230212 Question and answer strategies in political interviews (S) (SoSe 2026)

This seminar is dedicated to the (structural) analysis of political interviews from a formal discourse-pragmatic perspective. Politicians are sometimes accused — rightly or wrongly — of not answering questions posed to them, or of giving evasive or incomplete answers. Since political interviews are the subject of public discourse, there is a wealth of illustrative material in the media that can be used to empirically examine response behaviour in principle.

First, however, we must address the problem of what questions and answers actually are and what it means to answer a question completely, partially or not at all. Semantics and pragmatics, which have been dealing with these issues for several decades, can help us here. Our focus is primarily on the theory of “questions under discussion” (Roberts 2012), which views the structure of discourse in general as a hierarchical order of questions and sub-questions. We apply this theory to selected interviews and attempt to identify different response strategies: Is a question answered directly? Does the interviewee divert from the discourse topic, talk "bullshit" (Frankfurt 2005), or is their response merely digressive but essentially constructive?

Bibliography

Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton University Press
Roberts, Craige (2012) Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics 5.