Types of Interruptions in TV Political Debates

Abstract

Being goal-oriented, TV political debate genre is a purposive institutionalized communicative event between the interviewer and one or two interviewees which has a schematic structure. To attend the purpose of the debate, a restricted structure has to be followed by participants as they take turns to achieve a smooth and successful communication. However, being restricted did not save this type of encounter from been breached by the emergence of interruption. To clarify the functionality of interruption in attending the aim of the TV political debates, samples of various types of interruption along with their linguistic explanation and analysis would be presented hoping to clarify their effect on the evolvement of the main topic of the debate. Interruption, being a series of embedded conversational acts, is an institutionalized strategy by itself used functionally to attend the aim in the dramatically structured televised political debates. As a breach of turn-taking system, interruption occurs intentionally and unintentionally depending on how interruptees interpret each type of interruption as being an aggressive or supportive and on the intention of the interrupter himself determined by the context and the setting these types emerge in. The interviewer is a goal-oriented participant as he masterminds the flow of communication to attend the preplanned goal intended to be achieved depending on the policy of the channel. All types of interruption used by him aids in reaching to the climax between the interviewees.