“But Then Again, Too Few to Mention”: Negotiating Regret in Israeli and American News Interviews

Abstract This study adopts a contrastive pragmatic approach to examine the meanings and functions of public regret in two linguacultures. We located questions realized by news interviewers Israel United States between years 2010 2020 using keyword searches databases diverse radio television broadcast media. Contrastive analysis realizations uptakes reveals similar discursive, functional thematic patterns across cultures: are predominantly used demand accountability or elicit emotion narrative evaluation, discursively constructed as either challenging supportive. also found delicate cross-cultural difference, with interviewees’ tendency avoid greater U.S. In Discussion we suggest possible explanations for overall resemblance discursive interviews U.S., their theoretical methodological implications pragmatics institutional settings.