From Potter and Edwards, 1990: 412
the interactional environment in which utterances are produced. This in turn can lead the analyst to impute an ideological significance to utterances when
their design may owe more to the particular turn-taking sequences which pro- vide an immediate interactional context. There is, then, a tension between dis-
course analytic projects which are informed by wider political and social concerns and those which focus more on the inferential or interactional tasks served by
language use. This tension will be explored more fully in later chapters.
Summary
• Discourse analysis emerged as a central part of a wider set of critiques of
experimental psychology and social psychology. •
The focus on the variable, constructive and constitutive properties of language offered a powerful critique of the laboratory-based practices and
cognitivist assumptions of mainstream social psychology. •
Discourse analysis was broadly concerned with the management of authority in disputes;the invocation of psychological states as social practices,
and the relationship between everyday discourse, and the ideologies which maintained the status quo.
Exploring the method of conversation analysis: talk in work-related or institutional settings
In the last chapter, we discussed some properties of the ways in which turn exchange is organised in everyday interaction. This allowed us to identify and
demonstrate some key goals of the conversation analytic approach: the analy- sis of the activities performed by turns at talk, and a concern to identify the
ways in which successive utterances cohere into strongly patterned sequences of interaction. And this in turn illustrated how normative frameworks under-
pin the sequential organisation of interaction. In this part of the chapter, we will explore in more detail the approach and methodology of CA by looking
at studies of interaction in formal institutional settings: televised news inter- views. In particular, we will be focusing on the ways in which the organisa-
tion of turn-taking and turn design in these contexts differ markedly from that found in more conversational interaction. These kinds of data will also
be used to illustrate the importance of paying close attention to those occa- sions in which participants seem to deviate from an established pattern or
sequence.
We will look at a study conducted by Heritage and Greatbatch 1991 on the organisation of news interviews. This has been selected for a number of reasons.
First, it is an excellent study of its kind. But more important, we are all familiar with the general character of interaction which happens in these political inter-
views. Interviews with leading political or public figures are a routine feature of
56 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
news and current affairs programmes broadcast on television or on the radio. Indeed, during election campaigns, politicians and candidates are expected to
submit themselves to regular televised interrogations from leading political jour- nalists and news interviewers. The majority of us, therefore, have some degree of
familiarity with the kinds of verbal activities which occur in news interviews.
Interaction in formal institutional settings
Drew and Heritage 1992b draw a distinction between two types of institutional settings: formal and informal. In formal settings we find that participation is
focused on particular tasks; that the order of participation is fairly rigid; and that the kind of turns expected of participants is limited, and to an extent pre-
allocated. This captures many of the features of interaction in news interviews.
News interviews have two kinds of participant: the interviewer and the interviewee hereafter the IR and IE, respectively. There is a clear ordering to
the interaction between the IR and the IE: they alternate turns at talk. Thus we can observe the following kind of pattern: the IR talks, then the IE, then the
IR and then the IE, and so on. Moreover, there is a clear difference in the kind of activity associated with each participant: so that we find IRs predominantly
tend to ask questions, and IEs predominantly tend to answer them. This IR–IE interaction can be characterised thus: question–answer–question–answer, and
so on. Immediately we can see that this is very different from ordinary con- versation, where there is much greater flexibility in both the ordering and
nature of participation.
What is interesting, however, is not merely that this is how interaction proceeds in news interviews, but that this is how participants tacitly
expect it to proceed. It is a normative arrangement which bestows obligations and
expectations on the participants in different ways. We can find evidence for this set of normative expectations if we consider some of the design features
of questions and answers. To illustrate, we will consider some properties of news interview interaction from Heritage and Greatbatch’s study.
Normative assumptions in news interview interaction
It is not uncommon to find that the IE’s questions will have two components: a preface, such as a statement of fact or what is offered as fact, and then a
question. So for example: