Dominanze multiple e negoziazione dell’agentività nell’interazione mediata delle conferenze stampa italo-tedesche di politici italiani

Bilateral press conferences are asymmetric interactions whose institutionalised frame involves the presence of journalists, interviewees (i.e., politicians) and of simultaneous interpreters. Due to their standardised interactional format, pragmatic constraints related to these events differ from canonical interviews. This may be observed as far as the participants’ interactional, semantic and strategic dominance is concerned (cf. Orletti, 2004). Within this “multiple dominance interaction” event we are going to analyse journalists’ questions in Italian (both original and interpreted from German) and Italian Prime Ministers’ answers (both original and interpreted into German) during international summits at the presence of Chancellor Merkel in the time-span 2013-2017.
Thanks to an integrated theoretical approach we aim to examine data from a pragmatic perspective, by applying a wide range of analytic categories for the interpretation of phenomena falling into the negotiation of agentivity in terms of mitigation and intensification.
Our qualitative analyses of journalists’ questions and politicians’ answers, in their original and mediated versions, focus on the performative and encoding level in order to provide evidence of the following assumptions: (i) politicians negotiate their role as dominant in response to journalists’ questions by modulating their agency and constructing their political Self accordingly; (ii) interpreters play an active role within the interactional exchange affecting the politicians’ dominance-gaining attempts and their pragmatic efforts in the Self-construction.