Conversationalization and democratization in a radio chat show: a grammar-led investigation

This paper investigates the closely-related concepts of conversationalization and democratization in a specialized register, the biographical radio chat show, represented by BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (DID). To explore these concepts in the show we first undertake a data-driven stylistic analysis of ‘key’ parts-of-speech (POS) tags, i.e. statistically significant grammatical categories that distinguish a corpus of DID talk from a corpus of conversation. We then track these grammatical features over four sampling periods to see what changes occur, and the extent to which they evidence conversationalization and democratization. This process is done separately for guests and hosts, since they each have a different role in the participation framework of the show. Results suggest a clear overall movement across time towards conversational norms and levelling of the differences between guests and hosts. The features that evidence conversationalization are usually but not necessarily evidence of democratization, and vice versa. We relate the findings to the changing contextual environment of the show.