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Pragmatics
Vol. 27:4 (2017) ► pp.529–552

The question of politeness in political interviews

| Glendon College, Toronto, Canada

This paper examines the question of politeness in political interviews, looking particularly at the use of loaded questions. Comparison is made between the two principal paradigms of politeness, Locher and Watts (2005) and Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper focuses on the interviewing style of Steven Sackur (HARDtalk, BBC) who employs loaded questions in his political interviews in keeping with the analysis of Walton (1991) who argues that loaded questions can function as a ‘reasonable’ means to constrain the response of an interviewee and in turn further discourse. Sackur employs loaded questions selectively to convey and reinforce a presupposition to which an interviewee is not committed. In so doing, he is able to constrain the contribution of his interviewee. Loaded questions are a linguistic means of (im)politeness used strategically by Sackur to further the discourse of his interviews.

Keywords: (im)politeness, loaded questions, political interviews
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The question of ‘politeness’ in political interviews
    • 1.2Political interviews
    • 1.3Theoretical approaches to (im)‘politeness’
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Requests for information
    • 2.3Loaded questions
  • 3.Findings
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Johnson interview with Mair
    • 4.2Calderone interview with Sackur
    • 4.3Impoliteness
    • 4.4Guterres’ interview with Sackur
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.4.03mac
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