Political Interviews Research Articles

Turn-Taking in Political Interviews and Its Impact on Building Government Credibility

Television political inquiry is conducted through question-and-answer exchanges with host and government officials on prominent livelihood issues, which helps to improve the efficiency of government governance. Interview participants’ identity, communicative intention, power, and contextual factors have a significant impact on the discourse choices of both parties. This research clarifies the mechanism by which communicators mobilize appropriate discourse strategies to promote the solution of social problems. It adopts qualitative research method and conversation analysis to interpret interview participants’ talk-in-interaction and discourse strategies in “Ask Government Affairs of Shandong”. Research finds that adjacency pairs in political interview perform social behaviors such as greetings, requests, suggestions, apologies, acknowledgement. Interview participants’ turn-taking is divided into claiming for the turn, holding the turn, and giving up the turn. Discourse strategies such as insertion, interruption, and repetition are adopted to claim for the turn. Discourse markers and conversation repair are applied in communicators’ turn-holding stage. Communicators adopt explicit nominations, vague job designations, and silence strategies to give up the turn. Clear, accurate, and highly relevant official responses are conducive to projecting a responsible government image and improving government credibility. The phenomenon of avoidance, hesitation, and pause in official response is likely to cause the masses to question government officials’ work capability, which is not conducive to establishing a positive and trustworthy government image. Suggestions for optimizing the process setting of political interview and official responses are provided to enhance the effect of political enquiry.

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Discourse Marker “But” in a British Televised Political Interview Show: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Discourse Marker “But” in a British Televised Political Interview Show: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective

Linguistic means of identity construction in media texts (comparative analysis of political interviews)

he study aimed to determine and explain the influence of discourse of political interviews on audience identity construction and their understanding of social and political processes. Methods of cross-cultural analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the method of linguistic analysis of identity markers in media text, and the method of linguistic analysis of identity markers were used in the study. The reliability of the methods was checked with Cronbach's alpha. The increase in the importance of media and social networks in identity construction indicates reorientation of the modern society towards digital platforms as a key factor of public position determination. Increased individualization was fixed in identity formation, where personal choices and clarity are important factors affecting the self-determination process. The study confirms that identity formation in media texts is a complex and multifaceted process, which includes the interaction of different aspects as individual, group, cultural and political identities. Further research perspectives are the study of the role of new technologies, including artificial intelligence and large data analysis in identity construction and interaction with the audience in the digital environment.

Investigating discourse markers “you know” and “I mean” in mediatized English political interviews: a corpus-based comparative study

This study employs a corpus-based approach to examine and compare the use of two discourse markers (DMs), “you know” and “I mean”, within the context of two mediatised English political interviews. The analysis encompasses frequencies, functions, co-occurrences, and positional distributions of these DMs. The study utilizes specialized corpora from two political interview programs: CGTN’s The Point with Liu Xin and BBC’s HARDtalk. The frequency analysis reveals that “you know” is statistically more prevalent than “I mean” in both programs, reflecting the spontaneity, interactivity, and need for clarification characteristic of political interviews. Notably, the Chinese interviewer (IR) uses “you know” more extensively, possibly due to a cultural preference for ensuring mutual understanding and engaging the audience, while the British IR employs “I mean” slightly more frequently, likely reflecting a tendency to clarify or reframe statements for precision. Functionally, these DMs serve diverse purposes such as hedging, agreeing, and monitoring across various domains including interpersonal, sequential, and rhetorical. Positional analysis shows “you know” typically appearing medially and “I mean” often in initial positions. These results underscore the distinctive interviewing styles of the two IRs and the pivotal role of these DMs in fulfilling a spectrum of communicative functions. This research offers valuable insights into the interviewer’s perspective in political interviews.

Translating Idioms in Political Discourse: Translation Strategies and Semantic Categories

This study examines the Arabic translation of 165 English idiomatic expressions in political interviews in terms of Baker’s translation strategies (2018) and investigates the deployment of idiomatic expressions in terms of semantic category based on Fernando (1996) and Kovacs (2016). The corpus of the study consists of 17 political interviews conducted in English by King Abdullah II from 2013 to 2023 and translated officially into Arabic. The results show that the paraphrasing strategy accounts for more than half the data (56.36%), followed by the strategies of ‘similar meaning but different form’ (23.63%) and ‘similar meaning and form’ (15.15%), while the omission strategy comes last at (4.84%). The analysis indicates that although the overall quality of the translation is acceptable, there are a few cases where the emotiveness of the idiomatic expressions and the appropriate genericity are underestimated. In terms of semantic category, the results reveal that the degree of opaqueness/transparency is a determining factor for choosing the translation strategy, viz., the paraphrasing strategy accounts for (82.69%) in translating opaque/semi-opaque idiomatic expressions against only (27.69%) in transparent/semi-transparent ones. The study concludes that much attention should be paid to the sensitive nature of the degree of emotiveness in idioms and the relevant generic constraints

Tautology and Pleonasm in Political Interviews: A Semantic study

Pleonasm refers to the involvement of unnecessary words or morphemes represents pleonastic words which repeat a mentioned information elsewhere, whereas tautology refers to the inacceptable repetition of the same ideas, words, or phrases by using diverse words. In English, there is a perplexity to distinguish some elements that may be misled to be regarded as pleonastic or tautological. The current study aims at analysing two political interviews in the light of pleonasm and tautology concepts and find out the differences between them semantically. The data analysis is taken from two presidential interviews for the American presidents Trump and Biden in 2020. The study has concluded that tautology and pleonasm can be used in disparate degrees in political speeches. Using tautology is more necessary than pleonasm in political speeches, in which pleonasm concentrates on ideas and implied meaning, which can be misled to simple, ordinary people, while tautology is clear and can be understood by any simple brain in spite that it is dull and boring sometimes if the repetition is exaggerated, but can be perceived easily to focus on some important ideas the politician sees it is significant.

‘Where there is a will there is a way’: figurative language use and its pragmatic functions in political discourse

Abstract Although political discourse is essentially expected to be fact-based and objective, both practice and research show that literal language in political discourse is very often compounded with figurative language. The paper at hand tackles figurative language use in political interviews. For the purposes of this research, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of political interviews given by a former Macedonian female politician – Radmila Shekerinska. The corpus consists of six interviews (with a total duration of about 3 h) in which she answers questions about the political climate and the challenges of North Macedonia in the last couple of decades. The selected interviews are all conducted in English as they are aimed at international audiences and they all fit into the time frame from 2017 to 2021, which practically overlaps with the final years of Shekerinska’s long-standing political career. This study uses a descriptive qualitative research design and focuses, first, on ascertaining the presence of different types of figures of speech in her answers (e.g. metaphors, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, rhetorical questions, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc.); then, on identifying the pragmatic functions they perform in the context in which they are used, and finally, on establishing an interface between the figurative language use and the political ideology propagated by this politician. The results point to an extraordinarily resourceful use of a wide spectrum of figurative devices, skillfully intertwined with fact-based political discourse, primarily for addressing highly sensitive political issues, but also for driving important political points home; also, for gaining support from both the domestic and international community regarding the political ideology of this political figure as well as for enhancing the criticism addressed to political adversaries with an additional layer of creative flourish.

Образные единицы в коммуникативных практиках медиатизированного политического дискурса

The article is dedicated to the communicative features of mediatized political discourse, which remain insufficiently explored. Using the example of the use of figurative means of language in the genres of media-political communications, it is demonstrated that the mediatized form of communication possesses not only the basic functions of professional discourse but also additional functions: amplifying or softening content, saving linguistic means, emotional and attractive functions. Each of these functions plays a significant role in shaping audience perception and influencing public opinion on political issues. With the help of contextual and semantic analysis, as well as the corpus method, the following results were obtained: in the studied context, figurative units are important linguistic means used for the effective conveyance of specific political views and emotions. These units include figurative metaphors and comparisons, phraseology, proverb, precedent phenomena and colloquial expressions. The novelty of the research lies in the analysis of communicative features and functions of figurative units in various genres of mediatized political discourse: political talk shows, political interviews, and internet texts of politicians. The research results can be applied in the practice of media communication, communicative linguistics, and discourse theory.

Sarcasm in Iraqi Political Interviews

Sarcasm in Iraqi Political Interviews

Pragmatic Deviation of Grice’s Cooperative Principle in Trump’s Political Interview With the CNN News Channel

The present paper aims to investigate pragmatic deviation from Grice’s (1975, 1989) cooperative principle and conversational maxims in the previous United States president, Donald Trump’s political interview with CNN News Channel. The paper follows a qualitative approach in gathering and examining the data. An oral document that was captured from YouTube is followed in the current paper as instrumentation. This document, which is chosen purposefully, is an interview that was broadcast on CNN News Channel between Trump and reporter Cooper in 2016 before the election which Trump won. A discourse analysis method is utilized to study the coded transcript. Findings show that Trump deviates from Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims. Also, the researchers argue that the reasons behind such deviation are (1) hiding the truth that could damage Trump’s image before the audience, (2) trivializing other’s claims to make the audience feel that these claims are silly, (3) refusing to share his own plans with others, (4) withholding his opinion about the US allies so as to keep strong relationships with them, (5) influencing the audience’s thinking about him by distorting the facts, (6) showing himself as the best candidate and should be elected as the US president.

Levelling, differentiation and structure of feeling: Address and interlocutor reference in Indonesian political interviews

This article discusses the ways in which participants in Indonesian political interviews address and refer to each other. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s concept ‘structures of feeling’, it proposes levelling and differentiation as mechanisms by which interview participants orient to a common feeling. Levelling and differentiation form a dialectical process characterised by tension that emerges through positioning of the self and the addressee relative to social categories and social orders. Such positioning involves exploiting the semantic contrast between kin terms, which denote relationality, and pronouns, which individuate, in addition to mobilising other linguistic resources including names and titles. The article suggests that the differentiation made between how those in the highest office and politicians below them are addressed and referred to is indexical of a shared consciousness about the relevance of rank.

Going meta: Interaction at the normative boundaries of the news interview

In the modern hybrid media landscape, the relations between journalists and politicians in arenas such as the broadcast news interview can seem less stable. Politicians and their advisors seem increasingly confident in identifying when and how to engage with political interviewers while journalists, in response, feel under pressure to intensify their role as scrutineering tribunes of the people. In such an environment, the normative interactional boundaries of the news interview itself can come under pressure from both sides, and even be breached. This article discusses the phenomenon of ‘going meta’ – occasions in which participants break out of the interview’s interactionally managed frame, and render topical the very practices that, ordinarily, constitute and reproduce the rules of that frame. Going meta is a practice that simultaneously breaches the ‘rules’ of the interview, and invokes the same rules in the construction of complaints about the behaviour of a coparticipant. The analysis shows how interview participants use going meta to raise questions of objectivity, truth, and the interests of ‘the people’, often in moments of heightened conflict talk.

Evasiveness in Greek Political Interviews: A Case Study in Conversation Analysis

This paper identifies the conversational practices of evasiveness in Greek political interviews and debates through Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. The present study is accomplished according to Clayman and Heritage's proposed model of questioning and answering dimensions in American and British news interviews. The analysis focuses on the sequential organisation of the pre-allocation type of interviews exploring how interviewers structure their questions while focusing on the practices that interviewees deploy to display resistance towards the addressed questions. By presenting transcripts from three interviews and two political debates, it is argued that Greek IEs show resistance in answering by providing partial or incomplete responses or by performing a different action than the addressed through specific turn prefaces, i.e., look-, listen-, first of all- turn beginning components and the practices of rhetorical questions and the incorporation of IR’s wording. According to findings, similar practices of resistance can be found in both cross-cultural contexts with some differentiations and novel elements in the Greek corpus as well as Greek IRs’ multi-unit style of questioning which seems to favour politicians’ evasiveness.

‘Softballs’ for ‘Hardballs’: The congenial political interview on right-wing partisan TV news outlets

Taking a conversation-analytic approach, this article examines potentially shifting norms of political interviewing against the surge of authoritarian populism and increasingly legitimated forms of political and discursive bias on affiliated partisan TV outlets. Based on four political interviews of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon on Fox News and GB News, the analysis documents changes in interviewing practices away from the conventions of accountability interviewing. These changes involve the design of IR questions, the interpersonal dynamics between IR and IE, and the interactional work performed by questions and political interviewing at large. It is demonstrated that, in the aftermath of organizational and ideological disruptions affecting partisan right-wing media such as Fox News, political interviewing enacts a congenial type of questioning, with attendant transformations in the negotiation of accountability. The analysis documents two variations of congenial interviewing practices, one in the absence of adversarial questioning, and the other in the presence of ostensibly accountability questions, that are nevertheless deployed as interviewer resources for doing strategic image-repair work in the benefit of the interviewee. The attested questioning practices have implications for the normalization of authoritarian populist discourses and agendas, and, also, for the future of journalism as watchdog and safeguard of democratic institutions in liberal democracies.

The discourse of American and British political interviews

The aim is to conduct a comparative analysis of the political discourse of Great Britain and the United States, in particular the study of the speech style of the leaders, the context and the role of the media in the formation of public opinion. Methods. The study employs the method of analysis of lexical units, the linguistic method of field structures, and the method of stylistic analysis of markers. Standard methods of mathematical statistics were used, as well as Cronbach’s alpha to check the reliability of the research methods. Conclusions. The study reveals the importance of the media’s role in political discourse, especially in the dissemination of political interviews and their public perception. A comparison of UK and US political discourse reveals both similarities and differences in the communication of political leaders, and helps analyse each country’s response to common challenges and issues. Prospects. Further research could focus on gendered aspects of political speech, including the analysis of the gender’s role in shaping political discourse and identifying gender stereotypes.

A Pragmatic Study of Mitigation Strategies in Bidenʼs Political Interviews

Political interviews play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing electoral outcomes. This study investigates the use of various mitigation strategies employed by politicians during interviews to minimize the impact of potentially damaging questions or statements. The current study is concerned with the news of the Ukrainian-Russian war which began on February 24, 2022, and is still ongoing, from a pragmatic point of view. The problem is manifested in the great shortage of pragmatic studies of mitigation strategy in political discourse.
 The present study adopts Caffi's (2007) model to analyze the selected data. The aspects of this model include five main types, which are: bushes, hedges, deictic shields, quotational shields, and topical shields. Each strategy differs from the other in composition. The deictic shields contain six sub-strategies and the topical shields contain two sub-strategies.
 The study investigates mitigation strategies in one of Joe Bidenʼs , the current US president interviews . It aims to highlight the mitigation strategies used in Biden 's political interview. To investigate the most frequent type of mitigation strategies are used in the data under study.
 To achieve the aims of the study and verify its hypotheses, the study hypothesizes that some mitigation strategies are used in Biden 's interview. The most commonly used strategy is the deictic shields strategy.
 Qualitative and quantitative methods are used in analyzing data.The most important conclusions of the study are: 1)It is found that the mitigation strategies employed in Bidenʼs interview are : bushes ,hedges , deictic shields ,and topical shields and 2) the most commonly used strategy in Bidenʼs interview is deictic shields.

A Pragmatic Study of Mitigation Strategies in Bidenʼs Political Interviews

Political interviews play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing electoral outcomes. This study investigates the use of various mitigation strategies employed by politicians during interviews to minimize the impact of potentially damaging questions or statements. The current study is concerned with the news of the Ukrainian-Russian war which began on February 24, 2022, and is still ongoing, from a pragmatic point of view. The problem is manifested in the great shortage of pragmatic studies of mitigation strategy in political discourse.
 The present study adopts Caffi's (2007) model to analyze the selected data. The aspects of this model include five main types, which are: bushes, hedges, deictic shields, quotational shields, and topical shields. Each strategy differs from the other in composition. The deictic shields contain six sub-strategies and the topical shields contain two sub-strategies.
 The study investigates mitigation strategies in one of Joe Bidenʼs , the current US president interviews . It aims to highlight the mitigation strategies used in Biden 's political interview. To investigate the most frequent type of mitigation strategies are used in the data under study.
 To achieve the aims of the study and verify its hypotheses, the study hypothesizes that some mitigation strategies are used in Biden 's interview. The most commonly used strategy is the deictic shields strategy.
 Qualitative and quantitative methods are used in analyzing data.The most important conclusions of the study are: 1)It is found that the mitigation strategies employed in Bidenʼs interview are : bushes ,hedges , deictic shields ,and topical shields and 2) the most commonly used strategy in Bidenʼs interview is deictic shields.

Pragmatic functions of evidentiality in the response judgments at a political interview

The article is devoted to the establishment of expression forms and the description of the pragmatic functions of evidentiality in the interviewed politician’s response discourse in the context of the official discussion. The research is aimed at identifying and analyzing the pragmatic specifics of evidentiality as the politician’s strategic tool in the interview, assuming a special evidence base in order to manipulate and convince the target audience. Based on a solid sample of fragments of an English-language political interview in which respondents raise current socio-economic problems, an original classification of the expression means and pragmatic functions of evidentiality is proposed in accordance with such parameters as the source of relevant information and the way of the everyday reality cognition. Relying on critical discourse analysis, the method of extracting and annotating evidential markers of the response judgment effectiveness, their subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis, the description of various evidentiality types that underlie the interviewed politician’s ideological attitudes and the pragmatic functions of these types are given. It is established that in the format of reacting judgments, evidentiality functions as the consequence of the interviewed politician’s need in activating effective information sources that can be based on personal knowledge, well-known information about socio-economic reality and other sources. At the same time, the politician’s evidence base may be of direct, indirect and presumptive character. It is revealed that the interviewed politician to cover the ideological attitudes of his / her activities also uses evidentiality as it legitimizes one’s own judgments and delegitimizes alternative (opposite) opinions,. The interviewed politician’s evidence source base is characterized, which reflect ideological bias due to the coding of hypothetical assumptions about the authority of representatives of the political sphere, facts of reality, well-known information. The contexts are analyzed when the politician assumes responsibility for the publication of relevant information, resorting to the sources of information actually obtained and thereby strengthening the argumentation of the propositions put forward. The typology of the sources of the interviewed politician’s evidence base is proposed.

Referential Cohesion, Ambiguity, Vagueness and Generality in Parliamentary Debate*

AbstractPolitical discourse has been characterised as being ‘vague’ and ‘ambiguous’. It is argued that politicians tend to use generic and unspecific words in order to avoid explicit commitment (McGee 2018). Although this situation may describe discourse genres such as political interviews and election debates, it is unclear that it can be applied to parliamentary debate. This study analyses a corpus consisting of two parliamentary debates in English and Catalan with respect to ambiguity, vagueness and generality in connection to referential cohesion. Three variables are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed: a) the abstractness of the topics, b) the non‐specific or specific nature of these entities, and c) the grammatical or lexical nature of the units that maintain referential cohesion. The results show that ambiguity and vagueness are rather infrequent in parliamentary debate. However, the high frequencies of non‐concrete referential entities, and of non‐specific referents characterise parliamentary debate as a general discourse. As a counterpart, lexical cohesion devices as repetition and encapsulation highlight the topics under discussion, what leads to avoid ambiguity and vagueness.

“Say, are you a little ashamed?” – Shame allocation and accountability in Israeli news interviews

In light of the growing emotionalization of public discourse, this article deals with the action of shame allocation in Israeli accountability interviews. A qualitative analysis of tokens of the Hebrew verb lehitbayesh ‘to be ashamed’ in political interviews was conducted using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis methods. The findings show that in this public context the verb lehitbayesh is mostly not used to convey an emotional state, nor can its meaning be explained by the classic theoretical conceptualization of shame. Instead, lehitbayesh is mobilized to allocate shame to another actor, and portrays the allocator as morally superior and as someone who sacrifices for what is right. Lehitbayesh is part of the negotiations between journalists and politicians over the question of who is accountable for a transgressive act, what the desired response is, and who the relevant audience for the moral lesson is.