Anna Viktoria Beatrice Terzi

I am a PhD candidate in linguistics at Stockholm University, where I am conducting a research project on discourse markers in contemporary Italian political speech. My analysis focuses on their use in televised political debates (2000–2020), with the aim of describing their contextual functions and pragmatic relevance in interaction management and argumentative structure.

The theoretical and methodological framework combines conversation analysis — with a particular focus on the concept of broadcast talk — with elements drawn from informal argumentation rhetoric, namely pragma-dialectics and the new rhetoric. The unifying thread of my research is the concept of hybridity. Broadcast talk is a hybrid conversational form: on the surface it resembles ordinary everyday conversation and draws on its strategies, yet it is simultaneously embedded in a highly institutionalised context governed by its own rules and conventions. Political language operates in the same way, constantly oscillating between the technical and specific register required to manage public affairs, and the vague and general register needed to address a broad and heterogeneous audience.

Discourse markers serve in my work as an analytical magnifying glass for examining the hybridity of political broadcast talk — since they are themselves hybrids, on a double level: in their nature (a stable semantic value pragmatically enriched by factors drawn from the interactional context and the textual co-text) and in their function (operating simultaneously on the metatextual semantic level and on the interactional-pragmatic one).

I am particularly interested in what happens in the microstructures of political language — in those seemingly marginal segments of discourse where a ma, a cioè, or an allora actively contributes to shaping the political message, anchoring the speaker's credibility, and constructing the ethos that lies at the very heart of political persuasion.

I have presented my research in several academic settings, including my seminar Hate speeches online, delivered as part of the Channels of Digital Scholarship Seminar series (Maison Française d'Oxford); the International Seminar on Social Media Discourse Analysis (ISSMDA) at the Université d'Aix-Marseille; the ROMPOL 2024 conference, What place for democratic exchange in digital media spaces?, held at Stockholm University; and the international congress on discourse markers in Romance languages, DiSRom9, held in Oviedo. I have also organised a conference at Stockholm University entitled Hospitality: Concept, Practice and Tension, dedicated to the concept of hospitality and the different ways in which it can be approached within the humanities. I have recently published the article The Offense-Pandemic – Discourse Markers and the Spread of Offensive Speech in Italian Political Talk Radio, which examines how discourse markers contribute to the construction and spread of offensive discourse in confrontational Italian talk radio.