Abstract:Abstract: Discourse and power relations, as key topics in critical discourse analysis, are normally explored in terms of power being reproduced and challenged in discourse. As a complementary to this trend, this paper investigates the way power is legitimized and accepted. The data analyzed are from a TV interview program, and the theory is Fairclough’s (2010) account of “technologization of discourse” and “hegemony”. Observing such discourse technologies as interview, teaching, medical enquiry, and genre hybridity, which are designed and deployed by discourse technologists (e.g. experts and the TV grogram hostess), we find that the experts bring their medical expertise into the field of mass media, in which new discourse conventions are formed, and new power relations legitimated. It is then argued that the technologization of expert discourse brings legitimation to the expert power and makes it recognized by the mass, and also, in this case, guarantees the good effect of this TV program in advertising the medicine. This argument is more helpful than other researches (e.g. Moberg 2018) in understanding the function and mechanism of the technologization of discourse in legitimating the technologists’ power.
Key words: technologization of discourse; discourse hybridity; legitimization of power; critical discourse analysis