Contrastive Parameterisation of the Interview as a Genre of British and Ukrainian Media Spaces

Abstract

This typological study presents a contrastive parameterisation of the dialogue in the form of the interview within modern British and Ukrainian media spaces. It has proved to be effective if conducted as a complex investigation facilitated by the achievements of Comparative, Structural, Cognitive and Communicative Linguistics. The parameterisation of the dialogue is seen as a polyparadigm methodological procedure of decomposition and taxonomy of the dialogue systems within the British and Ukrainian lingual cultures. A definite discourse practice is considered to form with the help of mode, genesis and genre filtering. In general, the first one results in oral or written practices, the second reveals itself in natural everyday and social (everyday and political) varieties, and the latter shapes primary and derivative genres of the dialogue. All these use the language and speech means of their own to embody themselves in the appropriate surface forms. In the framework of the created theoretical platform the interview is defined as an oral derivative genre of the socio-political dialogical interaction between the journalist and the respondent. This talk is both personal and institutional; it unfolds itself in a “question – answer” form and aims at generating facts, ideas and opinions stirring up public interest. The parameterisation of the interview has embraced its ontological, structural, lexical, syntactical, lingo-cognitive, non-verbal and communicative-pragmatic facets. It has become clear that within both British and Ukrainian media spaces the TV interview incorporates the same intrinsic features and composition. This results from the uniformity of the Action and Possession Frame networks that shape the conceptual bases of the interview – the INTERVIEW / ІНТЕРВ’Ю concepts – in the discourse spaces under analysis. The salient features of the British and Ukrainian interviews are the abundant use of terminology, preference for simple sentences as well as prevalent stylistic employment of homogeneous parts of the sentence and repetition. The ethnic varieties of the interaction are both of cooperative nature, but the Ukrainian one is more emotion saturated and apt to reveal its collaborative character than the British one.