Studies in Linguistics and Language Education
Volume 1, Numéro 1, Pages 10-20
2025-06-30
Adversarial Interactions In Political Interviews: Exploring The Non-resolution Of Questions Under Discussion
Authors : Schubert Raoul . Nicolas René .
Abstract
In this paper we examine the non-resolution of questions under discussion (QUDs) in political interviews, using Roberts’s (2012) QUD framework and the annotation methodology developed by Riester et al. (2018). Through a qualitative analysis of two German interviews, we investigate how politicians deflect or reframe questions to assert control over the discourse. Findings show that interviewer questions often remain unresolved (even when repeated), as politicians introduce new QUDs that lack entailment relations to the original questions. This disrupts the hierarchical structure assumed by Roberts, where subquestions contribute to the resolution of a top-level QUD. We argue that political interviews constitute a genre where strategic redirection, repetitive question-answer sequences and QUD persistence challenge theoretical assumptions about cooperative discourse. These findings call for refinements to QUD theory when applied to high-stakes interaction and adversarial settings.
Keywords
Agenda-Shifting, Political Interviews, Pragmatics, Discourse Structure, Equivocation, Adversarial Interactions, Cooperativity, Question Under Discussion
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