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.本论文围绕对立话语（Oppositional Discourse，OD）展开研究，重点聚焦英语语境下的视频介导传播（video-mediated communication）场景。首先，本文将界定对立话语的多重维度及其语言触发因素。随后，本研究将开展一项探索性分析，以验证数字化转型是否以及在何种程度上推动了对立话语策略的演变。为此，本研究将对意大利维罗纳大学开发的InterDiplo新冠语料库（InterDiplo Covid-19 Corpus）子集进行分析。该语料库收录了来自不同语言文化背景的记者与外交官、政客、科学专家之间以英语开展的面对面访谈与视频介导访谈，并针对访谈者与受访者之间的问答交互环节进行了专门标注。本研究选取的子语料库包含两组规模相当的访谈样本：面对面访谈与视频介导访谈，用于对比分析话语中的非语言与语言层面特征。本次预分析所得数据显示，两组样本在对立话语的实践呈现方式上存在显著差异，由此表明视频介导传播环境确实会对访谈的整体推进路径产生影响。