Communicative performance in the media: A discourse analysis of argumentative strategies for political debate on TV

This interactional approach to communication in media context suggests that the quality of the performance rests mostly on the speaker's capacity to simulate, with an absent audience, an interaction as natural as possible or, in Goffman's terms (Forms of Talk, 1981), to ratify the public in order to produce a message that makes sense. The analysis of some argumentative strategies used by politicians during a debate on TV reveals that, according to this type of media production and to the professional and personal identities of the politicians, some rhetorical procedures are particularly appropriate to support communicative performance.