A Comparative Analysis Of Conversation Structures Between American And Chinese TV Talk Shows

TV Talk Show first appeared in America in the 1950s. As a special genre of conversation, it has witnessed great development since it took shape. Nowadays TV talk shows have been widely broadcasted all over the world and have accounted for a large proportion of the TV programs.Compared with the same type program in America, TV talk show in China appeared quite late and seemed to be less satisfactory in either quantity or quality. But since 1990s, it also has achieved remarkable progress and gained huge popularity.This thesis chose two TV talk shows from home and abroad, namely Dialogue and Larry King Live, as the object of the research, and selected 10 issues from the two talk show programs respectively as the data of the study. The author intended to apply theories and methodologies of conversation analysis, which was set up by the American scholars Sacks and his colleagues, to the analysis of Chinese TV talk shows in comparison with those of America.As an imported program, Chinese TV talk shows is heavily influenced by American broadcasting culture. However, Dialogue as an English TV talk show produced in the Chinese context acquires some peculiar features of itself. In consideration of the above, this thesis employs Conversation Analysis theory as the theoretical basis, selects the twenty episodes of the talk show videos as the data source to make comparative study of the conversation structures of two English TV talks. The study mainly focuses on the comparison of conversation structure such as the turn-taking system, the turn-allocation and the turn-claiming mechanism. Furthermore, the exploration from the perspective of intercultural communication will be made between the two programs.The study aims to answer the following two questions: (a) What are the differences and similarities between the conversation structures in Chinese and American TV talk shows? (b) How to explain the differences in the comparative analysis from the cultural perspective? The results of the comparative analysis show that the similarities between conversation structure in shows are identifiable in the turn-construction and turn-allocation component. Meanwhile, obvious differences are found from the turn-claiming method used by the participants in the TV talk show, that is interruption. Based on this, the researcher classifies the obtained differences into categories and attempts to probe into the possible cultural causes in terms of the three contrastive cultural patterns in China and America: harmony versus assertiveness, hierarchy versus equality and collectivism versus individualism.