Grammar and Epistemic Positioning: When Assessment Rules

ABSTRACT

Televised interviews embrace a diversity of genres and formats. The particular genre studied here, the British football post-match interview, seems to privilege evaluation and commentary from the interviewee. This article argues that this is achieved through interviewer turns that are predominantly assessment oriented. The analysis shows the impact of this assessment orientation on the grammatical formatting of the interviewer turns and how it interacts with the sequential, institutional, and social distribution of epistemic access and epistemic primacy. Data are in British English.

Notes

¹ Football clubs in the English Premier League are contractually obligated to participate in these interviews, which are broadcast live immediately after a match.

² Heaney (2011) interprets these features as evidence that the PMI is a semiscripted collaborative performance in which both participants are oriented to preserving their face as competent professionals. However, Heaney only analyzes two interviews, so the tight parallels that he identifies across his two interviews are an accident of selection that does not hold up against a larger corpus.

³ PMIs where the IR was not a native speaker of English were also excluded because of the focus in the analysis on features of turn design. This was important to ensure that aspects of turn design were not an effect of transfer from L1.

⁴ Tolson’s (2012) analysis was focused on charting changes in adversarial interviewing over time and employs a somewhat different coding approach, including potentially coding turns as involving more than one strategy, so comparisons of the figures should be viewed with caution.

⁵ For reasons of space, IE responses are not incorporated in full, as they are very lengthy and the analysis here is focused on the design of the IR turn.

⁶ This structure involves a first and second saying with a same-turn self-repair insertion that provides necessary orientation or “story grammar” (i.e., who, what, when, etc.) for the upcoming talk of the multi-unit turn. Wong (2010) argues that the first saying is built to be pragmatically incomplete, projecting a multi-unit turn. The insertion is then heard as explanatory and parenthetical to the first and second saying.

⁷ We return later to the relevance of the tag question in the first TCU.

⁸ While this looks as though the IE epistemically defers to the IR, it is hearably sarcastic. The manager involved is apparently known for being hostile to interviewers citing statistics.

⁹ The function of the interrogative design is discussed later.

¹⁰ Given that the information is oriented to as already known by the IE, the extended format and the accompanying displays of football expertise in the details of the assessables might be further explored as evidence of orientation to the overhearing audience.

¹¹ There is some similarity between these examples and the turn increments discussed in relation to exposition and assessments in Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (2008). However, turn increments are positioned after a possible TRP, whereas in the PMI extraposition examples, the turn is prosodically hearably incomplete prior to the extraposed element so the first possible TRP comes after the extraposed element.

¹² Although there isn’t space to address these issues here, it also shows IR orientation to parallel scope for the epistemic downgrading. In both examples, the assertion that the games are coming “thick and fast” is outside the grammatical scope of the epistemic stance marker that downgrades IR epistemic authority with respect to the consequences “swapping and changing your players”/“juggling the troups.” Note that this is a separate issue from the previous word-order observations, as “games coming so thick and fast” in Extract 21 could just as easily have been positioned turn initially to be outside the scope of the interrogative.

¹³ Hepburn and Potter (2010) observe the use of turn-medial tag questions in the talk of child protection helpline operators. They also suggest that the turn-medial position reduces the response relevance of the tag question.

¹⁴ “The tag question is positioned so as to invite response as the first matter to be addressed by the coparticipant” (Heritage & Raymond, 2005, p. 20).