The Contrastive Analysis Of Conversation Structure Between Chinese And American TV Talk Shows

Discourse analysis is classified into text analysis and spoken analysis, the formerof which mainly discusses the written language, while, the latter regards the processof spoken language as its target. As to the conversation, predecessors have not onlyproposed many theories but also made a large quantity of researches about concretetypes of conversation such as the daily conversation, classroom conversation,telephone conversation or the job interview conversation etc. Following theestablishment of TV predominance in mass media, TV talk show seems to be a veryunique kind of conversation. In China, though the TV talk show has been widelyaccepted, because of the short history and the lacking of flexibility, it still has notmatched the similar program in America, which is mature in both the structure and thehosting skills of the show. The thesis is intended to apply theories and methodologiesof conversation analysis to the analysis of Chinese TV talk shows in contrast withthose of America. The thesis is divided into five chapters and deals with the followingissues respectively.Chapter One is a retrospection of the conversation structure studies including thesurvey of the conversation structure studies at home and abroad and the existingstudies on TV talk show. The development of conversation structure analysis isattributed to such linguists as Sacks, H, Jefferson, G and Schegloff. While in China, itis also the concern of many Chinese scholars, including Huang Guowen, HeZhaoxiong, Wang Fuxiang, Li YueE and so on. Since first put forward by the threeforerunners in 1960s, conversation analysis has occupied an important position inanalyzing the daily conversation. The great contributions to the analysis of spokendiscourse are the studies of turn-taking, adjacency pair and repair mechanism, all ofwhich at the same time are the foundation to the present study. Following the theoryof conversation analysis, the Birmingham School constructed the mode for theclassroom interaction, which enriched the discourse analysis further. Due to thereason that the history of conversation analysis is relatively short, the large scale ofthe study is hence not possible. Chapter Two deals with a survey of the theories and analyzing frameworkconcerning the conversation structure analysis. Theories and framework ofconversation structure analysis in my thesis are attributed to the three greatachievements through the work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, that is the theory ofturn-taking, adjacency pairs and repair mechanism. As to the framework of the study,the author adopted the mode from the macro-analysis to the micro-analysis in order toincrease the validity of the present study. Macro-analysis in this paper puts muchemphasis on the cultural codes, in which the patterns of thought and value system arethe focusing points; Micro-analysis is concentrated on the conversation structureincluding how to balance the turns, how to finish a question-answer structure, andhow to repair the wrong utterances in the process of talking with others, etc. Chapter Three concerns the methodologies used in this paper. Methodologicallyspeaking, this paper integrates both qualitative and quantitative analysis so as toachieve maximal reliability. It is data-driven and theory –driven at the same time. Asto the data, the present study is an empirical one, in that all the conclusions made inthis study are based on naturally occurring data without any preset plan for what is tobe obtained and what is to be derived from the data. In the present paper, the ChineseTV talk show is recorded and transcribed on the basis of certain quantities of naturallyoccurring data, as to the American one, it is mainly downloaded from thetranscriptions of the www.CNN.com because of the high difficulty in the datacollecting and the limitations of the author. Chapter Four is devoted to the contrastive analysis between Chinese andAmerican TV talk shows, with the aim to show both theoretical and practical insightsinto various linguistic features from the perspective of conversation analysis.Differences lying in opening, closing, way of yielding a turn, claiming a turn, togetherwith feedbacks, adjacency pairs and repair structure between Chinese and AmericanTV talk shows are some of the issues explored in this part. Then the differences inChinese and American patterns of thought and value system will be analyzed to giveexplanation to those in linguistic forms. By comparison, the author finds that Chinese...