Television genre as an object of negotiation: A semio-pragmatic analysis of French political "television forum"

This paper deals with the connection between television talk, genre and politics. Through a semiopragmatic approach based on the multimodal analysis (verbal, visual, non-verbal) of a case (the program 'Demain les jeunes'), we identify the communication contract which defines the 'television forum' genre. This genre appeared in France in the early 1990s; it can be analyzed as the hybridization between two opposite well known television genres: talk-show and political debate. This paper shows how the host and the participants negotiate the genre and puts to the fore the stakes (media, sociolinguistic and political) of such negotiations. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.