Oppositional Discourse in the digital transformation. A contrastive analysis between face-to-face and video-mediated interviews in English

This paper explores Oppositional Discourse (OD) with special attention to video-mediated communication in English. I will first qualify the various dimensions of OD as well as its linguistic triggers. Then, I will carry out an exploratory study to test if and to what extent the digital transformation has contributed to possible changes in OD strategies; to do so, a subset of the InterDiplo Covid-19 Corpus, developed at the University of Verona, Italy, will be analyzed. The Corpus covers face-to-face and video-mediated interviews carried out in English between journalists and diplomats/politicians/science experts from different lingua-cultural backgrounds, and is specifically tagged to concentrate on the question-answer interface between interviewer and interviewee. The subcorpus taken into consideration for the present study covers two equal sets of face-to-face and video-mediated interviews to compare non-linguistic and linguistic aspects. The data yielded by this pilot analysis point to differences in the actualization of OD between the two subsets, thus suggesting that the video-mediated environment does play a role in the way interviews unfold.