Interrupting For Power In Political Debates

Interruption has been a significant topic in studies on conversation.Previous studies on interruption mostly focus on the influence of power on interruption and few studies touch upon political discourse.Therefore,the present study,by means of both qualitative and quantitative approaches,examines interruption in political debates.Specifically,this study attempts to reveal the function of interruption in the power construction process in the first 2016 American presidential debate.This study adopted the transcribed data from the first 2016 American presidential debate and a revised theoretical framework for interruption was employed to analyze the phenomenon of interruption in this debate.Frequency,position,mode and outcome of interruption are explored to illustrate the power construction in the debate.The frequency of interruption of Trump exhibits an overall increase despite a minor fall in the last phase,while Clinton fails to show any discernable change over the whole debate.This sharp contrast suggests that Trump continually attempted to construct power in the process of the whole debate,while Clinton failed to do so.Regarding the position of interruption,the use of "between sentences"interruption is reduced and that of "within sentences" interruption is intensified as the debate proceeds,which indicates that the strategy of Trump is to employ more intrusive interruptions to help him construct power over the process of interaction with Clinton.As for the mode of interruption,the former half of the debate witnesses a mild change on the mode of interruption from Trump,while the latter half is accompanied by a sharp shift on this parameter.In the latter part of the debate,the use of "target discourse" interruption is rapidly increased and,the use of "interruption marker"interruption and "interruption marker + target discourse" is sharply reduced.That is to say,the forceful interruptions are intensified while the gentle ones are decreased,which is a clear manifestation of improvement in Trump's effort to construct power.The results of the outcome of interruption show that Clinton had been resisting the power pressure from Trump.Although in some cases,Clinton was interrupted and stopped talking,in more cases she chose to continue to speak without paying attention to Trump's interruption.When Trump had been constructing power by means of interruption,Clinton was suppressed for a while and then,she had been striving to destruet his power construction.A dynamic interactive process of power construction and destruction is illustrated in our study.This study provides implications in three dimensions.Theoretically,this study offers new evidence and more accurate description to a new perspective that interruption can be exploited to construct power in communication.Methodologically,this study combines CA with quantitative analysis,which deals with both micro and macro issues.Practically,the present study contributes to the understanding of political debates by providing a more explicit description of political discourse.