A Functional Analysis Of The Language In TV News Interviews

With the establishment of television as the dominant means of mass media in the 20^th century, the talk shows on TV have increasingly popularized and grown into a special dialogue type, among which the news interview is a popular and prominent style. Therefore, in the past decades, this distinctive genre has attracted the attention of a lot of conversation analysts, whose efforts have led to the accumulation of fruitful achievements in this field. However, up to now, few people have put much emphasis on the TV news interview from the perspective of systemic functional grammar.According to Halliday's Functional Grammar, three factors in the context of situation—field, tenor and mode—are in realization respectively mapped onto "ideational", "interpersonal" and "textual" metafunctions of language which in turn are realized by their respective components at the lexicogrammatical level. In TV news interviews, the field is about important current issues; the tenor involves the direct relationship between the interviewers and the interviewees as well as the indirect relationship between the participants present and the viewing audience; the mode is an oral interaction through media. Based on this, the paper, from three components at the lexicogrammatical level: transitivity, mood system and thematic structure, analyzes the language of both the interviewers and the interviewees in an English TV news interview program Dialogue on CCTV International, with the aim of investigating the linguistic features of this oral discourse.The analytic findings show that on the one hand, the language of the interviewers is characterized by heavy use of the material and relational processes, dominance of declarative and interrogative mood, large adoption of the present tense and the second and third person references as subjects, and few occurrences of marked themes. On the other hand, the interviewees make the relational and material processes in the dominant position, produce a quite high percentage of declaratives, employ the third person subjects and the present tense considerably, and take simple and multiple themes as the primary choices. In addition, both of them make use of a fairly large proportion of modal elements in their discourses. All these features match well with the roles of conversation participants and successfully realize the particular context of situation of TV news interviews.The research can not only prove the practicality and applicability of the systemic functional grammar but also is of certain referential significance to the future study.