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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 27:4 (2017) ► pp.529–552

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The question of politeness in political interviews

 | Glendon College, Toronto, Canada
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 3 November 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.4.03mac
Abstract
This paper examines the question of politeness in political interviews, looking particularly at the use of loaded questions. Comparison is made between the two principal paradigms of politeness, Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts. 2005. “Politeness Theory and Relational Work.” Journal of Politeness Research 11: 9–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. The paper focuses on the interviewing style of Steven Sackur (HARDtalk, BBC) who employs loaded questions in his political interviews in keeping with the analysis of Walton, Douglas N. 1991. ´Critical Faults and Fallacies of Questioning.” Journal of Pragmatics 151: 337–366. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar who argues that loaded questions can function as a ‘reasonable’ means to constrain the response of an interviewee and in turn further discourse. Sackur employs loaded questions selectively to convey and reinforce a presupposition to which an interviewee is not committed. In so doing, he is able to constrain the contribution of his interviewee. Loaded questions are a linguistic means of (im)politeness used strategically by Sackur to further the discourse of his interviews.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The question of ‘politeness’ in political interviews
    • 1.2Political interviews
    • 1.3Theoretical approaches to (im)‘politeness’
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Requests for information
    • 2.3Loaded questions
  • 3.Findings
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Johnson interview with Mair
    • 4.2Calderone interview with Sackur
    • 4.3Impoliteness
    • 4.4Guterres’ interview with Sackur
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (27)
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Cited by one other publication

Fu, Yanli
2024. A Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Discourse Marker “But” in a British Televised Political Interview Show: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective. Corpus-based Studies across Humanities 2:2 ► pp. 285 ff. DOI logo

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