Pre-talking in American Podcasts: A Pragma-Conversational Study

Pre-talking is a collective term for conversational strategies that develop before the main talk in podcasts. It is an informal interactional phase that unfolds between hosts and guests before the main content formally begins, functioning as a communicative strategy through which speakers establish interpersonal alignment and set the affective register of the episode. However, a systematic pragmatic analysis of pre-talking as a distinct communicative phase across multiple podcast genres remains underexplored. Therefore, this study seeks to fill this gap by identifying speech act patterns, examining interactional strategies, and accounting for variations across different podcast formats. The study employs a qualitative analytical approach, utilizing comparative tables for clarification, and analyses 12 excerpts selected from 6 widely recognised American podcasts. The analysis follows a model based on Sacks et al. (1974) conversational analysis, Austin's (1962) tripartite model of speech acts, and Searle's (1969) taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Through qualitative analysis conducted across three analytical levels, the study demonstrates that pre-talking is a genre-sensitive communicative phenomenon. The findings show that assertive acts are the most frequently used category, while expressive acts are the most functionally significant, performing the central relational work of the pre-talking phase. Declarative acts are absent from all twelve excerpts. Finally, the study contributes to pragmatic research on new media discourse and highlights implications for language teaching, media practitioner training, and public speaking.