Question Types In American Political Interviews A Linguistic Study Of Broadcast Interactions

Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, , language: English, abstract: The study deals with four interviews including four important politicians, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Through verifying this data, the study has come out with fruitful results about the question types and how they play an important role in political interviews. The specific question type influences broadcasting interaction in political interviews regarding the way of discussing current issues about the world or inner matters. End to this, questions appear different among political interviews, although some question types are higher than others.

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction is an invaluable reference work featuring contributions from leading global scholars, available both online and as a three-volume print set. The definitive international reference work on a topic of major and increasing importance, in a new series of sub-disciplinary international encyclopedias Provides state-of-the-art research for scholars in a highly interactive and accessible format, available both online and as a three-volume print set Covers key research topics in the field with contributions from a team of experienced, global editors Successfully brings into a single source, explication of all of the fascinating and ground-breaking Language and Social Interaction work developing globally and across subjects Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. Online version available at Wiley Online Library

This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative, corpus-assisted investigation of the language employed in a specialized communicative activity type: namely, the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns are analyzed here so as to unveil the stratification of discourses characterizing their speech, which inevitably favours the proliferation of a mixture of different lexico-grammatical traits and pragmatic functions. Previous studies in this field mainly adopt a conversation analysis approach, thus focusing on turn allocation and organization. This book adds a different perspective by resorting to a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques in the study of a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, the result being a comprehensive investigation of the genre. The analysis tackles both specialized language aspects and variation between spoken and written English in the genre at stake. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with their pragmatic functions in context, bringing to the fore, for example, differences between the ways in which interviewers and interviewees interact with each other and with the audience. Particular emphasis is also placed on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American and British interviews.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of Anglophone Studies), course: Spoken English, language: English, abstract: One of the more neglected fields in linguistics is the field of questions and their functions, although questions play an important role not only in casual conversation but in political discourse in particular. Therefore this paper will deal with one specific type of political discourse, namely political interviews (van Dijk 1995: 18). When it comes to political interviews, which have become more and more influential for political debate in the last few decades (Chilton 2004: 69), questions by the interviewer are the central elements leading and guiding the discourse. Thus the aim of this paper is to examine the questions and their functions in political interviews. Considering that firstly a brief look at what makes an interview a political one will be required and secondly there will be a section on what an interviewer intends. Examining the functions of questions is another way of asking why or with what intention a question is used. Thus knowing about an interviewers general intention in a political interview will later in the analysis help to understand what the use of questions is and why they are posed in the one way or the other. Thirdly it has to be clarified what a question is and what types of questions there are. These preliminary explanations will be followed by the main analysis on the basis of the transcriptions of two political interviews, one conducted by Andrew Marr in the Andrew Marr Show broadcast on BBC One on 21st July 2013 and the other conducted by Sir David Frost in the Show Frost over the World broadcast on AlJazeera on 10th September 2011. This analysis will focus on questions and attempt to provide answers to the following questions: What types of questions do the interviewers employ and how do they use them in order to succeed in their intentions? I.e. what are the particular functions of the interviewers’ questions to the interviewee (who in both interviews is the British Prime Minister David Cameron)? This second question is based on the assumption that there is (especially in political discourse) always one basic function of questions which then (according to the type and content of the question) further subdivides into more specific and individual functions. Exemplary analyses of question forms typical for the two interviews will illustrate how the particular functions are fulfilled.

This book is a collection of studies on political interaction in a variety of broadcast, namely news and current affairs programs, political interviews, audience participation programs and radio phone-ins. Following a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, dialogic forms of news production and media talk in general, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars investigate the discursive and interactional practices that give rise to the arena of public politics in contemporary society. Chapters span an array of cultural contexts, as diverse as Sweden, Greece, Belgium (Flanders), the U.K., Spain, Israel, the U.S.A., Australia and China. Authors combine an interest in discourse analysis and conversation analysis with different disciplinary orientations, such as linguistics, media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, and social psychology. The book uncovers current trends in media and political discourse, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of media discourse and politics.

This textbook provides an in-depth introduction to the theoretical perspectives and methods of doing conversation analysis, an approach to the study of talk in interaction which grew out of the work of Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. This book is unique in that it provides comprehensive instruction in both interaction in ordinary conversations in everyday life as well as talk in institutional settings and a wide range of workplace and business interactions, while teaching both major research findings and how to conduct conversation analytic research. The book is designed to be useful for students of linguistics, sociology, and communication studies, and is written in clear and accessible prose. The Companion Website provides additional resources for instructors, such as questions and data excerpts for tests and in class exercises, audio and video clips for transcription practice, and guides for instructors on a range of topics covered in the course.

This collection offers empirical studies and theoretical essays about human communication in everyday life. The writings come from many of the world's leading researchers and cut across academic boundaries, engaging scholars and teachers from such disciplines as communication, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Chapters emphasize empirical, qualitative studies of people's everyday uses of talk-in-interaction, and they feature work in such areas as sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography. The volume is dedicated to and highlights themes in the work of the late Robert Hopper, an outstanding scholar in communication who pioneered research in Language and Social Interaction (LSI). The contributors examine various features of human interaction (such as laughter, vocal repetition, and hand gestures) occurring naturally within a variety of settings (at a dinner table, a doctor's office, an automotive repair shop, and so forth), whereby interlocutors accomplish aspects of their interpersonal or institutional lives (resolve a disagreement, report bad medical news, negotiate a raise, and more), all of which may relate to larger social issues (including police brutality, human spirituality, death, and optimism). The chapters in this anthology show that social life is largely a communicative accomplishment and that people constitute the social realities experienced every day through small and subtle ways of communicating, carefully orchestrated but commonly taken for granted. In showcasing the diversity of contemporary LSI research, this volume is appropriate for scholars and graduate students in language and social interaction, communication, sociology, research methods, qualitative research methods, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistics, and related areas.

The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between an institutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These roles dictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collected volume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a range of methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-and using as data not just medical, legal, and educational environments, but also less-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism (i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing. An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issues as: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discourse function; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degree to which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; and how questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and to serve the institutional goals of speakers. Why Do You Ask? will appeal to linguists and others interested in institutional discourse, as well as those interested in the grammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.