A Conversation Analysis Of Banter In Chinese TV Talk Shows

TV talk show is a program where a person or a group of people discuss various topics put forth by the host. And it is warmly welcomed and accepted for its wide-ranging topics, frequent interactions, releasing and humor. As one of the most common phenomena in our daily life, banter also occurs frequently in TV talk shows. During programs, hosts and guests always exchange banter with each other. It seemingly violates the Politeness Principle, but it is a communicative strategy adopted for the sake of the augmentative amusement of the program. It aims to capture the attention of audiences and make them laugh, or to smooth the relationship between hosts, guests and audiences, or to elicit more information.Banter is a teasing in a playful way, aiming at rapport versus aggression (Tu Jing,2007). That is to say, banter is characterized by being offensive on the surface of the utterance, but at a deeper level intending to maintain comity (Leech,2005). Because of its complexity, there are few studies about it home and abroad. The existing researches are mainly developed from the approach of pragmatics, but are seldom from the perspective of C A. In order to make up this vacancy and help us to have a better understanding of this phenomenon, this thesis studies it as an organized event or activity, and focuses on the sequential organization and turn-design.Based on150audio-recorded cases of bantering in five Chinese TV talk shows, this thesis attempts to take the conversational analytic approach to discuss regular patterns, the sequence organizations and turn-design of banter. And the present study shows that there exists a minimal "banter-response" adjacency pair serving as an overall sequential structure. That is to say. banter sequences can be made up of two phases:the initiation and the response. In addition, the initiation can be sub-classified into two classifications:literal devices and figurative devices. And response utterances can also be divided into three types:acceptance, refusal and vagueness, which are going to be detailed from the perspective of the preference organization respectively.On the whole, banter sequences are of importance and worthy of researching. Furthermore, a conversational analysis of banter reveals the detailed features of it. It is hoped that this thesis can help us to maintain harmonious relationship with others, and can also inspire more people to do further studies in this area.