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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.

The use of contextual Information in discourse understanding has been discussed from various angles: is there a context-free meaning? what are the interrelations between context and co-text? what are the types of contextual Information exploited by the Interpreters in their attempt to capture the meaning intended by the Speaker?With the aim of answering the last question, we have suggested, in our work to date (Dascal and Weizman, 1987, in press) a model of contextual Information required for the Interpretation of speaker's meaning in written texts. We have further differentiated between context when used for the determination of utterance meaning and speaker's meaning (-äs a clue) and for the detection of gaps and mismatch (-äs a cue). It is on this last differentiation that we wish to elaborate in this paper. For this purpose, we shall first summarize the model (section 1) and discuss the roles played by context in various stages of the Interpretation process (section 2). We shall then proceed to illustrate the notions cue and clue by applying them to the analysis of a highly indirect written text (section 3), show how 'shortcuts' in the Interpretation process may lead to biased Interpretation (section 4) and suggest some guidelines for further investigation of the Interpretation process (section 5). Types and levels of contextual Information.Essentially, the model proposes a parallelism between two types of contextual Information: extra-linguistic, i.e. Information related to knowledge of the world, and meta-linguistic, i.e. the speaker's untutored linguistic knowledge -their 'folk', intuitive 'feeling 1 for linguistic conventions. Within each type, the model further distinguishes three levels, ranging from the 'specific' (immediate, 'ad hoc') Information about the circumstances of utterance, through the Brought to you by |

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