A Study Of Job Interview Language: An Adaptation-theoretic Perspective

In modern society, many jobs are offered to modern people. Factors such as education background and working experience are at work in the course of interviews. But the key point is their utterance during the process of interview. What are the best strategies for the job seekers?According to famous linguist Jef Verschueren, pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena and it has a strong relationship with their usage in forms of a speaker's utterances. And then, he proposes the Theory of Adaptation, a theory claiming that language use is the process of making choice through a speaker's adapting to context and linguistic structure at various levels of salience in a dynamic way. Why human beings can make continuous choices in language use? The reason is that there are three properties of language: variability, negotiability, and adaptability. And linguistic adaptation can be examined through four angels:contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and the salience of the adaptation process.Under the framework of Adaptation Theory, this thesis aims to answer the following questions. What are the linguistic choices that the communicators adopt to produce proper utterances during the interview? What strategies f during the interview? When making choices, what do language users try to adapt to? After analysis and investigation, it has been found out if the job seekers want to make the interview very successful, they should adapt to the context, including the physical world, mental world and the social world. Utterance of the job seekers also adapt to the structure of language. And the adaptation is always dynamic. And this thesis will specify the application of the theory in communicative context.