Constitutive ‘Rules of Engagement’. The case of White House press conferences

The kind of linguistic behaviour under scrutiny in this paper is an example of institutional talk, defined as talk at work and talk for work (Drew and Heritage 1992). Some of the constitutive rules of institutional talk are as structural and unequivocal as those determining the stalking behaviour of lions or the game of chess, in our case: address your question to the podium; ask one question per turn; make your question as brief as is reasonable. Beyond these there are rules of etiquette: use first names, such as ‘Mike’, ‘Joe’, ‘Helen’; if you do have a second question, pre-announce it: ‘and I have a follow-up, if I may’. But beyond these, as we have seen, in language-based and competitive activities like these brief-ings many of the rules are open to negotiation: are ad hominem attacks permissible?; is entrapment admissible? is the press’s insistence on the Clinton-Lewinsky case an obsession or legitimate interest? Beyond this kind of rules we enter into the realms of strategy. Just as with any rule-based activity, not all games unfold in the same way and different players adopt different techniques from, in our case, the cynical Helen Thomas (UPI), to the hyper-aggressive Lester Kinsolving (talk radio), to the companionable Wolf Blitzer (CNN). Constitutive rules are exploitable resources, from the hunting behaviour of big cats to the Sicil-ian Defence, from the incisive questioning of a Washington Post reporter to the fight or flight of a White House press secretary.