An investigation into the argumentation in dialogic media genres: The case of sport talk show interviews

This study tried to investigate the type of argumentation found in media discourse data. A case in point was the sport talk show interview. The data included an interview extracted from the Iranian popular sport show, Navad (meaning ‘ninety’), broadcast every Monday by Channel 3 in Iran. The interview was with the former president of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRIFF). Analysis of the data was done within the framework of Toulmin’s (2003) conception of argument as a form of conversation. Accordingly, the propositions produced collaboratively by the host and guests were used to reconstruct the argument structure of the interview in terms of Toulminian schemata. The qualitative analysis of the data revealed that: 1) the argument structure of the interview was that of substantial argument (argument requiring an inference to move from the data to the claim) rather than the analytic one. 2) Little if any formal validity (the validity of the argument in terms of the notion of forms) was found in the skeleton of the argument. 3) The talk seemed to be subjective, and backing and qualifier elements widely used by the guest were not in some parts satisfactory. 4) Warrant, considered as one of the essential components of practical arguments, was not, in some parts, explicitly referred to, but must have been be implicitly inferred by the listeners.