The Importance of Being Earnestly Impolite - Interrogation, Impoliteness and the Confessional Talk Show
Ken Turner
Dr Angela Pickering
Explore the corpus of the transcripts of a television talk show I recorded during the period of March 2008 to the present, with a conversation analytic approach, with the intention to develop an observation-based empirical study on naturally occurring questions.
Discuss the programme host’s talk on what styles of mass media talk are formed and how conversation analysis improves our understanding of the questions used in the talk show.
Examine the features of questions used by a current TV confession show host, on how questions open and close in the exchanges in the interviews as well we on the functions, types, and questioning strategies.
Apply linguistic impoliteness theory to the host’s questioning strategies in the confrontational style talk show. Investigate the shift in the host’s questioning strategies while examining the fact that impoliteness is taken as a device to complete the host’s authoritative act.
To test the recent theory of impoliteness (Bousfield, 2008a,b) in the context of media discourse, with particular references to the ‘agony’ talk show.
