Conversational Analysis Of Interruption In Dialogue On CCTV 9

Western researchers have done a lot of work in the study of interruption phenomenon, some of whom concentrate on the interruption phenomenon in English news interviews. It seems that however, most of the studies are just focused on power relations between the participants, and few of them deal with the causes of interruption from a functional perspective. Fortunately, in recent years, some Chinese researchers have started from a functional perspective to study the interruption phenomenon. For instance, Zou Yunmin (2006) analyses the functions of interruption in doctor-patient interaction. But seemingly, there is no research concerning interruption in English news interview. Therefore, this paper is intended to contribute more or less to this study area.This study attempts a relatively comprehensive study of interruption phenomenon in the famous English news interview program Dialogue on CCTV9 from a conversational analytical approach, including interruption patterns, power relation between the interviewer (IR for short) and the interviewee (IE for short), the causes of interruption as well as the interruption strategies used by the IR.Rather than take the traditional way of data collection in conversation analysis, audio or video-recording, the author takes advantage of Internet, through which 10 episodes of English news interviews from Dialogue, hosted by Yang Rui are downloaded from http://english.cctv.com. All interruptions between the IR and the IE are transcribed by the transcription conventions. First, interruption patterns in English news interviews are classified. Then, a statistical analysis of interruption patterns is provided, in which the IR and the IE's respective percentage in the total number of each interruption pattern is calculated. Based on the statistical analysis of interruption patterns, power relation between the IR and the IE is disclosed: it is obvious that the IR produces the majority of successful interruptions and plays a dominant role over the IE. Then, by making use of Grice's cooperative principle (CP for short) and analyzing the particular context in which interruptions occur, the author attempts to explore the causes of interruption. Another statistical analysis is followed to further explain that the IR and the IE's role responsibilities as well as the general features of news interview determine that interruptions for different causes take different percentages in each interruption pattern. Finally, by analyzing the specific context of interruptions and applying politeness principle (PP for short) as well as face theory, the author aims to explore the interruption strategies used by the IR and concludes that such strategies are beneficial to the smooth progress of news interview as they in a certain degree undermine the power relations between the IR and the IE, thus saving the IE's negative face and promoting the smooth progress of news interview.