Article published In:
(Co-)Constructing Interpersonally Sensitive Activities Across Institutional SettingsEdited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter
[Pragmatics and Society 7:4] 2016
► pp. 570–594
Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter
[Pragmatics and Society 7:4] 2016
► pp. 570–594
Evading and resisting answering
An analysis of Mexican Spanish news interviews
This investigation is a conversation-analytic study of Mexican Spanish news interviews. It focuses on the question-answer adjacency pair in which interviewees (IE) are questioned, directly or indirectly, by the interviewers (IR) about the legality of their wealth in light of corruption allegations. The questions examined display strategies to generate news: content questions elicit a contrast; statement formulated questions followed by a request for confirmation give the opportunity to accept or deny the allegations, in contrast to statements which create a confrontational context. Non-type-conforming answers evade answering and type-conforming answers contain resistance elements. The IE minimize the allegations by repairing and providing a downgraded version, or use other resources to suggest that their activities are of common order, hence not newsworthy. The IE display evasion by addressing only certain elements of the question and counter the allegations by casting doubt on the professionalism of the IR.
Keywords: news interviews, answers, Mexican Spanish, evasion, questions
References
Atkinson, John, and Paul Drew
1979 Order in Court: The Organisation of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. London: Macmillan. 
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
2011 Mexican Poll Contender Peña Nieto Falters at Book Event. 6 December 2011. [online] Accessed on 30 August 2016 from [URL]
Bull, Peter
1994 “On Identifying Questions, Replies, and Non-replies in Political Interviews.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 13 (2): 115–131.
Bull, Peter, and Kate Mayer
1993 “How Not to Answer Questions in Political Interviews”. Political Psychology 14 (4): 651–666.
Clayman, Steven E
1988 “Displaying Neutrality in Television News Interviews.” Social Problems 35 (4): 474–492.
1992 “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality: The Case of News Interview Discourse.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 163–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2001 “Answers and Evasions.” Language and Society 30 (3): 403–442.
Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage
2002 The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clementson, David E
2015 “Why Do We Think Politicians Are So Evasive? Insight From Theories of Equivocation and Deception, with a Content Analysis of U.S. Presidential Debates, 1996–2012.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 35 (3): 247–267.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage
1992 Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garibay Kintana, Ángel M
1964 La Literatura de los Aztecas. Mexico, DF: Joaquín Mortiz.
Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie H. Goodwin
1987 “Concurrent Operations on Talk: Notes on the Interactive Organization of Assessments.” IPRA Papers in Pragmatics 1 (1): 1–54.
Harris, Sandra
1991 “Evasive Action: How Politicians Respond to Questions in Political Interviews.” In Broadcast Talk, ed. by Paddy Scannell, 76–99. London: Sage.
Heritage, John
2012 “The Epistemic Engine: Sequence Organization and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 30–57.
Jefferson, Gail
1990 “List Construction as a Task and Resource.” In Interaction Competence, ed. by George Psathas, 63–93. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.
2004 “Glossary of Transcription Conventions.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies From the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 14–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Paz, Octavio
1989 [1950] El Laberinto de la Soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude]. Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Pomerantz, Anita
1984 “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” In Structures of Social Actions, ed. by John M. Atkinson and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raymond, Geoffrey
2003 “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 681: 939–967.
Sacks, Harvey
1987 “On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organisation, ed. by Graham Button and John R.E. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
1992 Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey, and Emanuel A. Schegloff
1979 “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and Their Interaction.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 15–21. New York: Irvington Publishers.
Schegloff, Emanuel. A
1996 “Some Practices for Referring to Persons in Talk-in-interaction: A Partial Sketch of Systematic.” In Studies in Anaphora, ed. by Barbara A. Fox, 437–485. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2007 Sequence Organisation in Interaction: A Prime in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vázquez Carranza, Ariel
2013 “Responding and Clarifying: An Analysis of pues as a Sequential Marker in Mexican Spanish Talk-in-interactions.” Spanish in Context 10 (2): 284–309.
2014 Sequential Markers in Mexican Spanish Talk: A Conversation Analytic Study. PhD Thesis. University of Essex.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Alroumi, Abdulrahman
2022. Assessments and actions: Instances from Arabic broadcast political interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 191 ► pp. 211 ff. 
Alroumi, Abdulrahman & El Mustapha Lahlali
2023. The role of assessments in providing evasive answers in news interviews. Pragmatics and Society
Janusz, Bernadetta, Jörg R. Bergmann, Feliks Matusiak & Anssi Peräkylä
2021. Practices of Claiming Control and Independence in Couple Therapy With Narcissism. Frontiers in Psychology 11
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.