No abstract

No abstract

It has been claimed that the question and answer format is the defining feature of the news interview, although the definition of what constitute questions, replies, or non-replies is by no means self-evident. Such definitional issues are central to theoretical disputes about the nature of the political interview, but nevertheless to date have received scant attention in the research literature. In the study reported here, a set of guidelines is presented for identifying questions, replies, and non-replies to questions; these are based on the detailed analysis of 33 televised British political interviews from the General Elections of 1987 and 1992, and also from interviews that John Major (the present prime minister) gave in 1990 and 1991. In addition to presenting these guidelines, it is argued that responses to questions in political interviews should not simply be dichotomised into replies and non-replies, but rather should be seen in terms of a continuum, with a substantial proportion of what are called intermediate responses occupying a position midway between a full reply and a complete failure to answer the question.

To investigate the relationship between face and equivocation in political interviews, a new typology of questions was devised, based on their face‐threatening properties. This typology was applied to the analysis of 18 interviews with the leaders of the three main political parties in the 1992 British General Election. Nineteen different subcategories were distinguished, grouped into three superordinate categories of face which politicians must defend—their own personal face, the face of the party which they represent and face in relation to supporting or not supporting significant others. On the basis of this analysis, a new model of question‐response sequences in political interviews was proposed, the main tenet of which is that face is the most important factor in determining whether or not a politician replies to a question. This model provides both a means of predicting the direction of politicians' responses to questions, and a framework for future studies evaluating the performance of both politicians and political interviewers.

According to Atkinson, speakers at political meetings invite applause through rhetorical devices, which indicate when and where applause is appropriate. Hence, speech and applause are characterized by a high degree of synchronization. Thus, incidences of unsynchronized applause are of considerable theoretical interest. An analysis of such mismatches is reported based on six speeches delivered by the three leaders of the principal British political parties to their respective party conferences in 1996 and 1997. Only a mean 61% of applause incidences were fully synchronized with speech. Four principal types of mismatch were identified: isolated applause, delayed applause, interruptive applause, and applause interrupted by the speaker. Mismatches occurred when rhetorical devices were ineffective. They also occurred in the absence of rhetorical devices when applause was not invited. It is concluded that Atkinson's theory of rhetoric needs to be modified to take account of a distinction between invited and uninvited applause.According to a theory proposed by Atkinson (e.g., 1983Atkinson (e.g., , 1984aAtkinson (e.g., , 1984b, a limited range of rhetorical devices such as contrasts and three-part lists are consistently effective in evoking applause from audiences. Atkinson further observes that applause is typically closely synchronized with speech, which he cites as strong evidence that rhetorical devices function as signals indicating when and where is an appropriate place to applaud (Atkinson, 1984a, pp. 33-4). Thus, in testing the validity of this theory, incidences where applause is not fully synchronized with speech are of considerable theoretical interest. If such incidences occur with considerable frequency, this would suggest at the very least that rhetorical devices do not function as effectively as Atkinson has argued or, more fundamentally, that they are not as important as Atkinson proposes. Such failures in synchronization between speech and audience applause are termed mismatches and form the focus of the study reported in this article.

The interactional organization of leadership was examined in the context of 15 political speeches, delivered by leading politicians from the three major political parties in Britain. The study utilized a sociopragmatic methodology, supplemented by corpus linguistics and social psychology. Leadership was conceptualized in interactional–sociolinguistic terms, as brought in and brought out in the interaction through self-references collocating with four main verb forms (event, communication, subjectification and intention); these generate implicatures targeting political competence and responsiveness. Event and subjectification verbs were found to occur the most frequently, and communication verbs the least frequently, with little variation between politicians from different political parties. It was proposed that action and intention verbs primarily target competence, while subjectification and communication verbs primarily target responsiveness; overall, each of the four principal verb forms may be utilized to perform leadership throughout a political speech as a whole.

No abstract

No abstract