Socially, people find it difficult to say ‘no’ to requests or invitations. In spoken interaction, we orient to this difficulty through the design of our responses. An agreement response is characteristically said straightaway with minimal gap between request and response. A disagreement response is characteristically delayed through silence and by prefacing the disagreement turn with tokens such as ‘well’, ‘uhm’ and ‘uh’ or with accounts as to why the recipient cannot accept the request or invitation. The question for this article (...) concerns what occurs when requests or invitations are made via texting. The results from 329 texting interactions showed that if responses to a request or invitation were delayed by more than 1 minute, it was much more likely be a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’ response. In other words, preferred responses were sent quickly; dispreferred responses were delayed. Understanding texting as social interaction is increasingly important as the range of communicative options continues to widen, Multimedia Messaging Service, Instant Messaging, email). This study shows preference organisation similarities between spoken interaction and texting with texters orienting to social norms concerning delayed responses. Further research is needed to understand in what contexts a person might choose one communicative medium over another. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, (...) where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalisation of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice, both drawing on and contributing to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric. (shrink)

When people argue they routinely challenge the opinions, views, and attitudes of one another, they seek to cast the other as the aggressor or party at fault, and otherwise exert social control. This article illustrates how members work to hamper challenges, evade control or avoid being negatively characterized by systematically blocking access to a turn in the third position and stopping their opponent’s agenda. Examining 100 hours of public disputes in varieties of English, I use membership categorization analysis and conversation (...) analysis to unpack resistance as part of the structural organization of disputes. I identify two methods of resisting an agenda: passively, whereby a responsive turn stalls the progressivity of the interaction, and actively, whereby a responsive turn disaligns to outrightly suspend the progressivity of the interaction. I discuss how resistance sequentially unfolds across sequential positions, and as an interactional phenomenon which solves the trouble of a challenge. Overall, this article contributes to social interaction research on resistance, public disputes and how social order is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction. (shrink)

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features (...) of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. (shrink)

This article analyses the orientation of gaze as a significant communicative resource in televised political interviews. The study explores how interviewees use their gaze, in coordination with talk, in receiving and answering adversarial questions. It is guided by conversation analysis, Goffman’s work on gaze in interaction, and the approach on embodied actions developed primarily by Goodwin. Gaze is described as a flexible recipient and speaker resource available for stance-taking, the downgrading and upgrading of actions, and the claiming of the floor. (...) The study is based on taped and transcribed data from two formats of election campaign interviews on Swedish television, including 350 question and response sequences. (shrink)

It is argued in this paper that a multimodal analysis of turn-taking, one of the core areas of conversation analytic research, is needed and has to integrate gaze as one of the most central resources for allocating turns, and that new technologies are available that can provide a solid and reliable empirical foundation for this analysis. On the basis of eye-tracking data of spontaneous conversations, it is shown that gaze is the most ubiquitous next-speaker-selection technique. It can function alone or (...) enhance other techniques. I also discuss the interrelationship between the strength for sequential projection and the choice of next-speaker-selection techniques by a current speaker. The appropriate consideration of gaze leads to a revision of the turn-taking model in that it reduces the domain of self-selection and expands that of the current-speaker-selects-next sub-rule. It also has consequences for the analysis of “simultaneous starts”. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the transition that has taken place in Arab media over the course of time. It focuses more specifically on the case of Saudi Arabia to show how television interviewers there have performed their roles throughout three different phases. The first phase covers the period when the media was still controlled by Arab governments, the second focuses on the advent of satellite and the third focuses on the aftermath of the recent series of uprisings which (...) has become known as the Arab Spring. An examination of these three phases, which includes a discussion of some illustrative examples, will show how television interviewers have shifted from initially taking a very cautious and overtly deferential approach with interviewees, officials and public figures to adopting a more aggressive approach in the third phase. (shrink)