Syntactic Framing and Strategic Manoeuvring: Clause Selection as a Means of Mitigation, Justification, and Deflection in BBC HARDtalk Interviews

النحو والتداولية، المناورة الاستراتيجية، الخطاب الدفاعي الذاتي، الاتصال الإعلامي والمؤسسي، الاقتصاد اللغوي، التحليل عبر المجالات

Abstract

The role of grammar strategies in adversarial media discourse namely in five communication roles of politicians, activists, journalists, scientists and global leaders, is investigated in the current study. Utilising a data set of 12 BBC HARDtalk interviews (2020–2024), the analysis demonstrates the ways in which linguistic forms reflect strategic objectives: mitigation, justifying, deflecting and reframing. By incorporating the Syntax– Pragmatics Interface into Strategic Manoeuvring Theory, it is essential establish a two-economy model in which syntactic economy (well-structuredness) and pragmatic economy (economical processing) combine for clarity. A mixed-method design is employed, in which the quantitative analysis provided evidence of the correlation between phrase types and pragmatic functions and its statistical significance, while qualitative analysis served to ground these correlations within five social meanings. The results show clear tendencies: politicians and diplomats like to use conditional or passive clauses for justification and deflection; activists rely on assertive declaratives; journalists are prone to contrastive or cleft constructions for reframing; scientists and corporate speakers use modal clauses for evidential precision, while global leaders deploy empathic conditional constructions. It is argued in this paper that the principle of syntactic economy is a universal mechanism for pragmatic efficiency in institutional discourse and, thus it extends both the theoretical and empirical domain as far as discourse-pragmatic research is concerned.