A conversation analytic examination of alignment and disalignment in broadcast political news interviews

The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interviewers and interviewees display political alignment or disalignment with each other in news interviews. It looks at interviewers??? use and design of questions: negated questions; prefaced questions; disjunctive and prefaced questions. It, then, examines both interviewers??? and interviewees??? use of membership categorization devices as a means of displaying even stronger alignment and disalignment. Use of ethnic and religious categories such as ???brother??? and ???friend??? are examined as well as the use of attributes such as ???terrorist.??? The final section of this thesis examines instances of code-switching to display alignment. Data used in this thesis are taken from video-taped interviews with ambassadors concerned with the ???Question of Palestine??? and were collected from the United Nations web archive. Taken as a whole, this thesis could be used to compare political discourse in one culture/language with the discourses of other cultures. This type of comparison is needed for better cross cultural media relations and diplomatic negotiations, especially at international institutions such as the United Nations