Gender and the political interview in an Australian context

Journal of Pragmatics 20 (1993) 117-139 North-Holland

117

Gender and the political interview in an Australian context Joanne Winter Research in the area of gender/sex differences of women’s and men’s language has been characterised by typologies of pairs of antonymous adjectives (e.g. public/private; assertive/ passive etc.). These descriptions, while preferable to pairs of marked and unmarked terms (e.g. male/not male), contribute to the persistence of static stereotypes for women and men, e.g. ‘women are more comfortable in private forms and contexts of discourse owing to their cooperative, facilitative nature, etc’. The context for the investigation reported here is the public arena, i.e. televised media interviews, a setting in which a growing number of Australian women participate as journalists and interviewers. The question for this investigation is not centred upon access to the public context but rather on the nature and diversity of participation within a gendered situation. In this paper, investigation of the turn-taking and questioning strategies of two prominent media personalities (a woman and a man) reveal differing outcomes according to the gendered context. The constraints and freedoms that impinge on the interviewer’s style are, however, distinct in the construction of information exchange and image creation processes of the political interviews. Thus women’s participation in the Australian media today involves a delicate balance of individuality and compliance.

1. Introduction

The study of the relationship between language and gender1 has expanded in cross-disciplinary contexts in the past twenty years. The women’s movement, and the increased awareness of discrimination and recognition of the underrepresentation of women in professional settings, have provided the core impetus for this expansion. Language and communication skills are generally recognised in professional and industrial contexts as economically and functionally advantageous for promotion within the public and private sector. The electronic media (especially television) is one context where the representation and advancement of women has a high public profile. In Australia, the past decade has witnessed a greater percentage of women journalists and corre-

Correspondence fo: J. Winter, Department of Linguistics, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, 3 168, Australia. 1 In this paper I will adopt the term ‘gender’ to encompass both the biological and the social sense of the variable.

0378-2166/93/$06.00 0 1993 -

Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved

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, Gender and rhe political interview

spondents, newsreaders and current-affairs-style program hosts. * Likewise, in the political arena, women have played an increasingly prominent role. At the time of data collection there was a female leader of a political party and several politically active groups were concerned with issues relevant to the women of Australia.3 These facts appear encouraging in terms of increased representation and participation of women in powerful public situations. However, the role and nature of media women’s lives may be more restricted and constrained than the participation of men in the Australian context. While there has been an increase in published sociolinguistic research in the areas of language and sexism, and language and gender internationally, very little has been published in the Australian context4 This is true not only for the area of language and gender but also in pragmatic studies of Australian English in general. There are perhaps two central reasons that may be suggested for this. First, the lack of research into the pragmatics of Australian English may in part be explained by the widely assumed premise that Australian English is homogeneous with the other major varieties of English, except at the phonological or lexical levels. Consequently, research projects focusing on the pragmatic level may be perceived as uninteresting or repetitious (see Pauwels 1991). The situation appears to be changing slightly with an increased pragmatic interest in the Australian context especially in view of the ‘multicultural’ nature of Australian society. In addition there has been a greater inclusion of pragmatics and pragmatic frameworks in linguistic analyses of language use. 5 The issue of language and gender and the low level of associated research activities stems from the periphery status accorded to such research in linguistics generally. Traditionally gender has been included, in the Australian context, in sociolinguistic variationist studies. However, it has been generally treated as an independent, ‘objective’ variable. The difference between women and men in the pronunciation of Australian English vowels, for example, has been merely documented with little interpretation or explanation (see Mitchell and Delbridge 1965; Bradley and Bradley 1979; Horvath 1985). Many early studies on language and gender established typologies of difference for women’s and men’s speech, frequently without empirical substantiation (e.g. Lakoff 1975). Later studies offered empirically accountable descriptions of gender differences in the speech of men and women. However, these descrip-

2 Women in the media, even though some may be bilingual, conform to prevailing images of stereotypical images of slender, well-groomed, cultivated speakers of Australian English. 3 One such prominent group is the Women’s Electoral Lobby. 4 Notable exceptions are Pauwels (1987) and Collins and Blair (1989). 5 See many recent issues of the Australian Review ofAppliedLinguistics, especially Series S, no.7 (1990) dedicated to ‘Intercultural communications in the professions in Australia’; and Wierzbicka (1986, 1990).

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tions were often compared with stereotypical images with little reference to interpretation or explanation (see Thorne et al. 1983). In addition, many linguistic accounts have assumed the male patterns or variety as the standard or norm and the female variety as different or deviant. Consequently in quantitative studies gender has been by virtue of methodological soundness assumed as a necessary variable, but often devoid of explanatory power. Pragmatics, or socio-pragmatics, with its emphasis on context, offers a preferred explanatory framework for the analysis of the language used towards women and by women in interaction with same- or different-gender interlocutors. The televised political interview is the discourse context analysed in this paper. The interviewees were two prominent Australian politicians, interviewed by a female and a male interviewer. The media play a powerful and influential role in the exchange of information and ideas and also in the creation and promotion of images and stereotypes in society (cf. for analyses analogous to the present one, Moss 1988; WAUDAG 1990). This is particularly relevant in the arena of political beliefs and values. The powerful nature of the media’s role in political issues can be evidenced by the ‘blackout’ imposed in Australia, by legislation, on all election matters and advertising close to polling day.6 During the greater part of an election campaign, however, news and current affairs programs focus on the electoral issues, and project images of the personalities or political rivals to the viewing audience. Perhaps the most influential setting in this process is the live political interview. The interviewer assumes the voice of the public or acts as a public advocate establishing the ‘relevant’ questions to be answered or considered, and thereby assists in the creation of the public beliefs, ideas and opinions of the political identities. The interviewees on the other hand must be seen to be cooperative in facilitating rapport in the interview context and at the same time ensure that the image created is a favourable one. The political interview in the highly public and accessible media has two central functions. First, interviews involve the exchange of information, through the question and response adjacency pair (Schegloff 1972; Schegloff and Sacks 1973) about topics judged relevant: in an election campaign these are the ‘election issues’ and policies. Secondly, media interviews create and construct politicians’ images in contexts of interaction with the interviewer, the people’s representative. Thus the match between expectations for the interview and the outcome can be discovered in the interview process and in particular in the analysis of the role of the controlling interviewer. There are three central features of interviews which set up a series of expectations regarding the participants and the type of discourse structures

6

Broadcasting

Act 1942, Section

1.1.6, Subsection

4.

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J. Winrer 1 Gender and the polilical

interview’

and arrangements found in interviews.‘First, the participants in the interview context have the mutually recognisable roles of interviewer and interviewee. Second, the mutual recognition of these distinct roles is fundamental for the expectations of the participants toward the discourse function of the linguistic question. Interviewers are expected to pose the questions while the interviewees have the obligation to respond to the questions. Third, the greater access to the initiating question by the interviewer generates control over discourse topic and episodic structure. The interviewer explicitly introduces new topics which form separate episodes for the discourse, typically via the interrogative. Likewise the duration of topic maintenance and ultimately topic deferment is the interviewer’s domain, though the interviewee may provide a weak causal link for the introduction or initiation of topics in the obligatory response to the question. There are further expectations that reflect the exclusive media setting for the interview. The interview is broadcast to a public audience who can choose between television programs or alternatively switch off the television. The demand for increases in the percentage of the viewing public by the television networks places additional emphasis on the creation of images as part of their entertainment value. The interviewer should ask informationseeking, relevant, reasonable questions and the interviewee should offer relevant, coherent, informative answers. The goal of political interviews suggests a further expectation that the object of the interview from the outset is the interviewee’s answers. Consequently, interviews typically see a bias in favour of longer turns by the interviewees while at the same time the interviewer’s turns are briefer and typically in question form.

2. Objectives The above features and expectations provide the framework for this analysis of two political interviews. The management of the turn-taking system, the question strategies adopted by the interviewer and the episodic structure of the interview are the parameters of the investigation. The structures and patterns of these discourse features are investigated in order to discover the nature of the gendered context for the interviewer. In addition, the results of the analysis can be interpreted or accounted for in relation to the two functions of the political interview in the electronic media: political interviews involve on the one hand the exchange of information, beliefs and ideas between the participants and on the other the creation of images for the political identities.

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3. The data

The discourse context under examination could be seen as almost universally present, in its defining characteristics and role, in most western ‘democratic’ societies. However, the interviews to be examined here are contextually bound as Australian. The political interviews analysed in this paper are two segments from a larger collection of recordings made during February 1990. The two interviews occurred the week of February 23-27 1990, following the announcement of a forthcoming federal election date for Australia. The interviewees in both interviews were male and held high social status positions as the Treasurer and the Prime Minister of Australia respectively. The initial discourse topic in both interviews focused on a document that had been released earlier in the day outlining the government’s agreement with the trade unions on prices and income policy and on restructuring of taxation and social security payments. The interviews were broadcast during current-affairs-style programs. The first interview (Interview 1) was conducted by a female interviewer, also the presenter of the program, and was televised on a commercial television station directly following the main news program. The male interviewer, a correspondent for a similar program which also follows that station’s news service, conducted the second interview (Interview 2) on the state-controlled broadcasting station. Both interviews were televised on the same night.7 Initially, it was hoped that interviews could be recorded with the same interviewee speaking on the same topic and that sets of interviews including all possible permutations of interviewee and interviewer gender could be obtained but this did not eventuate through the recording time period. There was no opportunity to obtain a female-to-female political interview, even though, ironically, Australia had a female leader of a political party at the time of recording. However, she was only interviewed once, by the male interviewer, and then it was for an extremely brief time (2.4 minutes). In total there were only five political interviews recorded for the week. This appears to reflect a trend for fewer ‘live’ interviews in the media and an increase in magazine style segments with edited interviews and narrator monologue. This suggests that the creation of images increasingly involves a manicured approach whereas the ‘live’ interview does not allow for repair or deliberate planning for the politician. ’ I was unable to obtain written details about the results of the ratings surveys carried out during the recording period due to restrictions in the copyright laws. A researcher working for the firm that conducts the ratings surveys indicated that there was a difference in the sociological mix of the largest groups watching the respective programs. The composition of the groups is determined by occupation, education and income. The majority of viewers of the commercial program were semi-skilled workers while the largest majority of viewers for the state-owned program were retired professionals.

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The possibility that differences between interviewer style may only be relevant at an idiolectal level must be addressed. The interviewers, as speakers of Australian English, belong to the same speech community; they are both engaged in the same discourse context, i.e. the televised ‘live’ political interview; they are also similarly subject to the constraints of broadcasting regulations (e.g. they cannot use offensive language) and security of employment (i.e. they must maintain their market share in terms of attracting a viewing audience). However, the latter is perhaps more of a constraint on the female interviewer because she is the host of the program and because a commercial television network has increased levels of vulnerability due to private ownership and sponsorship interests. The male interviewer is not the host of the program and state-controlled television is potentially less vulnerable. Both interviewers have substantial experience in interviewing, have successful careers and may therefore be assumed to be representative of established interviewers in the media. The most reliable safeguard against this ‘idiosyncratic’ possibility is the adoption of a discourse-analytic approach with detailed investigation of the linguistic organisation of the interviewer’s speech.

4. Results and discussion 4.1. The interview as discourse type Interviews are typically dyads and in fact discourse events with more than two participants were excluded from my sample, since in panel discussions or debates the media interviewer has a modified adjudicatory function. In a dyadic interview the participants have mutually recognised a priori roles either as interviewer or interviewee. The expectations for an interview are based on the recognition of identifiable roles for the participants in the context of a media setting. Furthermore, the interviewer assumes control of the interview and the responsibility for the opening and closing segments. The onus is on the interviewer to establish and demarcate the topic boundaries, topic maintenance and episodic structure and also to force the interviewee to observe topicality. Concurrently, the interviewer uses strategies that allow for topic change or shift. This does not mean that interviewees cannot have a causal relationship to topic introduction, but rather that the overt topic introductions segmenting the discourse into episodes are located in the interviewer’s turns. It should be remembered that it is the interviewee who is the central reason or justification for the interview in the first place and as a consequence will normally have substantial input to the discourse. Analysis of the data confirms some of these expectations to a greater degree than others. For

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example table 1 shows that indeed it is the interviewee who has substantially longer turns than the interviewer. The setting of the interview within a television program may be signalled explicitly in the discourse itself. In both interviews the interviewers’ initial turn is a monologue addressed to the viewing audience. The monologue concludes with an opening question directed to the interviewee. The interview conducted by the female (Interview 1) has many more references to the context of a media interview. She acknowledges the planned organisation of the interaction and informs the interviewee of imminent time constraints. In the opening and closing segments of the interview she expresses gratitude for the interviewee’s presence and immediately prior to the closing sequence she warns him that the interview must end because of time constraints. In addition, in the middle segment of the interview she reminds the interviewee of the need for an intermission due to sponsorship commitments. She also asks the interviewee if he would remain available for future discussion. It is probable that arrangements to this effect would have been agreed upon prior to the commencement of the interview; however, the interviewer continually marks the mutual, contractual nature of the interaction by seeking explicit collusion in the arrangements. The interviewee cooperates in the contract and responds to every acknowledgment and request. The formal nature of the political interview is also apparent in the nonreciprocal use of address forms (cf. Brown and Gilman 1960). In Interview 1 the female interviewer prefaces each question with an address form. This is consistent throughout the interview. She addresses the interviewee as “Mr Hawke” or “Prime Minister” and refers to him as “the Prime Minister”, while the interviewee addresses her by first name only. There is only one instance where the female interviewer uses last name only of the interviewee. It is in a referential sense and she quickly suffixes it with the gloss “you and your government”. This afterthought functions to personalise the reference and reduce the distancing effect of the referential form. In Interview 2 the interviewer does not preface each turn with an address form, but when he does address the interviewee he uses the title form “Treasurer”. The use of address forms is overall less frequent for the male interviewer and they usually occur in utterance-final position. As in Interview 1, the interviewee in Interview 2 demonstrates non-reciprocal use of address forms in calling the interviewer by his first name. This non-reciprocal use reflects the power differential between the participants. Whereas the interviewer has a larger proportion of power in the management of the interaction, the social status of the interviewees is superior to that of the interviewers. The non-reciprocal use of address forms is traditionally explained with reference to unequal status relations between interactants and the access they have to more or less power (see Brown and Gilman 1960; Brown and Ford 1961; Braun 1988). The salient aspect of power operating in the political interview context and address

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form patterns relates to the social determinants of status relationships. The inherent power value of the interviewer role must be seen as secondary for an adequate explanation of address form usage in these interviews. The greater use of address forms by the female interviewer may be explained by the marginal power status between the two interviewees. One of the interviewees is the Prime Minister of Australia and it may be more usual to exhibit greater deference to a person holding this position, through increased use of formal address terms, although this has not been empirically verified. Use of address forms by the interviewee in Interview 1 seems to serve two distinct pragmatic functions. The interviewee appears to use the interviewer’s name as a planning device, to maintain the floor while planning the next utterance (l), and as a cooperative marker serving to include the interviewer in a display of mutual understanding and cooperation in the beliefs of the speaker (2) : 8

(1) PM*

(2) PM

/ to which I’ve been subject and you know / a lot of it I mean it’s been / frightful the sort of things that have been said / but I simply knew Jana (2 sets) that if I let the pilots / get away with their 30% claim / the Australian economy . . .

that’s the independent Treasury judgement but the underlying inflation is going down as the result of policies we’ve brought in and the alternative / lana as you know will be a a blow out in the inflation and interest rates 3ecause our opponents have this enormous ...

*PM = interviewee

(Interview

1)

The context of the interview and the recognition of the participants’ roles in that discourse are mentioned by both interviewees. In Interview 2, for example, the interviewee refers to the function of interviewers, i.e. to ask questions:

8

I *

Transcription conventions: disjuncture overlapping speech linking

speech

interruption continuing discourse

J. Winter / Gender and the political interview

125

(3)

TRE* now / the economy cannot afford that cost. and we’re meeting it / by instituting a system of superannuation / where it’s afforded in national wage terms which I might say the Liberal Party want to abolish and cut to pieces and you might put that question to Dr Hewson when he comes on / he wants to take away I... *TRE = interviewee (Interview 2) 4.2. The management of talk and silence, and turn-taking Descriptions of turn-taking systems have focused primarily on casual conversation discourse. Casual conversation is interpreted as a more fundamental social activity while other discourse types are institutionalised or governed by assumptions about the context (Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Roger and Bull 1989). The underlying assumption for turn-taking systems is a preference for ‘one-at-a-time’ rule for participant turns. I expected that a political interview, because of the specific roles assigned to participants and the interviewer’s control of the situation, would reflect very strict adherence to this underlying turn preference. However, there are instances where the regular, singular speaker, pattern of talk is disturbed. The components of overlapping speech, interruptions and unsuccessful turns observed here are additional features included in descriptions of turn-taking, and the investigation of variation in turn-taking in a formal interview centres around the following questions: who interrupts whom? which is the more relevant aspect of the breakdowns in the ‘one-at-a-time’ sequence? The power balance will be crucial for determining whether the social status of the interviewee outweighs the power of control the interviewer has over the interaction. The figures in table 1 show that the interviewer has a greater number of turns than the interviewee. This is predictable in the light of expectations for the interview context with the need for explicit opening and closing segments, especially since an advertising segment is run in the middle of this interview. The interviewee has a greater mean length of utterance, which was also to be expected, as the rationale for the interview is the interviewee’s beliefs opinions, etc. Thus the roles of the participants and the discourse context are reflected in the management of turn length and the organisation of the interview. The analysis of turn-taking practices in relation to gender has been the topic of much research, with a great deal of controversy and conflicting results in research on gender differences in turn-taking management. Some studies show that men talked more than women (Eakins and Eakins 1978) while others find women to have more frequent and longer turns (Fishman 1983). The crucial element in this paradox is the context of the discourse. The research by Eakins and Eakins was conducted in more formal contexts of

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meetings. These contexts impose strict ‘one-at-a-time’ hierarchical rules in the system of turn-taking. The apparently conflicting results of Fishman emanate from informal contexts of conversations between intimates in the home environment. The rules for intimate interaction are couched in egalitarian ideas about cooperation and the sharing of experience. Thus context should always be included in the analysis of either experimental or spontaneous data. In the political interviews, the male and female interviewers both have shorter turns than their respective interviewees, however in the shorter time period the male interviewer has as many turns as the female interviewer (13 excluding context directives and closings). Thus the turn length patterns of the same gender interview are shorter and more frequent in comparison with the mixed gender interaction. The female interviewer allows the interviewee to have longer turns for the communication of interviewee-based information, beliefs and opinions. Table 1 Turn-taking

and pauses in two political

interviews Interview (F)

Pauses Total duration Total duration Total duration Total duration

of of of of

inter-turn inter-turn inter-turn inter-turn

Turn-taking Number of unsuccessful

turns

Number

of interruptions

Amount Number

of overlapping talk of interview turns

Number

of context

Total duration

exchanges

of turns

Mean length of turns

pauses pauses pauses pauses

> > > >

1 1 I 1

set *‘er’ set ‘ee’ set ‘er’ set ‘ee’

‘er’ ‘ee’ ‘er’ ‘ee’ ‘er’ ‘ee’ ‘er’ ‘ee’ ‘er’ ‘ee’ ‘er’ ‘ee’

‘ee’ ‘er’

Interview CM)

mins mins mins mins

9;27 mins 2;34 mins

lo;54 mins

6;40 mins

12;57 0;50 0;08 I;05

Total duration of the interview Duration of introductory monologue Duration of context exchanges Total duration of pauses > I set Duration of interview less pauses, monologue and context exchanges

1

0;03 0;04 0;04 0;54

mins mins mins mins

0; I3 mins

0;05 mins 0;02 mins 0;08 mins

1

2

4 4 5 7 13 II 5 4 2;58 9;56 9.88 39.66

I 9 17 17 3

I mins mins sets sets

3:27 5;47 10.35 19.28

mins mins sets sets

2

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Overlapping speech occurs when participants ignore the unmarked single turn-taking pattern. Table 1 reveals a much lower instance of overlapping speech in Interview 1. In the same-gender interview there is a greater number of overlapping turns which are classified as interruptions. In the literature overlapping turns are analysed as interruptions if the speaker starts a turn at a point in the discourse that is not considered a preferred transitional place (see Beattie 1981; West and Zimmerman 1985; Roger 1989). A range of linguistic options have been categorised as indicating preferred transitional places, including the interaction of prosodic features with the notion of a ‘complete’ unit, either syntactically or cognitively organised. In fact interruptions can be explained as more than breaking the rules of the ‘one-at-a-time’ pattern. The interrupting speaker is denying the current floor holder the chance to complete the turn or indicates that the beliefs or ideas being expressed or the image presented requires modification. The male interviewer interrupts the interviewee and succeeds in acquiring the floor and completing a turn. In the cross-gender interview the interviewer is unsuccessful in her attempts to obtain the turn but these instances are not cases of interruptions. The turns where the interviewer unsuccessfully attempts to commence a turn occur at preferred transitional places; the interviewee has completed a grammatical unit usually accompanied by a falling tone and a pause. The interviewee however, does not wish to concede the floor and continues with his turn. The interviewee in this case has experienced a breakdown in his planning strategies for the manipulation of turn-taking. In one instance in Interview 1 the interviewee interrupts the attempted turn initiation by the female interviewer while apologising for doing so: (4)

IntF* but Mr Hawke 1 and PM 1 despite despite what you say I’m sorry but but IntF PM *sorry I’m simplymaking the point er make the point quickly er I I don’t mean to interrupt / but I’m simply making the point *IntF = female interviewer (Interview 1) The results presented in table 1 support findings of earlier investigations into interruption behaviour on a gender basis, i.e. the male interviewee does interrupt the female interviewer without reciprocation. However, the results

appear to conflict with findings that same-gender male dyads experience little interruption. This paradox can be resolved if the notion of power is considered, in terms of both the social status of the interviewees and the power of control of the interviewer. The interview context creates a tension between the

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J. Winter I Gender and rhe political interviek

two realisations of power.g Additional features such as the length of turn in combination with tolerance of silence (pauses greater than I second) need to be included in the interpretation of interruptions. Analysis of the two interviews indicates that if the discourse is characterised by a low frequency of pauses and a shorter mean length of utterance, and if the interview involves pressure of time, then interruptions are far more evident and predictable. Associated with turn-taking management strategies are the prosodic features superimposed on the discourse. The tempo of the male-only interview is much faster than the female-male interview and the loudness level is considerably greater for the male-only interview. (This is interesting because the loudness levels would presumably be monitored by the production crew in the television studio.) The female interviewer on the other hand manipulates intonation and stress patterns in her question strategies and in the control of the topic. Frequently, items occurring turn-finally involve greater stress levels and may be articulated in a higher key (most turns concluded with a fall-rise intonation contour) with increased loudness and duration. For example in extract (5) below the lexical item fine is in a higher key after an earlier disjuncture with increased stress.

(5) IntF

PM

b but Mr Hawke the opposition has been saying it’s being your people Mr Howe’s been saying / it’s all FI:NE up until this point * he hasn’t been saying it’s all fine / because we’ve been . .

rorted

/

The prosodic manipulation in the formulation of the interviewer’s question effectively narrows the focus for the possible response. The above example demonstrates a frequent pattern following prosodic difference, i.e. identification and repetition of the particular item. The female interviewer’s questioning style included many more extremes and diversity of prosodic manipulation. The female interviewer’s questioning strategy includes a greater number of question forms indicated by these prosodic components. Thus the interviewer’s discourse facilitates the expression of enquiry rather than declaration of beliefs and values. The male interviewer does not use prosodic information to such an extent but rather modifies the speed of his utterances or he increases the loudness levels for the interruptive turns. Pauses, inter-turn and intra-turn, were measured and recorded if they were longer than 1 sec. This figure, while arbitrary, reflects lengths frequently

9 The notion of ‘power’ in language has been investigated by several researchers in relation to Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework. The results indicate that the concept of power needs to be divided into several components (cf. among others, Brown and Gilman 1989; Chilton 1990).

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assigned as significant to either spontaneous speech or speech events in experimental settings (see Butterworth 1980; Jefferson 1989). The time constraints of the televised political interview are reflected in the low incidence of pauses overall. There is, however a high incidence of pauses greater than 1 set in the female-male interview and the frequency increased during the course of the interview. There were very few pauses in intra-turn position in the malemale Interview 2. The interviewees in both interviews had a higher incidence of pauses than the interviewers. The longer pauses occurred between the cessation of the interviewees’ turn and the commencement of the interviewer’s turn. These longer pauses coincided with a change of topic and a new episode. There is less intra-turn pausing in the same-gender interview but at the same time a higher frequency of interruptions and overlapping talk. If the pauses are viewed in the light of the turn exchange and interruptions, then it is understandable why there are fewer pauses in the same-gender interview, a result which appears to conflict with other research on pause occurrence and gender (Winter 1990). In the same-gender interview the consequence for pausing longer than 1 second intra-turn is the loss of the floor and the turn. The other side of the research results are borne out in the cross-gender interview. The female interviewer does not interrupt or take the floor from the male interviewee at the preferred transitional place potentially offered by a significant intra-turn pause. Thus pauses in the interviews are relatively low in occurrence, which reflects the discourse type of the interview, and pauses in inter-turn position are strategies for the introduction of new topics (i.e. in the interviewer’s domain). Participants’ manipulation of pauses is dependent on the other features of the turn-taking pattern of the discourse. The overall pattern of turn-taking and management of the political interview is a synthesis of interacting elements. The restrictions of the context result in the dominance of the interviewer, with respect to number of turns and strategic inter-turn pauses. The gender differences combine with the social determinants of power in determining access to interruptions and manipulation of the turn-taking system. The male-only interview is constructed as more competitive in turn-appropriation and floor-holding tactics. 4.3. The questioning strategies in interviews The external structure, or context, of the interview is similar for both interviews. The interviewer opens by introducing the interview and presents the background topic, through a monologue. The initial turn concludes with the introduction of the interviewee. During the interview with the female interviewer, broadcast on a commercial station, there is an interruption of the interview for an advertising segment. The higher number of actual turns for the interviewer in Interview 1 in comparison with the male interviewer is due to this intermission. The result is predictable, because the interviewer announ-

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/ Gender and the political interview

ces the break in the interview, and upon return reintroduces or reorients the audience with the interviewee. Both interviewers have the final turn in the closing of the interview in order to progress with the rest of the program. I described interviews above as information-seeking or image-establishing structures. If the interview is seen as the place for questions to be asked by the interviewer and obligatory sequential responses to be provided by the interviewee, the question will be the linguistic form central to the discourse. Another prior assumption made here about the political interview was the purpose for the interview, i.e. the interviewee’s participation. In addition the interviews analysed are media interviews so the need for a partial component of entertainment value was assumed. These assumptions lead to expectations about the form of questions that would appear in interviews. The questions posed by the interviewers should, according to this model, be those that gave the interviewee the greatest opportunity to provide the most information. The analysis of the discourse segments, excluding the phatic communion involved in the management of the interview context, categorised the questions according to fairly traditional interpretations of question form and appropriate answer type. The most widely adopted classification of questions reflects this pattern in terms of the expected outcome or responses. Therefore it would be reasonable to expect that wh-questions would occur most often in the interaction. The figures in table 2 show that exactly the opposite trend occurs. Table 2 Question

types in interview

Question

type

episodes

wh-question yes/no question tag question intonation ??other

??: turns of interviewers that were not of a question of the expectations for the interview context.

Interview

1

Interview

(F)

W

4 2 2 4

2 3 2

I form. They are included

2

I 5 in this table because

The small number of wh-, information-seeking question types was in conflict with expectations for the role responsibilities of the interviewers. The interviewees on the other hand do appear to observe their role and offer informative, ‘longer’ answers even in response to a yes/no question. There was no significant difference in turn length between answers according to the types of questions posed. The exception to this occurs in the first episode of Interview 2 where a series of yes/no questions are answered accordingly. More typically the interviewee offers more than a simple yes or no answer to these types of

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questions. The emphasis in this analysis on context and the surrounding cotext and discourse structure suggests that it is the place of the wh-question in the episode that proves interesting. The surprising result is the high number of yes/no questions and the high incidence of declaratives in the interviewers’ turns. The interviewees’ role in the interview overrides the appropriateness of response form demanded by the question form. The effect of the high incidence of declaratives in the male-only interview contributes towards the competitive characterisation of the interview already suggested. The male interviewer uses strategies of interaction that contain a higher degree of imposition or potential face-threatening implications (Brown and Levinson 1987). Thus the expectation that appeared intrinsically linked with the role of the interviewer, i.e. the use of questions, has not proved useful in the characterisation of the political interview. 4.4. Topic and episodic structure The final parameter of the interview outlined in the introduction focused on the control of topic by the interviewer. Interviews are situated along a linear temporal dimension, within which the discourse topics form the cohesive core of the separate but successive ‘episodes’. Episodes are composed of an introduction followed by an elaboration and a final conclusion (Allan 1989). The organisational exchanges for the interview between the interviewer and interviewee were excluded from the episodic analysis. In this section, discussion of the openings and closings of the two interviews will follow the episodic analysis. The episodes are introduced by the interviewer owing to the inherent topic control implied in that role. The introductory utterance to a new episode is always coded as a question, typically of a wh-type. The interviewers and the interviewees participate in the elaboration stage of the episode. The concept of an episodic conclusion is problematic for interviews. Whilst the final utterance separating one episode from another, i.e. coming prior to a topic change and a new episode, could be identified as a conclusion, the function of a conclusion extends beyond simply marking boundaries of the episodes. Conclusions include summarising elements for each episode. There is only one occasion in the two interviews where a conclusion is explicitly provided for an episode. This is facilitated in Interview 1 by the need for an intermission to the interview because of an advertising segment. The interviewer has the final turn prior to the commercial and includes a summarising conclusion in it. The interview itself is an episode characterised by an introduction (the opening turn by the interviewer), an elaboration (the interview episodes) and once again an absence of a conclusion. Perhaps the pre-empting of the closing segment in the first interview could be considered a conclusion because the discourse topic focuses on the results or consequences of the election: ‘life

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after an election if you are not the victor’. However, at a different level, the interview and its episodes do possess conclusions by virtue of the public media context of the interview. The conclusion to the interview amounts to the images created by the discourse and the implications drawn by the viewing audience. Central to this process is the linguistic organisation of the discourse in the elaboration of each episode. The opening introduction to the interview (the interviewer’s monologue to the audience), provides the discourse topics for the separate episodes of the interview. In Interview 1 the female interviewer introduces the following discourse topics in her introduction: the wage tax accord; unemployment and social security arrangements and other election issues. Each of these themes is taken up in the interview episodes and elaborated in sequence chronologically. Interview 1 Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 Episode 6 Episode 7

social security changes the state of the Australian Economy election time and voting practices the effectiveness of the current government ideology of the Labour movement the mood of the electorate life after the election if he loses

Each new episode is usually differentiated by a pause greater than 1 second. The inclusion of ‘other election issues’ in the interviewer’s opening turn allows for the wide range of discourse topic included in the interview. The male interviewer in his introduction outlines the issues of wage/tax accord; the changes to unemployment and social security payments; and the implications for Australians of these changes. The episodic structure also reflects the narrower issues outlined in the introduction: Interview 2 Episode 1 the presentation of the package Episode 2 the state of the economy Episode 3 taxation and superannuation

(setting

the scene)

The introduction for each of the episodes is always achieved through the manipulation of questioning strategies. The introductions account for 80% of the wh-questions in Interview 1 and 100% in Interview 2. The initial expectation that an interview would contain questions posed by the interviewer typically of the wh-type are confirmed in the introduction to the episodes. The elaboration of the episodes appears to be the place where the two interviewers adopt different discourse strategies. The female interviewer includes basically a questioning strategy with an occasional statement whereas the male interviewer

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has very few question forms in the elaboration of the episode. The following discourse segments were the second episode for each of the interviews. The episodes are unified by the same discourse topic: ‘the state of the Australian economy’: (6) Interview I IntF Mr Hawke you’ve offered us er a lot of dollars today / what is the value of those dollars if they are lost in a sea of / inflation and high interest rates PM Well they won’t be lost in a sea of inflation and high interest rates the Treasurer has given / the er inflation . . . the 6% er is er a / a sound er figure IntF Mr Hawke your government’s record on predicting inflation rates is not good is it PM well it’s not too bad / we’ve been a little bit under / but er / let me say this in terms of outcomes which I guess are the important thing / just look at what we’ve done we inherited an inflation rate of 11% / and er we’ve brought it right down IntF Mr Hawke I appreciate that but / but you and your Treasurer predicted that inflation would now be at around 4l/, / it’s it’s in fact regrettably / it’s around 8 / now that that’s not a a good record is it PM [ * Well now let me . . . it and with demand being higher than we all / expected certainly inflation was somewhat higher IntF Mr Hawke that’s tantamount to saying we were wrong isn’t it PM it’s / it’s not tantamount to I’m saying and I’ve said it before this is not the first time I I’ve said / that all . . . along recognised that they are working (7) Interview 2 IntM all right now if you can offer a wage tax package of $50 a week / how badly off are we really TRE well it’s a very responsible affordable package in national terms it’s 7% 1 average weekly earnings growth the same . . . IntM [ * so does that give low paid workers a of a catch-up TRE it’s it’s it it helps low and middle income / workers / and but the tax cut is designed to also assist people from about . . . a proper outcome for the nation IntM but given the the fact that the labour market’s getting a bit soft a lot of the steam’s gone out of the economy / some might say / couldn’t he have got a better deal out of Kelty and the ACTU TRE well it’s it’s ah it’s it’s an outcome which has a 7% average weekly earnings cost in national terms over the year / . . . IntM this is real wages plus 1%

134

TRE IntM TRE IntM TRE IntM

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this is an increase in disposable income yes it is an increase in disposable and can we afford it Treasurer yes the answer is yes we can . . . taken by business in a period of high demand 1 and fat executive salaries 1 and salaries 1 bigger profits

TRE IntM TRE IntM TRE IntM TRE IntM TRE

but as but you can’t do anything

about that can you yes I can as the [ now hang on

economy . . . and we’re not just chasing our tail around wages and inflation while we become less and less competitive no no no because look this this is 7 . rather than go up but it’s it’s not going to fuel it 1 it’s no exactly this is exactly right it’s .

The interviewer in Interview 1 acknowledges that the interviewee has one interpretation of the facts and points out that there are other interpretations available. The political context of the interview immediately suggests a tension between different interpretations and beliefs. The assumption that the interviewer’s role is representative of the audience’s views implies that the opposing or parallel interpretations will be questioned. The explicit nature of the female interviewer’s acknowledgment of the alternative positions enables further explication in a more neutral manner. The interviewer challenges the interviewee in an equally unbiased manner. She is the representative who is aware of the issues. This creates a fairly impartial image of the interaction. The interviewer is conscious of her role in the interaction and the basis for further discourse is cooperation bounded by the interview context. The interviewer does not express personal beliefs or opinions. The conclusions the audience will draw for the interview’s episodes focus on the information exchanged in the interaction. The declaratives adopted by the male interviewer, in Interview 2, in the elaboration of the episode effectively remove the discourse from the interview type. This does not imply that the roles of the participants change or that control of topic is lost by the interviewer, but rather that the features of the discourse move closer to that of a discussion or a casual conversation. There are additional features contributing to the shift of discourse type, including

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the repetition of the interviewer’s utterances by the interviewee and the completion of the interviewee’s utterances by the interviewer. In addition the rate of speech and the loudness levels increase during these segments. The male interviewer also contributes input to the information structures, which are by definition part of the interviewee’s role. The interviewer interrupts the interviewee with additional information clauses that supplement the ideas and information offered by the interviewee. The turns by the interviewer frequently contain emotive, value-based language. The interviewer does not participate in the information exchange through an interview style characterised by questioning strategies. The interviewer’s turns are statements which do not formally entail the same response obligations as a question. The interviewee, however, continues to maintain cooperation by reacting to the interviewer’s statements. The consequences for this sort of ‘reactive’ discourse strategy are that the episodes and the interview become increasingly adversarial and the threat of conflict increases. The interviewer expresses what are presented as his personal beliefs and assigns values to the discourse topic. The image created is not based on the information exchanged between the interviewer and interviewee but rather on the participant that ‘wins’ the conflict. The discourse excluded from the episodic analysis includes the opening and closing segments of the interviews. Openings and closings have been analysed by conversation analysts with predictions for the sequence patterns of the segments (Jefferson 1972; Button and Lee 1987). The opening sequence of the interviews functions to introduce the interviewee and the topic of the interviews and to initiate the start of the interview proper (i.e. the transition between monologue and interview discourse types). The openings of the two interviews differ in the lack of cooperative introduction between the interviewer and interviewee in the male-only interview. The two opening segments follow: (8) Opening from Interview 1 IntF . . . opposition’s tough stand on social security benefits / and joining us now is the Prime Minister / Mr Hawke thank you very much for your time this evening PM [ * pleasure Jana IntF now for some time / the opposition has been telling us that / the dole system is being rorted / you and your government have been saying all is well why are you clamping down . . . In the opening of the interview the interviewee acknowledges the gratitude expressed. However in the interview conducted by the male interviewer there is no evidence of mutual gratitude or opening phatic communion:

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(9) Opening from Interview 2 IntM well Treasurer if we could just start / by setting the record straight / given that you’re the caretaker Treasurer now and we’re in an election campaign is this an official economic statement or is this a piece of ALP propaganda TRE (clears throat) it’s a government statement it’s a it’s a statement / on behalf of the . The consequence for the interviewer in Interview 2 of not acknowledging explicitly the time constraint is that shortly before the conclusion of the interview, in order to initiate a closing sequence, the interviewer resorts to an interruption to gain the interviewee’s attention and commence a closing sequence. The interviewee ignores the interruption and continues with his answer and the interviewer is forced to wait until he has completed his turn. The closing sequences of the two interviews express gratitude to the interviewee adopting more usual closing sequence patterns found in formal contexts (we don’t normally thank our conversation interlocutors for the conversation!). The two closing segments follow. (10) Closing from Interview 1 IntF ah we are running out of time and I regret that / but / er / PM [ that’s okay 1 would IntF PM I’ll come back sometime 1 I’m sure you can do you do if you lose / IntF [laughter] PM I I I would er purely hypothetical and I don’t think I will but er / I would not have any personal er sense of loss I’ve . . . find devastating / IntF Mr Hawke I thank you for your time we’ll have to leave it there Jana PM [ thanks very much IntF The prime Minister Mr Bob Hawke (11) Closing from Interview 2 TRE no it’s not it’s it’s controlled in industry funds jointly with employers but understand this at the top end of the wage system the end of it IntM [ * Treasurer in those days we can’t have it if there’ll be that many people in TRE retirement / the base rate pension would have to be / nothing like it is today IntM thanks for your time TRE thank you Paul

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Schematically then there are different discourse patterns for the opening and closing of the two interviews and the use of time or context indicators by the interviewers. The female interviewer expresses gratitude, and in accordance with politeness or sequential norms the interviewee responds. Because the male interviewer does not pre-empt time management and signal this to the interviewee, he is forced to use an interruptive (non-cooperative?) strategy to close the interview. The interruption of the interviewer in the second interview again forces the discourse to shift towards the interview context from a previous position involving elements of casual conversation. The interviewee in Interview 1 responds to the interviewer’s expression of regret at the impending close of the interaction. Consequently, the interviewer is taken by surprise evidenced by a non-verbal gesture (surprise) and nervous laughter. Thus there appears to be a tension between organising the context of the interview and alerting cooperatively to the interviewee the expected closure of the interview.

5. Conclusions The analysis of the discourse structure of the political interviews points to the validity of assuming that the interviewer is the controlling agent in the interaction. The interviewer is the participant who poses the questions, initiates topic change and manages the turn-taking system. The initial expectations were proved valid in the analysis except for the relatively low usage of questioning strategies. The explanation for the low occurrence is reflected in the elaboration stages of the episodes. The interviewer through the elaboration of episodes may continue to observe the constraints of the interview setting or alternatively shift towards a more conversational style. In the two interviews there was a marked difference between the discourse strategies of the female and the male interviewers. The analysis of turn-taking management demonstrated a more competitive situation in the same-gender interview. This competition for the floor is maintained throughout the elaboration stage of the episode by means of the lack of interview style questioning and the adoption of statement/reaction discourse patterns by the interviewer. The female interviewer maintains her questioning interview style and thus cooperates with the interviewee in their mutual understanding of the context. The differing discourse styles and structures imply different effects or responsibilities to the two central functions of the political interview, i.e. the exchange of ideas, information and beliefs versus the creation of images for the interviewee. A cooperative interview emphasises the exchange of information while an adversarial, competitive conflict implies value judgements by the interviewer. This additional information forces the audience to consider more than the information exchanged in the procedure of establishing conclusions.

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The interview demonstrates that women in the media can establish successful careers without adopting a male discourse model. The challenge for future discourse investigations of political interviews and gender lies in the direction of the analysis of the power variable. It is pleasing to discover that women in the media can maintain and develop distinct discourse strategies in relationships with other powerful images.

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