Communicative Failures in Ukrainian- and German-language Celebrity Interviews from the Respondent’s position

Abstract

The aim of the article is to determine and analyze the characteristics of communication failures in star interviews from the point of view of the respondents, i.e. the interviewees. The empirical research base consists of Ukrainian and German language video interviews from 2010 to 2019, which were either broadcast on television or produced for YouTube. The research process includes the integrated application of methods and techniques from communicative linguistics, in particular discourse analysis. A new methodological basis was developed for the investigation of these communication failures, namely for the reconstruction of a single event in two discursive environments, the determination of the communicative context and the communication situation in interviews in comparable languages. The results of the study made it possible to identify the characteristic features of communication failures in star interviews on three levels of the communicative genre: on the external structural, internal structural, and situational levels. Both common features of communication failures and differences in the Ukrainian and German-language interviews were determined. The results of the study show that the types of communication failures in interviews with celebrities in Ukrainian and German are universal, but they reflect national and cultural specificities given the characteristics of both languages and each language culture and their realities, norms, conventions, and maxims of communication. In both languages, communicative failures are a typical and often unavoidable component of interviews.

Keywords

• communication failures
• star interview
• interviewee
• ukrainian
• german