| The present study provides an investigation on Chinese traffic police's discourse roles in the interview. The focus of the study is on the choice and switch of discourse roles and their reasons and functions in Chinese traffic police interview. In this study traffic police interview is approached as a complex speech activity, which involves more than one speech act. On this basis, we attempt to explore how discourse roles are strategically adopted to perform the specific speech acts in Chinese traffic police interview, the communicative goal of which is to get the authentic information. Based on J. Thomas'classification of discourse roles and the data collected in the present study, we make a new classification criterion, classifying discourse roles into three types.The data in the present study, which consists of 8 cases, about 27000 words, are collected by the author through transcribing the materials recorded on the spot. Data analysis shows that interviewers choose to act as the roles of "Speaker confirming message (SCM)", "Speaker Seeking Message (SSM)" and "Speaker Transmitting Message (STM)", which have their own lexical and syntactic features. Interviewers tend to use many law terms to ensure the solemnity and impartiality when acting as the role of "SCM", use lots of question sentences to seek information when acting as the role of "SSM". Meanwhile, frequency of each type of discourse roles is counted, with "SSM" accounting for the highest among three types and "STM" the lowest one. What's more, interviewers constantly switch discourse roles during the interview process, which result from being influenced by the communicative contexts, such as social context, social power and speakers'motivations and objectives. Besides, the switches of discourse roles effectively help the interviewers open a new topic and focus on a topic, keeping a firm control on advancing the process of interviews and achieving the communicative goal. |
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