Hedging in political interviewing

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of hedging strategies employed by the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, in political interviewing. Using a discourse-analytic procedure, the study investigates a corpus of 22 press interviews and verifies the presence of hedging-related discursive strategies in the President’s responses. It also identifies four specific interrelated discourse moves: ‘Reformulating the interviewer’s question’, ‘Expanding the scope of the original question sequence’, ‘Switching the time frame of the question context’, ‘Recasting the question reference from specific to general terms’. It is suggested that President Obama manages to avoid explicit responses to questions about controversial issues through hedging strategies, which shift the focus of the interviewer’s question to different interrogative formats, time frames and reference perspectives.

Tension Analysis in Survivor Interviews: A Computational Approach

“…"Well" has various functions. It has been well investigated by many scholars over the years (Ponterotto 2018;Jucker 1993). It appears in seemingly different contexts.…”

“…Though interview dynamics have been studied to some degree in the past (Misztal 2003;Layman 2009;Bornat 2010;Thompson 2017;Ponterotto 2018), there is very little work that has been done to automate the process of detecting tension in interviews with computational approaches. Burnap and colleagues performed conversational analysis and used different text mining rules to identify spikes in tension in social media (Burnap et al 2015).…”

“…A discourse marker can be an utterance or a word or a phrase (such as oh, like, well, and you know) that either directs or redirects the flow of conversation without adding any significant meaning to the discourse (Schiffrin 1987). Ponterotto demonstrated how hedging in talks is used to tackle controversial issues (Ponterotto 2018). On the other hand, boosting, using terms such as "obviously," "clearly," and "absolutely," is a communicative strategy for expressing firm commitment to statements.…”

Hedged Performatives in Spoken American English: A Discourse-oriented Analysis

“…HPs also routinely feature in research on the use of hedges in specific genres such as academic writing or political speeches (e.g., Hinkel 1997;Meyer 1997;Thue Vold 2006;Ponteretto 2018), or in empirical research on modal verbs (e.g., Palmer 1990;Collins 2009;Coates 2014Coates (1983), but here they tend to feature merely in a list of forms and no comprehensive or detailed analysis of their use is attempted. Similarly, hedging is described as a negative politeness strategy in Brown and Levinson (1987: 145-172); they specifically note that certain devices hedge illocutionary force.…”

Evolution of U.S. Presidential Discourse over 230 Years: A Psycholinguistic Perspective

“…The existing studies on U.S. presidential discourse has culminated in a mature field of academic inquiry, with a plethora of books and journal articles already published on this topic. These studies represent a wide array of perspectives, covering such aspects as the linguistic features of presidential discourse and how they evolve over time (Kubat & Cech, 2016;Chen, Yan, & Hu, 2019;Xiao, Li, & Chen, 2019), the role of such discourse in crafting public personas (Benoit, 2006;Ponterotto, 2018), the framing of collective national identity and the expression of social values (Dunmire, 2005;, etc. Utilizing archival data of presidential discourse to examine the psychology of different presidents has also received ample scholarly attention, usually based on the assumption that people's language use could reflect underlying psychological states or personalities.…”