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 Kyung-hee. 2012. Repeating the Interviewer: Repetition Strategies by Chinese EFL Learners in NS-NNS Interview. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 20(2). pp. 269-289. This paper examines the sequential contexts where repetition is observed in NS-NNS interview interactions involving Chinese learners of English. Special reference is made to how repetition practiced by NS and NNS is differently distributed in ways consistent with their identities situated in the institutional setting of interview. The examination of data reveals that Chinese EFL learners frequently use repetition as a discourse strategy. They repeat the topically salient phrases or key words from the prior utterances of native speakers at the utterance initial position in adjacency pairs. Such an allo-repetition (repetition of others) is to index topicality, which helps signal cognitive, textual, and affective participation or involvement in contextualized discourse. Such a repetition also functions to buy time for the speaker to finish planning his/her next move without relinquishing the floor. Here, repetition is deployed as a means of creating joint cognition and as a strategy with which partially competent speakers can find room in interaction, while a competent speaker can provide scaffolded help collaboratively. We can see that repetition is a social activity, part of our everyday behavior and not just a marker of a "disfluency" or "sloppy speaker" (Schegloff 1987). Repetition clearly has the power as a communication and negotiation tool.