In Chapter 7, we discuss how best to analyse mediated political monologues. As news and other forms of media present political events, they are important to study, and for the pragmatician a key issue is how to tease out the dynamics of such monologues, making them pragmatically relevant. We believe that it is important to consider how such monologues gain interactional effect with the public because gaining such effect is the goal of these monologues. Thus we focus on textual features through which a monologue covertly interconnects the readers with politicians and political entities. Here we will refer to the concept of alignment, proposed by Goffman, arguing that many seemingly ‘innocent’ phenomena in political monologues aim to trigger the alignment of the public with politicians or political entities represented by the monologue. As a case study, we examine a corpus of political monologues published in Chinese newspapers in the wake of a national crisis. Following our cross-cultural pragmatic contrastive view, we will compare various types of political monologue, in order to tease out the interactional dynamics through which they trigger the alignment of their readers.

Chapter 4 examines social protocols in public discourse, representing the realm of ‘overly’ ordinary language use. The term ‘public discourse’ means both monologues and dialogues that take place in public, often through mediatised events or written (online) pieces which are available for, or even addressed to, members of the public. ‘Social protocols’ describe forms of language use associated with ‘politeness’ in public discourse specifically, where ‘politeness’ in the interpersonal sense is hardly needed, i.e., such forms at first sight may seem to be entirely ‘superfluous’ if not ‘redundant’. Because if this, while social protocols and mediatised public aggression (studied in Chapter 3) may appear to have little in common at first sight, interestingly both of them have an ‘unreasonable’ element. This sense of unreasonableness however dissolves once one looks at such forms of language use through the ritual perspective. As a case study, Chapter 4 examines the ritual conventions of social protocols in a corpus of Chinese public announcements made in the wake of a major social crisis.