Question Time is a distinctive daily parliamentary routine. Its aim is to hold Ministers of the State accountable for the actions and decisions of the Government. However, in many Parliaments, including the New Zealand and Australian Federal Houses of Representatives, it is more of a theatrical performance where parties try their best to score political points. As any performance, Question Time is governed by certain rules and regulations outlined in an official document Standing Orders. As there is not much action, Standing Orders mainly describe language norms and specify „unparliamentary language‟. This research looks at and analyses the use of formulaic vocabulary used by MPs in the year preceding general elections in New Zealand and Australia. The formulaic language includes phrasal lexical items and formulae for asking / answering questions, for raising points of order and the Speakers‟ idiolectal phrasal vocabulary for quelling disorder in the Chambers and regulating the work of the House. The framework developed for this research consisted of the following steps: an ethnographic study of Question Time as a communicative performance which included the development of a database containing all the empirical material; a xii linguistic study of Question Time including genrelect study, parliamentary formulae study and disorder analysis before the elections. As a result this research has shown that Question Time is a communicative performance event in New Zealand and Australia with significant cultural, historic and linguistic differences in spite of the common origins of the two Parliaments. It has identified 60 Question Time genre-specific phrasal lexical items that MPs use in the two Parliaments, studied their structure and meaning (where necessary). It has also looked at the strategies the MPs employ for creating disorder in the House, and the ways of quelling disorder by the Speakers of the two Parliaments.

This thesis uncovers and analyses the relationship between forms of talk on British television between 1970-1990, and the uneven transformations in gender politics that occurred in this period, which encompasses both the second wave feminist movement and the rise of neoliberal politics. It presents five historical case studies of talk-based television programmes from across this time period: No Man’s Land (Associated Television/ITV, 1973), Good Afternoon! (Thames Television/ITV, 1971-1984), Pictures of Women: Sexuality (Channel 4, 1984), Watch the Woman (Channel 4, 1985), and Question Time (BBC One, 1979-present). These case studies offer a deliberate selection of television texts that differ according to their institutional contexts; their position in the schedules; their status in existing broadcasting histories; their discursive arrangements; and their modes of address. The thesis seeks to consider how the communicative ethos of television talk has been gendered in three key ways: at the level of production - in the sense of when, how, and why television spaces have been opened up for gendered forms of talk in relationship to wider shifts in gender politics; at the level of the text - in terms of how the discursive arrangements of talk-based programmes have worked to include, exclude, legitimise or disavow women’s voices; and at the level of critical reception - in the sense of how television talk has been evaluated in profoundly gendered terms. The thesis is methodologically innovative because it theorises gendered forms of television talk in relationship to histories of television production, as well as to broader political, cultural and gender histories. It carries out important empirical ‘recovery work’ of hidden women’s television histories through the presentation of original archival research. It also presents theoretical work, which re-evaluates the distinctive communicative ethos of television – or its “sociability” in light of feminist theories of language, gender and power. Moreover, it sheds some historical light on why the institutional parameters of television still delimit the available spaces for women's speech.

Given that the basic functions of parliamentary Question Time are to provide information and to hold the Government accountable for its actions, the possibility of evasion occurring in such a context is of crucial importance. Evasion (equivocation) has been identified as a matter of concern in political interviews, but no systematic study has been undertaken in the context of parliamentary discourse, notably Question Time, anywhere in the world. This study applies and adapts Harris's (1991) coding framework on various types of responses, Bull and Mayer's (1993) typology of non-replies and Clayman's (2001) work on how politicians 'resist' answering questions, all of which are based on political news interviews, to the study of evasion in Australia's House of Representatives' Question Time. A comprehensive, unified framework for the analysis of evasion is described, a decision flow-chart for the framework is provided, and an illustrative example of the applied framework is given based on Australia's Federal House of Representatives' Question Time. Put simply, the study was undertaken to determine if evasion occurred, how frequently it occurred and how it occurred. It involved the classification of responses as 'answers' (direct or indirect), 'intermediate responses' (such as pointing out incorrect information in the question), and 'evasions' based on specific criteria. Responses which were considered evasions were further analysed to determine the levels of evasion, whether they were covert or overt in nature and the types of 'agenda shifts' that occurred, if any. The thesis also involved a discourse-analytical study of other factors that appear to facilitate Ministerial evasion in Australia's House of Representatives, including the Speaker's performance and the use of 'Dorothy Dixers'. The research data was sourced from Question Time transcripts from the House of Representatives Hansard for the months of February and March 2003, dealing only with questions and responses on the topic of Iraq. In those months there were 87 questions on the topic of Iraq, representing more than two thirds of all questions on Iraq for the whole of 2003. Of these 87 questions, the majority (48) came from the Opposition party, through its leader. The balance (39) was asked by Government MPs. Analysis of the question/answer discourse for all 87 questions revealed that every question asked by Government members was answered compared to only 8 of the 48 Opposition questions. Of the 40 remaining Opposition questions, 21 were given intermediate responses and 19 were evaded outright. The fact that the overwhelming majority (83%) of Opposition questions were not answered together with other findings such as instances of partiality on the part of the Speaker; the use of 'friendly', prearranged questions by Government MPs; and the 'hostile' nature of questions asked by Opposition MPs casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of Question Time as a means of ensuring the Government is held accountable for its actions. The study provides empirical evidence that evasion does occur in Australia's House of Representatives' Question Time.

The thesis analyses the pragmatic aspects of the language of political discourse in the particular context of the institute of parliamentary question time. The thesis examines and compares the use of hedging in the context of other communication management strategies (e.g., evasion, reformulation, dodging a footing shift) in the British House of Commons and in the Australian House of Representatives. In addition, the thesis seeks to test the methodological approaches and verify the conclusions reached in previous research, especially by Alan Partington (2003) and Bruce Fraser (2010). Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)