Power Relations:Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political TV Interviews In China

As a kind of institutional dialogue,political TV interviews constitute an important channel for people to know politics and to understand political issues from various perspectives.They also provide a crucial platform for politicians to disseminate their political ideas and beliefs.However,political TV interviews are rarely explored by domestic scholars and researchers and the power relations in it are paid little attention.This study conducts a research on the power relations between the interviewers(IRs)and interviewees(IEs)in Talk with the World Leaders,a famous political TV interview program in Phoenix TV,by employing Critical Discourse Analysis.Drawing upon Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,the author chooses mood,modality,personal reference and transitivity as main analytical devices in the current study.Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research of the ten episodes of the program from the year of 2012 to 2016,the thesis has reached the following conclusions:there is an asymmetrical distribution of roles in political TV interviews.However,the power relations between the IRs and IEs are not fixed.The IRs in the program mainly exercise their institutional power endowed by the TV station whereas the IEs primarily use the informational power to build their identities as political leaders.The two parties constantly "negotiate" and "compete" for control and neither party can play a dominant role in exercising power all the time.Moreover,the informational power is usually subordinate to the institutional power for the IEs cannot control the overall structure and trend of the interview but only try to balance and weaken the control from the IRs.In terms of mood,the IRs usually use various forms of interrogatives to play an active role in the turn-taking mechanism and control the topics in the interview.The IRs,on the other hand,often try to weaken the IR's power in turn and topic control by employing a large amount of declaratives to hold and extend their turns and even evade the IRs' questions in the interview.When it comes to modality,the IRs always employ a lot of median and low value modals to create a cooperative environment and keep their impartial stance to better exercise their institutional power.The IEs,on the contrary,frequently employ high value modals and projecting clauses of explicit subjective to show their freedom in expressing their ideas and opinions.Median and low value modals are also frequently used by them to build their authoritative roles as political leaders.As for personal reference,the IRs frequently use the personal pronoun "you"and the possessive determiner "your" to achieve the purpose of direct communication and elicit the information they want.The IEs,on the other hand,employ a lot of exclusive "we" to show their privilege to judge and evaluate.Inclusive "we" is also used to create a sense of solidarity and help them to influence and control the attitudes and opinions of the IRs and the audience.Moreover,"I" is frequently used to show their strong belief in their positions and authorities.Lastly,through the choice of various process types in the transitivity system,the IRs can not only keep their neutrality and express their concern of the IEs' ideas,but also conceal their own power in initiating topics by mentioning other sources.The IEs,on the other hand,always employ various process types to state their ideas in an objective way thus build a favorable image and achieve certain ideological purposes.This study further proves the constructive effects of discourse in social identities,social relations and social facts and gives some enlightenment to further research theoretically and practically.Theoretically,the study extends the scope of application of Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar,which provides a new model in the analysis of political TV interviews in China.Through the analysis,it is found that the combination of CDA and SFG is very effective in revealing the hidden power relations between the IRs and IEs.Practically,the present study offers a dialectical and critical view to interpret TV interviews.It proves that what we are informed from TV interviews is usually not a faithful representation of the reality,but a"distorted picture" constructed by both the IRs and IEs.