The media is a powerful tool of influence in societies. Media interviews
provide a special platform that showcases how language is used. This
study focuses on the Pragmatic concepts of Face-Saving and
Face-Threatening Acts on the BBC'S HardTalk interview. It attempts to
find out what kind of acts interlocutors on interviews perform; how face
threats affect interlocutors and how they respond to them. The Speech
Act theory and the Stimulus-Response theory are deployed in analysing
the data. In all, three interviews are studied. A total of 25 tables
containing about 50 utterances are extracted and studied. The findings
show that, by their utterances, interviewers and interviewees perform a
variety of acts. Some of these acts include questioning, accusing,
alleging, asserting, debunking, denying, concurring, reprimanding,
cautioning, announcing, affirming, requesting, informing, clarifying,
obscuring, defending, reporting, denigrating, admitting, rejecting,
approving, attacking, bragging and naming, among others. The findings
also show that both the interviewer and the interviewee encounter
face-threats as they engage in dialogue. Face threats can arise from the
implicatures invoked by/embedded in the utterances of the interviewers
and the interviewees. Face-threats are countered with face-threats, more
or less. In conclusion, the interviewer's attitude, more than that of
the interviewee, determines the politeness tone of the whole interview
process. FTAs undermine politeness. The more an interlocutor feels his
face threatened, the less polite (and perhaps, cooperative) he/she will
be at every given time. But when FTAs are mitigated by careful phrasing
and couching, the threat level becomes very minimal.