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In this paper, I analyze part of a 1973 phone conversation between President Richard Nixon and Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson, regarding the Watergate scandal. I find that the conversation is organized largely in terms of three, successively developed contrasts. These contrasts brought into play two "dimensions of contrast"—pervasiveness and importance. The analysis resulted ultimately in a structure of meaning that included both taxonomical and scaling relations. It is shown how this structure is developed sequentially and collaboratively, how ambiguities are resolved, and how both participants converge on a common interpretation of the situation. Throughout, Watergate is treated primarily as a news story rather than an event or crime. Matters of law and ethics are subordinated to matters of perception and public relations. The ultimate objective of this analysis is methodological—to add to the toolkit of occasioned semantics, the study of how structures of meaning are developed and manifested in verbal discourse. Whereas my previous work has focused primarily on co-categorization, inclusion structures, and scaling, this study shows how contrast can function as the primary element structuring meaning in talk. • President Nixon and Special Counsel Colson discuss Watergate. • Conversation is structured by three contrasts. • Contrasts are interrelated and cumulative. • Contrasts are scaled by pervasiveness and importance of the media story. • Structure of meaning developed sequentially and collaboratively by participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It has been shown that press releases are heavily preformulated, that is to say, they exhibit a number of metapragmatic features that make it easy for journalists to copy them in their own news reporting. The present article sets out to further explore this notion of preformulation by presenting ethnography-based work on how press releases are being written at the public relations (PR) department of a major Belgian bank. In particular, zooming in on the complex story of the bank''s sponsoring involvement in an educational website, we will demonstrate how our fieldwork serves to foreground some of the practical as well as political concerns that have been glossed over in previous discourse-analytic and (semi-)experimental writing on the topic. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]