Positioning in Media Dialogue : Negotiating roles in the news interview [1 ed.] 9789027290816, 9789027210203

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Positioning in Media Dialogue

Dialogue Studies (DS) Dialogue Studies takes the notion of dialogicity as central; it encompasses every type of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides a clear methodological profile. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and considers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach necessary for addressing the complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. This peer reviewed series will include monographs, thematic collections of articles, and textbooks in the relevant areas.

Editor Edda Weigand

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Editorial Advisory Board Adelino Cattani

Marion Grein

Kenneth N. Cissna

Fritjof Haft

Světla Čmejrková

John E. Joseph

François Cooren

Werner Kallmeyer

Robert T. Craig

Catherine KerbratOrecchioni

Università di Padova University of South Florida Czech Language Institute Université de Montréal University of Colorado at Boulder

Marcelo Dascal

Tel Aviv University

Valeri Demiankov

Russian Academy of Sciences

University of Mainz University of Tübingen University of Edinburgh University of Mannheim

Université Lyon 2

Geoffrey Sampson University of Sussex

Masayoshi Shibatani

Anne-Marie Söderberg Copenhagen Business School

Talbot J. Taylor

College of William and Mary

Wolfgang Teubert

University of Birmingham

Linda R. Waugh

University of Arizona

Elda Weizman

Bar Ilan University

Yorick Wilks

University of Sheffield

Rice University

Volume 3 Positioning in Media Dialogue. Negotiating roles in the news interview by Elda Weizman

Positioning in Media Dialogue Negotiating roles in the news interview

Elda Weizman Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weizman, Elda.   Positioning in media dialogue : negotiating roles in the news interview / Elda Weizman.        p. cm. (Dialogue Studies, issn 1875-1792 ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Discourse analysis. 2.  Interviewing in journalism.  I. Title. P302.46.W45    2008 070.4'3014--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 1020 3 (Hb; alk. paper)

2008037928

© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa



Dedicated to my husband, Zvi



And to the memory of my parents, Dvora (Voitchi) and Narcisse Zuckerman, who are always with me

Table of contents

Abstract Acknowledgements

xi xiii

Part I.  Negotiating positioning 1.

The news interview 1.1 Approaches to the study of news interviews  3 1.2 Introducing the corpus  9 1.3 Presentation and transcription conventions  10

3

2.

The interactional construction of positions in discourse 2.1 Positioning  13 2.2 Positioning and role  16 2.3 Role and identity  17 2.3.1 Role, identity, status: A sociological orientation  17 2.3.2 Membership categories and identity: Discourse orientation  18 2.4 The perception of role and identity in media talk  19 2.5 Multiplicity of roles  23 2.6 Two role types: Social and interactional  26 2.7 “Making relevant” in and through discourse  31

13

3.

Positioning through challenge 3.1 Defining challenge  35 3.2 Two challenge-types  38 3.3 Who challenges whom?  41 3.4 Challenge potential  45 3.5 Summary  45

35

Part II.  Discourse patterns 4.

Interactional roles: Normative expectations and discourse norms 4.1 Preliminaries  49 4.2 Normative expectations  50

49

viii Positioning in Media Dialogue

4.3 4.4 4.5

Discourse norms  58 Rights and obligations: A case of wishful thinking  69 Conversationalisation and positioning  71

5.

Irony 5.1 Preliminaries  75 5.2 Cues and clues for ironic interpretation  76 5.3 Ironists and targets  86 5.3.1 Interviewers target interviewees  88 5.3.2 Interviewees target a third party  92 5.4 The locus of irony  100 5.5 Does irony reduce threat to face or enhance it?  103

75

6.

Framing challenge through terms of address 107 6.1 Preliminaries  107 6.2 Explicit other-positioning: Addresses and references in the openings and closings  111 6.3 Framing conflict and challenge: Addresses in mid-position  116 6.3.1 Interactional positioning through deference  119 6.3.2 Framing challenge through solidarity  131 6.4 Positioning through terms of address  137

Part III.  Case studies 7.

Individual intentions and collective purpose 7.1 Ritual blows of peace-making: Individual intentions and collective purpose  141 7.2 Individual intentions: Challenge and conflict 143 7.2.1 Interviewee’s loop-responses  143 7.2.2 Meta-comments and interruptions  147 7.2.3 Reciprocal irony  149 7.2.4 Exchanging last blows: The closing  149 7.3 Collective direction: Collaboration and joint endeavor  150

8.

Negotiating social positioning: The interviewee’s political  role in context

9.

Intertwined positionings 9.1 Interactional co-operation: Turns 01–10  164 9.2 Reciprocal adversative positioning: Turns 11–30  167 9.3 Reciprocal challenges at their peak  173 9.4 Summary  174

141

153 163



Table of contents

Part IV.  Conclusion 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

175

Two methodological comments  176 1.1 Methodology and findings: A two-way street  176 1.2 Units of analysis  176 Positioning, role and challenge: An interactional view  177 The discursive nature of positioning  178 News interviews in the Israeli context  180 4.1 Symmetry and reciprocity  180 4.2 High informativeness  181 Desideratum  182

References

183

Appendix A

193

Appendix B

197

Appendix C

201

Author index

205

Subject index

207

ix

Abstract

The analysis presented in this book aims to explore discursive positioning, focusing on news interviews. In this genre of dialogic interaction, characterized by a tension between pre-conceived division of roles and meaningful deviations from it, participants constantly position themselves explicitly and implicitly, and by so doing reciprocally position their interlocutors and their audiences. A complex system of interactional and social roles and identities is established through discursive practices, and is being dynamically modified through negotiations. Thus, positioning, conceived of as a dynamic alternative to the notion of role (Davies & Harré 1990; Harré & van Langenhove 1999), encompasses such basic notions as interactional construction of meanings, interlocutors’ individual intentions and shared collective goals, and dynamic negotiations of meanings and intentions. The conceptual analysis is based on an empirical study of a 24-hour corpus of news interviews broadcast on Israeli television, as well as on an open corpus of recent interviews and comments made by media figures and politicians. Based on an integrated pragmatic approach, it focuses on potential interpretations of discursive patterns, explores interlocutors’ responses to them, and interprets them in terms of reciprocal positioning and the negotiations of roles and identities.

Acknowledgements

I was privileged to meet Prof. Chaim Rabin at an early stage of my academic life. He inspired me with his erudition and multi-faceted approach to the study of language. In later years, my dialogue with Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Marcelo Dascal enriched my thinking in many ways. These important sources of inspiration influenced, directly and indirectly, the conceptualization underlying the discussions in this book. Several friends and colleagues commented on the manuscript or on parts of it, in their present or previous versions, and shared with me their invaluable comments. These include Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Peter Bull, Claude Chabrol, Svetla Cmejrkova, Marcelo Dascal, Anita Fetzer, Roni Henkin, Galia Hirsch, Adam Jaworski and Zohar Livant. I am deeply indebted to all of them, as well as to Miriam Shlesinger and Ruth Morris, who gave me their sound advice on matters related to English style. Special thanks are due to the editor of the series Dialogue Studies, Edda Weigand, for her support and important input. During the years, participants in various seminars and conferences offered their views on different aspects of my work. I am particularly grateful to my friends at the International Association for Dialogue Studies for their critical comments on my talks at our annual meetings; to my colleagues at the Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; to the researchers at the CEDITEC, Université Paris 12 Val-de-Marne and to the participants at the séminaire de troisième cycle, Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle); and especially to faculty and students at the 2005 seminar for advanced students at the Department of Communication, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who devoted a few meetings to the notion of positioning. Tamar Sovran, Il-Il Malibert-Yatziv, Pnina Shukrun-Nagar and Zohar Livnat offered me their friendship and professional input whenever necessary. My heartfelt thanks go to them. I am grateful also to Idmit Lev-Shalem for data collection and coding as well as for her clever insights, to Tsipy Parnassa for the statistical help and her important observations, to Irit Segal for bringing the manuscript to completion, and to Ruchie Avital for coping with the difficult task of translating the examples into English. Isja Conen, Acquisition Editor at John Benjamins, offered me her

xiv Positioning in Media Dialogue

­excellent professional advice, and Nomy Cohen and Ephraim Singer offered me their friendship. My deep gratitude to my sister, Nitsa Shelef, for her unrelentless encouragement, clever mind and analytical thought, to my good friend, Annie-Claude Karger for her encouragement, and to my children, Noam and Maya, who saw how it all began, and acted as my assistants on demand. Finally, and above all, I thank my husband, Zvi, for everything that words cannot tell. This research was supported by The Israel Science Foundation. I am grateful to Walter de Gruyter for permission to publish a version of my 1998 paper: Individual intentions and collective Purpose: The case of news interviews. In: Čmejrková, Svtela, Jana Hoffmanová, Olga Mullerová and Jindra Světlá (eds), Dialogue Analysis VI: Proceedings of the 6th Conference, Prague 1996, vol. 2, Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 269–280; and to Elsevier Ltd. for permission to publish parts of my 2006 article: Roles and identities in news interviews: The Israeli context. Journal of Pragmatics, 38 (2), 154–179.

part i

Negotiating positioning

chapter 1

The news interview

This book explores interactional positioning in news interviews. In this genre of dialogic interaction, characterized by a tension between pre-conceived division of roles and meaningful deviations from it, participants constantly position themselves explicitly and implicitly, and by so doing reciprocally position their interlocutors and their audiences. A complex system of interactional and social roles is established through discursive practices, and is being dynamically modified through negotiations. Salient aspects of this interactional complexity will be studied here, mapping an essentially sociological theory of positioning onto a pragmatic fine-grained textual analysis of discourse patterns. The conceptual analysis is based on an empirical study of a closed 24-hour corpus of news interviews broadcast on Israeli television, as well as on an open corpus of meta-comments made by media figures and politicians. The interviews and the media references were produced in Hebrew, and are quoted here in English translation. Based on an integrated pragmatic approach, the analysis focuses on potential interpretations of discursive patterns, explores interlocutors’ responses to them, and interprets them in terms of reciprocal positioning and the negotiations of roles and identities. Accordingly, the book has three parts. In the first one, the conceptual framework is introduced, and the methodology underlying the research is presented; the second part focuses on two discursive practices – irony and terms of address, and examines the discrepancy between normative expectations and discourse norms; and the third part proposes an integrated analysis of three case studies, focusing on the nature of the news interview as a case of joint endeavor, and shedding more light on the complex duality of interactional and social roles.

1.1

Approaches to the study of news interviews

The discursive nature of news interviews has been the subject of a growing body of research from various viewpoints. In this chapter I outline briefly four dominant approaches: conversation analysis, media studies, pragmatics and social psychology. I then locate my work vis-à-vis these different paradigms, explain the methodology underlying it and describe the corpus.



Positioning in Media Dialogue

Research in the school of Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA) is concerned with news interviews, and more generally with other forms of broadcast talk (which include also talk shows and phone-in programs), as instances of institutional discourse. The latter includes talk in institutionalized contexts such as medical encounters, psychiatric interviews, interaction at the workplace, counseling and courtroom discourse, in addition to various instances of broadcast talk. In CA perspective, the institutionality of dialogue is constituted by participants through their orientation to relevant institutional roles and identities, and the particular responsibilities and duties associated with those roles; and through their production and management of institutionally relevant tasks and activities. The study of institutional dialogue thus focuses on the ways in which conduct is shaped or constrained by the participants’ orientations to social institutions, either as their representatives or in various senses as their ‘clients’.  (Drew & Sorjonen 1997, p. 94)

Having emerged from the non linguistic, sociological work conducted within the paradigm of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967, 1972), Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA) was initially concerned with the conversational organization of mundane talk, launched by Harvey Sacks in his 1964–1965 lectures (Sacks 1995; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974). Research into institutional discourse purports to underpin its specificities as compared to everyday conversations. The news interview is thus viewed as “a functionally specialized form of social interaction produced for an overhearing audience and restricted by institutionalized conventions” (Heritage 1985, p. 112). Hence, CA research into news interviews is concerned with the interactional co-construction of the institutionally determined order by interviewers and interviewees, always having in mind their audience. Specifically, it focuses – to name but the most prevalent emphases – on such organizational features as turn-taking practices and the question-answer design (for instance, Heritage 1985, 1998; Greatbatch 1986b, 1988, 1992; Clayman 1988, 1992, 1993; Heritage & Greatbatch 1991; Clayman & Heritage 2002), topic introduction, topic shift, interviewee’s evasions or resistance (Greatbatch 1986a, b; Harris 1991; Clayman 1993; Clayman & Heritage 2002), openings and closings (Clayman 1989, 1991; Clayman & Heritage 2002), formulations (Heritage 1985) and the interviewer’s neutralism, co-produced by the interviewer’s practices and the interviewee’s responses (Clayman 1988, 1992; Greatbatch 1998; Heritage & Greatbatch 1991; Clayman & Heritage 2002). The data represent the Anglo-Saxon world, mostly in the US and Britain, but the limitations imposed by this ethnocentrism are not discussed. The qualitative analysis is based on transcribed (­video)



Chapter 1.  The news interview

taped data; it is inductive, and does not explore a-priori hypotheses. Emphasis is put on discourse procedures as they are manifested in interaction. In the framework of media studies, specifically in the work of the Ross Priory group, the news interview is viewed as an instance of news talk, which, in turn, is considered as part of broadcast talk. In this view, “Broadcasting is an institution – a power, an authority – and talk on radio and television is public, institutional talk, an object of intense scrutiny, that gives rise to political, social, cultural and moral concerns” (Scannell 1991, p. 7). Other instances of broadcast talk include such genres as radio phone-ins (Brand & Scannell 1991), DJ talk (Montgomery 1986, 1991; Tolson 2006), celebrity talk (Tolson 2001, 2006) and sports (Toslon 2006). Reference to the wider context of the public discourse is central to this approach. It is illustrated, for example, in Garton, Montgomery & Tolson (1991), whereby the analysis of meta-talk about Neil Kinock’s response in an interview leads to a reassessment of the notion of the ‘public sphere’, and mostly to that of the ‘public forum’. Among the central notions of this school of thought, let me mention the most relevant to my approach: talk is central to broadcasting, on radio as well as television. It is intended for an audience, and thus “either addresses the audience directly, or attempts to engage the audience in a ‘quasi interactive’ relationship” (Tolson 2006, p. 3). But the notion of audience is rather complex, as explicated below: The effect of listening to radio and TV output is not that of overhearing talk not intended to be overheard. All talk on radio and TV is public discourse, is meant to be accessible to the audience for whom it is intended. Thus broadcast talk minimally has a double articulation: it is a communicative interaction between those participating in discussion, interview, game show or whatever and, at the same time, is designed to be heard by absent audiences. The talk that takes place on radio and television has listenable properties intentionally built into it.  (Scannell 1991, p. 1)

The crucial part broadcast plays in the public sphere determines some of its important properties – sociability, sincerity, eventfulness, authenticity and dailiness – and underlies the complex construction of identities (Scannell 1992, 1996, 1998). These pivotal concepts, as well as those of “being ordinary” and “liveliness” (Tolson 2006) are connected with the basic requirement that broadcast attend to the need of its audience. Studies of news interviews in the tradition of socio-pragmatics are heterogeneous and multi disciplinary, as is the field of pragmatics as a whole. However, they all share the following features:





Positioning in Media Dialogue

1. They strive to interpret the use of discourse patterns in terms of their functions in a culture-dependent social environment, and they do so at various levels of generalization. The analysis of the illocutionary force of questions, for example, is more locally bound to the immediate co-text then the assignment of values in terms of positive and negative face. Thus, in one of the earliest extensive studies of news interviews (broadcast on BBC), Jucker (1986) analyses the structure of news interviews in terms of speechact sequencing, explains the illocutionary force of interviewers’ utterances in terms of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims, and explores the influence face wants (Brown & Levinson 1987) exercise over participants’ choices. In his analysis, pragmatic functions are thus mapped onto their syntactic and semantic realizations, and vice versa. Owsley and Myers-Scotton (1984) examine the use of linguistic features such as interruptions, silences, types of questions and statements and challenge markers (mostly concession conjunctions) for the construction of what they call “powerful language” or “taking charge”, which, in the conceptual framework adopted here, pertain to interactional power; and Fetzer (2006) interprets references to media-frame in the body of the interview as blatant floutings of the Gricean maxim of quantity, and hence – as potential sources of inferencing processes which lead to the negotiations of validity of media presuppositions. 2. They are based mostly on a detailed textual analysis which is not confined to a closed set of discourse patterns determined a priori. For example, questions and answers are widely regarded as fundamental to news interviews, but pragmatic studies do not take their nature and function for granted. Jucker (1986), Bull (1994, 2003) Harris (1991) and Blum-Kulka (1983) are concerned with the issue of what constitutes a question and an answer, discuss the relations between questions and answers at the level of coherence and cohesion, and cope with the difficulty to determine what direct and invasive answers are. The use of irony (Weizman 2001), represented discourse (Johansson 2002), voicing and ventriloquizing (Lauerbach 2006), on the other hand, may not be constitutive of the genre, but their analyses contribute to the understanding of how roles and identities are coconstructed in discourse. 3. They view the news interview, as any other form of interaction, as a case of dynamic negotiations of meanings and positions. These include, among others, the negotiations of levels of cooperation required to maintain a rule-governed speech event (Blum-Kulka 1983); the re-contextualization and co-construction of objects of discourse in interaction (Johansson 2006); the negotiations of agendas and relations of interviewees within their intra-party affiliations (Lauerbach 2001); of irony and its implication for the implicit introduction of non-ratified participants – the targets of ironic ­ criticism



Chapter 1.  The news interview

(Weizman 2001); of meanings and viewpoints through challenges to social norms and conventions (Cmejrková 2003) as well as through the construction of femininity (Cmejrková 2006) in news interviews on Czech television; and of the ways self- and other references are strategically employed to negotiate footing and hence – to establish accountability (Bull & Fetzer 2006; Fetzer & Bull 2008). In keeping with the premises delineated above, Bull and his colleagues propose empirical micro-analyses of news interviews, anchored in social psychology. In their work, news interviews are conceived of as typical cases of equivocation. According to Bavelas, Black, Chovil & Mullette (1990), equivocation is used in order to avoid losing face in avoidance-avoidance conflicts, where each answer may have negative consequences, and thus cause loss of face to the interviewee, to the party he or she represents, or to significant others. Analyses in this theoretical framework focus mainly on interruptions as well as on questions and answers and the interrelations between them (Bull 1994; Bull 2003; Bull, Elliott, Palmer & Walker 1996; Bull & Elliott 1998; Bull & Mayer 1993). Special emphasis is placed on the face-management underlying the avoidance-avoidance conflicts and the ways questions and answers are handled in the interview (Bull et al. 1996; Bull & Elliott 1998; Bull 2000; Bull 2003). In the context of misunderstanding, Blum-Kulka & Weizman (2003) associate equivocation with Gricean implicature. Adopting a typically pragmatic approach, we argue that tolerance for equivocal talk in news interviews accounts for the fact that norms of conversation are extremely flexed, if not suspended, and that unless otherwise indicated, politicians’ departures from them would be interpreted as conversational implicatures rather than as cues for misunderstandings. 4. Interactional practices are viewed as culture-dependent. Cross-cultural analyses are called for in terms of discourse patterns as well as their social implications. This cross-cultural perspective is characteristic of Gerda Lauerbach’s empirically based project “Television Discourse” on cross-cultural analysis of television discourse in election night coverage on US, British and German TV (for various aspects of this multi-faceted study see Becker 2005; Hampel 2005; Fetzer 2005; Johansson 2005; Lauerbach 2005). Contributions based on this and other projects include, for instance, a comparison between the interviewer’s involvement in interviews in Hebrew and Arabic (Levi, Weizman & Scheneebaum 2006; ­Weizman, Levi & Schneebaum 2007), a comparative study of represented discourse in French and English (Johansson 2007) and of challenges (Fetzer 2007) in British English and German, and others. The analysis presented in this book ascribes to an integrated pragmatically oriented approach, albeit relying on other orientations as well. For example, I take





Positioning in Media Dialogue

into account the extensive work on news interviews done by CA researchers, I am inspired by its basic understanding of institutionality and the emphasis on the ways roles and meanings are made relevant in interaction, often in the responses, and adopt the view that in news interviews, talk is produced for an overhearing audience; but on the whole, I am essentially concerned with mechanisms of interpretation and the social values attached to discursive practices. With Tolson (2006), I start with the premise that the news interview is more flexible than is claimed by CA researchers, and with researchers in media studies I see it as a mélange of institutional and conversational discourse practices, and am well aware of its staged quality; but not withstanding Tolson’s reservations (2006, p. 39), I consider the Gricean (1975) mechanism of assigning meanings through conversational implicatures as a powerful explanatory tool, and assign to it a central place in the analsyis. On the whole, the news interview is conceived of here as a complex dialogic action game (Weigand 2000, 2007) whereby each local action is related to other actions – either initiated by them or reacts to them, and participants have purposes (as put forward by the theory of speech acts and Grice’s [1975] conversational principle) which may conceal specific interests (Weigand 2007) grounded in the culture-dependent social world. Like any other conversation, the news interview is also a case of collective behavior (Searle 1992; Dascal 1992) which encompasses more than just the sum of the speakers’ intentions (Weizman & Blum-Kulka 1992). Based on an empirically collected data (see 1.2 below), the analysis presented here is not descriptive, in the sense that it does not aim to give a full-fledged picture of the discursive features characterizing the corpus. Rather, it is guided by a conceptual premise: news interviews are typically vulnerable to explicit and implicit division of roles, and are therefore fertile ground for the exploration of positioning. Accordingly, it explores mechanisms of the dynamic co-construction of positions in interaction. For this purpose, it focuses on potential interpretations of discursive patterns, analyses interlocutors’ responses to them, and interprets them in terms of reciprocal positioning and the negotiations of roles and identities.

1.2

Introducing the corpus

The analysis draws on two sets of data: (a) a 24-hour corpus of news interviews in the program Erev Xadash (“New Evening”), broadcast daily between 5–5:30 pm . The research has been supported be the Basic Research Foundation Administered by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.



Chapter 1.  The news interview

on Israel national television, channel one; (b) an open corpus of meta-comments made by prominent journalists and leading political figures in the Israeli media (radio, dailies and television). Meta-comments have been collected between 1990 and 2007, were transcribed when necessary and translated into English, and they serve as the basis for a discussion of the perception of roles and identities in the media. The corpus of TV interviews serves as a basis for the textual fine-grained analysis of interviewers’ and interviewees’ discourse patterns. The corpus of news interviews consists of 48 half-an-hour programs, featuring 181 short interviews, videotaped, transcribed and coded. Data were collected in two periods of time – November-December 1991 and December-January 1993, 24 programs in each period, 101 interviews in the first one and 80 in the second. The gap between the two periods, selected at random, was intended to ensure an arbitrary variation of topics and interviewers. Nevertheless, the interviewers did not change, and the data thus represents three leading interviewers – Rafi Reshef (50.8%, N = 92), Dan Margalit (31.5%, N = 57) and Dan Shilon (17.7%, N = 32). Although the studied program features mainly dyadic interviews, the arbitrary selection of dates presented us with multi-party interviews as well. The distribution of interviews by number of interviewees is presented in Figure 1. As can be seen, 79% (n = 144) of the interviews are dyadic, and the rest are multiparty interviews, either with 2 interviewees (18%, n = 32), or with 3 interviewees (3%, n = 5).

Figure 1.  Distribution of interviews by number of interviewees



10

Positioning in Media Dialogue

Table 1.  Average length of interview by number of turns No of interviewees No of interviews Average no of turns (iees+iers)

Average no of iees’ turns

Average no of iers’ turns

1 2 3 Total

13.58 12.60 11.40 13.35

13.76 10.51 10.40 13.09

144   32    5 181

27.35 46.25 65.40 31.74

The average length of interview was measured in number of turns, since measuring it in terms of time proved to be imprecise and sometimes irrelevant – interviews may include short documentary films, for instance. The data, shown in Table 1, indicate the following: 1. Interviewees have an average of 13.35 turns per interview. The number increases with increase in number of interviewees. 2. Interviewers have an average of 13.09 turns per interview. The number decreases with number of interviewees, from 13.76 in dyadic interviews, to 10.5 and 10.4 in multi-party interviews. This may be the result of talk between the interviewees which is not directly regulated by the interviewer. Interviewees in the corpus were classified by profession into 4 groups: politicians, experts, journalists and “ordinary” people, which we called “everyman”. The classification was motivated by the hypothesis that interactional practices differ according to interviewee’s profession (and see Jucker 1986; Clayman & Heritage 2002). This hypothesis is also reflected in the open corpus of meta-talk (see Chapters 2, 3) and was confirmed in the analysis of irony and address terms (see Chapters 5, 6). Figure 2 shows the distribution of interviewees by profession. The total number of interviewees, 223, takes into account multi-party interviews, which have more than one interviewee. Figure 2 indicates a marked majority of politicians (57%, n = 126), and a smaller proportion of the other groups.

1.3

Presentation and transcription conventions

The Hebrew data are presented in transcription and semi-literal English translation of the original. The Hebrew is transcribed following the broad phonemic transcription conventions for Hebrew as devised by Berman and her colleagues for CHILDES (http://semtalk.talkbank.org/HebrewTranscriptionBracha.pdf). The transcription “is intended to represent the way utterances are generally pronounced by speakers. It does not represent abstract underlying historical



Chapter 1.  The news interview

Figure 2.  Distribution of interviewees by profession

forms, but it does take into account distinctions still manifest in the current orthography of Hebrew in order to facilitate disambiguation of homophones and homographs” (ibid.). It thus distinguishes between 5 Hebrew vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 25 consonants. Prepositions and definite articles are transcribed as prefixes. Names are capitalized, and I sometimes adopt their English conventional spelling, even when it does not converge with the above-mentioned conventions. In the transcribed interviews, the punctuation does not conform with CHILDES, and stands for the following transcription signs: ,

= a brief pause, the number of commas represents the relative length of the pause . = utterance falling intonation followed by a noticeable pause ? = utterance rising intonation followed by a noticeable pause (.) (?) = utterance mixed intonation, with a tendency towards a falling or a rising intonation, respectively

= overlap; [>] = overlap follows; [] but but uh 05 Ier [] aval aval eh [] 23 Ier [] [] 16 Dunevitch: [] [] 21 Ier: [] [] []

Chaim Ramon omer aval dvarim pshutim!, hu omer bi# tvax arba shmone shtem-esre shana,… hu omer! ma she# kara le# mifleget ha# Avoda be# 77 yikre la# histadrut!, [>] []



33 Ier:

Chapter 4.  Interactional roles

[]

61

62

Positioning in Media Dialogue

21 Ier:

[]

(Dan Margalit and Members of Parliament Yehuda Volman and Chaim Ramon, November 21, 1991, interview 1)

In this part of the interview, Volman is being asked about the implications of the political turbulences for his own status and career. Volman, on his part, tries to recontextualize the question within the larger, national context (45, 47, 49, 51), and expresses repeatedly his intention to consult with ‘xaverim’. The Hebrew noun xaverim is polysemic, and signifies, depending on the context, either “friends” (e.g. 55), or, mostly in political discourse, “members”, connotating “comrades” (e.g. 51), or both (47, 53). Either way, by insisting on the need to consult with party members and friends, the speaker establishes in-group solidarity, further conveyed by the shift from the first person singular to the first person plural (47) and by qualifying the party as “home” (51). Volman’s personal issue is thus reframed as central to the party’s ideological concerns. This reframing is challenged by Ramon, who self-selects and cuts in twice, with two ironic utterances: “He’ll consult!” (turn 54) and “He has yes” (turn 56). In both, he transparently echoes Volman’s preceding answers (turns 53, 55) with the required change in personal pronouns. This echo may also be read as blatantly flouting Grice’s (1975) maxim of quantity, being extremely uninformative. Note, that the question whether ironic interpretation may rely here on a flouting of the maxim of quality leads us to the need to refine Grice’s account. If we assume that the flouting of the quality maxim leads the interpreter necessarily towards a propositional antonymy, of the type “He is ‘clever’” signifying “He is stupid”, flouting in this case would yield the interpretation “he will not consult”, which casts doubt on Volman’s intention to consult with friends, and hence questions his credibility. This possibility is the least plausible under the circumstance, for two reasons: consultation of this kind is so deeply rooted in parliamentary tradition, that there is no reason to doubt it; and even if there were grounds for such a doubt, questioning credibility presents a threat to face so severe, that it is hardly . The insulting, belittling use of the third person pronoun in the presence of the person referred to has been discussed in Weizman 1999b.

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conceivable under the circumstances. More likely, the speaker questions one of the presuppositions underlying the use of the verb “consult”. Four candidate interpretations come to mind, and in all of them – the target of the ironic criticism is Volman, whose words are echoed by Ramon’s. First, the act of consulting with friends presupposes the consulter’s belief that the consultation might lead to worthy results. On the ironic interpretation, then, Ramon questions the efficacy of Volman’s consultation in terms of its potential results, and speaker’s meaning is: “This consultation will not (or is not likely to) yield any significant results”. Second, the act of consulting further implies acting in good faith, with the intention of carrying out the advice one gets; the ironic meaning implies that Ramon doubts Volman’s willingness to act in good faith, and yields: “He will consult, but he does not intend to accept the advice he gets or carry it out”. Third, the need to consult presupposes the consulter’s dependence on the consultees. The use of irony implies, then, that Ramon criticizes Volman’s dependence, as manifested by his search for advice and support. This interpretation is further supported by one of Ramon’s previous comments, whereby, in reply to the interviewer’s question whether he will resign from the Parliament, he emphasizes his own independence and determination: “I’ll sit and do uh and think, and I will not make hasty, decisions., [...]”. Finally, consulting implies the consulter’s trust in the consultees; i.e. his or her belief in the value of friendship. On this interpretation, Ramon doubts that Volman has trustworthy friends, and criticizes his naiveté. The last interpretation relies, to a large extent, on the polysemic nature of “xaverim”, the Hebrew word for “friends”. We have already seen that in Israeli political parlance, the word xaverim denotes “friends” as well as “party members”. Furthermore, it brings to memory connotations which are not far removed from comrades (=meta-linguistic shallow information), mostly when used by members of the communist party and the elder generation at the Avoda party. A few of the Avoda leaders, for instance, still address their colleagues in their speeches as “xaverim”. In the interview under discussion, the word xaverim carries all the above-mentioned meanings. For example, asserting “I’m xaver at the Avoda party” (turn 51), the meaning “member” is selected, based on the use of the preposition at. On the other hand, the indefinite form of the noun in Volman’s response “I’ll consult with xaverim” (53) allows for a polysemic reading, both in the sense of “members” as well as of “friends”. Against this background, it is interesting to note that while Ramon’s ironic comment “He has, yes”, alludes to xaverim only by ellipsis and therefore retains its ambiguity, in Volman’s response (“I have many friends”, turn 55), the use of the possessive (“have friends”) allows only for the meaning “friends”. It thus shows that Volman takes Ramon’s irony as a personal challenge, implicating that he has no real personal friends. Indeed, it is precisely



Chapter 5.  Irony

at this level that he is being challenged again by Ramon’s next ironic remark (“He has [many friends], yes,” turn 56). Thus, this case demonstrates the complexity of ironic interpretation, and the need to combine and refine the existing theories. Whereas the cues for ironic interpretation are relatively conspicuous, a few candidate speaker’s meanings might be construed here. In all of them, however, the target of Ramon’s ironic criticism is the author of the echoed utterance, i.e. Yehuda Volman. Similarly transparent is the echoic mention in the next extract. Here, however, another complexity is introduced. The interviewee repeats the words of the interviewer, which, in turn, can be read as echoing the words or thought of a third, absent party. Thus, we are faced with a two-level echoic mention. Ironists and targets are multiple, as will be seen, and the participation design is thus being expanded through the use of irony. (8)  (For an elaborate discussion of other aspects of this interview, see Chapter 7) Background: Mr. Eli Landau, Mayor of the city of Herzliya, has been invited to give his own version of some allegedly illegal activities related to the construction of a marina in Herzliya. A complaint has been filed against two of Landau’s cronies, Samocha and Ziesser, by Aryeh Avneri, Chair of the anti-corruption association “Amitay”. Mr. Avneri, who was also invited to the studio, didn’t arrive because of a traffic jam caused by the rains. Despite the interviewer’s attempts to discuss the allegations, the interviewee makes every effort to turn this mishap into the topic of the first 20 turns, as can be seen in the following extract: 01 Ier:

Well the affair was made public two men were arrested, brought before a judge and released, on bail uh on the charges of,illegal conduct in the Herzliya marina project. We wanted to discuss this matter with Chair of the Amitay organization who filed a complaint uh on this matter Arie Avneri he did not arrive, because of the rain but we will interview the Mayor of Herzliya, Eli Landau who has rushed to the defense of the two suspects, uh, Moti Ziesser and Samocha. Good evening, Eli Landau.

uvexen eh hayom hitparsema ha# parasha shney anashim ne’ecru al yedey ha# mishtara huv’u le# beyt mishpat ve# shuxreru, be# arvut eh be# ta’ana she# na’asu averot, pliliyot, ba# marina be# Herzliya. anaxnu bikashnu lesoxe’ax be# nose ze im yoshev rosh, agudat Amitay asher yozem et ha# tluna eh be# nose ze Arie Avneri hu loh higi’a hena, biglal ha# geshem aval anaxnu nera’ayen et rosh iriyat Herzliya, Eli Landau asher yaca le# haganat shney ha# xashudim, eh, Moti Ziesser, ve# Samoxa. erev tov lexa, Eli Landau.

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02 Landau: Good evening, Happy Hanuka., I just wanted to say something, if I may Dan the marina project is not stuck, [>], it’s beautiful, 03 Ier: < ha ha > [] [] with him!, and he []. [] 14 Landau: [], hi bnuya letalpiyot, [] [] ito!, hu []. []

[ [>] 16 Landau: