A Linguistic Analysis of Interviewing Discourse During a Talk Show in the U.K.

By relying on a self-compiled corpus of British political interviews aired on BBC’s Sunday morning talk show "The Andrew Marr Show", sampled from January 2019 to June 2021, this chapter aims to describe typical linguistic features contemporary broadcast political interviews in the U.K. in both interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns. The analysis is divided into two phases. First, an inductive overall quantitative exploration is carried out of the discourse produced by interviewers and interviewees through keyword extraction and evaluation. Second, based on the evidence obtained, attention is focused on morpho-syntactic expressions of stance, and in particular on the usage of epistemic stance adverbs. The results show a marked tendency towards the expression of certainty, reassurance, and reliability on the part of the interviewee as opposed to doubt, hesitation and hedging on the part of interviewers.