Topic Continuity And Change In TV Talk Show

In the thesis, the author applies theories of discourse analysis and pragmatics to conducting in-depth research on topic continuity and change in the TV talk show, reviewing the similarities and differences between this conversation and daily talk, and tries to find out the rules of topic continuity and change.The article is divided into five chapters with exception of concluding remarks, bibliography and parts of corpus.Chapter I introduces research object, theoretical basis, research value, the source of corpus and usage of symbols.Chapter II discusses topic classification in TV talk show. According to the size of topic scope, we divide it into three categories: discourse topic, turn topic and sentence topic. Discourse topic can also be divided into two kinds: multiple topic and single topic. Meanwhile, we explore topic marker, including syntactic marker and phonetic marker.Chapter IIIis concerned with topic continuity in TV talk show. In the light of different roles cohesive devices play in the topic progression, it falls into two types: static cohesion and dynamic cohesion. Some examples are employed to explain the sub-categories of the two cohesive devices.Chapter IVdeals with topic change, which is divided into two types: linguistic change and zero change. The former refers to using some linguistic symbols as markers of topic change, the latter refers to completion of topic change with no any markers. Meanwhile, we also discuss effect of turn-taking on topic continuity and change.Chapter V approaches the influence of pragmatic cooperative principle and politeness principle on talk show in terms of topic change, agreement and divergence of views, conversational overlap and interruption, branching sequence and response.Concluding remarks generalizes the content of the thesis and points out disadvantages of it. Bibliography and parts of corpus are attached to the article.