The construction of discursive roles in TV interaction

Abstract

Within the theoretical and methodological framework provided by Discourse Analysis, the present study explores conversation in TV ‘autobiographical’ interviews from a linguistic perspective. The corpora come from TV texts whose objective is to present life accounts of representatives of the contemporary Argentine culture. These dialogic instances reveal a cooperative interaction between interviewer and interviewee, since both make important contributions to the organized structuring of the emerging discourse with shifting relations of power. The approach presupposes that this particular type of interaction provides evidence of a topic specificity that differentiates it from other interviews. The overall objective is, then, to determine the regularities related to role distribution on the basis of linguistic categories such as discursive topics, topic continuity and discontinuity, and the procedures of co-construction of text coherence.