Elda Weizman

Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating roles in the news interview

This book proposes a socio-pragmatic exploration of the discursive practices used to construe and dynamically negotiate positions in news interviews. It starts with a discursive interpretation of ‘positioning’, ‘role’ and ‘challenge’, puts forward the relevance of a distinction between social and interactional roles, demonstrates how challenges bring to the fore the relevant roles and role-components of the participants, and shows that in news interviews speakers constantly position and re-position themselves and each other through discourse.The discussion draws on an empirical fine-grained analysis of a 24-hour corpus of news interviews on Israeli television and a corpus of media references. The author postulates a discrepancy between interlocutors’ normative expectations, which presuppose an asymmetrical division of labor, on the one hand, and real-life practice, which exhibits partial symmetry in speakers’ selection of discourse patterns as well as reciprocity in the use of challenge strategies, on the other. Special attention is given to irony and terms of address, which are shown to act as the center-points of satellite challenge strategies, geared as an ensemble toward the co-construction of reciprocal positioning. The analysis of three case studies further sheds light on the negotiations of intertwined positionings in context.

‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is ...’: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse

This article examines the discursive construction of ordinariness in the context of mediated political discourse, considering in particular contexts, in which ‘non-ordinary speakers’ quote ordinary people, bring them into the mediated public arena and assign them and their quoted contributions the status of an object of talk, and in which ‘ordinary speakers’ follow up on the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’. The contexts under investigation are Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) transmitted in the social media and commenters’ posts on the exchanges between the Prime Minister’s and Leader of the Opposition’s bringing-in-ordinariness. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition treat the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ in an ordinary manner by naming quoter and quoted and providing responses to the quoted questions while accommodating the political elite in their contributions; some of the ordinary commenters take up the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ by negotiating its perlocutionary effects with evaluative metacomments. The ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ receives various kinds of uptakes, ranging from enthusiastic responses hailing true democracy to negative responses criticizing the non-professional manner of doing politics.