based accounts while at same time implicating leadership skills. They present themselves listening people, voicing concerns arena, initiating acting behalf. Ordinary tell stories, distancing agents. In data, participants' references private-public interface generally trigger conversational implicatures targeting sincerity, credibility ideological coherence, used show effects decision real-life experience.