Conversational Analysis Of Supportive Verbal Feedback In Chinese TV Talk Shows

The present study conducts a conversational analysis on supportive verbal feedback in Chinese TV talk shows. The study follows Stubbe (1998) to define supportive verbal feedback in a broad way to include a wide range of supportive verbal feedbacks, from minimal feedback response like Mhmm (Ng,嗯), Oh(O,哦), Ah(A,啊)etc. to complicated sentences. The data used in this study are drawn from three Chinese TV talk shows, Dialogue, Behind Headlines with Wen Tao and Life of Art.The quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted to explore the following questions: (1) What are the forms, distribution features and pragmatic functions of supportive verbal feedbacks in Chinese TV talk shows? (2) What contextual factors influence the host or guest to make a supportive verbal feedback? The result shows that (1) there are six types of form: interjections, concrete words, phrases, sentences, repetition and the combination of any two of them. Among them interjection ranks the first in terms of amount. Two types of distribution features are found in the study, that is, at TRPs and at non-TRPs. The quantitative analysis reveals that supportive verbal feedbacks occur mostly at TRPs. As for pragmatic functions, nine types are found in our data, which are listening, reception, understanding, acknowledgement, agreement, evaluation, gratitude, assistance and explanation. According to the statistics, listening is the most frequent function performed by supportive verbal feedbacks, which is followed by agreement. (2) Moreover, the result indicates that contextual factors of gender and social distance affect the occurrence of supportive verbal feedbacks. Females make more supportive verbal feedbacks than males; and the closer the relationship between the participants, the more supportive verbal feedbacks is provided. Besides, we investigate the relation between supportive verbal feedbacks and program style, but we find there is no significant connection between the two. However, due to the limitation of the data, the relation between supportive verbal feedbacks and program style needs further investigation.This paper is expected to contribute to the study of Chinese supportive verbal feedbacks.