Abstract:
This study aims at discovering linguistic devices used in Thai politicians' response in journalistic interviews. The data are 10 spontaneous interviews and 10 arranged intervies. The research shows that the basic components of political interview are 2 types of question-response adjacency pairs: the concise and continued pairs. It is discovered that there are more adjacency pairs of the former type in both situations of interview. The study of the questions shows that the interviewers use both the interrogative sentences and the statements. The study of the responses shows that there are 3 types of response: answer-response, non-answer response and non-response. In all types of response, politicians use 4 kinds of hedging strategies: quality hedges, quantity hedges, relevance hedges and manner hedges. In an overall analysis of the data, it is found that the interview situation can affect the elements within an interview in only one aspect. It is the type of response. There are more non-answer responses in a spontaneous interview than in an arranged interview