Question Design and Institutional Change: Explaining the Historic Rise of Aggressive Questioning in U.S. Presidential News Conferences

Professor Steven Clayman, University of California, Los Angeles.

Questions are ubiquitous in a wide range of occupational and professional activities, and the design of questions reflects not only the essential nature of such tasks but also the dynamic and evolving institutional environments in which they are embedded.  Accordingly, the phenomenon of question design can provide a window into processes of institutional change.   This study exploits the analytic potential of question design in the context of U.S. presidential news conferences.  Presidential journalism in the U.S. is known to have grown substantially more aggressive through the 1970s and beyond, but a definitive explanation for this trend remains elusive.  Some suggest that events surrounding Vietnam and Watergate transformed the professional norms of journalism.  However, the trend could also be a more superficial and transitory response to other circumstantial factors that converged in the same time period, such as president-level characteristics (the prevalence of Republicans, Washington outsiders, and more vigorous news management efforts), the political environment (the rise of official discord), and the economic environment (a downturn in the business cycle).  This study disentangles these various factors and assesses their relative success in explaining trends in journalistic conduct in the postwar era.  Data are drawn from a large sample of presidential news conferences from 1953 through 2000, focusing on the aggressiveness of journalists' questions.  The results strongly support the normative shift hypothesis, although economic factors have also been consequential. These results suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of journalistic change in relations between the White House press corps and the presidency.

Multimodality in dance instruction

Docent Leelo Keevallik, Uppsala universitet.

When learning a bodily activity, much can be achieved by imitation. However, dance teachers regularly make use of both voice and the body in the class. They are constantly faced with the problem that human movements evolve in time and immediately disappear into oblivion. In order to discuss students' dance performance the teachers have to "replay" the relevant movements with their own body. Vocal means are simultaneously used to make sense of the moving body. The paper discusses multimodal practices of referring and quoting in dance instruction. To achieve a reference to a movement, a spate of time and a sequence of body configurations have to be extracted from the general flow of dance. This may be done by decomposing the movement with the help of deictic words, beat numbers and bodily displays, which are manipulated in terms of timing to achieve salience. In order to achieve salience in corrections, the teachers contrast the correct and incorrect performance. A demonstration of incorrect performance may be carried out as a bodily quote of the observed students' performance, but it necessitates verbal framing. Talk is used to explain which of the demonstrated versions is right, what the body has to do and why. The symbolic nature of language furthermore enables discussion on hypothetical cases, such as what happens if you don't correct your performance, and the use of metaphors. None of this is easily doable with the iconic body movements, which paradoxically constitute the very essence of dance. The study shows how the unimodal analysis of quoting and referring in linguistics profits from a wider multimodal account of human behavior.
 

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