Survey on the Pragmatic Elements of Television Interviews. What Can be Learnt from Japanese Talk Shows

This study analyses the pragmatic aspects of intracultural management of TV interview in Japanese. In particular, it investigates how speakers, in order to achieve their communication goals, often melt together their sociopragmatic values with an unconventional use of language. From a didactic point of view, this observation proves to be particularly significant since it helps to reduce the boundary between a pedagogical approach too often linked to models of syntactic-grammatical correctness and a more recent one which tries to come as close as possible to actual interactional models by promoting awareness of intralingual communication strategies, and reducing sociopragmatic, pragmalinguistic and intercultural mistakes by foreign/second language learners. From a methodological perspective, the presentation intends to clarify the inner dynamics of pragmatic management of the interview with the following goals: a) intercepting intracultural dynamics of content management and feedbacks through a bottom up approach by utilizing transcription techniques of CA; b) extracting and isolating those key concepts apt to describe TV interview features in Japanese without imposing them through a top-down model; c) stimulating a reflection that goes beyond the analysis of language itself in order to understand the iconic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic aspects of communication.