Comparative analysis of conversational strategy of interruption and disfluency in political interviews conducted in Croatian and English

Abstract

The genre of political interview includes informational and communicative persuasive strategy, as each interlocutor wants to establish their dominance. The desire for dominance results in frequent interruptions and speech overlaps, which can also be associated with speech fluency. A comparative analysis was used to examine the discourse strategy of negative interruptions and overlaps in relation to other parameters of fluency in the television genre of political interview in the pre–election period, between Croatian and British journalists and politicians. In total, 24 speakers, evenly represented by language, occupation and gender, were analysed based on 12 news programmes for each language. Th e analysis revealed that journalists tend to interrupt and overlap politicians in a more conflicting way. Men tend to interrupt and overlap interlocutors more than women, and statistically, Croatian speakers do it more often. Moreover, Croatian journalists interrupt politicians more than their British peers. An interesting piece of research data reveals that women interrupt women and men to the same extent. Based on the overall data, it can be concluded that English speakers were more fluent, and that British journalists used fewer negative interruptions than Croatian