A Study On Power-driven Interruptions In Chinese Televised Job-hunting Program You Are Hired

The present study examined interruption patterns in Chinese televised job-interview interactions with a view to explore the features, strategies, functions of interruptions caused by unequal power among the host, interviewers and interviewees. This thesis adopted the conversation analysis(CA) put forward by Sacks, et al(1974) as the analytic framework, combined with the critical discourse analysis(CDA) as the explanatory framework to disclose the causes of interruptions in televised job-interview conversation. According to the relationship among discourse, ideology and power in CDA, the occurrence of interruptions in this program is driven by four types of power endowed by the televised institution context: host power, expertise power, information power and leader power. With these four types of power, the interrupter adopted prosodic and lexical strategies to interrupt the interrupted by employing the phonetic, lexical, syntactic features in the discourse of the interrupted so as to achieve the cooperative or intrusive function. The methodology is a corpus-based analysis by randomly selecting ten videos of You Are Hired and transcribing them according to the Levinson’s(1983) transcription conventions. After repeated watching and observation, a statistic analysis of the frequency of the strategies, causes and functions of interruptions will be made.The findings of the present study show that the purpose of interruptions in televised job-hunting reality show is to finish the program cooperatively and successfully so that the interviewer can pick up the most talented job applicant and the job applicant can better show their competence. Though the interruption strategies adopted by the host, the interviewer and the interviewee are different which were caused by the unequal power among them, the function of interruptions driven by various types of power is not only intrusive, but also cooperative.The present study can enrich the study of interruptions in institutional discourse field and deepen the research in Chinese televised job-hunting reality TV show. On the other hand, the present study can shed some light on the participants of the televised job-hunting program to catch the appropriate occasions and opportunities of interruptions and grasp the program more effectively; meanwhile, the present study can make some implications to the job-seekers in how to catch the appropriate occasions of interruptions to show their competence by adopting appropriate strategies and employing information power and leader power without threatening the face of the interviewers.