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Turn-taking and interruption in political interviews: Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan compared and contrasted

This study presents some analyses of the speech and conversational styles of two of Britain's leading political figures — Margaret Thatcher, now Prime Minister, and Jim Callaghan, now leader of the Opposition. The corpus on which the analysis is based consists of two televised interviews shown on British television in April 1979, just before the last general election. They were shown on ITV's 'TV Eye' program. At the time of the initial recording the political role of the two politicians was reversed. Mr. Callaghan was then Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher was leader of the Opposition. The analysis presented in this paper focuses on conversational turntaking in these interviews and the study only considers other aspects of speech where they are thought to be relevant to turn-taking. In this paper I am especially interested in deviations from the turn-taking rule that specifies that only one party should talk at a time — we normally refer to such deviations as 'interruptions'. Turn-taking is a central and apparently universal feature of conversation (Miller 1963) that is made necessary by the cognitive limitations of human beings. People find it very difficult to talk and listen simultaneously, especially when the speech is relatively complex, and therefore, for reasonable efficiency in conversation, there must be some means of allocating turns so that for some limited period one person alone holds the floor and acts primarily as speaker and the other person acts primarily as listener, contributing only briefly to provide support, encouragement, and feedback. Turn-taking skills develop early. In the very earliest interactions between mothers and children simultaneous vocalization predominates (Anderson 1977; Anderson and Vietze 1977), but within two years children learn to terminate simultaneous vocalization by shifting to a listener role (Stern 1974; Stern et al. 1975). Some of the signals used in the regulation of turns have been observed in nursery school children (De Long 1974, 1975).