The use of contrastive markers in English policy speeches: A corpus-based cross-modality comparison of but and however in interpreted and non-interpreted language

Policy speeches constitute one of the most important means for the general public to access a government’s official policies (Schäffner & Bassnett 2010). The delivery and interpreting of such speeches thus require a high level of pragmatic competence in order to convey the message and underlying attitude in an accurate way (Pan & Wong 2015a, 2015b, forthcoming). In this regard, the appropriate rendition of pragmatic markers (PMs), “the linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” (Fraser 1996:168), becomes significant. Through a corpus-based survey of the use of different PMs in interpreted and noninterpreted political speeches, Pan & Wong (2015a, 2015b) found that contrastive markers (CMs), a subset of PMs, were treated differently than the other types of PMs in interpreted language, including syntactic markers
(e.g. “I know”, “I think”), lexical markers (e.g. “actually”, “kind of”, “sort of”, “then”), and elaborative markers (e.g. “above all”). Whereas the aforementioned PMs were found to be underused in interpreted language, the use of CMs seems to be more complicated: the CM “however” was found to be overused while “but” and “instead
of” were underused. In addition, CMs form a special type of PMs in that they signal “the utterance following is either a denial or a contrast of some proposition associated with the preceding discourse” (Fraser: 1996: 187). Despite the pragmatic significance of CMs in policy speeches, little research has been done to show how CMs are used and should be rendered in policy speeches.