Analysis of a Newsnight Interview Using Francis and Hunston's Model
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Analysis of a Newsnight Interview using Francis and Hunston’s Model. Leon Townsend-Cartwright - January 2015 MA: TESOL Module 4: Spoken Discourse; Written Discourse SD/14/03 Record part of a conversation in English that takes place in one of the following situations (or similar), as outlined by Francis and Hunston (Francis, G. and Hunston, S., ‘Analysing everyday conversation’ in Coulthard, 1992: 123-61.): casual conversations between friends and family members child-adult talk commercial transactions professional interviews radio phone-ins Transcribe part of your recording, choosing a part in which there are fairly frequent alternations of speaker. Make an analysis of the transcribed data, using the categories proposed by Francis and Hunston (ibid. p. 125 and ff.). Present your analysis as Part I of your assignment, preferably in table form. Comment on how easy it was to fit your data to the categories and the usefulness of this kind of analysis for understanding the kind of communication you have analysed. Present your commentary as Part II of your assignment. (Advice: Work like this can be very time-consuming. Attempt only as much data as you can transcribe in about 2 hours. To allow for the work involved in analysing your transcript, the total word count for the commentary need not exceed 2,500 words, although you can use the full 4,000 words if you wish. Your unanalysed transcription must be included as an appendix.) 1 Table of Contents 1. Introduction .........................................................................................................................................................3 2. Literature Review ......................................................................................................... 3 Part I 3. Analysis .......................................................................................................................... 4 3.1 Outline of the Data .................................................................................................... 4 3.2 Interaction ............................................................................................................................. 5 3.3 Transactions.......................................................................................................................... 5 3.4 Exchanges ............................................................................................................................. 6 3.5 Moves ................................................................................................................................... 8 3.6 Acts ....................................................................................................................................... 9 3.7 Summary of the Analysis ................................................................................................... 10 Part II 4. Commentary ................................................................................................................ 11 4.1 Difficulties Encountered ..................................................................................................... 11 4.1.1 The Nature of the Data ....................................................................................................... 11 4.1.2 Interpretation of the Data ................................................................................................... 14 4.1.3 Categories Not Covered by Francis and Hunston .............................................................. 15 4.2 Usefulness of This Kind of Analysis .................................................................................. 16 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 17 6. References .................................................................................................................... 17 7. Appendices ................................................................................................................... 19 2 1. Introduction. This paper applies the system of analysis proposed by Francis and Hunston (in Coulthard 1992:123-162) to a televised professional interview between two speakers. The paper begins with a review of the relevant literature surrounding conversation analysis and the categories put forward by Francis and Hunston. Part one of the paper provides an analysis of the transcription of the conversation. Part two presents a commentary on difficulties encountered as well as evaluating the usefulness of this method of analysis. 2. Literature Review Discourse analysis seeks to explain the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used, and grew on work carried out in numerous field during the 1960s and 1970s (McCarthy 1991:5). Much work has been carried out to better understand and describe the nature of spoken interaction. In 1975, Sinclair and Coulthard observed that much classroom interaction was predictable and consisted of three moves realising a teaching exchange. These were initially labelled opening move, answering move and follow up and then revised to initiation (I), response (R) and follow up (F) in Sinclair and Brazil (ibid.:16). Sinclair and Coulthard formulated a model to describe spoken classroom discourse based on Halliday’s ‘Categories of a theory of Grammar’ (Sinclair & Coulthard 1992:5). Their rank scale consisted of 5 ranks, from largest to smallest: lesson, transaction, exchange, move and act. Each rank ‘can be expressed in terms of the units next below’ (ibid.: 2) meaning that, for example, an exchange can be described in terms of moves, and a move described in terms of acts, with the lowest rank having no structure. Utilising this research, Francis and Hunston attempt to ‘Interpret, integrate and systematize the various adaptations and refinements of the original Sinclair-Coulthard model’ (1992:123) including changing the topmost rank to interaction: 3 Interaction Transaction Exchange Move Act Fig. 1. The Rank Scale (ibid.) Their work incorporated adaptations made by Coulthard and Montgomery which rejected the ‘one-to-one correspondence between move and element of exchange’ (1992:124) which was reformulated as follows: Element of Structure Move Initiation eliciting Response informing Follow-up acknowledging Additionally, they realised that the exchanges could potentially consist of more that the three IRF moves, as well as incorporate an additional element of structure R/I. Coulthard and Montgomery arrived at a formula of I (R/I) R (Fn), where I and R are mandatory, and F can occur multiple times (Francis & Hunston:1992). The full rank scale is presented in appendix 2 (page 24) and each rank expanded on in the following section. Part I 3. Analysis This section describes the source of the data and presents an analysis of the data according to Francis and Hunston’s rank scale. 3.1 Outline of the Data The data to be analysed is from an interview between Jon Snow (JS) and Jeremy Paxman (JP) following JP’s decision to leave the BBC program Newsnight (Channel 4 News, 2014a). JP 4 is renowned for being an aggressive and often confrontational interviewer himself, therefore I felt that the interview could offer some interesting deviations from more typical televised interviews, with JP attempting to exert more control over the interview than a typical interviewee. The interview was chosen for the frequent changes of speaker and what seemed, prior to analysis to be relatively even amount of speaking time. It was thought that these features would place the interaction closer to that of conversation with more equal roles than a classroom interaction. The full interview is 12 minutes and 49 seconds long in total of which the first 7 minutes and 52 seconds were transcribed and analysed. The transcribed analysis consists of 1711 words, of which 1061 were uttered by JP (62%), and 650 by JS (38%). The unanalysed transcript can be found in appendix 1 (page 19) and the coded transcript in appendix 3 (page 26). 3.2 Interaction Interactions, the highest unit on the rank scale, are acknowledged by Francis and Hunston to be somewhat problematic as their structure remains uncertain (1992:140-14). One particular difficulty arises in deciding whether to include greetings and leave takings within the category of interaction (ibid.); a problem also present in my data as any greeting and leave takings may have been edited out. For the purposes of this analysis, the interaction can be considered as the full interview as available on the Channel Four website. 3.3 Transactions Transactions, consist of three elements of structure: Preliminary (P), Medial (M) and Terminal (T) to form the structure (P) M (M2-Mn) (T), and are considered to be topic-units (Francis & Hunston 1992:140-141). The organizational (P) and (T) are optional, while conversational M is obligatory and may occur multiple times. The data sample consists of three conversational transactions as represented below. The lack of preliminary and terminal transactions seems consistent with the nature of televised interviews where greetings and leave takings are often edited out. Table 1. Transactions in data sample Transaction number Element of structure Topic(s) 1 M Who is JP, intellect, and the nature of television 2 M The future of JP and Newsnight 3 M Reminiscing about the past, the future of the BBC 5 As the above table shows, the nature of a topic is not always clear, with potentially three different topics being grouped to form the first transaction.