Linguistic markers of involvement in American broadcast politics. A case study on TV political interviews

This paper investigates the phenomenon of involvement in American TV political interviews. The dataset used to carry out the study consists of a corpus of interviews with American leading politicians aired on the most popular US Sunday morning talk shows within a time span of nine years, from 2010 to 2019. Comparisons are made with another synchronic corpus of American TV interviews coming from the entertaining talk show Charlie Rose featuring personalities who discuss different issues such as technology, science, the film industry, etc. Corpus linguistics methods are exploited to describe verbal traits associated with involvement in American political interviews, as compared to entertaining-oriented talk show interviews. Therefore, this study ascertains whether, and in which ways, the usage of linguistic involvement characterizes the genre of political interviews.