Gender Differences In Interruption Speech Act

As a speech act,“interruption” refers to the listener’s speech insertion in thecurrent speaker’s turn to prevent the latter from finishing his or her talk. Whether ineveryday communication or on special communicative occasions such as jobinterview, interruption is often regarded as a kind of conversational strategy for thefulfillment of one’s pragmatic motivation. To certain extent, interruption is aface-threatening speech act, a challenge to the conventionalized conversation structureof turn-taking as well as a violation of the pragmatic principles concerningcooperation and politeness in conversation. In authentic communication, interruptionmanners will vary with the participants’ gender, personality and preference as well astheir specific communicative purpose and motivation. So far, the domestic systematicresearches on interruption speech acts of certain specific occasions from theperspective of gender differences are rather rare. In view of this, the present thesis isaimed to explore the interruption speech act occurring in leaderless group discussionfrom the angel of gender difference.This thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for thestatistics and analysis of the corpus of interruption speech acts occurring in leaderlessgroup discussion. The data are mainly obtained from the sources such as the media,networks and the present author’s own recordings of realistic job interviews, hencethe authenticity of the data are ensured. Based on authentic textual materials, thethesis is devoted to the research on the gender differences in interruption speech actperformed in leaderless group discussion, a new style of job interview, within thetheoretic framework of politeness theory and conversational structure.Having analyzed interruption speech acts in LGD from three aspects such asunintentional interruption, cooperative interruption and competitive interruption, thepresent thesis arrives at the following results: interruption in LGD is mostlycompetition-driven and less cooperation-driven. Due to the requirements of politeness principle, the relevant parties will also choose some “cooperative” forms of language,but viewed from their communicative intention and speech behavior, they much moreprefer the competition model which could give prominence to their own opinion andleadership status.In addition, speakers of two genders differ evidently in their frequency ofinterruption and its success rate, their choice of politeness strategy and turn-takingstrategy as well as the formal representations of their interruption speech act: thefrequency of interruption by the female in LGD is significantly higher than that of themale，females are generally more competitive who prefer to perform ISA at will andhold the floor for longer time whereas males are more face-conscious andgentlemanly who prefer to take a turn naturally at TRP and would yield own turnwhen it is necessary; interruption happens more frequently between different gendersand the female is more likely to take the turn successfully with resort to interruption;on the contrary, less interruption happens between participants of the same gender andthere is no much gender difference in this aspect; as to the choice of politenessstrategy, the female is more inclined to choose positive politeness whereas the male ismore likely to choose bald-on-record strategy without redressive actions. Moreover,after one’s successful cross-gender interruption, in order to ensure the smoothprogress of the group discussion, the new speaker of either gender would demonstratea cooperative tendency through maintaining the ongoing topic in the extendeddiscussion. However, as far as the topic shift is concerned, the female is more activethan the male in actual communication.In the conclusion, it is pointed out that along with women’s gradual rise of thesocial status, there is a change in gender differences in verbal behavior. Women’sspeech acts become more active. They would start their interruption by presentingtheir counterarguments straightforwardly while males become more willing to agreeto others’ opinions and express a more cooperative attitude in order to ensure asmooth conversation. In LGD the interviewees should pay much attention to thegender differences in speech act and use the interruption strategies properly in order to get the desired effect. That is, on one hand, they should try to seek moreopportunities to speak, and on the other hand, their speech behaviors should not seemrude or impolite. Only in this way, can they leave a favorable impression on theinterviewer and thus increase their opportunities of being hired.