Interpersonal Meanings Of Engagement Resources In Business Interview

In recent years,some Chinese scholars have studied the interpersonal function of TV interviews,but most of their research subjects are Chinese TV interviews with the ignorance of different types of TV interviews.Moreover,the generation and reception of TV interviews are often subject to context and social function.Context analysis also plays an important role in the study of TV interviews.In order to deepen the research in this field,this thesis studies the interpersonal meaning of business interview with the context analysis as the background,the engagement subsystem of Appraisal Theory as the main theoretical basis,and a famous foreign interview program as the subject.As a major type of TV interview,business interview is a formal face-to-face encounter between an interviewer and interviewee under business topics.Appraisal Theory is a functional model of interpersonal meaning to study discourse semantics,aimed at exploring,describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate,to adopt stances,to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal relationships.Engagement,a subsystem of Appraisal Theory,deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse.This thesis selects 3 business interviews between Jack Ma and Charlie Rose in Charlie Rose as the research target,and manually transcribed the interview videos into texts.Based on the SFL model,the thesis firstly analyzes the context of business interview through genre and tenor.Then the present study is engaged with quantitative and qualitative analysis of engagement resources in business interviews respectively.Quantitative analysis applies UAM Corpus Tool to annotate text,and then get the distributed data of engagement resources.While qualitative analysis shows the characteristics of engagement resources and the realization of interpersonal meaning by analyzing examples.Finally,the thesis discusses factors influencing the realization of interpersonal meaning based on previous studies.It is found out that dialogic expansion is more frequently employed than dialogic contraction;entertain is more frequently employed than attribute;deny is more frequently employed,followed by counter and concur.The features of engagement resources in business interview are obviously found out that the interviewer often employs ‘rhetorical' or ‘expository' question to open dialogic space in the turn-taking of conversation while the interviewee usually employs mental verb/attribute projections(I think,I believe)and conditional clauses led by if to expand the dialogue and achieve active interpersonal meaning with the interviewer and audience.Besides,‘deny + counter' and ‘deny + entertain' are two obvious collocative strategies in business interview.With respect to the realization of interpersonal meaning,interaction of the engagement features forms prosodic patterns throughout business interviews.In the end,endorse and distance don't occur in business interview.The reason why the speakers give up employing endorse and distance may relate to the genre and tenor of discourse.However,there is not a clear standard to judge whether the prosodic pattern is saturation,intensification or domination.Besides,prosodic pattern is not discussed under the framework of Appraisal Theory.Prosodic patterns of attitude,engagement and graduation need to be studied further.