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Description:
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This book proposes a socio-pragmatic exploration of the discursive
practices used to construe and dynamically negotiate positions in news
interviews. It starts with a discursive interpretation of 'positioning',
'role' and 'challenge', puts forward the relevance of a distinction between
social and interactional roles, demonstrates how challenges bring to the
fore the relevant roles and role-components of the participants, and shows
that in news interviews speakers constantly position and re-position
themselves and each other through discourse.The discussion draws on an
empirical fine-grained analysis of a 24-hour corpus of news interviews on
Israeli television and a corpus of media references. The author postulates
a discrepancy between interlocutors' normative expectations, which
presuppose an asymmetrical division of labor, on the one hand, and
real-life practice, which exhibits partial symmetry in speakers' selection
of discourse patterns as well as reciprocity in the use of challenge
strategies, on the other. Special attention is given to irony and terms of
address, which are shown to act as the center-points of satellite challenge
strategies, geared as an ensemble toward the co-construction of
reciprocal positioning. The analysis of three case studies further sheds
light on the negotiations of intertwined positionings in context.
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