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 semio-pragmatic 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.