Assessing the Language of British and American TV Political Interviews: A Corpus-Assisted Perspective

This thesis features 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 turn allocation and organization. This book adds a different perspective by resorting to a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques to the study of 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 at stake. 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.