Question/Answer Topical Coherence in Television Interpreting. A Corpus-based Pilot Study of American Presidential Debates

Abstract

The chapter outlines a corpus-based analysis of topical coherence in interpreted American presidential debates broadcast on Italian television. It aims at investigating the ways in which dialogue format and question/answer structure are managed. The first part identifies the types of question and answer in the SL, their Italian equivalent, and the incidence of each type of question. The question/answer classification takes into account syntactical, illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of the discourse. The second part focuses on question/answer topical coherence in the interpreted versions. It examines whether topical coherence is achieved, and in which ways its achievement is influenced by the type of question and the changes that occurred during the interpretation process, observed through a contrastive analysis of the original and the interpreted version.