Interruption in Conversation: An Analysis of the Movie '12 Angry Men',, Slides of Linguistics

Download Interruption in Conversation: An Analysis of the Movie '12 Angry Men', and more Slides Linguistics in PDF only on Docsity! 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the background, focus, objectives and significance of the research. A. Background of the Study As social creature, people need to communicate in order to maintain their relationship and to give or gain information from others. In these interactions, conversations occur between two or more people in which one person in a particular time plays as an informant or speaker, and the other plays as a listener. Conversation is a cooperative activity between a speaker and a listener. In maintaining cooperative activity, people should know the right time when to speak in accordance to make the conversation flows. Yule (1996: 72) in his book entitled Pragmatics states that people should be aware of the right time to speak. This particular timing of speaking turns is called turn taking which serves to maintain smooth transition in a flowing conversation. Since conversation is an organized sequence of talking, there is a basic role for establishing who talks and who talks next. Naturally, only one person talks at a time regardless who speaks to whom in what language. The talk is socially organized (Wiemann and Knapp,1975: 78). Organizing taking turns is fundamental to conversation. People may give a signal by taking some actions, such as lowering or raising an intonation, moving eye gaze smoothly, or naming the next speaker to show that he/she finished his/her utterance. 2 Sustaining smooth transition in series of talk, especially in spontaneous conversation, is not as easy as it could be. Sometimes, people disturbs their partners in order to grab their chance to speak and try to be dominant by taking other’s floor. This phenomenon of battling the floor in conversation is called interruption (Wiemann and Knapp,1975: 88). Interruption happens when the current speaker who is interrupted (interruptee) does not finish his or her utterances because the listener grabs the speaker’s floor. Usually the interrupter (the person who interrupts) talks at the same time with the speaker and makes the speaker stop his/her utterances. People usually regard this phenomenon as a way to dominate the conversation. An interruption is not permanently an action to dominate a conversation. This is in line with what Tannen says […] interruption is inescapably a matter of interpretation regarding individuals' rights and obligations. To determine whether a speaker is violating another speaker's rights, you have to know a lot about both speakers and the situation. (Tannen 1990:93) According to Tannen, having known the speaker’s intention and the situation may help another speaker to know the purpose of interruption. Sometimes, an interruption is needed to support smooth conversation, and in this context, interruption plays for cooperative purposes. If an interruption occurs when the interrupter still gets confused about the interruptee’s idea, this interruption belongs to neutral interruption Goldberg (1990:888). This interruption does not have a purpose to disrupt or cooperate with the interruptee. However, this interruption occurs to collect a brief information from the speaker. This idea is supported by 5 Given a number of issues in this movie which have possibility to be analyzed, the researcher eventually focuses on the problem related to the phenomenon of interruption. The first problem is the type of interruption which are based on Ferguson’s theory in Beattie’s journal 1982. In his journal entitled "Turn- taking and Interruption in Political Interviews: Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan Compared and Contrasted", Ferguson classifies interruption into simple interruption, overlap, butting-in, and silent. Then, the second problem is the purpose of doing interruption. Every interruption has disruptive or cooperative purpose. The aim can be identified using some cues which the speaker employs when interrupting. To be able to analyze the purposes, context needs to be taken into account. Based on the description above, the researcher proposes some questions as follows: 1. What types of interruption are employed by the characters in 12 Angry Men? 2. What are the purposes of interruption done by the characters in 12 Angry Men? C. Objectives of the Study In correlation with the problems formulated above, the objectives of the research are: 1. to reveal the types of interruptions employed by the characters in 12 Angry Men, and 6 2. to describe the purposes of interruption employed by the characters in 12 Angry Men. D. Significance of the Study This study on interruption has two significances which can be in the form of theoretical and the practical forms; 1. Theoretical Significance The research of this study may enrich linguistics research, especially in the field of conversation analysis. Moreover, this research enriches knowledge to the society about the phenomena of interruption in daily life. It also contributes at giving deeper understanding in the analysis of interruption especially in a movie. 2. Practical Significance This research may become an additional reference for the researcher who focuses on the same theme, interruption. It can help English Department students to gain deeper understanding on learning conversation analysis especially interruption as well. It is expected that this research can stimulate other researchers to conduct a research on the same topic with different object.