The focus of this paper is on techniques devised by the author and his colleagues for the analysis of question-response sequences in broadcast political interviews (e.g., Bull, 1994, 2003; Bull, Elliott, Palmer & Walker, 1996). In this context, the pragmatic force of a question is defined as a request for information, which may or may not take interrogative syntax (Bull, 1994). Questions are subdivided according to their syntactic structure (polar, interrogative word, disjunctive); these categories are important for judging what constitutes a reply. Intermediate responses can also be distinguished (answers by implication, incomplete replies, interrupted replies), which lie somewhere between a full reply and a complete failure to answer the question (referred to as a “non-reply”). To further analyse non-replies and intermediate responses, an equivocation typology distinguishes between at least 35 different ways of not replying to a question (Bull & Mayer, 1993; Bull, 2003).
