{"pk":7075,"title":"Some Standard Uses of \"What about\"-Prefaced Interrogatives in the Broadcast News Interview","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Interrogatives (as linguistic objects, described by their grammatical features) and questioning (as a social action, responsive to prior actions and consequential for subsequent ones) can both serve as vehicles for a range of social activities. This article reports on one distinctive form of interrogative, the \"what about\"-prefaced interrogative, with a particular focus on its uses in broadcast news interviews. We analyze the internal composition and sequential position of \"what about\"-prefaced interrogatives and identify four standard uses of them by interviewers: pursuing a prior interviewee's response, juxtaposing multiple interviewees' positions, invoking a prior agenda, and proposing membership in a category. On the basis of this analysis, we consider how the recurrent use of this particular interrogative form can serve as an interactional means of instantiating a particular broadcasting \"style,\" thus contributing to distinctions among various public affairs programs.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"Applied Linguistics"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bg0c37w","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"","last_name":"Roth","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":"None"},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Olsher","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2010-06-20T07:00:00Z","date_accepted":"2010-06-20T07:00:00Z","date_published":"1997-06-30T07:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ial/article/7075/galley/4195/download/"}]}