Political Interviews, Talk Show Interviews, and Debates on British Tv: a Contrastive Study of the Interactional Organisation of Three Broadcast Genres
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UNIVERSIDADE DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA Facultade de Filoloxía Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa POLITICAL INTERVIEWS, TALK SHOW INTERVIEWS, AND DEBATES ON BRITISH TV: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF THE INTERACTIONAL ORGANISATION OF THREE BROADCAST GENRES Doctoral thesis submitted by Mª Esperanza Rama Martínez and supervised by Dr. Tomás Jiménez Juliá 2000 Vº Bº o Director A Doutoranda Dr. Tomás Jiménez Juliá Mª Esperanza Rama Martínez Acknowledgements I am indebted to a number of people who have contributed to the realisation of this work in various ways. It is to them that I want to express my special thanks now. Foremost, I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Tomás Jiménez Juliá, for his invaluable academic guidance, keen intellectual judgement and unfailing personal support over the years. He devoted more time and attention to my work than I could reasonably have expected. I want to thank Dr. Susan Thompson for her collaboration in collecting the data for this research. I should also mention that it was she who kindled my interest in spoken discourse early in my postgraduate career at the University of Liverpool. I am also grateful to the distinguished reporter and political interviewer Mr. Jonathan Dimbleby for the personal interview that he so generously accepted to give me at his address. I have greatly benefited from the clear explanations about the world of broadcast interviewing he provided me with. My friends Paul Mardlin and Eugenia Alende Sixto have revised most of the hours of transcribed talk. My heartfelt thanks to them for this time-consuming task. Of course, all transcription mistakes that remain are my responsibility alone. Collective thanks are due to my colleagues and friends at the Universities of Vigo and Santiago for their academic support and friendship over these years. I must single out Carmen Pena Díaz, who was kind enough not only to read most parts of this dissertation and suggest improvements in style, but also to revise several prosodic details of the data transcriptions. Again, if any errors remain, it is my sole responsibility. For financial aid, I am indebted to the following institutions: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Vicerrectorado de Investigación), Universidade de Vigo (Vicerrectorado de Profesorado) and Xunta de Galicia (Consellería de Educación e Ordenación Universitaria). None of this would have been possible without the constant help and encouragement of my parents, grandmother and sister. Last but not least, I have no words to express how much I owe to my husband, Tomás, who has put up with me all this time, and even more than usual over the last couple of years, especially on those many occasions when the going seemed particularly tough. He has been understanding and loving throughout. It is to him that I dedicate this thesis. Contents CONTENTS .................................................................................................. 1 ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................... 5 TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS ........................................................ 7 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES ............................................................ 11 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1.1. Preliminaries ............................................................................................ 15 1.2. Delimiting TV genres .............................................................................. 17 1.2.1. The notion of genre ........................................................................ 17 1.2.1.1. Introduction .......................................................................... 17 1.2.1.2. A definition of genre ............................................................ 18 1.2.2. TV genres ....................................................................................... 20 1.2.2.1. The political interview ......................................................... 20 1.2.2.2. The talk show interview ....................................................... 22 1.2.2.3. The audience debate ............................................................. 25 1.3. Approaches to language in its social context ........................................... 29 1.3.1. Introduction .................................................................................29 1.3.2. Textlinguistics and Discourse Analysis ....................................... 34 1.3.2.1. The notions of text and discourse ............................................ 34 1.3.2.2. The disciplines of Textlinguistics and Discourse Analysis .... 47 1.3.3. Disciplines integrating Discourse Analysis as a multidiscipline ... 58 1.3.3.1. Linguistic Anthropology or Ethnolinguistics ......................... 58 1.3.3.2. Sociolinguistics ...................................................................... 60 1.3.3.3. The Sociology of Language .................................................... 64 1.3.3.4. Social Psychology .................................................................. 66 1.3.3.5. Pragmatics .............................................................................. 68 1.3.4. Communication Studies ................................................................. 72 1.3.5. The notion of context ..................................................................... 73 1.4. Aim of the study ....................................................................................... 74 1.5. Outline of the discussion .......................................................................... 77 CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY 2.1. Conversation Analysis ............................................................................. 83 2.1.1. Introduction ............................................................................... 83 2.1.2. Turn taking in everyday conversation ....................................... 86 2.1.3. Conversational structure ............................................................ 91 2.2. Move structure ......................................................................................... 95 2.3. Turn taking in news interviews ................................................................ 97 2.3.1. The roles of interviewer and interviewee ......................................97 2.3.2. Turn types .......................................................................................100 2.3.3. Institutional imprints on the turn-taking system ............................102 2.3.3.1. The role of the audience .................................................102 2.3.3.2. Objective reporting .........................................................104 2.4. The notion of interruption ........................................................................ 107 2.4.1. Introduction ............................................................................... 107 2.4.2. Defining the interruption ........................................................... 112 2.4.2.1. Turn and TRP ............................................................. 112 2.4.2.2. Genre-specific and participant-oriented approaches .. 117 2.4.2.3. Categories of interruptions I: The qualifiers interruptive, successful, unsuccessful, single, complex, successive, and compound ....................................................... 119 2.4.2.4. Categories of interruptions II: simple interruption, overlap, butting-in interruption, and silent interruption ......... 123 2.4.2.5. Categories of interruptions III: simultaneous start 1, simultaneous start 2, simultaneous start 3, simultaneous start 4, parallel, interrupted interruption, and non-interrupted interruption ............................................ 125 2.5. Cooperation, face and politeness ............................................................. 133 2.5.1. The Cooperative Principle ......................................................... 133 2.5.2. The notion of face ..................................................................... 135 2.5.3. Politeness strategies .................................................................. 137 2.6. Applying CA methodology to the study of broadcast talk ....................... 140 2.7. Data collection, transcription, and database design ................................. 143 2.7.1. The corpus ................................................................................. 143 2.7.2. The interruption database .......................................................... 146 2.7.2.1. The database design .................................................... 146 2.7.2.2. Speaker exchange patterns excluded from the generic study of interruptions ............................................................... 152 CHAPTER THREE: OPENINGS 3.1. Introduction .............................................................................................. 161 3.1.1. Openings in ordinary conversations .......................................... 161 3.1.2. News interview openings .......................................................... 163 3.1.3. Aim and outline of the chapter .................................................. 164 3.2. Structure of openings in political interviews ........................................... 165 3.2.1. Routine opening components .................................................... 165 3.2.2. Programme opening vs. interview opening ............................... 168 3.2.3. Optional opening components ................................................... 171 3.2.4. The case of free-standing interviews ........................................