Mais Monsieur le Président… La question contre-argumentative comme acte de réfutation dans les interviews du 14 juillet

Abstract

For more than 40 years, the presidents of the V French Republic have lent themselves to a televised interview on July 14. A highly formal interaction situation, with rigid functionaldiscursive roles and with the matters of greatest interest to the State and government on the agenda. We could expect from them a satisfactory fulfillment of conversational cooperation and the mitigation of threats to the image of the interviewee. However, in two interviews analyzed with Jacques Chirac and François Hollande, we find episodes of counter-argument, more typical of the debate than of the interview. The purpose of this work is to describe this practice of discursive pressure from the tools of discourse analysis and conversation analysis.