McIllvenny1996a

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McIllvenny1996a
BibType ARTICLE
Key McIllvenny1996a
Author(s) Paul McIlvenny
Title Heckling in Hyde Park: verbal audience participation in popular public discourse
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Conversation Analysis, Audience, Political communication, Public Discourse
Publisher
Year 1996
Language
City
Month
Journal Language in Society
Volume 25
Number 1
Pages 27–60
URL Link
DOI 10.1017/S004740450002042X
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Speakers' Corner is a multicultural setting in a London park at which the general public can actively participate in popular debate. A successful “soap-box” orator should attract and keep an audience, elicit support from the crowd, and gain applause; indeed, a mastery of the crowd, the discourse, and the message is highly valued. However, although talk resources are deployed sensitively by speakers to elicit group affiliation and response, they are also exploitable by hecklers as resources for launching heckles and disaffiliative responses. Audiences at Speakers' Corner are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages; they are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may support, resist, or conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner, the timing, format, and sequential organization of heckling are described and analyzed with the tools and methods of conversation analysis. (Conversation analysis, audience response, popular public discourse, political speech, heckle)

Notes