Article published In:
Journal of Language and PoliticsVol. 6:2 (2007) ► pp.147–177
‘I’ll tell you what the truth is’
The interactional organization of confiding in political interviews
The goal of this article is to examine the context-dependent nature of acts of confiding in political interviews and to identify its genre-specific constraints and requirements. It looks at their distribution in British and French political interviews with regard to form, function and possible perlocutionary effects. The communicative act of confiding is compared and contrasted with disclosure, self-disclosure and revelation, and the necessary and sufficient conditions required for confiding in a felicitous manner are examined. Particular attention is given to the genre’s status as mediated and public discourse with public and political information. The most prominent strategies for realizing acts of confiding are analyzed by comparing and contrasting implicit and explicit realizations as well as their communicative functions in the British and French data.
Keywords: confiding, disclosure, political interviews, mediated discourse, Britain, France
References
Arlt, Hans-Jürgen and Otfried Jarren
1998 über den Umgang mit einer wählerischen Klientel: Politik entsteht heute erst durch Medienvermittlung oder: die modernen Regeln der öffentlichkeitsarbeit. Frankfurter Rundschau 12.01.1998, 7.
Bell, Philip and van Leeuwen, Theo
1994 The Media Interview. Confession, Contest, Conversation. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1983 The dynamics of political interviews. Text 3 (2), 131–153.
Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Bull, Peter
2003 The Microanalysis of Political Communication: Claptrap and Ambiguity. London: Routledge.
Charaudeau, Patrick and Ghiglione, Rodolphe
1997 La parole confisquée. Un genre télévisuel: le talk show. Paris : Dunod.
Clayman, Steven
1992 Footing in the achievement of neutrality: The case of news interview discourse. In: Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds). Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 163–198.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
1995 Media Discourse. London: Arnold
Fetzer, Anita
2000 Negotiating validity claims in political interviews. Text20 (4), 1–46.
2002 ‘Put bluntly, you have something of a credibility problem: Sincerity and credibility in political interviews. In: Paul Chilton and Christina Schäffner (eds). Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 173–201.
Fetzer, Anita and Weizman. Elda
2005 Political discourse as mediated and public discourse. Pragmatic aspects of political discourse in the Media. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2), 143–153.
Fetzer, Anita
2005 “Minister, we will see how the public judges you”. Media references in political interviews. Pragmatic Aspects of Political Discourse in the Media. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2), 180–195.
Foucault, Michel
1981 [1976] The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 11. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin.
Greatbatch, David
1988 A turn-taking system for British news interviews. Language in Society 171, 401–430.
Johansson, Marjut
2000 Recontextualisation du discours d’autrui: Discours représenté dans l’interview médiatique. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B — tom. 237. Turku.
2002 Sequential positioning of represented discourse in institutional media interaction. In: Anita Fetzer and Christiane Meieirkord (eds). Rethinking Sequentiality: Linguistics Meets Conversational Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 249–271.
2006 Constructing objects of discourse in the broadcast political interview. In: A. Fetzer and E. Weizman (eds). Pragmatic aspects of political discourse in the Media. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2), 216–229.
Jucker, Andreas
Léon, Jacqueline
2004 Preference and “bias” in the format of French news interviews: The semantic analysis of question-answer pairs in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 361, 1885–1920.
Petit Robert
1996-1997 Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française. CDROM.
Searle, John
1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shuy, Roger W
1998 The Language of Confession, Interrogation and Deception. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Traverso, Véronique
1996 La conversation familière: Analyse pragmatique des interactions. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon.
Wilson, John
1990 Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Bull, Peter, Anita Fetzer & Marjut Johansson
2008. Prologue. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27:4 ► pp. 324 ff. 
Craig, Geoffrey
Fetzer, Anita
2022. Small stories and accountability of discursive action in mediated political discourse: Contextualisation and recontextualisation of ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants. Frontiers in Communication 7
Heller, Monica & Aneta Pavlenko
Johansson, Marjut
2008. Presentation of the Political Self. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27:4 ► pp. 397 ff.
Semino, Elena & Jonathan Culpeper
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.