Navigating Challenge and Commitment: A Domain-Functional Analysis of Discourse Markers in Zohran Mamdani’s Al Jazeera Interview

Abstract

In unscripted talk, speakers constantly signal how each utterance connects to earlier talk and how the listener should receive it. Small expressions known as discourse markers (DMs), carry much of this work. This study investigates the DMs produced by the interviewer and by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in an Al Jazeera English interview broadcast to mark his first 100 days in office. The data consist of a 4,109-word transcript prepared from the YouTube recording. The analysis applies Crible’s two-dimensional domain-function model, which places each DM in one of four domains (ideational, rhetorical, sequential, and interpersonal) and assigns it a specific function, while also paying attention to the disfluencies, such as repetitions, that accompany DMs in spontaneous speech. A total of 200 DM tokens were identified: 60 from the interviewer and 140 from the mayor. For both speakers the sequential domain was the largest, followed by the rhetorical, ideational, and interpersonal domains. The interviewer’s DMs leaned toward the rhetorical domain, largely through I mean when framing critical questions, whereas the mayor’s DMs leaned toward the ideational and interpersonal domains for supplying reasons, softening answers that departed from the question, and opening personal stories. The forms but, so, and well moved across domains within the same interview. The findings show that a two-dimensional model reveals interactional detail in political interview talk that single-level DM classifications tend to overlook