Interruptions and co-construction in the First 2016 Trump–Clinton US presidential debate

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to critically examine the evaluative implications of the conversation analytic (hereafter CA) methodology for studying interruptions, and second, to offer an outline of an intertextual approach to interruption that situates a US presidential debate by taking seriously its interrelatedness to ‘ongoing debates in the media’ (i.e., its intertextual constitution).First, the analysis identifies the ‘interruptions’ that occur in the debate using four CA notions of ‘clashes’. These four notions presume that interruptions involve uncooperative or incoherent actions, and interruptions are identified on the basis of the participants' mutual orientations.Next, the ‘interruptions’ thus identified are subjected to intertextual analysis. Here, interruption is conceived of in terms of a very different notion of ‘clash’, namely as participants drawing on different, conflicting ‘prior discourses’. This part of the analysis draws on Jacobsen's (2016) notion of the position–contradiction pair type and Tannen's (2007/1989) Bakhtin-inspired approach to verbal interaction.The analysis not only reveals several things about interruption in the First 2016 US presidential debate, but likewise demonstrates that the picture of ‘clash’ that one is left with using the present intertextual approach is very different from the one left by a CA-oriented approach.