The pragmatics of political interviews

The next time you hear a politician challenged to ‘answer the question’ in a television interview, you can be fairly sure that he/she is attempting to stretch the notion of ‘relevant’ beyond what the interviewer and audience are likely to find acceptable, by answering a different question to the one posed, and is being dragged back to observance of the maxim of relevance by the interviewer. In fact, the jousting match between a skilled interviewer and an experienced politician often amounts to an attempt by the former to force compliance with Grice’s maxims on the latter.

While the politician may have a strong interest in violating the maxims (for example by being obscure or ambiguous about unpopular policies), he/she is also aware of the strong countervailing pressure to observe them, and therefore often attempts to convince the audience of his/her intention to do so. When a politician prefaces remarks with ‘Let me be clear’, for example, it’s usually a sign that the maxim of manner is about to be violated. Many of the interviewer’s stock responses, on the other hand, can be interpreted as demanding of the interviewee that the maxims be observed:

‘But, Prime Minister, all the available evidence suggests this policy isn’t working…’ (quality) ‘

Your government does not seem to want to talk about unemployment’ (quantity)

‘I must press you to address the point the listener has made’ (relevance)

‘You haven’t been clear, have you, Prime Minister, about who will actually benefit from this proposal?’ (manner)

Politicians’ words are a matter of public record and are regularly tested for their honesty and consistency. As this famous exchange between Jeremy Paxman and ex-Home Secretary Michael Howard demonstrates, a politician would therefore rather violate manner by being obscure than run the risk of openly violating quality by being untruthful. Paxman actually asked the same question no fewer than 14 times before coining the word ‘obfuscommunication’, which we might define as ‘persistent and deliberate failure to observe the quantity maxim’.

Paxman: Did you threaten Derek Lewis?

Howard: I was not entitled to instruct Derek Lewis and I did not instruct him. And –

Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?

Howard: The truth of the matter is that Mr Marriott was not suspended. I did not –

Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?

Howard: I did not overrule Derek Lewis.

Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?

Howard: I took advice.

Paxman: You’re a master of obfuscommunication, Mr Howard.

A similar gap between entailment and implicature is evident in the logical and real-world use of numbers. Few people, for example, would argue with the statement ‘If both teams score two goals, the result is a draw’. Yet, when presented with the (unlikely) scoreline ‘West Ham United 6 Barcelona 2’, all English speakers agree that this is not a drawn game on the above definition, even though both teams have, quite clearly, scored two goals (one of them with four more to spare). The entailment of ‘two’ (‘at least two’) differs from the implicature (‘two and only two’) which flows from observance of the quantity maxim: we assume that, if the speaker had meant ‘at least two’, he/she would have said so and that in normal circumstances ‘two’ means ‘two and only two’.

An important property of implicatures is that, unlike entailments, they are defeasible, i.e. they can be cancelled:

Q: Did you give £50 to Children in Need?

A: Yes, in fact I gave £100.

?A: Yes, in fact I gave £49.

In the first reply, the implicature (‘£50 exactly’) is overridden by the ‘in fact…’ clause, but the entailment (‘at least £50’)

cannot be, so the second reply is pragmatically ill formed. The implicature that events follow the sequence in which they are uttered can be cancelled in a similar way:

I washed the floor, fed the cat, did the washing-up and watched TV, but not necessarily in that order.

Finally, Barry Blake (2008: 116) gives the example of Mr Brown meeting Mrs Jones for an illicit tryst at a hotel and being asked by the receptionist: ‘Are you married?’. Both reply, truthfully, that they are: the implicature ‘married to each other’ is one which neither party has an interest in cancelling!