A Study on interruptions and overlaps between two main characters in the film "bringing down the house"

Dewi, Ivana (2004) A Study on interruptions and overlaps between two main characters in the film "bringing down the house". Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

In the social interaction, people always deal with communication and in communication, people cannot avoid the interruption. Primarily, this study focuses on interruption and overlap. The writer chooses this topic for there are still many interruptions and overlaps occur in the conversation. The data which is being analyzed is taken from a film titled `Bringing Down the House?. This film is chosen for there are many interesting interruptions and overlaps occur in this film that have been attracted the researcher to analyze them; moreover, there are many reasons emerge in the conversation. Furthermore, the writer only observed the main characters, Peter and Charlene since they produce more interruptions and overlaps. From this study, the writer would like to find out the dominant types of interruptions and the most common reasons of interruptions on the conversation between the main characters in the film The data is analyzed employing the theories written by Holmes (1992) and Zimmerman and West (1975) for the meaning and description of interruption; additionally, the reasons are investigated based on theories stated by Wardhaugh (1985), Wodak (1996), Tannen (1991), and for the last theories about interruption, the writer obtains the sources from the web site http://www.sil.org/LINGUISTICS/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms.htm. This research is considered as a qualitative research. The data are acquired from the VCD and in order to get the transcript, the writer types all the dialogues that emerge in the film in the form of transcript after first watching it for several times. Moreover, the writer utilizes tables to categorize interruptions and overlaps and the reasons to interrupt and overlap. Compares to interruptions, overlaps emerge much more than interruptions. It shows that the main characters like to partly cover the last words of the first speaker than cut it. Overlaps commonly occur for Charlene and Peter do not have good relationship and they always debate in defending their statement. The common reason of interruptions that happens in the conversations is breaking up and the most common reason of overlaps that occurs in the film is disagreeing. Those reasons become the most common reasons since there are many contradictions between Charlene and Peter. In this case, interruptions and overlaps that occur in the conversations between the main characters happen for Peter and Charlene have different purposes; they think that their statement is right so they try to defend the statements.

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