| This thesis is to testify the classic turn-taking model proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson with a small-scale corpus with 35,000 words collected from CNN Larry King Live (LKL) talk show. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to study the subjects that are conversations transcribed from LKL from January,2008 to March,2010. The guests in the talk show are former US President Bush and first lady Laura Bush, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama. Each turn of the corpus is analyzed to identify the turn-taking strategy. The distributions of turn-taking strategies employed by King and his guests are analyzed and testified with Chi-square test of SPSS.The results indicate that Sacks's turn-taking model can be applied in LKL talk show. From the distributions of turn-taking strategies by both King and his guests, we can conclude that King and his guests prefer employing turn-yielding and turn-holding, which account for more than 83% in the corpus. Since it is not appropriate and polite to claim the next turn in most cultures, turn-claiming is the least used by King and his guests, approximately accounting for 10%.Moreover, it can be concluded from the comparison of turn-taking strategies by King and his guests respectively that they employ different turn-taking strategies in the talk show. The differences on employing the strategies of turn-yielding and turn-holding are significant. King employs more turn-yielding to allocate his turn to his guests in order to acquire the information he needs, while the guests use more turn-holding to keep the floor. Both King and his guests do not employ turn-claiming as much as the other two strategies; besides, their difference on employing it is not significant.
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