Crossing the Bridges behind the Walls: The Case of Discourse Markers in the Princess Diana Panorama Interview
Crossing the Bridges behind the Walls: The Case of Discourse Markers in the Princess Diana Panorama Interview

Summary/Abstract: Since Martin Bashir’s interview of Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, represents a unique and unparalleled media event in the media world, and since the BBC Panorama interview represents an instance of successful communication and ideal delivery, it offers possibilities for analysing diverse discourse phenomena. The objects of this investigation are linguistic items investigated as part of highly heterogeneous categories, such as discourse connectives and discourse markers. Whilst inspecting the interview transcript, it was noticed that certain discourse markers had developed interaction functions in the process of discoursisation in addition to their primary transaction functions. Moreover, some discourse markers in the BBC Panorama interview have the role of closing the exchange between Bashir and Lady Diana, thereby introducing an utterance that summarises the main point of discussion. Some discourse markers under investigation mark an utterance as a rhetorical question. In other words, these lexical items mark a conclusion that can be reached by the interlocutor on the basis of the previous assertion. By way of illustration, the paper also offers certain corpus-based examples, showing that discourse markers may contribute to deriving conclusions that have been transformed from particular to general, among other things.

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