PRESUPPOSITION TRAP: THE INTERVIEWER’S INTERROGATIVE AND NON-INTERROGATIVE MOVES AS MEANS OF MANIPULATIVE INFLUENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MEDIA INTERVIEWS (2024–2025)

This article examines the interviewer’s interrogative and non-interrogative moves as means of covert influence in the English-language media interviews (2024–2025). The topicality of the study arises from the virtual absence of research in which the verbal mechanisms of such influence are described not only on the level of general communicative strategies, but also in terms of the specific syntactic forms through which this influence is exerted. The research material consisted of 445 communicative moves made by the interviewer, selected through consecutive selection from six complete verbatim transcripts of political and business interviews published in TIME and Fortune. Each move was analysed in terms of four parameters: the syntactic type of the utterance, the presence of a negative or accusatory presupposition, the presence of a lexical pressure marker, and the degree of restriction on the respondent’s scope for reply. In the result of analysis, a conclusion was made that only 69.9% of the interviewer’s communicative moves were realised in the form of interrogative constructions. The remaining 30.1% consisted of affirmative utterances. Such constructions have a similar urging function in the dialogue. The most frequent type was general questions (47.3%), followed by questions structured in a declarative form (19.6%), and special wh-questions (14.8%). Typical disjunctive questions, traditionally regarded as having high suggestive potential, are represented in the corpus by a single example (0.3%). Negative presupposition proved to be a distinctive feature (12.2%), associated with specific syntactic types of utterances. At the same time, a universal feature of the interviewer’s communicative moves is the restriction of the addressee’s response space (78.5%). It’s noteworthy that over a fourth of all presuppositional moves build on assumptions made from the previous statement and do not contain their own lexical markers. Thus, a conclusion is made that it is not an individual sentence that should be the unit of analysis for the interviewer’s suggestive influence, but a pair of adjacent communicative moves. At the same time, presupposition in the discourse is not distributed evenly across sentences, but is associated with specific syntactic patterns, in which the interrogative plays a condensing role, steering the direction of the interviewer’s discourse.