Attribution Shields in English Political Interviews From Perspectives of Projection Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis

In political interviews, as a mitigating device used to lessen the impact of an utterance, hedging is employed to mitigate speakers' responsibility in order to realize their communicative goal or get the better hand in interviews. The present study is intended to investigate whether attribution shields in English political interviews are ideology-driven by serving the different purposes of the two parties in the discourse. We find that the attribution shields were not frequently used by both sides of interviews in the corpus in comparison with the total number of hedges. We also find that the "indirect projection attribution shields" are the most frequently used by interviewers and interviewees, whereas the "free projection attribution shields" are less frequently used. Based on the above findings we argue that despite the relatively low frequency of occurrence of attribution shields in political interview discourse, the interviewers use Attribution shields more frequently than the interviewees, which proves and implies that the interviewers are situated in a lower position and less authoritative than interviewees owing to the functions of attribution shields, using a third person's voice to influence or orient the other speakers and audiences' ideologies, build power relationships in the situated discourse and expose a speaker's underlying ideologies in the spoken discourse. The present study may have both practical and theoretical significances.