does not want to hear M’s opinion and want to immediately finish the discussiong by performing such utterance.
2 Cooperative Interruption
Besides functioning as a disruptive act, interruption also functions as a cooperative act. In this function, interruption is used to show agreement or support to
other speaker’s opinion. Related to this, Murata, Kennedy and Camden in Li, 2001: 269 propose three subcategories of this function. Those are agreement, assistance,
and clarification.
a Agreement
Agreement occurs when a speaker interrupts other speaker’s utterance in order to show concurrence, compliance, understanding or support. It means the
interrupter has the same opinion as the interruptee. To make this function clear, one example is shown as follow.
Peg : The part I didn’t like was putting everybody’s snow pants and
boots and Marge : Oh yeah That was the worst part
Tannen, 1994: 70 In the example above, Peg is interrupted by Merge in the middle of
discussion. The function of Marge’s interruption is to support Peg’s statement.
b Assistance
Assistance occurs when the interrupter provides word, phrase or sentence which helps the interruptee to utter his or her idea. The example of this subcategory
is shown below.
Dara : It’s like the famous to
Steph : tongue twister.
Tannen, 1994: 61 In that example,
a pause occurs in Dara’s utterance. She cannot continue her utterance since she forgot about the term of “tongue twister”. Then, Steph assists
Dara and help her to finish the utterance.
c Clarification
This function of interruption is commonly initiated by the listener. In this case, the listener, as the interrupter, interrupts as an attempt to clarify something from
the current speaker’s utterances. It also occurs when an interrupter does not get the current speaker’s utterance. One example of this subcategory is shown as follows.
Ross: Dr. Oberman. Okay. And is he Susan:
she Ross: she of course, she uh familiar with our special situation?
Xu, 2009:26 In the example above, Ross, as the speaker, is interrupted by Susan in the
middle of conversation because Susan wants Ross to clarify her statement before that Dr. Oberman is a woman not a man. The function of this interruption is to have the
current speaker to clarify or explain the previous statement that is false or unclear.
6. Gossip Girl TV Series
The object of this research is the first season of Gossip Girl TV series. This TV series is directed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. The first season of this
TV series was aired from September 19, 2007 until May 19, 2008 with total 18 episodes. This TV series is originally developed from Cecily von Ziegesar
’s book
series. Gossip Girl TV series brings a story about Upper East Side people in New York City. The first season of this TV series brings a lot of appreciations from
audiences. This TV series won twelve nominations in Teen Choices Award 2008, nominated as Outstanding Achievement in Casting in Artios Award 2008, nominated
as Favorite International Program in ASTRA Award 2008, and many others. The story begins with the return of Serena Van der Woodsen
to Manhattan’s Upper East Side society. Serena takes a role as one of the main characters. This TV
series follows a plot from the past to the present. The return of Serena is the trigger of mystery and scandal of the story. Serena suddenly returns to the city after she
disappears for almost a year. Then, the story continues to reveal what has happened in the past. This sudden return of Serena from her sudden disappearance makes her
ex close friend, Blair Waldorf upset and insecure. On the other place, Dan Humphrey has also
been waiting for Serena’s return. Dan, in this season, becomes Serena’s boyfriend after several coincidences occur between them.
This TV series, in general, shows the daily life of upper class people in America. Every episode of this TV series shows different themes of upper class
events and traditions such as Ivy League party, Thanksgiving party, Cotillion Ball and many others. The stories within are organized naturally like the real life of people
in America particularly Upper East Side’s people life. Not only depicting the upper
class lifestyle, this TV series also portrays the middle class people who live around the upper class society. The story then illustrates how power and status become
important things to rule the society.
B. Previous Research Findings
In analyzing conversation, many researchers were concerned to reveal the conversational strategies that are used by men and women. One of those interesting
topics to be analyzed is interruption. This topic is sometimes related to gender issue. Most of the previous studies were concerned to reveal the occurrence of interruption
in men ’s and women’s language. They have been conducted with different
approaches, objects, aims, methods, and results. The two of them along with the results are discussed below.
The first research was conducted by Youqing Xu 2009 which is entitled Gender Differences in Mixed-Sex Conversations: A Study of Interruptions. This
research aimed to reveal the differences and similarities between male and female speakers in mixed-sex conversations with a particular focus on interruption. The
primary material of the research was three transcripts of informal and face-to-face conversations that were taken from the famous American TV sitcom Friends. The
three transcripts were chosen randomly from season 1, season 5 and season 10. The research was conducted by using a mixed-method qualitative and quantitative.
The result of the research showed that women interrupt more than men. In quantitative result, there were 32 interruptions in the three chosen episodes. From
those results, there were 22 interruptions as dominance-related, 8 as rapport-related and only 2 as neutral interruptions. Among all of these interruptions, 12 were
initiated by men and 20 by women. In the qualitative result, the researcher concluded that interruptions were used more by women rather than men. Then, the result
presented that both women and men use dominance-related and rapport-related
interruptions. This result was contradicted from the assumption that interruption was only used as a way to dominate.
The second research was conducted by Chera Kurnia Larasati 2014 in her thesis entitled A Conversational Analysis of Interruptions in Modern Family Season 1
Series. The aims of the research were to identify and to describe the types and the functions of interruption in Modern Family season 1. The method of the research was
descriptive qualitative by using conversational analysis as the approach of the analysis. The result presented that four types of interruption were found in
conversations. Those types were simple interruption, overlap, butting-in interruption and silent interruption. In addition, the highest frequency was found in the use of
simple interruption, where the lowest occurrence found in the use of butting-in interruption. Besides, this research also studied the three functions of interruption.
Those were cooperative, intrusive and neutral. Disagreement as the subtopic of cooperative was found as the most dominant function used among the characters.
Meanwhile, clarification as the subtopic of cooperative was used less in the conversations.
Although interruption becomes the main interest of both previous research, this issue is broad and this research analyzes interruption from different perspective
from them both. While Youxing’s research focused on analyzing the differences and
similarities between men’s and women’s speech particulary in interruption in mixed- sex conversations, this research focuses on analyzing the types and functions of
interruption in mixed-sex conversations.
