Doing things with discourse in the mediated political arena


 This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in question-answer-sequences
 based discourse genres (interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Questions) in mediated political
 discourse. It considers the multilayeredness of participation and pluralism of discursive action on the one hand, and the
 delimiting frame of the dialogic discourse genres on the other. It shows that both have a decisive impact on the participants’
 meaning-making processes in context: the inherently unbounded participation framework contributes to pluralism of discursive
 action, while genre- and media constraints narrow down the scope of production and interpretation. This does not only hold for the
 stage at which a discursive action occurs in the discourse, but also for its degree of explicitness with regard to presuppositions
 and felicity conditions.