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Paper short abstract

This presentation traces recurring pragmatic patterns in press-conference interaction, showing how speakers use role-specific linguistic resources to delimit accountability, manage stance, and regulate topic accessibility in situ.

Paper long abstract

This presentation offers an interactional-pragmatic analysis of Japanese political press conferences, focusing on how institutional roles are indexed and managed through language. It draws on press conference transcripts by Sanae Takaichi from May to September 2024, a period marked by role overlap, during which she simultaneously served as a cabinet minister while positioning herself as an ambitious figure within the ruling party. This configuration provides a particularly revealing context for examining how institutional positioning shapes linguistic choice as interaction unfolds.

Adopting a functional-pragmatic discourse perspective, the presentation concentrates on recurrent linguistic patterns rather than isolated statements or ideological claims. Central attention is given to role indexicality and to how it structures stance-taking and epistemic authority. One recurring pattern involves frame-indexing expressions that define the press conference as a bounded interactional space (ba 場), thereby limiting topic eligibility and setting clear expectations about what counts as an appropriate contribution. Another concerns explicit role self-reference (for example, speaking “as a minister”), which recalibrates footing and narrows epistemic scope, allowing speakers to suspend personal stance without issuing a direct refusal.

Pragmatic deflection is further realised through speaker de-centering strategies, including the delegation of epistemic authority to higher institutional actors and the use of depersonalised grammatical constructions. These practices shift responsibility away from the individual speaker and anchor accountability in institutional hierarchy rather than personal intention. Across the corpus, such strategies consistently neutralise affect and constrain evaluative stance, making it possible to handle potentially contentious issues within the limits of institutional interaction.

Rather than treating these practices as evasive, the presentation shows that pragmatic deflection operates as a regularised interactional mechanism grounded in role-specific language use. Institutional constraints emerge not simply as external pressures on speech, but as effects that are produced and sustained through patterned pragmatic choices. In this sense, agency is not suppressed by institutional language, but reconfigured through disciplined footing and carefully managed stance-taking.

This presentation aims to contribute to research on Japanese pragmatics and institutional discourse, illustrating how political accountability and authority are negotiated through everyday linguistic practice in highly regulated interactional settings.