A Conversation Analysis Of English News Interview-Top Talk On CCTV

News interview on TV, as a common mode of transmission, attracts more and more audiences, which has become an indispensable information source. Therefore, a lot of researches on news interview have been made by scholars at home and abroad. However, the most of the focuses are on the aspects of sociology and semantics. The study on news interview by conversation analysis in pragmatics is still rare.This thesis analyzes the conversational characters of the news interview Top Talk in Oriental Horizon based on the theory of conversation analysis founded by Sacks et al. 20 programs are chosen randomly as the data, which are categorized to three types according to the interviewees: political leaders, business elites and cultural celebrities. The ways how the interviewer and interviewee control and maintain the conversational turns and adjacency pair are investigated. And how to start, establish and end a conversational topic by the host and guest during the interview is also explored.Turn-taking system includes turn-taking, turn-holding and turn-yielding. The investigation shows that the host and interviewee take the turn by questioning, answering and insertion of the sequence. Turn-holding occurs during the discussion of the topic. The common strategies of turn holding in the Top Talk are insertion, overlapping and sequencing. Interview is a process of communication. The host is bound to yield the turn to expect the information from the guest. Concluding remarks proposed by the guest is a kind of turn-yielding. To avoid answering to the sensitive question from the host, the guest makes the turn-yielding to give up the opportunity to speak.The interviews in Top Talk are comprised by various hot topics related to the interviewees. Microscopically, the initiation, establishment and close of the topics are studied. The host adopts strategies to put forward the topics to control the interview through various hot issues, such as question and requirement. The interviewee develops the topics by response and transference. Macroscopically, the styles of the topics in Top Talk are highlighted. The interviews for the political leaders focus on the political policies and introduction of the foreign country; the interviews for the commercial giants are mainly about the process of the development of the enterprise; the interviews for the cultural elites emphasize on the personal charm and social influence.The limitations and suggestions are given at the end of the thesis. The data collected from the internet are redacted with the intermittent Chinese introduction, therefore, if the live recording can be obtained, the analysis should be more precise.The language in Top Talk is typical, which makes the analysis significant and valuable. The research findings enrich the theory of conversation analysis. Besides, the analysis can help the TV producers apply language skills in interview successfully to attract the audiences. In addition, it can help the audiences have a better understanding of the interview.