This paper analyzes the footing shift by focusing on an interviewer’s questioning from the conversation of a Korean TV news interview. By dividing the interviewer’s questions into adversarial questions and non-adversarial questions, this study investigates what footing shift functions and what the interviewer wants to achieve through it. The analysis of the news interview reveals that footing shift in adversarial questions performs a function of defense. The interviewer attributes the responsibility of remarks that criticize and refute interviewees to a third party so that they can defend themselves against the criticism of attacking interviewees. On the other hand, the footing shift in non-adversarial questions is used to introduce a new topic to the conversation. The interviewer speaks on behalf of a third party when the new topic indicates one’s position on a contentious topic. It enables the interviewer to entirely conceal his personal opinion and lead the discussion in depth. In conclusion, footing shift in questions allows an interviewer to satisfy institutional demands of the news interview. Furthermore, it is found that interviewees collaborate to preserve the interviewer’s stance of footing shift in their responses.

Suh, Kyunghee. 2014. Pulling off Being Both Adversarial and Neutralistic: The case of Korean News Interview. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study analyzes how a journalist can design his question to strike a balance between two competing journalistic norms-neutrality and adversarialness-within the framework of conversation analysis. An analysis of the three news interview segments in JTBC News 9 reveals that the interviewer, Seok-hee Sohn, resorts to the extensive use of prefaced questions. These prefaced questions depict the third person-attributed statements in a way that distances Sohn from his more overtly opinionated remarks. The use of quotation from others serves a dual function: it enables the interviewer to express adversarial criticism of his guests, while maintaining a formally neutralistic posture. Yet this strategy is also employed to give the interviewee the chance to justify him/herself. Particular attention should be given to the observation that Sohn deliberately refrains from asking questions after revealing sensitive details about the interviewee. The interviewer sometimes implicitly voices his own adversarial stance even in a seemingly neutralistic question, thereby showing how the interviewer can function as a ‘devil's advocate’ in a news interview. The question design examined in this study suggests that innovation in question design and rhetoric in news interviews can reflect changes in social and political attitudes, norms, and behavior.