A Case Study Of Conversational Strategies Used In Political And Sports News Interviews In USA

This paper attempts a conversational analysis of televised news interviews with present American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the famous golf star Tiger Woods from the pragmatic perspective. The paper, based on the theories of pragmatics including Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Brown & Levinson's Face Theory, studies different responding strategies employed by the two interviewees, summarizes the similarities and differences between the two, and describes possible factors that contribute to the differences.The paper starts with a brief review of literature on conversational analysis and the findings of research by domestic and foreign scholars in news interviews using conversational analysis approach. Then, it introduces main theories in pragmatics, including Cooperative Principle, maxim-flouting, Politeness Principle and face-threatening act, as well as different views of context, traditional and dynamic. Though the nature and characteristics of news interviews request participants to be familiar with the topics discussed in the process of questioning-answering and interviewees to be cooperative by answering questions sincerely and truthfully, pragmatic principles are not always observed in news interviews, as participants of news interview (interviewer and interviewee) may have different communicative intentions. To the interviewees, some questions may be too sharp and challenging which are raised only to satisfy audiences' curiosity and thus face-threatening. If they answer the questions straightforwardly, they will lose face or even bring damage to themselves or the interest group they represent. Naturally, the interviewees will turn to communicative strategies and answer the questions indirectly to safeguard their own interests or save positive or negative face. This explains why indirectness becomes a popular option for responding to challenging questions, though indirectness could mean intentional violation of the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance or manner under the Cooperative Principle, either in a separate way or jointly, giving rise to conversational implicatures whose understanding, most often, calls for, knowledge of Politeness Principle and Face Theory. It is stressed that "face" and "benefit" are two key factors in the use of conversational strategies. In any interview, to reduce the face threat to "the other" and "self is always a central theme; besides, "benefit" is always put in the first place, that is, to minimize cost to others and maximize benefits to self for a win-win situation.The paper points to the importance of context in conversational analysis and discusses different views of context, traditional and dynamic. It's pointed out that traditional context is static, which includes everything and exists before the communication process, and participants are supposed to accept it passively, white dynamic context is constructed in a psychological process of conversation interpretation. During the interview, the interviewee must guess the intention of the interviewer, the effect of answers and the expectation of audiences. And for audiences or readers, in order to understand what are implied in interviews, either political or sports, they must be familiar with the social and cultural background; otherwise it will be a bit difficult to understand the implicauture. In other words, context is an essential factor which cannot be ignored.With careful comparative analysis, the paper presents the conclusion in the last part: Though both Rice and Tiger violate maxims of Cooperative Principle to some extent and they both show politeness to a third party, Rice uses comparatively more of communicative strategies than Tiger, and takes advantage of all chances to air her own views to influence the audience. Yet, it may not be true that she or other political figures is/are more skilled in using conversational strategies than sports stars, as several possible factors influence the adoption of strategies, which are interviewee's identity, target audience, and whether the questions are face-threatening or not.