Rethoric questions in the political interview: a study of case

Abstract

The aim of this study is show how rethoric questions are asked by speakers. This research has as investigation corpus two interviews granted by politicians Luís Henrique and Salvador Zimbaldi to journalist Heródoto Barbeiro. The used method is the inductive, because, in this work, the starting-point is to analyse rethoric questions in selected corpus, in order to describe the contexts in which theses questions are asked. Based on the Interactive Sociolinguistics and Textual Linguistics presuppositions, this research is developed by the Speech Analysis (guided by ethnomethodology) technics. This article contains the following observations: 1) when interviewees ask a rethoric question, they intend to adapt themselves to interactive moment established by interviewer; 2) when interviewer ask this kind of question, he purposes to make some accusation for interviewees, with a view to control the interaction. We have concluded rethoric questions are based on pragmatic connection between a seeming question and an answer. Through this link, it happens a structural recomposition of adjacent pair, term used by Schegloff and Sacks (1973).