This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative corpus-assisted study of a particular communicative activity type: the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ delivery is analyzed 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 are mainly from the perspective of conversation analysis, thus focusing on turns allocation and organization. The book adds a different perspective by relying on a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques to study a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, thus resulting in a comprehensive study of the genre. The analysis presented in this piece of research tackles both specialized language aspects as well as variation between spoken and written English in the genre in question. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with pragmatic functions so as to bring to the fore, for example, differences between the way interviewers and interviewees interact with each other. Particular emphasis is also put on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American vs. British interviews.
Assessing the Language of TV Political Interviews: A Corpus-assisted Perspective
Gianmarco Vignozzi
Primo
2019-01-01
Abstract
This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative corpus-assisted study of a particular communicative activity type: the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ delivery is analyzed 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 are mainly from the perspective of conversation analysis, thus focusing on turns allocation and organization. The book adds a different perspective by relying on a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques to study a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, thus resulting in a comprehensive study of the genre. The analysis presented in this piece of research tackles both specialized language aspects as well as variation between spoken and written English in the genre in question. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with pragmatic functions so as to bring to the fore, for example, differences between the way interviewers and interviewees interact with each other. Particular emphasis is also put on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American vs. British interviews.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
