A Study On The Interruption In Chinese Talk Show Tell It As It Is

Conversation, a social interaction among people, is one of the most significant activities which are actively and cooperatively completed by each participant. Meanwhile conversation, as primitive form of language use, is the first form that people get in contact with language. This study takes conversation as the most authentic and interesting phenomenon worth of studying. According to the conversation turn-taking system put forward by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, ideally, people talk in turns (1974). A turn is the basic form of conversation, refers to the conversation uttered by a speaker at a time and is ended up with silence or other speakers' speaking. However, in a specific talk, people often violate these turn-taking conversation modes that are described in the turn-taking system, in the forms of repetition, repair, overlap, or silence, which arouses the interest of many scholars. It is a quite common phenomenon for one to interrupt the current speaker and obtain the speaking right. As early as in 1970s there arose studies on this issue. West and Zimmerman believe that interruption is a deep intrusion into the inner structure as well as the syntactic border of what the speaker says.However talk shows, which win great popularity all over the world, have been the least studied field on interruption. This paper maintains that talk shows are in nature a spontaneous talk grogram in which common people or/and authorities in a particular field are invited to participate in discussions or interviews led by the show host. It is not hard for us to be consciously disturbed by interruption in talks shows, which seem quite rude and rouses audience's dissatisfaction. So is interruption accidental or an indispensable part in the shows? According to the data collected, there are only three articles which discuss in brief the model and function of interruption in televised discourse, leaving some crucial points unqualified.This paper, from the perspective of pragmatics, conversational analysis and critical discourse analysis, studies the interruptions appear in the Chinese talk shows Tell It As It Is. And the result turns out that the ultimate goal of interruption is to achieve the final common goal of a talk show program. Interrupters cut in by virtue of phonetic and lexical strategies based on the host power, expertise power, leader power and information power endowed by the institutional context in order to either cooperate or disrupt. This paper enriches the study on interruption in institutional fields and deepens the research on Chinese talk shows. Meanwhile the paper aims to guide talk shows practitioners to get familiarized with the phonetic and lexical strategies of turn-bidding on televised discourse and facilitates their efficient operation of talk shows. In addition this study guides audiences to have a better understanding about Chinese talk shows.