| Being informed is considered to be the most important thing in these days. Everybody wants to know everything about current events and their circumstances, future situations. The occurrence of TV interviews solves these issues and meets the people's needs. The program of TV interviews has become more and more important as it conveys important issues to the public. Meanwhile, TV interviews have been the focus of attention of both linguistics and non-linguistics. Linguists abroad have implemented comparatively comprehensive and in-depth research on this communicational media. Comparative speaking, TV interview has a short history in China. Recently a series of TV interview programs appear in the screen, not only in Chinese but in English. According to incompletely statistics, there are hundreds of TV interview programs, however only a few of them has a higher quality. The program Dialogue as the authoritative English TV interview program is produced by CCTV channel 9 in 1997. This program contains a wide range of topics and two excellent anchors, and has been inviting lots of highlights form all walks of life. Meanwhile, the audience rating of this program can be considered among the best.The program of TV interview is full of communication skills between host and guests. The research on the techniques in communication is necessary. Discourse markers as the widely used methods in communication play an important role in utterance production and utterance interpretation. The proper use and interpretation of them consist of a considerable part of pragmatic or communicative competence.In this thesis, Dialogue is as the research object. The data studied consist of 40 transcripts from the program of Dialogue in CCTV channel 9. The investigation of discourse markers on this high quality program could make a better explanation of the techniques in communication. The purpose of this thesis lies in two aspects. Firstly, reveal the functions and effects of discourse markers which played in communication skills. Secondly, on one hand, the investigation of discourse markers in turn-taking process in Dialogue of CCTV channel 9 may benefit hosts and guests in achieving success in other TV interview programs, and even giving the widely English learners a better understanding of TV interview; on the other hand, the awareness of importance of discourse markers could facilitate peoples' communicational competence.The present thesis consists of 5 chapters:Chapter one is the preface. To begin with, a brief introduction to English TV interviews is proposed. Secondly, the development situation of TV interviews in China is reviewed in detail. The problems of TV interviews in China are pointed out: on one hand, most of hosts do not seek for what audiences want; on the other hand, most of the programs can not keep the program alive and fresh. So Dialogue can excel in these TV interviews with the timely topic and highlights invited. Thirdly, the significance of this thesis is described. There is not a research which examines the TV interview program from the perspective of discourse markers in turn-taking process. Through the investigation of this thesis, the usefulness of discourse markers in turn-control strategies can be learned by people. Meanwhile, the level and quality of current TV interviews are quite different is also becoming the writing motivations of this thesis.Chapter two presents a literature review. First of all, the definition of discourse markers, which are linguistic elements that signal relations between units of talk, relation at the exchange, action, ideational, and participation framework level of the oral discourse, such as, oh, now, and, well, but, or, so, because, however, you know, I mean etc. From the grammar perspective, discourse markers do not own much semantic, however, they do arouse the listeners'attention, develop the turn, maintain the turn, and etc. Overall, the past research on discourse marker has mainly focused on English. The representative Schiffrin (1974) put forward the so-called "local coherence". The other representatives like Blakemole and Jueker (1987) made deep analysis on relevance theory. In recent years, some psychologists like Clark and Fox Tree (2002) paid more attention to people understanding of discourse markers. Some domestic scholars have raised a study upsurge of English discourse markers in China. The most representatives are He Ziran and his disciples. The theories which they used basically are relevance theory and adaptation theory.Turn-taking is generally acknowledged as the core of the theory of conversation analysis. According to the previous research by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) through the analysis of daily conversation, and taking the nature and characteristics of talk show into full account, this chapter has explored the turn-taking rules and turn-control strategies in TV interviews. And the relevant theories like turn, adjacency pairs and the turn-taking rules are also introduced. Turn is the basic structural unit of daily conversation. The most widely used adjacency pairs proposed by Levinson (1983), which refer to the thanking-response, request-acceptance, apology-minimization, and question-answer sequences etc. Sack, Schegloff, and Jefferson argued that turn-taking rules are as the mechanism governs turn-taking. At the same time, the turn-taking process should abide by the turn-taking rules.There are three parts in turn-taking process, which include turn-yielding, turn-claiming and turn-holding. When hosts and guests get turns to speak, they will certainly adopt some strategies to yield, claim and hold turns. Owing to the limited previous studies on turn-taking in conversation, Sack, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) conducted a more thorough study on turn-taking in daily conversation, and outlined the fourteen turn-taking mechanisms.The previous researches on TV interviews are reviewed. And power distribution in TV interview is examined by many linguists. In the task-oriented TV interview program, hosts possess more institutional power to control over the program. In the Linguistic field, Harries (1992) found four characters of TV interview:first of all, participants sometimes use a high degree of indirectness and elaboration, which makes their response elusive. Secondly, neutrality is another character of TV interview. Thirdly, participants have interacted final goals. Fourthly, a fluent dialogue requires that speakers can effectively negotiate and signal turn-taking.The third chapter explains the purpose of the present study, introduces the source and collection procedures of data of this thesis, and initiates two research questions of the study:a. How does each discourse marker as one of the effective turn-control strategies works in turn-taking process in English TV interview? b. What roles of functions do discourse markers play in turn-taking process.The fourth chapter describes the application of discourse markers in the process of turn-taking in Dialogue of CCTV channel 9. In order to make the study clearly, the definition of discourse markers is restated and the scope of discourse markers analyzed in this thesis is listed. As the central parts of this thesis, this thesis places the emphasis on the distribution of discourse markers as one of the turn-control strategies in turn yielding, turn claiming, and turn holding respectively, then come answers to the question one in chapter three. Turns transfer should accord with the turn-taking rules. In answer to the question two in chapter three, the functions of discourse markers are figured out at the end of this chapter, the author summarizes eight major functions of discourse markers according to the position they located in turns, and there are three functions in the initial position:firstly, continue turn with insufficiency. Secondly, do not agree to the prior turn. Thirdly, initiate a new turn. There are also three functions in the middle turn:firstly, explain and complete to the prior statement. Secondly, make contrast with the following argumentation. Thirdly, expose psychological subjective order. At the end of the turn, there are two functions, one is the turn ending, and the other is mutually agreed by the two parts. Chapter five is the concluding remarks, which presents the major findings of this thesis. The research shows that the turn-taking in the news interview has founded the question-answer format between hosts and guests. And under this format, hosts and guests obey the turn-taking rules. Discourse markers as one of the turn-control strategies help hosts and guests accomplish turns transfer successfully. However, this study is far from satisfactory due to some practical limitations, since all the data collected were categorized and analyzed artificially and by no means of using in computer or other automatic method. As a result errors are inevitable and the preciseness of findings can not reach exactly. The materials including 40 transcripts of Dialogue are relatively insufficient. Therefore, some specific discourse markers can not obviously be seen from the result. Some suggestions for the future study are proposed at the end of this chapter. As is pointed out at the end of the thesis, there are much more work remains to be done about turn-taking in English TV interviews because the present study only makes a macro study on the application of discourse markers in the process of turn-taking in English TV interviews. Future work might be done on the interlocutors'nationality due to their different native languages.
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