Stance Taking In News Interview Dialogue

As an institutional talk with widespread audience and strong communication power,news interview discourse differs from our everyday conversations in various aspects such as structure and content.Linguistic studies on news interview emerged in the 1980s,and with the continuous improvement in research techniques and methods,scholars at home and abroad have carried out increasingly refined studies on this unique genre.In general,the majority of relevant studies focus on the overall conversational structure and pragmatic analysis of news interview,and scant attention has been given to stance taking in domestic news interviews.By adopting an approach that combines Du Bois’s theory of stance triangle with the research results and method of conversation analysis,this thesis modifies the original"stance triangle" and thus establishes the model of stance taking for news interview,and analyzes the two essential stancetaking activities,namely positioning and alignment,in view of the linguistic data from a domestic English news interview called Dialogue on CCTV NEWS.The study first points out that stance taking in news interview is an intersubjective interaction,which is basically realized in the questioning-answering activity between the interviewer(henceforth IR)and the interviewee(henceforth IE).The action of questioning by the IR corresponds to the stance act of positioning,which is primarily manifested as the IR’s effective design of questioning turns for the purpose of setting up difficult positions for the IE;while the action of responding to the IR’s questions by the IE corresponds to the stance act of alignment,which is chiefly reflected in the convergent or divergent alignment displayed by the IE toward the position set up by the IR in prior turn(s).Based on the transcription and analysis of relevant data,this study has concluded some major findings:First,in the questioning turns of news interview,the IR tends to 1)set topical agendas or action agendas,2)incorporate presuppositions,and 3)embody preferences for positive or negative answers to set up a position for the IE;Second,in the answering turns,the IEs tend to display convergent or divergent alignment toward the position set up by the IRs in prior turn(s),among which convergent alignment is categorized into agree,derive and reinforce,while divergent alignment is categorized into evade,disagree and challenge.All these subcategories altogether constitute a continuum of convergent and divergent alignment in terms of the degree to which they display convergence to the prior stance.The conversations in Dialogue,as the database,are representative of domestic English news interviews.Based on conversation analyframework sis of stance taking therein,this study can possibly provide a feasible theoretical for relevant future study.