Political interviews as hybrid genre

Abstract

The aim of this article is twofold. In the first part, a number of discourse analytic approaches are presented which have been selected for their suitability for the analysis of generic variants of political interviews. In the second part of the article, these analytical concepts are applied to a case study of the comparative analysis of BBC and ITV interviewer style. Using concepts from systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and pragmatics, a multi-level tripartite model of genre is proposed, requiring analysis in the three dimensions of representational, interpersonal, and textual meaning on all levels of structure. Appraisal theory, preference organization, conversational inference, and the concept of move schemata are employed. The BBC and ITV interviewers' style can be shown to differ in their orientation to representational and interpersonal meaning, as well as to explicit and implicit meaning. The BBC interviewer's style, with preferred question formats and interpersonal restraint, orients to an audience that expects political interviews to be issue-oriented and dramatized as confrontation. The ITV interviewer's style, with elaborate dispreferred question schemata and interpersonal effusiveness, orients to an audience that expects it to be person-oriented and emotionalized as talk.