Question(Ing) Strategies in British Political News Interviews: Grilling The Interlocutors as a Strategic Weapon

Abstract

Every dialogue is constrained by a rigid framework, which manifests itself in its linear character (an initial-continuation-counter move structure or a question-answer relationship and dismissal-argumentation order of dialogue), and which illustrates the functional dependencies between sentences or sequences of sentences. The following study focuses on the discourse-pragmatic notion of the interviewer’s text-forming strategies, and, in particular, the question-answer relationship of political news interviews in Great Britain. Attention is focused on the questioning strategies employed by Andrew Marr in The Andrew Marr Show. Various types of questions within epistemic logic, which act as the strategic repertoire of the participants in dialogue games (Carlson 1983), are examined. The list of question types includes indirect and direct questions, where the former refer to sentential (yes-no), search (wh-questions), conditional, alternative, tag, ellipted, disjunctive or conjunctive questions (as instances of multiple questions), and the latter to questions presupposing the accomplishment of the specific epistemic state. Andrew Marr, as a dominant participant in this dialogue game, at least with reference to his role that presupposes topic control (selection and change of topics), will use this strategic weapon to influence the politicians’ performance and make them account for their political actions.