Discourse Strategies of Expressions of Opinions in Radio Talks

Media discourse exhibits a variety of features which are similar to everyday conversations, on one hand, and more institutional forms of verbal interaction on the other. In investigating media interaction, we can observe how media communication affects the attitudes and opinions of society through the way it presents people and issues. Therefore, there is a need to look at why certain utterances occur in speech and to analyze why participants in media discourse have certain preferences for producing such utterances. The aim of the study is to analyze how Malaysian speakers of English engage in exchanges of speech in media talk when expressing opinions, and to investigate the strategies of expressing agreement or disagreement to the topic under discussion. The theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992) on recorded talk in natural settings of social interaction, as well as the application of CA to the study of talk in media setting (Hutchby, 2006) are adopted for the study. These two approaches are relevant in investigating how speakers engage in exchanges of speech or turn-taking in the on-going interaction, in relation to agreement and disagreement sequences and strategies, as well as in exploring the linguistic aspects of media talk.