English as a lingua franca in political talk : The use of self-repair and repetition as clarification strategies in political interviews with Jean-Claude Juncker

Abstract: This study investigates the use of two communicative strategies in particular, namely self- repair and repetition, in political interviews with Jean-Claude Juncker where English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). While ELF has received increasing attention throughout the past years, with a variety of researched genres ranging from higher education (e.g. Björkman 2011; Kaur 2011; Mauranen 2006) and business (Bjørge 2010; Firth 1996; Ehrenreich 2009; Pullin Stark 2009) to domestic settings (e.g. Klötzl 2014; Pietikäinen 2014), the genre of political interviews remains largely under-researched – despite it being such a highly international and high-stakes domain. Therefore, the aim of the present research is to include this domain to the list of researched genres, and thereby to gain a better understanding of how a politician uses ELF in his official role. The data comprises four interviews with the president of the EU-commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, with a total interview-time of 35 minutes. The interviews have been transcribed in their entirety for the purpose of the present study, and the data was analysed drawing on conversation analytic approaches. Both self-repair and repetition were frequently identified as clarification strategies in the data and their functions comply to a large extent with previous findings from ELF research (e.g. Kaur 2011; Lichtkoppler 2007; Mauranen 2006). Repetition was found to be used as a strategy to specify utterances and ensure understanding and self-repair to either right the wrongs or raise explicitness. In addition to that, the use of repetition showed some interview-genre related functions as well, such as the use of repetition to influence and interrupt the regular turn-taking structure of interviews. This study shows that the use of ELF is in fact to a certain extent different in political interviews than in other researched genres, and therefore suggests that further studies within this genre would significantly contribute to the field of research into ELF.