ABSTRACT
Throughout the course of a campaign, political candidates make hundreds of public appearances, with the goal of connecting with voters, explaining their policy proposals and energising the public to engage in the political process. This chapter argues that all forms of public political interaction, from town hall question-answer interactions to inaugural addresses, constitute identity performances whose discursive structure can be fruitfully analysed using tools of interactional sociolinguistics. The concept of social identity as a performance or an interactional achievement is by no means new in socio-cultural linguistics or social theory in general. Framing is a concept that has been widely applied in studies of individual and group identity construction and in the interpersonal negotiation of meaning. Frames are defined as the definition that individuals attribute to a situation. As such, frames play a central role in structuring interaction because they provide an interpretive scaffold on which speakers and hearers rely in order to produce and interpret meaning from cues.
