Contrastive Studies Of Chinese And English TV Talk Shows

TV talk show initially appears in America, and it gets a high-speed development in the 1990s. In China, we begin to pay attention to TV talk show since the broadcasting of Tell It Like It Is in 1996. Currently, investigations on TV talk shows are mainly conducted through two approaches, the linguistic approach and the mass media approach (the non-linguistic approach). And the conversation analysis theory (CA in short), developed by Sacks and his associates, provides a comprehensive framework for the analysis of TV talk shows.In this thesis, theories like turn-taking strategies and conversation structure in the framework of CA are applied. The language resources in this research are downloaded from the internet, and all the 16 episodes are collected from the popular and representative Chinese and English TV talk shows in recent years, which take about 700 minutes totally. For the research methodology, a mixed method that combines the quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis is adopted via the assistance of statistical form designed by myself and the internationally commonly adopted transcription system.Through analyzing and contrasting the 16 episodes of Chinese and English TV talk shows, and especially focusing on exploring the similarities and differences revealed in the shows'turn-taking strategies and the conversation structure construction, finally we get the following conclusions:1. A successful TV talk show is led by an excellent host, and highly cooperated by the inviting guest(s).2. Nearly each representative TV talk show has a complete conversation structure, and it consists of a beginning part, a main body, and a closing part.3. For the turn-controlling in Chinese and English TV talk shows, the host enjoys the priority to control the turns in the conversation. And in the process of turn claiming, the strategy "insertion" is used most frequently. The occurrence frequency of turn-claiming in English TV talk shows is much higher that that in Chinese TV talk shows. The research also produces some suggestions on making TV talk shows:The studio should be consistent with the program's topic, and the decoration of the studio should vary at times to keep the audience's interest. And for topic selecting, our Chinese TV talk shows should expand the range of topics to catch the attention of different kinds of audience.