Genre Analysis Of Yang Lan One On One-Beijing Olympic Series

As a spoken TV genre, TV talk show interviews that originated from popular American TV talk show programs have gained much popularity in China nowadays, flourishing from China Central Television Station to local TV stations. Scholars and researchers start to pay their attention to this subject. However, investigations on the cognitive move structure of TV talk show interviews are rarely found. Given that different program orientation and communicative purposes of different TV talk show interviews, this paper conducts a case study of one mature TV talk show interview program on Chinese television, Yang Lan One on One—Beijing Olympic Series, because of its fixed production pattern, premium quality, clear communicative purposes and high reputation among audience. This paper aims to describe the cognitive structure of the Olympic series of Yang Lan One on One by carrying out a genre analysis of 30 episodes of the series, based on Swales' and Bhatia's genre analysis theory, and Hasan's Generic Structure Potential theory.The result shows that in the corpus all the samples of the Olympic series of Yang Lan One on One enjoy a comparatively fixed cognitive structure of nine moves with several steps in some moves, among which three moves are optional. Besides, each move has its distinctive communicative functions that serve to realize the communicative purposes of the whole program.This paper conducts a positive and tentative research to explore the cognitive structure of a spoken genre, leading readers to a better understanding of such spoken genre, TV talk show interviews, which brings significant enrichment to both the application of genre analysis and the study of TV talk show interviews, and sheds light on the research method of spoken genre.