journal of linguistic studies

2. MATERIAL AND METHODS
The analysis of political interviews has so far been conducted mostly within the
framework of conversation analysis. In this tradition, Clayman (1991) and Martinez
(2000) define the sequential structure of news and political interviews respectively and
their findings serve as the basis for our model. However, we combine this methodology
with the principles of genre analysis (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), which is usually applied
in the examination of written genres due to the structuredness of written communication.
What allowed for this type of methodology to be employed here was the institutional
nature of broadcast political interviews.
An interview opening is basically a preliminary transaction (the term used by Francis
& Hunston 1992), while the rest of the interview is carried out through medial
transactions (topic cycles), which end in a terminal one (the closing of the interview). The
preliminary and the terminal transaction are actually boundary transactions (the term used
by Sinclair & Coulthard 1992). The type of exchange (a smaller unit which constructs
transactions) employed in the openings, the introductions to topic cycles and the closings
of conversations are typically called an organisational exchange (Francis & Hunston
1992), as opposed to those used in the rest of the conversation, which belong to a
comprehensive class referred to as conversational exchanges. In political interviews, a
standard three-move structure of conversational exchanges (initiation + response +
feedback) is commonly reduced to a two-move sequence, or an adjacency pair (initiation
+ response or question + answer). The structure of the opening transaction is, however,
much more complex. The aim of the present analysis is to pinpoint the elements of these
in the terminology of genre analysis and explain their function.
Such an analysis is based on a corpus made up of three groups of political interview
openings. The British group of interview openings is made up of introductions to 11
interviews taken from BBC1, BBC News, BBC World, Sky News, Channel 4 and the
British edition of Euronews. The American group of interview openings has been taken
from 10 interviews broadcast on CNN, CBS, ABC and Fox News, whereas the
Montenegrin group of political interview openings consists of introductions to 8
interviews broadcast on RTCG, TV IN and TV Vijesti.
The methodology used for the identification of rhetorical structure draws mainly on
conversation analysis and genre analysis. Below we identify the typical rhetorical
structure of political interview openings in three different media cultures, which will
allow us to draw conclusions of whether there exist any similarities.
3.1 BRITISH DATA
3. RESULTS
The analysis of introductions to British political interviews pointed to a model which
consists of the following obligatory elements, i.e. moves, as they are called in genre
analysis:
Move 1: Interviewee (IE) introduction
Move 2: Headline
Move 3: Initial component (adjacency pair: greeting-greeting)
The pattern identified will be illustrated by example (1):
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