Questions in political interviews

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of Anglophone Studies), course: Spoken English, language: English, abstract: One of the more neglected fields in linguistics is the field of questions and their functions, although questions play an important role not only in casual conversation but in political discourse in particular. Therefore this paper will deal with one specific type of political discourse, namely political interviews (van Dijk 1995: 18). When it comes to political interviews, which have become more and more influential for political debate in the last few decades (Chilton 2004: 69), questions by the interviewer are the central elements leading and guiding the discourse. Thus the aim of this paper is to examine the questions and their functions in political interviews. Considering that firstly a brief look at what makes an interview a political one will be required and secondly there will be a section on what an interviewer intends. Examining the functions of questions is another way of asking why or with what intention a question is used. Thus knowing about an interviewers general intention in a political interview will later in the analysis help to understand what the use of questions is and why they are posed in the one way or the other. Thirdly it has to be clarified what a question is and what types of questions there are. These preliminary explanations will be followed by the main analysis on the basis of the transcriptions of two political interviews, one conducted by Andrew Marr in the Andrew Marr Show broadcast on BBC One on 21st July 2013 and the other conducted by Sir David Frost in the Show Frost over the World broadcast on AlJazeera on 10th September 2011. This analysis will focus on questions and attempt to provide answers to the following questions: What types of questions do the interviewers employ and how do they use them in order to succeed in their intentions? I.e. what are the particular functions of the interviewers' questions to the interviewee (who in both interviews is the British Prime Minister David Cameron)? This second question is based on the assumption that there is (especially in political discourse) always one basic function of questions which then (according to the type and content of the question) further subdivides into more specific and individual functions. Exemplary analyses of question forms typical for the two interviews will illustrate how the particular functions are fulfilled.