Same Words, Different Work: Discourse Markers and Face in a Confrontational Interview Between Trump and Welker
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24256/ideas.v14i2.12920Keywords:
Discourse markers; Pragmatic functions; Politeness; Face-threatening acts; Political interviewAbstract
Discourse markers are often dismissed as filler, yet in a confrontational political interview they may do interactional and face-related work. This study asks how Donald Trump and Kristen Welker use discourse markers to manage common ground and face in the Meet the Press interview broadcast on 7 June 2026, which Trump ended himself. It is a descriptive qualitative single-case study of 310 speaking turns from the official transcript, checked against the broadcast recording. Eight markers from Jucker and Smith (1998), namely yeah, oh, okay, really, well, like, you know, and I mean, were screened with an omission test and a semantic-bleaching test, which left 83 valid tokens from 146 candidate occurrences. Functions were classified as reception or presentation, and politeness strategies were interpreted with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework. Trump produced 71 tokens and Welker 12. Trump’s tokens opened answers to questions that pressed him to commit and also sat inside his own long turns, where you know often presented a disputed claim as shared ground. Welker used only okay and well, always at the start of a turn, to accept, contest, or interrupt. A politeness strategy could be assigned to 40 of the 83 tokens, but to fewer than half of Trump’s (32 of 71). Well and okay carried different social meanings in the two roles, and the termination of the interview, judged here to be the most face-threatening sequence in the data, contained no marker.
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