The Meta-Linguistic Analysis Of TV News Interview

In the past 30 years,"Bakhtin"has been undoubtedly a hot topic in international academic research. His theories have been widely applied in various fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory."Meta-linguistics", a theoretical concept with quite an original and personal view, is his contribution to linguistics. According to Bakhtin, the basic function of language is communication. The nature of language can be found in communication, so linguistic research should be carried out in the perspective beyond a single person, that is, in the perspective of its social nature and communicative function. TV news interview is featured with verbal communication as its form, and serving the society as its goal. Therefore, to analyze TV news interview in a meta-linguistic way is of both theoretical and practical significance.Utterance and speech genre are two representative concepts in meta-linguistics. Bakhtin distinguishes utterance with sentence in that sentence is a unit of grammatical system of language, while utterance is the unit of speech communication. With utterance as the carrier, speech genre is closely related to the social activity where speech genre is applied. The specific form of each speech genre depends on the need of certain social activity.The paper consists of five chapters, carrying out, with a qualitative method, the meta-linguistic analysis of a TV news interview program on CCTV-9 named"Dialogue":It begins with introduction of research orientation, aims and significance, research method, data delimitation and collection and other relevant information in need. The main part of this paper starts from Chapter 2 to Chapter 4, including in Chapter 2 a literature review of TV news interview and the theoretical framework of this thesis which consists of the philosophical origin of meta-linguistics, literary background, central concepts– utterance and speech genre, essence of thought– dialogism, and theoretical significance, in Chapter 3 utterance analysis of Q&A and turn-taking, and in Chapter 4 speech genre analysis of opening, closing and commercial break, during which the dialogic nature, namely, the social and intercommunicative nature of these linguistic phenomena are explored. In Conclusion, summarized are major findings, value of implication, and some limitations existing in the paper due to a limited knowledge capacity of the author, to which some suggestions are given for the future perfection of this research. This paper contributes to the research of TV news interview and meta-linguistics in the following aspects:Applicable research target– TV news interview is a unique kind of news program that has been adopted widely in TV news industry."Dialogue", as the research target, is an opinion-seeking authority interview, taking immediacy,abundance and authority of information as characteristics, conversations between the interviewer and the interviewees as a form. To research such a popular kind of news program aims at contributing to the analysis of media discourses.Different theoretical framework– As a newly emerging discipline, Bakhtin's meta-linguistics, which is an original linguistic theory, combines related ideas of philosophy, literature, and linguistics together. It emphasizes speech communication, and the social belongings and dialogism of language, agreeing to a large extent with the social function of media discourses. It is therefore theoretically and practically feasible of this research.Aborative train of thought– As basic as utterance, Q&A and turn-taking in techniques of TV news interview embody properties of utterance elaborated by Bakhtin. Different from utterance, speech genre is more macro, with which the structure including opening and closing is analyzed. Hence, the analysis of elements of TV news interview with utterance and speech genre is based on an insightful knowledge of both the theory and the research target.Modern implication– According to the understanding of this meta-linguistic analysis, linguistic researchers are able to master the linguistic features of interview discourse better in an intrinsic way, the interview participants have a deeper understanding and serve the audiences better, and the audiences obtain more information besides the literal meanings. In addition, since most of Bakhtin's theory is applied to literary language and discourses of monologue, an application to non-literary conversational discourse may contribute to the growth of this potentially powerful theory, even though a slight piece.