Being informed ist what most people consider the most important thing in these days. Everybody wants to know everything about present events and their circumstances, future conditions regarding politics, etc. and also be able to discuss them with other people. This often requires having a lot of background knowledge. But as the facts are often too complex and not all information needed is accessible to each and every person, there has to be some way to easily inform all people who are interested in a comprehensible manner. What once was the herald, who was sent out by the king, may now be the interviewer in a TV-Show or on the radio. He gets the information directly from politicians who are involved or in charge, victims of a crime, eye-witnesses and so on. In so doing, he passes everything he learns to the audience who may not only consist of a third person participating in the discussion but of thousands or sometimes millions of people.
Consequently news interviews have become more and more important as they convey important issues to the public e.g. considering elections or a party manifesto. Since these interviews need to get across important facts it is imperative that in no case they are blurred by a disorderly held conversation. To guarantee this, the interview has to follow specific rules which preserve its informational character. News interviews often consist of an interviewer and one or more interviewee(s) who alternately talk in a specific way: one asks a question and the other person(s) give(s) a more or less appropriate answer. This may change on some occasions, though, depending on the number of participants, their knowledge about the topic or their degree of involvement in the current case.
Pragmatics, as a branch of linguistics, deals with language and communication and provides us with the possibility to analyze this orderly communication in a scientific context. From a linguistic point of view the constant change of the active speaker may be described by a turn-taking system and by the use of adjacency pairs.
Working with the terms 'turn-taking' and 'adjacency pairs' I want to examine to what extent the linguistic turn-taking system applies to British news interviews. Whether they do or do not follow this idea of a communicational ordering or even have their own turn-taking system shall be found out by looking at an excerpt from a British news interview.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Linguistic Terms
2.1. Turn-Taking
2.2. Adjacency Pairs
3. Turn-taking in British news interviews
4. Conclusion
5. Bibliography
6. Appendix
Objectives and Core Themes
The primary objective of this paper is to examine the application of linguistic turn-taking systems within the context of British news interviews. By analyzing the interaction between interviewers and interviewees, the study investigates whether these institutional dialogues adhere to standardized conversational models or if they operate under a distinct, specialized system of communicational ordering.
- Analysis of turn-taking mechanisms in institutional settings
- Examination of adjacency pairs as fundamental units of conversation
- Investigation of turn-type preallocation in news interviews
- Evaluation of repair strategies used by interviewers to maintain control
Excerpt from the Book
IRs and IEs systematically confine themselves to producing turns that are at least minimally recognisable as questions and answers, respectively.
Following their institutional roles the participants quite often use their turns to request or provide information. They are thus, linguistically speaking, working with APs. Right at the beginning of the excerpt A directly asks B a question to which B responds, producing a preferred second.
The IR and IE do not always restrict themselves to requesting and supplying information but also perform other actions. For example, another way of eliciting information from the IE may be challenging, probing or casting doubt upon the IE's statements who then has to counter and resist these investigative attempts.
Here the IR states something to bring the IE out of his shell but as the latter is not interested in saying something bad about his colleague he uses an insertion sequence to sort things out before he produces the expected second part. At first he resists the IR‘s approach by directly articulating that he figured out his intention and only then answers his question.
Mundane conversation allows many different second parts to their respective firsts like e.g. statements following each other alternatively uttered by different active speakers. In a news interview this does not apply, though, as the IR has to constrain himself to questions as first parts and the IE to answers as second parts. Hence appropriate APs are in a way preallocated.
Summary of Chapters
1. Introduction: This chapter introduces the societal importance of news interviews and defines the research scope regarding the application of pragmatic linguistic principles in these settings.
2. Linguistic Terms: This section establishes the theoretical framework, defining essential concepts such as turn-taking, transition relevance places (TRP), and the structure of adjacency pairs.
3. Turn-taking in British news interviews: This main part analyzes specific rules governing interviews, focusing on how participants manage speech and maintain institutional roles through preallocated turns.
4. Conclusion: The final chapter summarizes the findings, confirming that British news interviews utilize a specialized, highly regulated turn-taking system based on general conversational models.
5. Bibliography: This section lists the academic sources cited throughout the paper.
6. Appendix: This section provides the detailed transcription of the analyzed interview material.
Keywords
Pragmatics, Turn-Taking, Adjacency Pairs, British News Interviews, Linguistics, Institutional Discourse, Turn-Constructional Components, Transition Relevance Place, Conversation Analysis, Interviewer, Interviewee, Communication, Preallocation, Repair Strategies
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the core subject of this paper?
The paper examines how turn-taking systems function specifically within the context of British news interviews, comparing them to everyday mundane conversation.
What are the primary themes discussed?
The central themes include the structure of conversational turns, the role of adjacency pairs, institutional constraints on participants, and the mechanisms of turn-type preallocation.
What is the main goal of the research?
The aim is to determine to what extent standardized linguistic turn-taking systems apply to news interviews and whether these interviews exhibit their own unique rules of ordering.
Which scientific method is utilized?
The author uses conversation analysis, focusing on pragmatic theory and an empirical analysis of an excerpt from a 1990 BBC news interview.
What topics are covered in the main section?
The main section covers the rules of speaker selection, the use of statement components as preliminaries to questions, and how participants handle departures from standard formats.
What are the key terms for this research?
Essential terms include Turn-taking, Adjacency Pairs, Transition Relevance Place (TRP), Turn-Constructional Components (TCC), and institutional preallocation.
How do interviewers maintain control during the interview?
Interviewers exert control by systematically confining their turns to questions, withholding routine conversational receipts, and using repair strategies to steer the interviewee back to the topic.
Why are "continuers" absent in these interviews?
Continuers like "uh-huh" are absent because the institutional roles strictly preallocate turn-types, and participants display an understanding that speakership transfers occur only at completed question boundaries.
- Quote paper
- Matthias Gebhardt (Author), 2004, The Turn-Taking system in British news interviews, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/66289
