A Relevance-Adaptation Approach To Responder's Overinformativeness In The TV Interview

This is a tentative study on the responder's provision of additional information i.e. responder's overinformativeness (RO), in the institutional discourse—TV interview, aiming to explain the relevance-adaptation of this phenomenon. Responder's overinformativeness in this research will be understood as the process of providing additional or added information apart from the information which is necessary to satisfy the interviewer's communicative needs in the ongoing interview interaction.The theoretical framework is an improved relevance-adaptation model which is set up on the basis of Yang Ping (2001) and Ran Yongping's (2004) Relevance-Adaptation Model. The improved model claims that verbal communication aims to seek optimal relevance. The seeking of relevance results from the inter-adaptation between linguistic structures and contextual correlates. The speaker and hearer have to make efforts to achieve a successful communication in the process of seeking relevance and inter-adaptation. The model employed in the present study provides a more adequate model of describing and explaining the whole process of communication from both the production and interpretation side of languageThis study is mainly based on qualitative analysis of the data which are collected from two well-known TV interview programs "Yang Lan One on One" and "Meet with Lu Yu for Your Stories".The responder's overinformativeness is variable along two main dimensions. propositional content (RO as expanding act(s), RO as grounding act(s), RO as attitude-expressing act(s), RO as self-supporting act(s) and RO as remedy act(s)) and information quantity(mono-propositional RO and multi-propositional RO). As regards the functions of responder's overinformativeness, which is consistent with the claim of Relevance-Adaptation Model, communicator-oriented functions and ongoing discourse-oriented functions are discussed. For the communicator-oriented functions, the study analyzes how interviewee utilizes overinformative response to maintain a harmonious interpersonal relationship by maintaining his/her positive self-image and mitigating the embarrassment and face threat to others. With regard to the ongoing discourse-oriented functions, RO affects the ongoing discourse by introducing a new topic center-shift and raising communicative efficiency.Based on Relevance-Adaptation Model the thesis makes a trial study of the mechanism of RO from both the perspectives of production and interpretation. The research shows that the production and interpretation of RO is a process of relevance-adaptation, which means that the interviewee adapts his linguistic choice to the contextual correlates and chooses RO consistent with the principle of relevance. And the interviewer adapts the context to the linguistic choice of the interviewee and infers the interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance.