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Part of
Questioning and Answering Practices across Contexts and Cultures
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 323] 2021
► pp. 109–144

Pragmatic functions of question-answer sequences in Italian legal examinations and TV interviews with politicians

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The aim of this chapter is to identify the sequential relationship between coerciveness of questions and equivocation of answers when the same 11 politicians were interviewed on TV, and also examined during a criminal trial. Two observers codified each of the 2,757 question-answer sequences of the sample (37 h of video recordings) for coercion and equivocation. The results show that the coerciveness of questions interacts with the context to determine the equivocation of the answer, and so does the equivocation for determining the coercion of the following question. The interactional asymmetry between politicians and questioners displays opposite patterns in the two contexts: in courtrooms, coercion depends strongly on the equivocation of the answer, but the answer depends more on the coercion exerted by the type of the context; on TV, however, equivocation depends strongly on coercion. The subsequent implications are discussed.

Keywords: coerciveness of questions, equivocation of answers, legal interaction, political interaction, interviews, examinations, sequential analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Courtroom examinations and political interviews
    • 1.2Literature review
      • 1.2.1Sequential analysis: Implementing theories with a sequential approach to interaction
  • 2.Aim and research questions of the study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Sampling strategy
    • 3.2Final sample
    • 3.3Observation procedure
    • 3.4Category systems
      • Coercion of the question
      • Equivocation of the answer
    • 3.5Sequential data analysis
  • 4.Corpus analysis and discussion
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Does the effect of the coerciveness of the question on the equivocation of the subsequent answer differ in the two contexts under consideration?
      • 5.1.1Discussion
    • 5.2Does the effect of the equivocation of the answer on the coercion of the subsequent question differ in the two contexts?
      • 5.2.1Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.323.04gni
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