Repetition on examples of interviews with Italian politicians

This paper analyses the repetition types in a specific subtype of political discourse – the media political interview. A political interview is a conversational type in which institutional participants take part in order to comment on a specific topic, and their speech is directed by media experts (cf. Lauerbach and Fetzer 2007). The roles, functions and motivation of the participants are determined by the environment in which the political interviews take place, and it is mostly an institutional and/or media environment and by its very nature it should be a structured speech with clearly defined rules and interactional norms. Nevertheless, the use of repetition which can have different functions is very common: from those arising from speakers’ insecurity, discomfort, or communicative disfluency, to those that are consciously employed in order to emphasize specific words, phrases, or entire statements, thereby enhancing the salience of the message and drawing the audience’s attention. Such repetitions serve to increase the illocutionary force of the utterance and contribute to its persuasive effect. This supports the assumption that political discourse frequently ignores the content, that is, the proposition, and that it most often focuses on the effect that one wants to achieve when addressing the target audience.

The aim of the research, using the examples of media interviews with Italian politicians, is to point out the different functions of repetition that politicians use in this political discourse subtype. The analysed corpus consists of twelve (12) interviews with Italian politicians and journalists available on the YouTube platform (video clips are approximately 15‒25 minutes long each), which were produced between 2002 and 2024. The interviews, lasting approximately four (4) hours, were transcribed in full so that various types of repetition could be extracted and analysed.

In order to accomplish the research questions, the interviews are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively, with the classification of different types of repetition according to the functional categorization (adapted and expanded from Lichtkoppler 2007; Ponzi 2019). This classification enabled the analysis of the frequency and functional distribution of repetitions in the interviews.