f.ii)High Involvement vs. Low Involvement

f.ii)High Involvement vs. Low Involvement

The analysis presented in this thesis reveals that interviewers show a significantly lower degree of involvement than politicians. Their questions are pre-prepared and even if they have to react to politicians’ answers immediately, they are less involved. This fact relates to their role in political interviews, which is to lead an interview with politicians and to find out information concerning current affairs, opinions and attitudes of politicians that are interesting for listeners. Politicians, on the contrary, aim at asserting themselves in front of their audience and at influencing their potential voters. In this connection, Tannen (1984) distinguishes a style of “high involvement” and a style of “low involvement”. Thus, it may be stated that the style of politicians is high-involved and that of interviewers is low-involved. Means of the high-involved style of politicians, which are analysed in this thesis, are connected with the modification of the illocutionary force of speech acts (see Chapter 4). The illocutionary force is modified by the use of boosting and hedging devices (see Chapters 6, 7 and 8), and also by the use of modal expressions (modal verbs, modal adjectives, modal adverbs, and pragmatic particles). The concept of modality is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9.

The features of high involvement style that Tannen defines and further explores in the genre of face-to-face conversation are: topic, pacing, narrative strategies, and expressive paralinguistics; and within this framework she identifies a group of specific involvement aspects (Tannen 1984:40-41).

As regards the topic, the conversationalists in a casual face-to-face conversation prefer debating personal topics. Besides, they tend to alter topics of talk abruptly (Tannen 1984:40). This is a typical feature of the genre of informal conversation. The speakers are more spontaneous and relaxed during their talk and there are no strict rules which they have to follow. The topics discussed develop according to the interest of those involved in the conversation, according to the relationship between conversational partners and what they have in common.

As the present analysis shows, the genre of political interview, in contrast with the informal face-to-face conversation, is not characterised by similar abrupt and frequent change of topic. This is caused by the fact that there is an interviewer who leads the debate of the participants in political discussion, and also by the fact that the topics to be discussed are to a great extent settled in advance. If a politician diverts from the topic, the role of the interviewer is to interfere and force him to speak to the point.

Another aspect of interactional involvement classified by Tannen is the introduction of topics without hesitation, which is, as the present analysis shows, connected with the spontaneity and relaxed atmosphere of informal conversation. The speakers are free from tension and strain, they do not hesitate to introduce a new topic. If necessary, the topic is reintroduced repeatedly (1984:40).

With respect to pacing, Tannen has found that it is predominantly related to faster rate of speech and turn taking. As for turn taking in the genre of political interview, my research has shown that it is regular but not so fast as in informal settings. This results from the nature of this kind of discourse. The contributions of the interviewer are shorter than those of the interviewee, who is a dominant speaker and explains the things in a detailed way.

Tannen’s research into informal conversation has shown that the speakers avoid interturn pauses because silence may show “lack of rapport” (1984:40), which means that the speaker is not involved enough and that he lacks mutual understanding. Additionally, it has revealed frequent overlap of speakers and “participatory listenership” (1984:41), which is the sign of cooperation between speakers, and thus involvement. Overlap between speakers in political interviews is not the sign of involvement, as I see it, but rather the attempt to grab the floor, or the right to speak.

Another feature of interactional involvement, which Tannen mentions in connection with her research, is the use of narrative strategies. It means that the speakers tell more stories during the conversation, tell stories in rounds, and “prefer internal evaluation”, which means that “the point of a story is dramatized rather than lexicalized” (1984:41). Again, the genre of political interview is different in character from that of informal conversation and thus it does not allow to use this kind of narrative strategies too frequently. There is only one interview in the whole corpus in which a narrative strategy is used, namely, an interview with Condoleezza Rice (App., p. 251, Condoleezza Rice, 2008-03-27, ll. 713-728). In the very final part of this interview, she tells a short story about her grandfather and the problems he had receiving college education.

The last aspect of involvement indicated by Tannen is the use of expressive paralinguistics. “Expressive phonology, marked pitch and amplitude shifts, marked voice quality, and strategic within-turn pauses” (1984:41) appear in the corpus of informal conversation. I suggest that these attributes belong to the strategies of creating involvement in political discourse as well. However, the thesis will not take them into consideration. When analysing the corpus of political interviews, I worked only with their transcripts and did not have their audio versions at my disposal. An analysis of paralinguistic means is beyond the scope of the present thesis since it is a very broad topic and it would have to be the subject matter of a different study.

To sum up, I agree with Tannen’s claim that “though no two speakers use all the same devices in the same way, there are patterns by which these devices co-occur in the speech of certain participants. The combination of particular devices makes up the style of each speaker” (1984:41). All the above-described aspects express involvement. Thus, Tannen describes the style of the speakers who employ them as “high-involvement style” and the style of those who showed the need not to impose as “high-considerateness style” (1984:41-42).