Face-to-Face Verbal Interaction in Selected TV Political Talk Shows. A Socio-Pragmatic Account

Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, University of Babylon (College of Education for Human Sciences), course: PhD, language: English, abstract: The present paper seeks to find out the correlation between the pragmatic meaning and the sociolinguistic meaning expressed in face-to-face verbal interaction. It discusses the problematic areas in relation to how the verbal behaviour conveys pragmatic and sociolinguistic meanings, and how they contribute to the overall communicative value of verbal face-to-face interaction. To do this, the study has selected some interviews taken from two TV talk shows; namely, BBC Politic Show and 20/20 talk show. The study identifies the interviews' contexts of use, employing utterance and force techniques. Then, it employs the two separate, but related, aspects of the interlocutors' social identities and social ties and adopts Hymes’ model for the sake of identifying the contextual factors of the interaction and Brown and Levinson's (1978) theory of politeness.