Assessing the Language of TV Political Interviews

This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative, corpus-assisted investigation of the language employed in a specialized communicative activity type: namely, the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns are analyzed here so as to unveil the stratification of discourses characterizing their speech, which inevitably favours the proliferation of a mixture of different lexico-grammatical traits and pragmatic functions.

Previous studies in this field mainly adopt a conversation analysis approach, thus focusing on turn allocation and organization. This book adds a different perspective by resorting to a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques in the study of a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, the result being a comprehensive investigation of the genre.

The analysis tackles both specialized language aspects and variation between spoken and written English in the genre at stake. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with their pragmatic functions in context, bringing to the fore, for example, differences between the ways in which interviewers and interviewees interact with each other and with the audience. Particular emphasis is also placed on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American and British interviews.